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

Help me understand the economics of breakfast

Been a while since the last entry. The lack of meat has really had an adverse effect on my thinking. Going well so far, just difficult when lunch time at the office comes. You walk into the staff eating area and you find your colleagues feasting on grilled chicken, burgers, stews, etc. Not a nice feeling. As a result I have my lunch thirty minutes before they do.

The meal I look forward to the most is thus Saturday breakfast as this is when I put a temporary halt to being vegetarian. As you can imagine, I go quite heavy on the grease either cooking it at home or going to the nearest coffee shop. I am not really a fan of those buffet breakfasts. I am quite fussy when it comes to breakfast and my tune is this: from pan to plate in less than a minute. I just don’t like those metal dishes with those warmers underneath that have sausages kept warm in their steam for thirty minutes. Worse with the bacon, as it tends to go hard when not eaten immediately. The scrambled eggs sometimes have this moat of water around them. Not too pleasing to the eye.

Last week I tried to calculate what would be cheaper, going out for breakfast or making my own. A no brainer I hear you say. Well, it’s not as simple as that. Let’s do a comparison using a group of three people: me, the madam and a hung over mate of mine.

A traditional breakfast consisting of two fried eggs, two rashers of bacon, two pork bangers, grilled tomato & a slice of toast goes for R29.00. Let’s make it R37.00 as one would include a glass of juice, cool drink. The bill for three people is thus R120.00

Cooking at home would come up to this:

Half dozen eggs – R10.00
Pack of bacon – R20.000
Litre of juice – R10.00
Sausages – R20.00
Tomatoes – R5.00

That comes up to about R65. I haven’t added the bread, butter, etc. assuming you already have these in your fridge. Still, its cheaper to make your own. That makes sense. It would obviously not make sense to make b

My confusion is with the buffet breakfasts. If it costs you about R22.00 to get a good, filling breakfast then why do people go and spend R80.00 on a buffet breakfast? That doesn’t make sense to me. A quick search has revealed the most expensive breakfast, which includes a 100g steak would set you back about R50.00. Still, that’s a saving of R30.00. So why do people do buffet breakfasts?

Not only is it not a romantic thing (in my humble opinion, mass produced food is a turn off) but surely its also not healthy to eat that much at the start of the day.

Buffet dinners I can understand because some of the stuff they make there might be a bit difficult and time consuming, but not the breakfasts.

For the next couple of weeks, I am 71.5% vegetarian…

After thinking long and hard about what to give up during Lent ( I have never given up anything), I decided that I should make up for all those times when I gave up nothing and go big. So, I decided on meat. Then I remembered that in our African culture it is very rude to refuse food from other people, especially meat. The final decision was this: no meat from midnight on Sunday/Monday morning till midnight on Friday/Saturday morning. This is because weekends have sport, birthday parties, etc. and there is meat involved. Weekends are also the only time one gets to sit down and have a proper fry up breakfast, and I just couldn’t give that up.

It has been three days now, and its going very well. Early days, I guess. I have a couple of cookbooks so I shouldn’t battle with some decent nosh and should save me a couple of rands too. The first day, I made this Afghani aubergine casserole and thought I would share my revamped version with you. Instead of grilling the aubergines, Reza Mahammad (that gay looking fella on BBC Food) fries them. The dish becomes too oily for my liking. We all know how aubergines mop up all the oil when you fry them.

Cut about 600g of aubergines into 1 cm thick slices. Salt lightly and drizzle with olive oil. Put on a roasting pan and roast for about 20 minutes on 180 °C, turning it after ten minutes. The aubergine should be slightly brown. While this is roasting, fry some garlic and green chillies in vegetable oil, and add a can of chopped tomatoes that are blended into a smooth liquid. Add a teaspoon of ground cumin, a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar. Let this simmer for twenty minutes into a sauce consistency, and add salt and black pepper to taste.

You then take a shallow baking tray and spread a third of the tomato sauce. Pile a layer of the grilled aubergine, and then sprinkle some chopped mint. Add another third of the tomato sauce and then repeat the process. Put this in an oven and bake at 190°C for 30 minutes. The end dish looks like a vegetarian lasagna without the white sauce, and is lovely with naan bread or rice.

This dish actually gave me hope that this period will actually be quite enjoyable. At first I thought I would have to buy those ready made Arabiatta sauces and frozen vegetarian pizzas. Hopefully, when I write next week my spirits will still be this high.

So…. if you love meat and want to visit me, don’t come during the week

Let’s give some respect to the producers of the food we eat….. When we can.

I had to put the ‘when we can’ part. I had a lengthy talk about this with a friend who was delighted about some ‘meals in minutes’ website that had been forwarded to her. I asked her why she wants to cook meals that fast. Food, in my opinion needs to be cooked for a reasonable period of time to get the flavors going. Try frying a mutton chop and some herbs, spices in butter and using the same stuff throw one in the oven and grill it on moderate heat. There is a huge difference. I like to think of myself as a Gordon Ramsay kinda guy; I don’t like food that is cooked with a micro wave, or worse a pressure cooker.

Why do I think food needs to be cooked in what is gastronomically called a loving manner?

It boils down to acknowledging the work that went into growing the vegetables you eat or raising the cow that end up as a rib-eye steak on your plate. It takes a lot of nurturing and sacrifices from the farmer’s side to get the animal to be in a condition where it can be slaughtered and sold. A lot of love goes into raising animals; you do get attached to them. Farmers will walk through rain to find lost sheep, rush a sick calf to the vet who might be two hours away. My parents used to raise chickens when we were growing up. Slaughtering them was a bitter sweet moment; happy for the meat but sad that there would be one less chicken to feed and chase around. To ease the pain, mom would lovingly cook the chicken with spring onion, carrots salt and chicken stock.

I understand that we live very hectic lifestyles and one cannot be expected to do roasts and oxtail stews after work on a daily basis. There is, however nothing wrong with stir-fry or Carbonara pasta once in a while. Quick to make, decent nosh. Or making a genuine Alfredo sauce, as opposed to the store stuff you simply mix with boiling milk. Why kill the flavour of nice, aged ham with chemicals?

The ‘meals in minutes’ brigade can argue by saying that farmers now raise chickens in half the time it used to take and get birds half the price. If you religiously eat that kind of chicken, then you shouldn’t be reading this blog. You should be Googling for the world record for the fastest grown chicken.

I look forward to the day when people go back to cooking food, as opposed to the current practice of preparing food. Micro waving frozen veggies can’t be called cooking. I would rather buy the precooked meals at our super markets than do those. Atleast those were cooked, I hope.

Honestly, if you can’t set aside thirty minutes an evening to make a meal, then you seriously need to rearrange your schedule.

Yes, I made the NO TO MEALS IN MINUTES thing. Took me thirty minutes, same time it should take to make your fastest meal.

The demise of padkos.

Where did the practice of preparing food for road trips die to? More importantly, what brought about its death?

When I drive home for Christmas, there is a spring about an hour away (now that the road to Lusikisiki is tarred) from home where my dad used to wash his car when we went to Kokstad for December shopping. He always paid a visit to the dealership he bought his cars from, and said he wanted them to see that the car was in a good condition. Either didn’t want white salesmen to look down on him for driving a dirty car, or wanted to show them that blacks could take care of cars. I suspect the latter.

It used to take us about two and a half hours through muddy terrain to get to this spring and we had a set routine when we got there. Dad and the three lads would wash the car, and mom and my sister would whip out the flask with coffee, sandwiches and cold chicken. Then we would continue on our way to Kokstad to do groceries and buy the gifts that Father Christmas would give us.

I really used to enjoy those trips, as well as the ones across the Transkei to my mother’s home. For those who do not know Transkei, there are no service stations along the way, and the food in the ones in town is below par. Except for a place that was called Golden Egg in Mthatha. You thus had no option but to make your own food for the road. This December I drove the same route to Kokstad en route to Mount Frere with my mom and I asked her why she didn’t bring food along. She laughed and said that the trips now take less than half the time, and the cars are faster. A five hour trip then can now be done in less than two hours.

I think from a rural point of view she is right. Roads used to be gravel, more like mud actually, back in the day and you spent half the day driving from one end of the Transkei to the other. People in the Republic have had tarred roads forever, but you don’t see an X5 parked in the middle of nowhere and people munching sandwiches and the like. I think two things are to blame here: airlines and service stations.

Lets be honest, very few people these days would drive from Johannesburg to Cape Town. Its just too long, and probably costs the same as flying there. A huge number of people that used to drive long distances now simply fly and hire when they arrive at their destination. What about the ones that cannot afford to fly?

These guys now make use of the convenience stores at the filling stations along the country’s major routes. Eating while traveling is no longer cool, especially parking under some mimosa tree in the Free State and having a roadside lunch. It’s better to stop at the filling station and order a hamburger or Dagwood and watch the world go by.

With GPS things have moved a notch up. It can actually tell you the nearest restaurants and you simply get their number through directory enquiries, and then your food is ready when you get there. No time wasted.

An inevitable product of the middle class: gourmet junk……..

I think the pioneering spirit of the middle class (all races) is going to give birth to a new way of life in terms of junk food. Come to think of it, I think gourmet junk is already here.

Junk food hasn’t really changed much since the days we were kids. You simply progress up the quality ladder as your financial situation gets better. You start of with Chomp, graduate to Kitkat and then you make it to the Top Deck and Mint Crisp. Tax payer status affords you the luxury of buying Lindt and company trips overseas are incomplete without a trip to the duty free shop.

Gourmet junk can be classified into two categories: upgrade junk and nouvelle junk.

An example of upgrade junk is the chocolate analogy I have mentioned above. Local chocolates are no longer good enough; it will has to be Lindt and Toblerone. It has already become company etiquette to bring a bar of chocolate for your colleagues when you go on one of those ‘benchmarking’ trips overseas.

Pringles used to be the gourmet crisp of choice, but the tonsil scrapers from Woolies seem to have taken over. This must have something to do with the Pringles packaging. I can’t imagine a boerseun being able to stick his hand in that container to grab the last five or so crisps. The Woolies ones are very innovative in flavour, and are cut from potatoes and simply fried, not like the others that are probably ground into a paste, moulded and dried into corrugated crisps.

On the cooldrink side, its no longer classy to buy two-litre bottles. That is student fare. You buy the sexy, 200 ml cans. Ideally Coke Light, Lemonade or Ginger Ale. The brightly coloured, tongue staining soda is for your country cousins.

Sweets have also had some form of revolution. When was the last time you had chocolate éclairs? These days its about sour this (still called sweets though), snake this, worm that. Truly speaking, the change here has been the packaging. You no longer have to buy a packet of 144 sweets that takes a month to get through.

Nouvelle junk is something altogether. It is delicacies that we can now afford to buy and eat en masse. Take dried fruit for example, it used to be a treat a couple of days ago but these days you find people snacking on dried mango everyday. Biltong has also undergone a facelift, it no longer hangs above the counter at your local butcher; you now get it nicely packaged in convenience stores. In a few years time, I am sure we will see free range beef biltong.

Cheese platters are also migrating towards nouvelle junk. Cheese used to be something you only ate on special occasions, skewered with polony at kiddies parties or Melrose spread. Apartheid deprived blacks of gourmet cheese like Brie, Gruyere, Gorgonzola, etc. Nowadays we even know the deli guy on a first name basis.

Junk is undergoing an evolution and with every evolution there are those that sadly do not make it.

I miss those fish flavoured Kreols, the ones that looked like Niknaks. I also miss Fruit Chews.

Maybe we should petition to get Kreols back.