Food is time travel.

I think I have seen that line before. Aaah, it is in Reuben Riffel’s cookbook. And it is so true, food is able to take you to places and times you have never been to, or return you to places and past memories. I know that for someone near and dear to me, a braised lamb shank served with gnocchi will always evoke special memories. Just like having a braai with the portable braai boxes will for me.

Last week I went to Taiwan on business related activity and our hosts went all out to impress us. I must admit, I was a bit wary of what to eat there, as everyone seemed to have advice on what to eat and what not to eat. By the end of the trip, I was brave enough to even go and eat at some back door Korean barbeque, where the owner was really worried about the ‘shortage of cabbage’ and how this would affect his kimchi. I told him I could organize him cabbage from South Africa, we feed that stuff to cows down here.

Ok, so we land in Taiwan and our hosts insist on going out for dinner. After nineteen hours travelling and sleeping at airport benches I wasn’t really in the mood for anything adventurous, especially in Taiwan. Thanks to this, I chose a simple, safe dish for dinner. This dish actually changed my perception on Taiwanese cuisine, and by the end of the week there I had tried out everything from sea cucumber, to abalone, to shark fin soup (very little shark fin in that soup) and pineapple cake. The dish was beef braised in soy sauce. If something this simple can taste this good, then their food is with exploring was my deduction after that meal. When I came back, I tried making the dish, and I think I am not too far off from the one I had there. It has a beautiful dark brown colour, and the beef is soft after cooking slowly for nearly four hours.

I will blog about some of my experiences in Taiwan, like the visit to a restaurant called South Africa Fish House, and the weird things they serve there under the name of South African cuisine. For now, I would like to share with you the recipe.

Get a kilogram of beef steak and cut into cubes, roll this in flour and set aside. Heat some oil in a pot and brown the steak cubes. In the meantime, soak some dried shitake mushrooms in about two cups of warm water. Chop an onion, and two carrots. Remove the browned meat from the pan, and throw in the onions and carrots. Fry gently for about five minutes. Return the beef to the pot; add about two cups of chicken stock, a third of a cup of soy sauce, and a dash of fish sauce and two table spoons of hoisin sauce. Let this simmer for about two and a half hours. Check for seasoning, and then add the mushrooms (drain them first) and about two star anise. I added the star anise half way through the cooking as I didn’t want it to overpower the soy sauce. Cook over a low heat for another hour. Chop up four spring onions, add to the pot and cook for ten minutes.
Serve with rice and steamed beans.

It’s all about the first impression...

..and the memory it creates. This is true from everything, from your first encounter with a teacher at crèche, your first voting experience. The same holds true for the first dinner two people have as a couple. Unless you date a colleague you hit it off with at a company dinner, then someone has to make the initiative. Two choices exist, eat out or cook in. Fellas; unless she eats out once or twice a year, she is unlikely to remember your first dinner together. For her to remember it, you need to do something outrageous like book out the entire restaurant or have your card declined. Memories sustain relationships; first experiences have to be memorable.

Call me cheap, but I would opt for cooking at home as opposed to going out to a restaurant. Firstly, I find sitting in an unfamiliar surrounding with someone for the first time, wondering if she will really finish that 400g t-bone steak at the bottom of things I want to remember. And what should I cook, I hear you ask? The trick is to set a standard you can sustain. So, a dinner of seared scallops, wagyu beef stir fry and saffron rice pudding will not do; it will leave you broke and probably scare her away.

To create a good first impression, go for something simple, something she has probably had before, but make yours in a way that is different from stuff she has had before. Bolognese! Yes, that is the ultimate first ‘cooking to impress her’ meal. Who hasn’t had bolognese? From the varsity stuff to the stuff you get at all Italian eateries, we have all had bolognese in our lives. More often it is made the same way, beef mince, peppers, tomatoes, onions with spaghetti and dehydrated parmesan cheese. Here is a recipe that will definitely make a good impression. It is being continuously refined in my household, in the quest to see who makes it best. She seems to be winning, for now.

For best effects, start cooking when she comes over, and don’t cook in advance with the hope of rushing things to the next base. Cooking should be fun, and she should join or watch you. Instead of using mince, use sausages. Mince is dull; it is chopped steak, with no flavour. It is best to use two types of meat; I usually use three pork sausages and three lamb sausages. (always make sure there are leftovers for the following day).The meat in sausages has been ‘cured’ with spices and thus has extra flavour. Remove the meat from the sausage casings, and mix it together in a bowl. The thinking is that every spoonful should have pork and sausage flavour.

Fry the meat in oil, till it is brown. The pork makes the fried meat look lighter than the dull brown colour you get when you fry beef mince. Remove from the pot, and in the same pot fry the following: two finely chopped cloves of garlic, an onion, a grated carrots, a handful of chopped mushrooms and finely chopped celery (two sticks). Fry this for about five minutes on a medium heat and then return the meat. Check for salt and pepper (because you are using sausages, you will need less salt and pepper). Cook this for another five minutes. Add a cup of red wine and a can of finely chopped tomatoes. Alternatively use a pint of passata (pureed tomatoes). Simmer the mixture for forty minutes, on a low heat.

Tip: get a good wine, as you will also be drinking the wine while the sauce is cooking away. I recommend something like a pinot noir. You would have paid a fortune for a bottle of wine at the restaurant, so don’t try cutting costs.

Bolognese has always been served with either penne or linguini. Varsity was spaghetti or macaroni. Try something different, get some freshly made gnocchi and boil it for a few minutes before the sauce is done. Drain the gnocchi, and return to pot, toss the sauce in and spoon into bowls. Shave or grate some parmesan cheese over the pasta (this is the coup de grace) and bon appétit.

Ladies, what can beat this for a first impression?

My least favourite politician is coming over for dinner, what do I serve him?

Had to be a HE. I love female politicians, the combination of the opposite sex and all that power talk is too good to hate. So lets assume I get a call from the office of politician Mr X. and they say that he would love top pop in for dinner in a couple of days time. They transfer some cash into my account (its recession time folks, and no politician deserves a free meal) and ask me to whip up something that will show him how I am likeminded people think about him. Go global the office says, don’t hold back. So, I go onto some food website and ask people about what food they would cook for their least favourite politician. The site crashes, but before that happens I have kind of figured my four course meal.

You can stop reading now and simply comment, or soldier on.

I decide on a set menu with an Oriental theme. Let’s be honest, most of the weirdest things know to be palatable come from China, Japan, Korea, etc.

Starter: Pig brain Soup – This dish is eaten throughout the Far East. This soup is quite yummy (they say) once you get past the lumpy bits of floating brain. It would take me a lifetime to get past that. Mine would be Thai influenced with coconut milk and Thai red curry paste.

Appetizer: Shirako Maki (see picture) – sushi made from cod sperm sacs. Yes, raw fish sperm rolled with seaweed into sushi. As you can imagine, these sacs are pretty delicate and you cannot roll them too tightly into a maki roll as the will burst and…. (Will leave you to imagine what I mean)

Main course: This dish is the ultimate. Braised horse penis. Yes, horse penis is eaten quite a lot in China and other countries with weird people and name like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Usually served at traditional weddings, it is considered a mark of respect to be offered horse penis. Women are however not encouraged to eat it as it causes a deep voice and aids the development of facial hair. But it’s good fro the skin. A risk worth taking? Husky voices are sexy; you can always hook up some chemical hair removal job. The braised penis will have Chinese five spice, with an extra touch of star anise for that aniseed flavor.

Dessert – Durian ice cream. This is quite a let down after the three courses I described above. Durian is actually quite nice; I had some in Singapore a couple of years ago. The only revolting thing is the smell. Man, it stinks. It’s so bad that’s it’s a crime in Singapore to carry it when using public transport. Most airlines don’t allow it on their planes. The durian ice cream is a bit stiffer than normal ice cream, so imagine cold sweet pap/polenta and you are close.

So, there you have it. My four course meal for my least favourite politician. I would expect him to bring drinks, but if not then I would serve him some rice wine vinegar with pickled snake hearts.

Yummy. What would you remove from my menu, and what would you replace it with?

Restaurants can do their bit for global warming

Ok, I have just finished reading Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book; Hot, Flat and Crowded. The book got me really thinking, and I find myself looking at way of being ‘green’. I attended a workshop at a five star hotel in Johannesburg recently, and couldn’t stand how my fellow attendees would request the aircon to be turned up and down every hour. I suggested we simply open and close one of the doors to regulate the heat. It worked, I smiled.

Besides being the right thing to do, going green can also have financial benefits. Let’s look at the blog’s area of interest: food. The most obvious one is going organic. You save a fortune in chemicals, etc. and organic produce fetches a premium. If only they could relax the requirements for a farm to be certified organic. That would definitely better the lives of many African farmers. My dad used to drive to surrounding rural areas, and get kraal manure for our garden. To this day, our garden remains chemical free. The ‘green gold’ that grows wildly in some patches is testimony to this.

What can restaurants do to help the green revolution? Firstly, they can operate smart. Do we really need restaurants to open from 10h00 till 22h00? Lets be honest, no one on a Tuesday morning is going to order a T-bone steak and onion rings, unless they went out the night before. This is what I would do if I were a restaurateur. Let’s assume I own a steak house. I would open for lunch and dinner only. This way I don’t have to keep my grills on the whole day. My lunch menu would be smaller meals, which are fairly quickly to make. Offer salads and stir fried veggies instead of starch that takes longer to cook. If I have stews as part of the menu, these would be prepared in the early morning.

I would also encourage other restaurants to follow suit. I would tell the pizzeria next door, that chances of people having pizza before sunset on a weekday are pretty slim. They are better off opening at 15h30, incase some people decide to leave work early. The deli selling gourmet Italian breakfasts and sandwiches should close by 17h00.

The’ less is more’ maxim is also part of operating smart. How many times have you sprained your wrist trying to hold and page through the monstrous menu. I now wonder how many trees it takes to produce the paper in some of these menus. A board against the wall, or go techno and have a flat screen TV (sola powered of course) displaying your menu. Keep your menu items as few as possible, and change the menu every few months based on availability of produce.

If you take one of these fifteen page menus, walk to the kitchen and ask the chef when he last prepared the beef stroganoff on page 8, he would in all probability shrug his shoulders. But the fridge has to carry the ingredients, in case someone feels like a stroganoff. Think of the place that offers ice cream in the middle of winter. The freezer is packed with ice cream tubs that will have to be eaten by the staff.

Through analysis of patron patterns and having suppliers in close proximity, a restaurateur can keep his stock to an absolute minimum. This can easily translate to fresher produce.

There, I challenge restaurants to develop and implement a ‘green programme’ and lets see how that goes.

Winter- time for some comfort food.

Change of season brings about many changes. People dress warmly, people stay indoors more. Some even acquire new partners. Time for change.

The change from summer into autumn was a confusing one for me, and that probably explains my inactivity on the blog. Everything is uncertain in autumn, even the brain. I doubt a lot of marriage proposals are made during this period. Needless to say, it’s my least favourite season

Back to my topic, winter and comfort food. Winter is good food season. Summer is all about braais and eating al fresco. Lets be honest, it’s the ambiance we enjoy at braais and not really the food. How many times have you been to a braai, only to receive half a chop of mutton and still conclude that the braai was good? Or you sit outside at a restaurant and eat luke warm pasta with sand particles and still smile at the world passing by?

Winter is the exact opposite. Good food, no pretensions. It is recipes that have outlived generations. Take an oxtail stew for example. It’s been there since time immemorial, and the whole experience of making it, checking every half an hour how things are going. The disintegration of the onion and celery. Heaven in a pot! Some might argue that oxtail is not comfort food, as it is not as easy to prepare as the classic comfort meal, bangers and mash. Comfort and simplicity differ from person to person.

Yes, oxtail is simple to make if you ask me. Dust oxtail with a mix of four, salt and pepper. Brown, then remove. In same pot, fry garlic, celery and onion. Return the oxtail; add rosemary and some bay leaves, half a bottle of good wine, and some stock. Season and allow cooking for a couple of hours. Its little variations that make the difference, like adding a can on cannellini beans towards the end, or a spoon of whole grain mustard.

Winter is also the time when you miss your mom’s cooking the most. You don’t miss the restaurant you went to for your company’s end year function. You miss food that is cooked from the heart.

My comfort food top three ……..

Oxtail with mash

Tripe eaten with steamed bread

Roast lamb and potatoes

With the current economic woes, let’s dig for old recipes, and get some comfort and loving in the kitchen.

Let’s start a petition to save the corner cafes

Last week, a colleague managed to persuade me not to bring lunch from home. We would go for a ‘grease up’ he said. Greasy food to me is fried chicken (I sometimes pour lemon juice over it to minimize the grease effect) and I assumed it was trip to the local KFC.

Grease hour came, and we grabbed our wallets and took a walk across the street, and walk in the opposite direction from the KFC outlet. Sunnyside has new fried chicken outlets popping up each day, so I assumed we were trying out a new one. Walk down Esselen Street, well drive down Esslen and you will see what I mean. Chicken outlets are to this street what casinos are to Las Vegas.

How wrong I was. We walked into a corner café, and it brought back so many memories of corner cafes. The smell of hot oil. The old guy behind the counter with the off white vest, and a pen tucked behind his ear. The queue of regulars coming in to get their fix of fried food and a free peak at the newspapers. The hustler outside trying to sell you something. What I like about corner cafes is that their food is made to order, size wise. I wanted a couple of slices of bread, a small russian and chips and a can of Coke Light. After looking at me funny, the old guy yelled;”One Chinese and chips, three slice and a coke light.” My colleague wanted the humongous russian. His order was yelled out too;”One Nigerian and chips, quarter loaf and Stoney”. Don’t ask me how the russians get these interesting names.

I was very wary of some word or phrase other than my order being said. this is usually the code when they are serving a non regular and the kitchen stuff should use the previous day’s chips. Be careful of phrases like ‘lalile’, ‘sheshile’ and ‘the usual’. What is usual about my order should be your question. That being said, I still love corner cafes and its sad to see them disappearing and making way for pricier franchise joints. They are and will remain a part of this country’s food history and together with roadhouses and street vendors should be protected and supported. The health fanatics should give us the freedom to choose if we want to indulge in some greasy food, once in a while or now and not force us to eat this and that wrap washed down with this and that smoothie.

Everyone who grew up in Mthatha will remember a place called Jimmy’s Fruiters. Although not in a corner, it had all the hallmarks of a corner café. I remember trips walking back from the municipal pool, past Jimmy’s and you buy the usual stuff: Erica butter (what happened to that?), freshly baked bread, Mello Yello and some fried chips. Oh, and some polony. The place rocks up to this day, with long queues just before lunch for their chicken gizzards.

Almost every town or suburb has its own fast food landmark. There is generally an inverse relationship between the affluency of the area and the number of fast food joints. The richer the area, the less likely you are to see a fast food joint. They get replaced by spas. Try picture a roadhouse in Sandhurst.

I hope our kids will also get the chance to enjoy the Nigerians and Chinese. And like us, go and sell empty cooldrink bottles and use the money to play Pacman.

Sunninghill meets Chennai meets Marrakech - Gastronomic Sessions 1

A while ago, some friends (female) had this idea of a theme dinner for a group of about 15 people. I put the female in brackets because none of my male friends would come up with such a wonderful idea. The decision was taken on fusing Moroccan and Indian cuisine and yours truly had to cook, or rather do most of the cooking as some other people would definitely help on the day.

The plan is to have members of this group hosting an evening on a rotational basis; the frequency is still to be decided. The first session was held on Saturday, 1 March in Sunninghill and it went off pretty well. Everyone had a great time, with the last people leaving at about midnight. The ladies dressed up for the evening, and some of the guys probably thought there would be some belly dancing. Next time, fellas.

Let me start of with the menu:

Indian fish cakes with cucumber raita and a lemon pickle as a starter. Main was mechoui (roast Moroccan lamb), chicken korma, couscous salad, spinach cooked Indian style and butternut roasted with cumin based spice mix. Oh, and some naan bread to mop up the korma gravy. Cocktails flowing the whole evening, desert was a fruit salad with mint leaves and syrup with an Indian twist (cardamom and cinnamon).

Although Indian and Moroccan cooking use the same combination of spices such as cinnamon, cumin, coriander, etc. the Indian dishes tend to be spicier. My take on that is the following: Indian cooking generally uses the cheap cuts of meat and thus relies heavily on the curry sauce to liven up the dish. Moroccan food is usually more flavourful with a more delicate hint of spices.

How was the food received? I will be honest, I had my initial fears. Firstly, I didn’t know how my mates would take to couscous. Lets be honest, its not at the top of darkie ‘must eat’ things. The more worried moment was when I was doing the veggies while people kept coming to the fridge for a beer or a glass of wine. I did a rewind to my drinking days and remembered how I didn’t really like veggies when inebriated. I was wrong, these people have refined palates and quite a number remarked on how the curry and cream added something special to the spinach.

The cocktails were a nice touch to the whole theme, with the hostess making sure that non drinkers were also catered for. Cocktails have this gay thing about them, but in the company of friends who know your sexual orientation, who cares?

For some people, it was the first time meeting but food proved to be a great ice breaker, and before long everyone knew quite a lot about the other person. Let me not go into detail there, and simply let the pictures do the talking.





The Gastronomic Darkie in action………..

Fish cakes with cucumber raita and lemon pickle

Too many cocktails

Clockwise (from top) Chicken korma, gravy from roasting tin, mechoui, couscous salad (with peppers, sundried tomatoes and mint) and roast butternut