Cape Gooseberry

Sunflowers

2009-11-10T06:39:00.000-05:00

For me, life's not a beach. It's a farm.

This one belongs to my friend Eric. He grows lots and lots of different vegetables, using permaculture, biodynamic and organic principles.

But that's deserving of a whole different post. This post is all about a food that Eric doesn't grow to eat: sunflowers. And I'm not talking seeds here - flowers.

I saw this post a couple weeks ago, and so when I visited Eric last week, and saw he had a couple sunflowers bobbing in the breeze, I told him about it. He was slightly skeptical, but as always, indulgent of my flights of fancy. So he waded into a field of flowering lettuce and picked one for me, most gallantly (I promised not to tell his wife he was picking flowers for another woman). So I took it home. And stared at it a bit.

Big Spoon stared at it rather doubtfully, too, and carried on making supper (it's his snazzy brown fleece you can see in the background). So I set to work, as best as I could considering I'd never trimmed, cooked or ate a sunflower before.

I'd read that sunflowers taste a lot like artichokes, and like artichokes, there wasn't much left after all the petals and calyx and seeds were trimmed off, but I braised it nonetheless in a pan of water with a good shot of cider vinegar, a bay leaf, a pinch of salt, pepper and sugar and some coriander seeds. A sort of sunflower giardiniera, or a la greque, if you will. It looked like this:

So I sliced it finely and tossed it with green beans and pasta, for supper. It did indeed taste quite a lot like artichokes, in their tangy, mushroomy glory, only slightly sweeter. In hindsight, I think you need to be even more ruthless, and cut off all of the seed layer (roughly half of the height of the braised sunflower 'heart' you see above), which is edible, but a bit... fluffy and strawlike. So next time, it makes sense to start off with the largest sunflower you can find. Or stuff it as they do here, so it's bit more substantial.

I'm Baaack 2.0

2009-11-10T06:32:00.000-05:00

I'm baaack. Again.

There's no good excuse - it was pure blog abandonment. I was focusing all my energies and creative juices on my work as a journalist, with nothing extra left over for this blog.

But now I'm writing a lot less, and CSAing and Slow Fooding and doing nonprofit work a lot more. So I'm feeling a bit of a hole in my life. And to be honest, my weekly blog traffic reports are making me feel guilty. One hundred people visiting a week - and the most recent post is from LAST September. Unacceptable. So. I'm back.

Waterblommetjie Soup

2008-09-23T14:31:00.002-04:00

Following my delicious, local spring meal two weeks ago, a nice punnet of waterblommetjies at the supermarket inspired me to reinvent the first course of that lovely meal: waterblommetjie soup.

Waterblommetjies are the flowers of the Cape Hawthorn (Aponogeton distachyos), which grows wild in vleis (marshes) and on riverbanks.

It is the only indigenous Cape food which is widely available for sale (I’m not counting rooibos, which in my mind is not a ‘food’). During the winter and early spring, it’s usually not too difficult to find waterblommetjies for sale at greengrocers and supermarkets. The name, which translates from the Afrikaans as ‘little water flower’ is a bit misleading, since it is best to buy the closed flower buds, as the white flowers themselves are very fragile, and bruised beyond use by the time you get them home. The green buds are much more robust, and beautifully tipped with white or pink, which turn to a less appetising khaki green once cooked. They are traditionally prepared in a bredie, a local meat stew, but I prefer the simpler and cleaner flavours of a vegetable soup.

I wish I could tell you that waterblommetjies are the most delicious vegetable ever. However, they taste to me like any green, firm vegetable (think: green beans). Nonetheless, it’s a nutritious addition to any meal, and a lovely, local way to celebrate the coming spring.

WATERBLOMMETJIE SOUP
Feeds 4 as a starter, or 3 as a main course

500g waterblommetjies
2 leeks, finely sliced
2 carrots, finely sliced
1 potato, peeled and diced
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 stick celery, finely sliced
Celery leaves, chopped
3 cups chicken stock
1 smoked ham bone (optional)

Before you begin, rinse the waterblommetjies, and soak in a bowl or sinkful of cold water for ten minutes or so, with a generous pinch of salt. Stir them with your hand occasionally. This is to dislodge any hiding bugs or soil, although sometimes they have neither. Then drain the waterblommetjies, and chop them roughly into quarters or halves, through the denser base of each bud.

In a pot, sauté the leek, celery and carrot in a little olive oil, until soft. Add the garlic and potato. Deglaze with a little white wine if you’re feeling fancy, otherwise just add the chicken stock with a good pinch of salt and sugar. Bring to the boil, add the waterblommetjies. Partially cover, and lower to simmer. Cook until the waterblommetjies are soft but not mushy. Remove the smoked ham bone if using, shred any meat clinging to the bone, and put to one side. I like to put my braun emersion blender stick into the soup pot, and pulse two or three times, just to make the soup a little creamier in texture.

Adjust the seasoning, add the celery leaves and smoked ham meat, and serve.

West Coast Weekend

2008-09-13T18:42:00.002-04:00

Big Spoon and I went away for the weekend. We drove up the West Coast, spent the night night and went to a Slow Food Cape Town lunch in the area before driving home. It's one of many beautiful parts of the country, quite popular with local holiday makers, although most tourists choose to travel east along our Southern Coast, aptly named 'the Garden Route'.

The West Coast is quite windy and wild, famous in botanic circles for its magical spring wild flowers, which carpet vast swathes of the area in oceans of purple, orange, yellow and white (Admission: these photos are from last year’s trip to Namaqualand. We didn’t get as far north this year, and the flowers were reliably unreliable!). Its sandy soils produce an impressive array of vegetables, and in its inland regions, good crops of wheat. Plenty of cows and sheep round out the pastoral picture, which makes for an enjoyable road trip ("A brown cow! A spotty cow! A black cow with a white face! A white cow with a black face!" You get the general idea...).

The weather was on our side on Saturday, and we ate seafood on the beach at Paternoster, and paddled in the normally frigid Atlantic. I collected shells for my potplants (they make quite a pretty, calcium-rich mulch, and a pleasant memento), mainly fragments of mussel shells in a hundred variations on Dresden blue and lavender purple. We spent the night in a nondescript but clean little chalet in the middle of the farmlands, ate a picnic brought from home (not many restaurants in the near vicinity!) with a pint of milk from the local award-winning Guernsey herd, with that old-time raft of cream floating on top.

Then on Sunday, we drove to the Slow Food Cape Town lunch, at Kersefontein, a wheat, cattle and sheep farm that’s been in owner Julian Melck’s family for eight generations. We wandered around the magnificent homestead, admiring the antique, Cape Dutch buildings, had a fortifying glass of wine, and were given a short lecture on the history of the farm. Then we sat down to a three course meal of local specialties. The first course was waterblommetjie soup.

Waterblommetjies are the blossoms of an indigenous water plant, and are enjoyed in stews and soups in the Cape in the early spring. In this case, it was a local as well as seasonal delicacy, since Julian picked the waterblommetjies in the Berg River, which runs through his farm. Our main course was roast wild boar, from feral pigs which Julian shoots on his farm. It was accompanied by several vegetables, most notably by steamed veldkoel, a wild shoot which looks just like asparagus, but tastes like a rather minerally green bean. All served with plaasbrood (farm bread, the rather cakey, burnished loaf favoured by Afrikaner farmers), and followed by a granadilla pavlova, light as a cloud.

The weather was stormy outside, and followed us home to Cape Town, but it was such a lovely weekend, full of quiet moments and beautiful scenery. And all within one and a half hour's drive from my home.

Enjoy your own quiet moments.

FRANSCHHOEK UNCORKED

2008-09-10T14:11:00.002-04:00

Last weekend, we drove up to Franschhoek. My family has a farm not too far away, and the trip is always a lovely excuse to stop along the route and pick up olive oil, cheeses, wine, bread, pork products and other delights from a whole series of small producers along the way.

Now, I hate to play favourites, but Bread and Wine Deli is hands-down one of my favourites, and as have previously alluded to here and here. Situated on Môreson (or Soleil du Matin, depending on your language of preference, and level of pretension!) wine farm, it is attached to a lovely restaurant of the same name. Unlike the restaurant, whose hours of operation I've never quite got the hang of, the deli is open until 5pm on weekends, and offers a superb selection of home (farm!) made breads and charcuterie (cured by Chef Neil Jewell).

However, once we had selected, after much oohing and aahing, some pistachio-studded mortadella, Spanish cured pork loin and a couple of links of saucisson demi-sec, I noticed to my dismay that there was no beetroot ciabatta on offer. In fact, there was no bread on offer. "Um, what happened to the bread?" I asked the cheerful sales assistant. "Oh, it's all in the back," she told me, "You can go through and get it yourself". I was struck with the incongruous image of me, wading into the restaurant in my wellies (they've got flamingoes on them, but they're really cool, ok??) and removing bread from the bread baskets at various tables while customers looked on, aghast. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I dragged Big Spoon away from his perusal of gooseberry jam, and we headed into the restaurant.

Only, there was no restaurant. All the tables had been cleared away, and the entire room was filled with food stalls and happily munching, mildly tipsy people. There was cassoulet and steamed mussels, salad-strewn cracker bread, boerewors rolls, fresh breads, micro greens and baby vegetables, locally produced buffalo mozzarella and a make-your-own pizza station. And obviously, lots of wine to wash it all down. In other words, a market!

As previous posts will illustrate, there's little which warms the cockles of my heart like a market. By the time I had fully taken in the surroundings, Big Spoon had already found us a table, called all our friends who were due to meet us in Franschhoek and redirected them to Môreson, and had organised himself a boerewors roll, a pizza, a coffee and a glass of wine. Motivated by good food, that man could manage an army, or at least a full set of cutlery.

It turned out that we had stumbled onto Franschhoek Uncorked, the valley's annual spring wine festival, where visitors travel between twenty-two participating wine farms, drinking and, in this particular location, eating up a storm. What's not to like? So like us, I recommend you keep an eye out for next year's festival, which will hopefully happen at the end of August or beginning of September, next year.

SAMOOSA SAMPLER: PART II

2008-07-04T05:02:00.000-04:00

If the Bo-Kaap is the historical home of the samoosa and the Cape Malay population, then the Cape Flats nurtures its modern descendents of both the human and pastry varieties. Aptly named, the Flats are a windswept plain that is home to over a million Coloured and Black Capetonians, forced there under Apartheid’s Group Areas Act over fifty years ago. To White Capetonians, the Flats are synonymous with council housing, gang violence and tik (crystal meth) addiction. In reality, the Flats contain another, parallel Cape Town, with schools, suburbs, churches and mosques, malls and sports stadiums, and both wealth and poverty. And some of the best eating that Coloured cuisine has to offer.

So later in the week, we go to Gatesville to seek out some prime pastries. Now, no samoosa (or indeed, any Cape Malay or Coloured food) survey would be complete without a visit to Wembley Road House. ‘Wembley’, as it is fondly known to its many fans, is a takeout joint which embraces a wide variety of foods. However, I’ve only seen people there order fried and deep fried offerings. While some will swear by a double hotdog with cheese, peri peri and whopper sauce, or indeed the whoppers themselves (chopped steak on a bun with salad and whopper sauce, cheese and mushroom sauce entirely optional), we are there for the samoosas. Or so I think, until all my fellow samoosa testers fall upon the menu and started ordering, well, double hotdogs with cheese, peri peri and whopper sauce, and whopper burgers themselves. In the melee, I manage to stay focused and get in a couple orders for samoosas. Unlike at most Wembley’s meals, we restrain ourselves until we returned to Sir Moosa’s house where, in a very un-Wembley-like meal, we eat our food off plates around his diningroom table. Umolested, until his mother comes home, and promptly has a heart attack at the sight of us eating off her everyday plates. Once she has forced us to exchange our dirty plates for her best visitor’s bone china (Sir Moosa merely mumbles “Yes, Mommy” to the barrage of maternal remonstrations, attempting to look dignified with half a double hotdog in his mouth), samoosa tasting resumes.

We all agree that Wembley’s mince samoosa is the gold standard of mince samoosas, typical of the genre, but with a slightly spicier, rounder flavour. The potato samoosa is the spiciest of the ones we have sampled, generously seasoned with red pepper flakes and still crisply hot from the fryer.

We then drive over to Vangate Mall (as Sir Moosa put it, “Canal Walk of the Cape Flats”), to visit My Diner’s. Primarily a Pakistani takeout restaurant, My Diner’s nonetheless offers samoosas in the local style. We have been told not to miss out on the cheese and corn samoosas, which is certainly fine advice: fried to order, they are filled with molten cheese and kernels of corn, seasoned with fresh green chilli that packs a delayed but potent punch. At R11.95 for four, they are the most expensive samoosas we sample, but also have one of the best pastries, which flakes into a bubbly, crisp exterior and a lightly chewy, inner layer.

We finish off the day by stopping at Springroll Delicacies, a factory shop selling frozen halaal snacks. While the in-store take-away counter’s samoosas are visibly wilting, this certainly is worth a visit for those who would stock their freezers with more exotic samoosa flavours – smoked snoek, lamb and raisin and butternut dhania were three of many creative options for sale in frozen bulk boxes. Too full to contemplate another samoosa (especially Big Spoon, who supplemented the cheese samoosas with a vienna chip parcel at My Diner’s), we quit for the day.

Two days later, we finished our samoosa sampling in the Southern Suburbs, that White stronghold in the leafy shadows of Table Mountain, where I grew up, went to school, and now live (albeit on the wrong side of the railway tracks).

We celebrated our three days of samoosas with both samoosas and curry at Bibi’s. Here we ran into a problem which plagues the hospitality industry in general; consistency. Previously, I have declared Bibi’s chicken samoosa to be the hands-down best chicken samoosa in Cape Town. But on the evening we were there to sample samoosas, the chicken samoosa wasn’t up to scratch. The filling was sloppy, the flavours dull and the pastry pap. It couldn’t even be called a shadow of its former self; it was like eating an entirely different samoosa. As I once heard a chef say to (or rather, yell at) his minions, “Be consistent! If we’re going to put crap on these plates, at least be consistently crappy from one plate to the next!”

The mince samoosa cheers me up somewhat. Benefitting from a recent emergence from the fryer, it is crisp and light and the filling is both well spiced and surprisingly, gratifyingly meaty in flavour. Tight corners. It’s all about the corners.

But perhaps my most favourite samoosa of all comes from Maharajah’s in Rondebosch. Maharajah’s feeds a largely student crowd totally vegetarian fare, but even the professed mince samoosa junkies are won over by their potato samoosas. Where other samoosas are filled with potatoes because potatoes are cheap and provide a bland base for an array of throat-searing spices, Maharajah’s samoosa is all about the potato; fluffily mashed rather than chunky, it delivers plenty of clean, rich potato flavour which the spices seemed to highlight rather than overwhelm.

***
Getting my panel to declare an outright samoosa winner was like trying to herd cats. Not only were they unable to decide via consensus or even a majority vote, they kept on losing focus. “Oooh, let’s do gatsbies next!” one cried, only to be volubly cried down by alternate suggestions. So, I can only give you my humble opinion: I enjoyed Bibi’s beef mince samoosa, and the chicken samoosa at Mariam’s. And Maharajah’s potato samoosa is worth a visit by even the most militant mince-only samoosa-vreter (gobbler).

WEMBLEY ROADHOUSE
23 Belgravia Road, Athlone
021-697-1430

MY DINER’S TAKEAWAY
Shop 75 (next to Ocean Basket)
Vangate Mall
Klipfontein Road, Athlone
021-638-1090

SPRING ROLL DELICACIES
27 Hadjie Ebrahim Crescent,
Athlone Industria 1
021-638-5690

BIBI’S HALAAL KITCHEN
Broad Road Medical Centre, Wynberg
021-761-8365

MAHARAJAH INDIAN RESTAURANT
6 Rondebosch Court (behind Pick ‘n Pay)
Rondebosch
021-685-7891

SAMOOSA SAMPLER: PART I

2008-06-27T07:25:00.002-04:00

While searching for a subject for a Serious Article (i.e. something I’d get paid for, as opposed to this!), I wrote up a list of local foods that I enjoy. Now, I’m not going to tell you all the things that made it onto that list (suffice to say, it was long), but the first that entered my mind was: samoosas. And the second thought that entered my mind was: I haven’t eaten nearly enough samoosas to write about them with authority.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I really like samoosas. Northern Indians popularized it, but every Arabic-influenced cuisine around the world has some version of this pastry, with a million different pronunciations and spellings (Persia’s sambusak is Portugal’s chamuca is Kazakh’s samsa). It probably was introduced to South Africa in the seventeenth century by early Malay slaves, the ancestors of today’s Cape Malays, and locally, it takes the form of a three-cornered, plump triangle of thinnish pastry, filled with a curried or spiced filling, most commonly beef mince, or otherwise chicken, vegetable or potato. The pastry is called purr, which you can buy, frozen, in Eastern supermarkets. The samoosa is deep-fried, and I don’t care what your nutritionist says. And best of all, it is widely available at take-out joints, corner cafes and even fancy restaurants (who blaspheme by making it with brie cheese and kumquat gastrique, and charge R40 for two).

So while I enjoy samoosas as much as the next Capetonian, I didn’t feel sufficiently schooled in their subtleties to expound on their virtues. So in the name of authentic and truthful journalism, I got together a group of game friends to eat as wide a sample of samoosas as possible. And who naturally turned out to be the most stubborn, opinionated, greedy and wonderful group with which to tour around Cape Town.

***

Typical Capetonians, everyone involved has a strong opinion. “You cannot taste a samoosa from a single bite,” one friend firmly tells me when I attempt to ‘share’ a samoosa with my boyfriend, Big Spoon. “The filling in one corner might taste different from the filling in another. A samoosa is to be savoured whole. Unless you’re on a diet,” she concludes ruefully. Sir Moosa and Mr Masala both insist that their mothers make the best, but since I cannot afford the time or petrol to go to Mpumalanga, and Ramadan is a long way off, this isn’t helpful. Most of the men I talk to feel that beef mince samoosas are the ‘true’ samoosas. No one has anything good to say about soy mince as a filling.

At my timid remark that Kenilworth’s Oakhurst Farmstall does a mean butternut samoosa, I am howled down by the entire group. “That’s not a real samoosa,” Tipsy Tart patiently tells me, “It’s a White samoosa. It’s pap (soft). A Woolies samoosa, if you will.” Oh. And everyone agrees that Indian samoosas are a whole different snack. No, the general consensus is, if I am going to write about samoosas, they will have to be Cape Malay samoosas.

Our first stop is in the historic heart of Cape Malay culture, the Bo-Kaap. Squeezed between the busy business district of downtown Cape Town and the steep slopes of Signal Hill, the Bo-Kaap feels worlds away from its neighbouring skyscrapers. Small, brightly painted square houses and cobbled roads still mark the original settlement of Malay slaves. And while many of their descendants have been forced from their homes by the gentrification of this historic quarter, it still is home to a sizeable Muslim population, several spice stores, corner cafes and Biesmiellah’s Corner Restaurant and Takeaways.

Biesmiellah’s is a local institution, and the store is constantly visited by bubblegum-seeking schoolchildren, lunching office-workers and local housewives. The mince samoosas are fresh out the fryer, we are reassured, and we order six chicken and vegetable samoosas which are fried to order.

Eating a freshly fried samoosa is both a beautiful and torturous thing; the pastry is at its crispest, and the first bite unleashes a heavenly steam, redolent with chili, borrie (turmeric), meat and onion. But as experience will teach, it is unwise to put something in your mouth that was seconds earlier submerged in 170 degree oil, and so we pass several minutes tossing the piping hot samoosas from one singed hand to the other, hopping from foot to foot in impatience and yelping when we finally succumb to temptation and the samoosas.

The samoosas are, as expected from the location and clientele, quite traditional, relying on turmeric, chilli powder and onions for flavour. Sir Moosa declares the mince samoosa too pap, and the pastry too thick. Everyone agreed that the vegetable samoosas are the most disappointing; “McCain Specials” as Tipsy Tart puts it, with precut frozen vegetables as the base. And while the chicken wasn’t dry, all lacked depth of flavour.

Things looked up at Mariam’s Kitchen, however. Situated in the busy Pic-bell Parcade on Strand Street in the CBD, we missed the lunch rush but are sadly too late to sample the potato or vegetable samoosas. We settle for mince and chicken, and are pleasantly surprised. Although clearly not recently fried, these samoosas are still crisp, perhaps due to a longer frying (fried more brown than golden, but certainly not overcooked). Like Biesmiellah’s, the chicken samoosa is flavoured with green chilli, dhania, turmeric and onion, but the meat is shredded rather than minced, more moist and has a more subtle, deeper flavour. The mince is also similar to Biesmiellah’s, but again juicier and more savoury.

The food was good enough to distract everyone from the seriousness of the task at hand, into a discussion of the best drink to accompany samoosas. At that point, we’d all been assuaging out thirst (and taming the chili heat) with an assortment of fantas, appletisers, cokes and even a one-litre jug of orange Quali-Juice. However, consensus was split among cubana, tropika and Frulatti followers, although the relative merits of Fanta versus Fanta Grape merited a spirited argument among the test panel. I wisely kept out of it, and focused on the chicken salomie (curry rolled into a soft, griddle-blistered roti) I was sneakily stealing, one bite at a time, from Big Spoon.

BIESMIELLAH’S CORNER RESTAURANT AND TAKE AWAYS
Corner of Wale and Pentz Streets, Bo Kaap.
021 423 0850

MARIAM’S KITCHEN
Picbell Arcade
Strand Street, Cape Town
021-421-9420

Aubergine Restaurant

2007-12-04T03:08:00.000-05:00

Big Spoon and I celebrated our sixth anniversary last week. Things have been a bit hectic at work for both of us, so following the age-old romantic credo of “Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook”, we booked a table for two at one of the city’s most respected restaurants.

Aubergine has been around for some time, but you won’t necessarily find it in any Conde Nast or tourist-lauded list of the most fashionable places to eat. It has a reputation for being a ‘chef’s restaurant’, not least because the owner, Harald Bresselschmidt, is first and foremost a chef. No, this is the place old-school chefs talk about with respect, where theshowroom showmanship has no place. There are no smartie- or chakalakka-inspired desserts on this menu, thank you very much. There is the occasional menu hat-tip to contemporary cuisine: Aubergine acknowledges Cape heritage with a pickled fish starter, and sadly has buckled to modernist pressure in the form of that ubiquitous menu bomb, an east-meets-west platter. But all things considered, this place is called Aubergine, not Brinjal, for a reason – it serves up straight Nouvelle Cuisine, with the focus on French-inspired preparations and tidy, sculptured plates.

This is what it does, and it does it very, very well. The crustacean bisque was exactly what bisque is supposed to be - creamy, rich, with the slightest, acidic catch at the back of the throat – and the same goes for the rabbit (when was the last time a Cape Town menu had rabbit on it?), the veal and the palate-cleansing beetroot sorbet.

My favourite course by far was dessert, which had a playfulness lacking in the rest of the serious menu. We shared a ‘surprise du chef’ (“It’s not a surprise if I tell you,” our waiter informed us with a smile), which was a platter of miniature, different desserts, both on and off the dessert menu. An iced melon soup with mango sorbet and fresh fruit, a deep-fried chocolate truffle with candied kumquats, semolina pudding with mint ice cream, lemon crème brulée and strawberry gelée and parfait were a masterpiece in contrasting and complementary flavours, textures and temperatures, which we lingered over as long as we possibly could.

The ambiance was not stuffy, given the seriousness of the food. Located in a beautiful, eighteenth century house, Aubergine offers high ceilings, warm wooden tones and soft lighting, and the option of eating al fresco in their walled courtyard, under a massive, balmy palm tree. Most notable in a city not known for its service, the waiters were of a professional quality I last saw at a top-100 (international, not local) restaurant. In fact, I think I got more pleasure from the discreet balletic ministrations of hand-behind-the-back waiting staff than I did from the food. After all, as any Cape housewife will tell you, it’s so difficult to find good staff.

And yet... with me, there always seems to be an ‘and yet’. Everything was so technically flawless, so straight-out-of-Larousse-by-way-of-Bocuse that it lacked spontaneity, the excitement of free-wheeling kitchen creativity. For want of a less clichéd, hackneyed phrase – it lacked soul. The truth is, nouvelle ain’t that nouvelle any more, and California has irrevocably ruined my appreciation of classical fine dining.

So if you’re looking for a refined but not too formal ambiance, with superb service and the comforting familiarity of flawless, classical fine dining, Aubergine should be your first port of call. But if you’re looking for something surprising, different and witty, you’ll be better served by Jardine's or theshowroom’s tongue-in-chakalakka showmanship.

Aubergine

39 Barnet Street

Gardens, Cape Town

021-465-4909

Porter Estate Produce Market

2007-10-05T11:03:00.000-04:00

‘Tis the season for farmers markets. Enter: Porter Estate Produce Market, better known as ‘that new market in Tokai Forest’.

Situated outdoors, this new market bravely (but unwisely?) decided to open during the winter – and was, as a result, rained out on the first two occasions I trekked out to inspect it. Thankfully, most of the rain is now behind us, and Porter Estate Market is flourishing.

Like the Neighbourhood Goods Market in Salt River, Porter Estate is open on a Saturday morning, but wisely has chosen not to compete with Salt River’s offerings (a blog on the Neighbourhood Goods new extension coming shortly). While there is some overlap – Constantia Cheesery, Komati Foods and Cape Gourmet Mushrooms are hedging their bets and run stalls at both markets – Porter Estate has a decidedly more rural, home industry feel, with plenty of preserves, biltong, bread and flowers on offer. So while the Neighbourhood Goods Market caters for the more cosmopolitan, hip, city crowd, Porter Estate is the territory of South Peninsula hippies, and cheery moms and tots. And when it comes to location, location, location, you simply cannot beat the magnificent Tokai Forest, with mountain views, stately trees and shady picnic spots galore.

And there’s the added excitement of defending your breakfast (hotdogs and freshly squeezed OJ recommended!) from baboons.

Porter Estate Produce Market
Saturdays, 9am-1pm
http://www.pepmarket.co.za/

Take the M3 towards Muizenberg, exit at Tokai, turn immediately right and continue straight, into Tokai Forest, past the picnic grounds, and turn right at the old Manor House, and into Crysalis Academy grounds

The Main Ingredient

2007-10-02T00:20:00.000-04:00

“The Main Ingredient” is one of those nifty resources that all your food-wise friends want to claim to have ‘discovered’ first. Only having visited it for the first time this year, I am impossibly late to claim the honour, but I don’t feel too miffed. It’s one of those places that feels like it’s always been there, in Seapoint, waiting for your discovery. And for the sake of the Cape’s intrepid food seekers, I hope it stays there, too.

It’s a genius idea, really: a shop which specializes in elusive, hard-to-find ingredients. You know that spice mix/chocolate/ your-got-to-have-ingredient that your poor American/Canadian/British aunt lugs out to Cape Town in her suitcase every Christmas? Well, it’s probably been at the Main Ingredient all along. And if it’s not to be found there, talk to the charming owners, John and Lynne Ford, and they’ll try their hardest to source it for you.

Aside from the exotic and downright esoteric, there’s a lovely selection of local wines and preserves, and the jam-packed shelves beg for a bit of browsing. My favourites include dried Persian limes and bricks of Callebaut couverture chocolate.

When you visit, be sure to put your name down for their email newsletter, which is a good source of local foodie information.

The Main Ingredient
Shop 5, Nedbank Centre
15 Kloof Rd
Sea Point, 8005
Ph 021 439 5169

Neighbourhood Goods Market - Part II

2007-08-19T03:57:00.000-04:00

My SHOPPING Itinerary

Once breakfast is taken care of, it’s time to indulge in a little recreational artisanal shopping. You know - buy a couple of misshapen fruit and feel like you’re at one with the earth, the agricultural process and global warming protesters.

FOR LUNCH

Mushroom Gourmet offers a range of locally grown and imported mushroom delights – the widest selection I have seen available to members of the public. Rare and pricey morels, truffles and chanterelles come and go with the seasons, but my favourites are the pungent, delicate maitake (scrambled egg heaven!) and local, pine needle-studded porcini. Run by a helpful and friendly couple, dried and preserved mushrooms, mushroom bread and other interesting things are also available.

Ondersteun Handelaars
The ‘serious’ greengrocers, Ondersteun is run by experienced and capable Wilhelmina (and son). She stocks an exotic array of Durban spices (fresh turmeric and sugar cane come to mind), daily veg and harder-to-find luxuries (fresh shell beans, baby avos, celeriac) at reasonable prices.

Joostenberg
It’s best to visit the delightful Joostenberg/ farm shop, bistro and deli, by the Klipheuwel-Stellenbosch off-ramp on the N1, but this stall is handy for those busy weekends when you can’t get out of the city. Their breakfast bacon (judiciously but not excessively marbled slices of porky heaven) is a freezer staple in our house.

Farm Food

Aside from their delicious egg and bacon rolls, these lovely people from up the West Coast sell boerewors, whole rabbits, terrines, fresh cream and milk (pasteurized and unpasteurized). Their pancetta is superbly smoky, succulent and makes a killer carbonara.

Bread and Wine Meats
I can’t say enough good things about the shop, deli and restaurant on Moreson Wine Estate. Their olive oil, smoked products and meat, marvellous meat, are worth the drive out to Franschhoek any weekend. Especially for the chance to run into Neil Jewell, chef and charcutier extraordinaire, responsible for the best charcuterie – bar none – in this country. Life loses its meaning without his Spanish pork loin in the fridge, and his demi-sec saucisson is just as memorable. Ignore this stall at your peril.

The Trailer Bread People
OK, I know, this isn’t their real name, but this no-name trailer filled with bread is one of the most popular sellers at the market. If you’re into rye, there are several options, but I like a nice loaf of their potato bread – all mellow, chewy and noshable. But I must admit – I tend to buy my ciabatta here from the Olive Station stall, which gets its bread from Cape Town’s celebrated Olympia Cafe and Bakery. Old habits die hard.

Constantia Cheesery
Run from a small-holding in the farm-suburb of Constantia, this cheesery makes a lovely farm gouda among others (although, true to artisan form, each cheese is a little different in flavour and texture– I ask for a taste every week before buying). They also stock Cremalat’s gorgonzola, whose unctuous, mild blueness will convert even the staunchest anti-mould individual.

Other stalls worthy of mention include Pesto Princess, the Curry Stall (mentioned previously) for takeouts, and the olive lady.

FOR GIFTS

Chocolats Marionnettes carry a range of interesting chocolate bars, made locally from imported Belgian chocolate. Try dark chocolate with lime, Karoo Mint, Chilli or Rose, white chocolate with gold flakes (aptly named ‘egoli’) or an adorable milk chocolate mouse. My mother’s favourite is Cape Malay Spice (although personally I think it tastes the same as the cardamom chocolate).

Frenzy Condiments
My mother likes nothing better than a bottle of Frenzy Asian salad dressing. I think she secretly drinks the stuff.

Flannerie Bonaparte
Mentioned previously here, these people know a thing or two about European patisserie. Something sweet from Bonaparte will always be a welcome gift.

Okasie Florist
OK, while not strictly edible, there’s nothing like a bunch of funky flowers to accompany a foodie gift. And these people have some of the prettiest, vivacious flowers I’ve seen on sale.

Neighbourhood Goods Market - Part I

2007-08-01T05:08:00.000-04:00

OK, so I was wrong about the market.

When I returned from the States at the end of last year, I was cautiously excited when I heard that Cape Town now had its very own farmers-style market. At the moment, farmers markets are undergoing a massive revival worldwide, as part of the Slow Food, Seasonal-Local-Organic trend. In the States, there were three farmer's markets within walking distance of my university, and when I worked in California, every suburb in the Bay Area had its own thriving weekly market. And of course, there was San Francisco's Ferry Plaza, that Mecca by which all other markets are judged – and invariably found lacking. But South Africa doesn't really have a tradition of farmers markets, for all our agricultural leanings. We have farm stalls, yes, but farmer's markets? They are few and far between. But as with all food trends, we follow our northern hemisphere peers, albeit five years behind the curve. Enter: the Neighbourhood Goods Market.

Salt River is a somewhat rundown but historically characterful industrial-commerical-residential suburb, just waiting (or dreading) the urban gentrification of its rundown Cape Victorian cottages. An ominous forecast of bourgeoise things to come, The Biscuit Mill sits at its heart - a renovated factory complex, peddling industrial-chic galleries, cafes and stores to people who most definitely don't live in Salt River. But they (or should I say, we) like to pop by on weekends, in our SUVs and superhatches, and pick up hand-crafted chocolates and artisan levain breads, before fleeing back to our safer, cleaner suburbs. Aah, the thrill of 'roughing it'! OK, so farmer's market it ain't. A great source of hand-crafted, sohisticated food products, it most certainly is. It's just a matter of steeling yourself against the crowds, and knowing to avoid the bad organic coffee, the overpriced cocoa meringues and other pitfalls.

Which is why I was underwhelmed on my first visit. But now, a year older and wiser, I'm to be found there every Saturday morning.

Here's my recommended EATING itinerary:

Arrive early. I.e. By 9.30am, before the dog- and child- toting hordes really arrive.
Hit Farm Food, a stall run by an actual farmer, for an egg and bacon roll (R25). The scrambled eggs are creamy, the bacon lovingly cured – and all are guaranteed to be gone by 10.30. This is also where you can pick up exotically flavoured boerewors (fig, anyone?), whole rabbits and unpasteurized milk.

The coffee at the market sadly isn't worth your time (or caffeine high), so rather hit the drinks bar, by the entrance, for a Virgin Raspberry Mule (R15)– Stoney Ginger Ale, raspberry puree and mint. Or if you can handle the hair of the dog at 9.30am, get them to add a shot of rum.

I am a big proponent of dinner foods for breakfast, so I usually move onto a vegetable curry (R28) from the friendly folk at the curry stall. I think this is one of the best Cape-style curries available in Cape Town, especially when served with the carrot atchar. The butter chicken is free range, and a good second choice. If you can't stomach curry for breakfast, get some to go, for later.

Another nice 'main course' is the beef or veggie burgers (R35) from the Purple Burger ladies. It's less about the burgers, and more about the hundred and one toppings on offer – salsas, sauces, salads, pickles, baba ganoush – and each creation artistically topped with an edible flower.

The falalels at the (you guessed it) Ali's falafel stall meet with Big Spoon's stringent standards of falafel-approval, and the tuna noodle salad at the fresh fish stall goes down well.

And don't you dare leave without something sweet from Flannerie Bonaparte, one of the best patisseries in the city. The brownie mandarin tart – sweetcrust filled with brownie, mandarin pieces and chantilly cream – is my favourite, but the frangipane, fruit and milk tarts are all delicious.

Next post... My Neighbourhood Goods Market SHOPPING ITINERARY.

Haagen-Dazs is Here!

2007-07-26T08:14:00.000-04:00

Food-related things I miss from America:

Scallops
Clams
Maple syrup
Annie’s Instant Mac and Cheese
Widely available Vietnamese food
Auntie Annie’s cinnamon sugar pretzels
Fresh sour cherries
Penzey's Spices
Cookware deals on Ebay
Heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables
the plethora of farmers markets
Prawns sold by weight at supermarket seafood counters
Ben & Jerry’s
~~Haagen-Dazs~~

Yes, it’s happened. Haagen-Dazs has headed south.

We Capetonians now have our very own Haagen-Dazs, an American ice cream shop which has, as American icons inevitably do, invaded the rest of the world. Lucky us!!!

I have had a long-standing relationship with HD, established during my four-year stint in the States. I must admit, I consider myself more of a Ben 'n Jerry's kinda gal, but I'll take whatever sugar-soaked globalist blessings come my way. Big Spoon, however, is all Haagen-Dazs heart, ever since I first introduced him to its pleasures three years ago, on our first holiday as a couple (in Thailand of all places). Since then, on all international trips together we have visited local branches of Haagen-Dazs as far afield as New York, London, Koh Samui and Amsterdam, primarily at his insistence. Although honesty compels me to admit that I never needed much convincing! In the same vein, I was delighted to be dragged three times to Haagen-Dazs in the past week, smug that, for once, the tables had been turned – I was tagging along on Big Spoon's food mission, instead of the other way around. Although I was quite embarrassed when he actually sprinted across V&A Waterfront foodhall, erroneously thinking that Haagen-Dazs was on the cusp of closing for the evening.

As with all international imports, this ice cream doesn't come cheap: R20.00 for one scoop, and a slightly more affordable R35 for two, and all the way up to a dizzying R60 for a full sauce-and-sprinkle-laden sundae. You can eat your frozen treat there, in the maroon-chair'd and faux-wood interior, or take it to go in tubs. Sales assistants are friendly, patient and knowledgeable.

The ice cream comes in many flavours (the flavour chart, proudly displayed by Big Spoon on our fridge, lists a range from tiramisu through coconut macaroon), and all display that particularly American, particularly gratifying, fudgy chewiness. Our favourites are dulche de leche and strawberry cheesecake.

Haagen-Dazs
Victoria Wharf Foodhall
V&A Watefront

Le Quartier Francais: the Tasting Room

2007-07-02T04:23:00.000-04:00

Last month, I was fortunate enough to be taken to Le Quartier Francais’ Tasting Room. Now, anyone who follows international restaurant surveys will be familiar with this name, as it is one of the few South African restaurants which consistently places in various top international restaurant lists. Now, I’ve gone to Le Quartier for lunch at IcI, their more moderately priced cafe-restaurant, and am a loyal, long-time fan of their lamb-burger. But the Tasting Room is, by South African standards, expensive, and as with all tasting menus, a bit of an event. So it was with excitement that I joined some family friends for an evening at SA’s Number One Restaurant.

You have a choice of an eight course set tasting menu with or without accompanying wines, or a four to six course tasting menu, chosen from a larger, selective tasting menu. The selective menu was split into five courses – starters, fish course, meat course, cheese course, and dessert, but you could choose to have one starter and five desserts, or two fish courses, one cheese and three meat courses, or however you wished to combine six courses. Two members of our dining party went for the wine paired menus, and the rest of us chose six courses from the selective menu. My selection ran as follows:

· Salt cured foie gras ‘au torchon’, spiced fruit salad, banana fritter
· Organic pork terrine, cauliflower & hanepoot panna cotta, pickled veg, cabbage puree
· Roasted queen scallops, roe parfait, parsnip foam, spinach
· Braised smoked pork belly, date pomme puree, chorizo and periwinkle barigoule
· Tomato sabayon, parmesan sorbet, von treche, basil (pictured below)
· Chocolate and praline fondant, almond and lavender milk, horlicks

As you can see, it was not the most balanced meal, because I sought out the most unusual dishes, and ones that I thought would be a challenge to the kitchen.

The meal was a long affair: we arrived at seven o’clock, and left past eleven. The food was delicious, and for the most part, well balanced regarding flavour and textures, and the service was probably the best I have had in this country – friendly, knowledgeable, but discrete. Aside from the somewhat florid repertoire of the pianist (since when is the Titanic theme song a welcome addition to a tasteful meal?), I had a lovely, lovely evening. But I still find myself wondering; how much did I actually enjoy the experience?

Knowing I was going to such a respected restaurant and knowing I was going to be eating very fancy food actually made me slightly nervous. Every dish was brought out with ceremony, plated more like artwork than food, and some with names I have never even heard of (barigoule? Au torchon?). And in response, I felt that each dish required more than the ordinary delighted response, more oohing and aahing, a longer pause to admire the artful structure of the plate. So many new flavour combinations – banana fritters with foie gras, hanepoot and cauliflower, chorizo and periwinkle – I do not consider myself unadventurous, but after the third or so course, the flavours began to lose their excitement and sparkle. Being suspended in a state of awe for four hours... was actually quite exhausting.

And finally, even though I was lucky enough to be there as someone else’s guest, the prices for this sort of experience give pause for thought:

4 course selective menu R310
6 course selective menu R390
Set menu excluding wine R500
Set menu with wine R760

Can you place a monetary value on gustatory pleasure? Assuming you can, was my experience at the Tasting Room worth R390? Or to look at it comparatively, was it eight times more delicious than the R55 lamb-burger? I know I am playing devil’s advocate, but the fact remains: for the same amount of money, I could have several meals which collectively, if not individually, I would certainly enjoy more. I’m glad I have tried the Le Quartier Francais tasting menu, because every eating experience contributes to a wider understanding and appreciation of food. However, it is an experience that, once had, I do not feel a particular compulsion to repeat.

I Say Naartjie...

2007-06-28T03:29:00.000-04:00

On weekends, I drive out to my parents’ farm in the Cape Winelands. Despite its location, the farm produces no grapes. We grow lemons, plums, olives and naartjies. The latter might seem unfamiliar to foreigners, but all South Africans know, use and love the local term for tangerines. In fact, many struggle to remember the English word! Pronounced “NAAA-chee”, naartjie is an Afrikaans word derived, according to Wikipedia, from the Tamil word for citrus. At first glance, an unusual linguistic marriage, but not too strange when you consider that the Dutch East Indian Company brought many Tamil slaves to the Cape colony in the eighteenth century. Today, the four million-strong Coloured community’s unique culture still reflects its eastern ancestry, and in its turn influences the languages, culture and cuisine of South Africa as a whole. I have written a little about it here.

But back to naartjies. For me, one of the greatest joys of a Cape winter is to eat naartjies straight from the tree. It’s impossible to beat the flavour of a living fruit, cold from the winter chill, rather than a protracted stay in a supermarket fridge.

Throughout the winter, we eat bucketfuls of the orange darlings, but I never tire of that zingy, juicy flavour.

Carla's Prawns

2007-06-04T00:06:00.000-04:00

It's hard to get any further off Cape Town's tourist-beaten restaurant track than a tiny, Mozambiquan hole-in-the-wall in Muizenberg. This place probably seats a scant twenty-five diners, is open only in the evening, and requires a reservation before Carla, the bustling proprietor and namesake, even thinks about opening the security gate to let you enter. In fact, when we arrived here for dinner not so long ago, I would have thought this muted shopfront in an abandoned street was closed for business. Had it not been for its softly twinkling fairy lights and the appetising aromas beckoning us in.

Because Carla's doesn't need flashy advertisements - locals know and swear by this tiny, intimate gem, and the place is always full whenever I drive past. Its checked, plastic table cloths, chalkboard menu and friendly chicken mural stand on no ceremony, and yet, ceremony is the only way to describe the consumption of Carla's premiere dish - prawns. Sure, you can tempt the appetite with a generous house salad, perhaps nibble at whatever other meat is on special that day. But the bottom line is: prawns. Twelve juicy, glistening, massive prawns, imported from Mozambique, and lightly tossed in a garlicky, buttery sauce whose specific ingredients are uncertain but composite deliciousness requires a compulsive amount of finger licking once all the prawns have mysteriously disappeared. And if Carla is in a good mood, and you are particularly charming, she might even honour a request for some hearty chips, to aid in the saucy-plate-cleaning.

By all means, choose a slice of cake from those displayed on the counter to finish off your meal. I never have, because after Carla's prawns... only More Of Carla's Prawns could top that.

Carla's

York Street, Muizenberg

021-788-6860

Open Monday - Saturday, from 4pm onwards

12 prawns - R108 (current market price)

But first, a brief explanation...

2007-05-14T09:55:00.000-04:00

Yes, I’m back. Online, and in Cape Town.

Returning from overseas was in fact another leave-taking – of the friends I’d made in my five years abroad, and the life I had created there. But while the parting was bittersweet, my homecoming was happy – I have returned to a place I love and certainly appreciate more after my absence, to my family, childhood friends and of course, Big Spoon, long-suffering, long-distance boyfriend.

Which has all taken me approximately six months to process, to find a new routine, a new course of study, a new house, and of course, get used to my new (actually, old, decrepit, rented-house) oven.

But in the context of this blog, the most pressing reason for my silence has been my uncertainty – what relevance can or should this blog take, given that my main reasons for starting it (homesickness, nostalgia, culture shock) no longer exist?

Well, I still have friends too far away across the ocean (albeit it the other side, since my return), asking for details about my latest culinary exploits, and the occasional email from a blog visitor asking me about this-or-that Cape restaurant or recipe. The majority of websites available to would-be visitors feature the same restaurants in the same price range, giving advice to in-and-out tourists, rather than to visitors and residents who want to find the hundreds of hidden treasures this city has to offer.

So from now on, I will try to post information, opinions and observations about local restaurants, local ingredients (and where to find them) and local cooking.

So enough explaining - to the food!

I'm Back...

2007-04-23T10:45:00.000-04:00

... in Cape Town, and on this blog.

Everything's Peachy

2006-08-30T01:57:00.000-04:00

When a Slow Food Berkeley peach-picking outing yielded four trays of gorgeous, perfectly ripe Elberta peaches, I was somewhat at a loss. Elbertas are hard to come by, since they are not suited to travelling long distances. But what they lack as a marketable, exportable asset, they make up for in sweet, rich, magnificent flavour. Being the Pie Queen, some of my delicious booty was reborn as mini peach pies. Which fed me, my housemates, colleagues at work, the panhandler on the way to work... until I couldn't bring myself to touch another pie (Well, ok - maybe just one more bite. Really.).

Over the winter, I used up a surplus of apples from my pie experiments by making apple butter. Now, fruit butters do not actually contain any dairy; you simply cook down ripe fruit until it forms a creamy, thick paste, perfect for spreading on some hot toast, swirling into some yoghurt, or perking up muffin batter. Some sugar is usually added, to take the edge off the tartness of the fruit, and perhaps some fruit juice if the fruit is not too moist, but other than that (and perhaps a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg) it's pure fruity goodness. It's an old-school American tradition, now enjoying a revival at farmers' markets, but of course, there's nothing like the painstaking challenge of battling to make your own. I decided to take things up a notch from my fruit butter experiments last year; I tried my hand at canning my labours, too. Which delightfully coincided with the 22nd Sugar High Friday, a sweet-toothed monthly blogging event (this round hosted by Delicious Days), giving me additional motivation to blog about my sticky adventures.

Which is how this...

turned into this...

and this...

Deliciousness all round.

Peach Butter
Take as many perfectly ripe peaches as you like. Remember, these cook down, so two trays of peaches will make only four pints of butter. Blanch to remove their furry skins (one minute in boiling water, followed by one minute in ice water should loosen the skins perfectly). Chop into large chunks, and place in a heavy-bottomed pot. Add a pinch of salt, cover tightly, and leave over low heat. Within ten minutes the peaches should sweat out a lot of liquid, which simmers, cooking down the fruit. Stir occasionally until the peach pieces are soft, approximately thirty minutes.

Puree the peaches and their juice, either with a hand imulsion blender or a normal blender. Pour puree into a wide pot or pan with high sides; fruit butter tends to splutter a lot. You want only 1.5cm (3/4") level of puree in the pot, so you will have to cook your puree in several batches. The more puree there is in the pot, the longer it will take to cook down, and the less like fresh peaches your butter will taste.

Pour in some sugar (maybe half a cup if your fruit is already quite sweet), cover, and place over low heat. When it starts to simmer, stir to make sure evenly heated. When the whole pot of fruit puree is simmering lightly, you can remove or partially remove the lid to allow some of the liquid to evaporate. Cook, stirring frequently, until the puree has darkened to a rich, amber hue. Spoon a little onto a plate; it should hold its shape, and the edges should not be runny. You're going to be spreading - not pouring - this onto toast, remember!

Spoon the butter into jars which you have already boiled for ten minutes, leaving 1/2cm (1/4") headspace. Run a little spatula around the sides of the jar, to free any air bubbles. Carefully wipe the rim of the jar with a clean cloth, and place the lid on top. Sticky, wet jar rims don't seal properly. Screw on a lid band, until you just meet with resistance. You don't want the lid on too tightly, or air in the butter won't be able to escape, causing a vacuum.

Now submerge these peach butter jars in boiling water for five to ten minutes, depending on the size of your jar. Carefully lift onto a heatproof surface (kitchen tongs wrapped with rubber bands help you to grip them securely). Flip over the jars so they're standing on their heads (this helps sterilize the lids), and leave them to cool, unmolested. Flip them over, right side up, and press on the top of the lid. If it moves up and down, it hasn't been sealed properly, and will need to be stored in the fridge. If the lid it taut, you have succeeded in canning peach butter. Congratulations! These jars of summer goodness should last on your shelf, out of direct light and fierce heat, for several months.

Categories: peach, pie, jam, canning

Chanterais Melon

2006-08-25T00:15:00.000-04:00

Organic chanterais melon, bought at Monterey Market.

All it needs is a spoon.

Categories: chanterais, melon

Brinjal, Eggplant, Aubergine

2006-08-21T00:48:00.000-04:00

The French and the Brits call it aubergine, and the Americans use the somewhat comical - but self-explanatory - eggplant. In South Africa, it is brinjal, an Asian word no doubt brought over by Malay slaves several centuries ago or Indian railway workers more recently in our colonial history. Whatever you call this funny vegetable, most people love it or hate it. As a child, I was convinced that the detested snozzcumbers from Roald Dahl's The BFG were really in fact brinjals. But recently I have had several positive brinjal experiences, which has forced me to reconsider my position, and raid my farmers' market for the beautiful varieties you see above. Clockwise from right: Thai green eggplant, Japanese eggplant, Chinese eggplant, green goddess eggplant.

Like sponges, brinjals will absorb everything they come into contact with, which is good if they're absorbing the smoke of a braai, and bad if they're sitting in oil. But they definitely do have their own, mild flavour, and caramelize delightfully given the right treatment.

Roasting them gives you versatile results, which can be tossed with pasta, put on a pizza, or eaten as a vegetable side dish.

Roasted Brinjals

Take as many brinjals as you wish to eat. Trim either end and, using a vegetable peeler, remove three or four strips of the peel lengthways, creating a striped effect. This helps hold the brinjal together while cooking, while assuring you won't end up struggling to eat massive pieces of skin. Slice the brinjal into coins, 1 1/2-2 cm (3/4"-1") thick. Place in a baking dish or tin, and toss them with some olive oil, just enough to coat them, and sprinkle generously with salt. Place in an oven preheated to 500F/260C.

After ten minutes, stir them, add a splash or water or stock, and lower the heat to 400F/200C. Stir from time to time. If they absorb all the water, and still don't seem cooked, add some more water, and cover with tin foil for fifteen more minutes. Remember to take this off ten minutes before finishing, to evaporate any remaining liquid.

The brinjals are cooked when they are browned, slightly deflated, and are soft but not disintegrated, anything from twenty to forty minutes total cooking time, depending on the variety and size of your brinjals.

Categories: Eggplant, brinjal, aubergine

West Coast Kreef

2006-08-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

OK, I lied. We didn’t head straight back to Cape Town. We stopped for kreef.
Cape Town is justly famous for its seafood, which is flown daily all over the world. However, the sad result of exportation is that locals rarely get to eat the best our seas have to offer. Restaurants offer local specialties, but have to pay export prices in order to get a share - a price that puts them out of the reach of pretty much everyone except overseas visitors. Strict quotas are in place to ensure that seafood is harvested in a responsible and sustainable manner, which only exacerbates the cost. You’re lucky to find a whole crayfish for less than R150 at a restaurant, and lucky to find perlemoen (abalone) at all.

OK, OK, so I’m trying to justify my illegal, environmentally irresponsible behaviour, but it takes a stronger moralist than I not to pick up a couple of gorgeous, fresh kreef (crayfish) at R30 each. Crayfish, a local variety of rock-lobster, are smaller than their American relatives, but with a similar taste. The prize is the juicy, sweet white tail meat, although patient eaters suck meat out of the spindly limbs, too. All along the main road out of Paternoster you’ll see groups of boys and men loitering, with suspiciously spiky, damp plastic bags dangling from one hand. The other hand waves subtly at the passing cars in the universal salute of black market kreef; palm upturned, outstretched fingers undulating beguilingly, in imitation of their still very much alive-and-kicking goods. Big Spoon negotiated aggressively, turning down a young boy who tried to sell us the largest kreef I had ever seen for R40 each. We just didn’t need them so large, and the meat is supposed to be sweetest in average- to small-sized kreef. We ended up with six for R190, which we stuck in the passenger footwell, where we insulated them with a towel and turned on the air conditioning foot vent full blast. The car still smelt briny and crustacean-y, but we didn’t mind. We had our prize, and dashed speedily home.

We sat them in fresh water to suffocate them, then stuck them in the fridge. The next day, we parboiled them for seven minutes, and then deveined and cut off the tails. This sounds a lot simpler than it was, because those buggers had clearly eaten well just before they were plucked from their watery home. Trust me, you don’t want to know what crayfish crap looks like, much less how much the average crayfish can contain. Several visiting vegetarians went green and promptly sat outside, while several determined kreef fans battled with the stubborn tails. Finally we slathered the (rinsed) tails with garlic butter, and put them on the braai (BBQ) for five or so minutes. We ate them, just smokily singed, with more garlic butter.

I’m not going to tell you how amazing they tasted, because I’d hate to encourage you to go and break the law. And because then there’d be less out there for me.

Categories: Kreef, crayfish, braai

The West Coast

2006-07-26T01:58:00.000-04:00

Looking back at Table Mountain, on the way to the West Coast...

I went with Big Spoon’s family to Die Strandloper the summer before last. A well-known restaurant a couple hours’ drive up the West Coast, Die Strandloper is a hedonistic celebration of seafood. You book in advance, and set aside at least four hours for lunch. The tables are all outdoors, overlooking the sea, and most of the food is prepared over open fires in front of you. It’s course after course of fish and shellfish; some little fillets of this, a stew of that, and so on and so forth, according to what’s available from the local fishermen. And in case you get peckish, there’s homemade bread and butter to nibble on in between. Now, I had a whale of a time, but Big Spoon insisted there was better seafood to be had. So this past summer, he drove me to Paternoster.

Paternoster is a small seaside town also on the West Coast, which you can see showcased in a South African movie called Forgiveness, which did rather well at international film festivals earlier this year. We ate at Voorstrandt, a casual restaurant right overlooking the beach. The menu was in Afrikaans, not my strongest language (though it should be after nine years of learning it at school), but with Big Spoon’s help I translated the entire thing. We didn’t dillydally with any turf, but headed straight to the surf: the visbord (fish platter) of three different fish, prawns in the shell, and a small portion of fried calamari strips. The fish was a bit ordinary (much to Spoon’s disappointment, as he had eaten a kabeljou of transcendental deliciousness on his previous visit), but the prawns were fresh and juicy, and the calamari was crisp without, and tenderly yielding within. We couldn’t handle dessert, but we admired the sticky toffee pudding we saw at a neighbouring table. Followed by a stroll along the beach and a brief, icy, ankle-depth foray into the surf, it was a delightful outing, and worth the two-hour drive there and back (through which I mostly dozed).

Die Strandloper
On the R27 to Langebaan
+27 (0)22 77 22 490

Voorstrandt Restaurant
Strandloper Way, Paternoster
+27 (22) 752-2038

Categories: Paternoster, Langebaan, West_Coast

Sour Cherry Pie

2006-07-20T01:53:00.000-04:00

A letter to my Mother

Dearest Mum,

Monterey Market sells sour Montmorency cherries, innocently placed alongside its sweet bing and ranier cousins. And yet these tiny, lunminously fire engine-red cherries are anything but innocent; eaten out of hand, they are mouth-puckeringly, violently sour. I finally succumbed to my fascination with the pert little things, and made a mini sour cherry pie.

In acknowledgement of my situation – i.e. one eager mouth cannot eat an entire pie, even if it wants to – I’ve been making mini pies in a little set of nonstick molds I bought for a couple of dollars at the discount store. I went all out for the cherries, and did a double pie crust. I’m glad I did; it looked so adorably pie-like once I was finished pinching the border into a pretty pattern. Since I’ve never eaten a sour cherry pie, and didn’t know how sweet-tart the end product should be, I actually looked up the sugar:fruit ratio in Chez Panisse Desserts. I usually avoid recipes for pies, since one batch of berries or apples might taste and act totally different from the next, and once you start faithfully following the recipes, you lose touch with your own taste instincts. Americans just love to drown out any natural fruit flavour with sugar. I don’t usually order pies when I’m in a restaurant or bakery, just because I’m so often disappointed by the jammy, sugary filling I find seeping out of crusts that are traditionally (and proudly!) made with half butter, half Crisco. Ugh. But I trust Chez; since their whole dessert philosophy is centered on the ingredients, both the recipes in the cookbook, and the desserts I have tasted at the restaurant, are never too sweet for me. So I bravely placed myself in the capable hands of Lindsay Shere (the first Chez pastry chef and author of the dessert book).

It was of those true, cooking-is-alchemy moments. I kept a careful eye on the pie (mini pies sometimes burn quicker than normal-sized ones), and took it out when it was just right. That’s the nice thing with double pie crusts: it’s like they have their own built-in doneness test. When the crust is golden brown and the filling starts bubbling out of the ventilation slits you slash into the top crust, you know it’s ready. Since the fruit juices inside have reached boiling point, it is wise to let it rest for a little before diving in!

Here is the most important thing I have learnt about fruit pies: you just cannot eat them by themselves. They are simply too intense, too perfumed, too rich, too sweet-tart. Either whipped cream, or in this case, vanilla ice cream, is totally necessary to bring relief to its intensity, creating a dance of cool-creamy warm-fruity, cool-creamy warm-fruity. So to get the most out of a pie - to taste each bite anew, like it’s the first, only again and again - you need the welcome intervention of dairy.

When I took my first bite of the sour cherry pie, I thought someone had played a trick on me. I expected something sweet-tart, but this was like an entirely different fruit! The first notes of its flavour were responsible for my fierce reaction: it reminded my vaguely of artificial cherry. There was the strangest, almost almond flavour to it; a low, nutty background hum to the tart cherry flavour. Then I finally understood: it was the cherry stone I was tasting. Now, and remembering the admonition that those who chip a tooth on a cherry stone while eating a cherry pie have only themselves to blame, I very carefully pitted each and every cherry before putting it in the pie. But here’s the strange thing: the cherry remembers. After months of slowly, achingly growing to maturity, clinging to the reassuring, hard stone, removing that stone cannot undo its relationship with its fruit: the cherry flesh remembers its heart. It’s a private mourning, its swan song for its stone. If you taste a pitted cherry raw, you will be overwhelmed by the juice, the flavour, the punch. But that stone perfume remains tucked away, too subtle for crude human taste buds, until it is unlocked by the relaxing, inexorable trial by heat. An ironic paradox: a light dose of arsenic lets you taste the life of the fruit.

So my sour cherry pie was more than merely sour. It was rich and redolent, gushing with warm juices – cherry blood; cut by the sharp almond flavour of the stone – cherry bone; every mouthful melting but each berry still holding its individual shape – cherry flesh. Everything cherry is, demurely tucked twixt two flaky, buttery crusts.

If I can find decent sour cherries in Cape Town (maybe they use them for pickling?) I will attempt to recreate this for you then.

All my love,
me

Baking Notes To fill a regular-sized pie, you need two pounds (900g) sour cherries, 2/3 cup sugar, and 2 TBS flour, mixed. For a mini pie, that's 1/2 pound cherries, 2 TBS + 2 tsp sugar, and 1/2 TBS flour. Preheat to 400F/200C, and lower temperature to 350F/180C, fifteen minutes into baking.

Categories: cherry, pie, Montmorency

Report: Acadia, Maine

2006-07-15T02:32:00.000-04:00

Acadia National Park is located on Mount Desert Island, which is connected to the mainland by a narrow bridge. Most of it national park land, it is a kingdom of pine forests and wide lakes and sea cliffs. We stayed in one of the larger towns, Bar Harbor, which was only starting to stir itself after the long, cold winter. We hiked in good weather, and drove in bad, slept late and ate well. A magical time.

Morning Glory Bakery
Small yet perfectly formed, this place serves coffee, freshly made sandwiches, and a range of baked goods. A perfect picnic supply stop for hikes! My one regret was that I didn’t try their blueberry Danish, which looked amazing the first day we were there, but was already gone on the following forays.

Café This Way
We had a decent breakfast, and a marvellous supper here. It’s a down-to-earth, warm restaurant, filled with a pleasant buzz of locals, where the walls are brightly painted, hung with even brighter art, and the books on the shelves are colour-coded. A good selection of omelettes, pancakes, etc. greets you in the morning, and the evening menu changes with the seasons. We skipped main course, and instead shared three appetizers and a dessert. We ate:
- lavash pizza, topped with brie, pear and mango-duck sausage
- Spring rolls filled with crabmeat, shrimp, lobstermeat, garlic, ginger and rice noodles, drizzled with sweet plum, ginger and chilli sauce
- Grilled prawns with five dipping sauces

It was all absolutely, utterly perfect. The pizza was light yet richly flavoured, the spring rolls were made from phyllo, and were undoubtedly the most delicate spring rolls I have ever had. The wrapping was thin and crisp without a whisper of grease, and the filling was succulent and sweet. The prawns were fresh, perfectly cooked, and each dipping sauce – jalapeno mojo, tequila lime, Cajun tartare, sweet chilli, plum ginger – was interesting and different. Desert was a tart-sweet blueberry pie, with ice cream. The meal blew us away, and was the culinary highlight of our time in Maine.

Mount Desert Is. Ice Cream
We dutifully went to Ben & Bill’s Ice Cream Parlor, much touted as a local ritual. The ice creams held the unusual distinction of being way too sweet, and yet totally tasteless. We threw them away, half-eaten. It was only on our last night that we sidled past Mount Desert Is. Ice Cream, which is apparently new, and a mere two blocks away from our first ice cream derailing. We only had space to taste, but what tastes they were: blueberry basil sorbet, chocolate wasabi, red banana sorbet, fresh and crystallized ginger… if I ever go back, this promising place will be on my must-eat list.

Jordan Pond House
The only place to eat inside the National Park, Jordan Pond is, as expected, overpriced, touristy, and mediocre. Its famous popovers were pleasant, but the clam chowder was pure cream only faintly flavoured by seafood (and way too many potatoes as poor compensation), its baked scallops were ordinary, and its coffee terrible. Who cares if it’s a rite of passage – I’d give it a miss, and take a picnic instead.

West Street Cafe
Our last meal in Bar Harbor, and both Big Spoon and I were craving simple, no-frills fish, but we were struggling to find something unpretentious and not too touristy. Enter: West St Cafe, along the harbour. I asked the manager about the seafood on the menu, and he told me upfront: "The Haddock's not local, but the lobster sure is". Impressed by his honesty, we ate a reasonably priced and simple meal here. I wouldn't return for the french fries, or the tartare sauce, but as the manager promised, the lobster was fresh, and a relief after so many fancy restaurant meals! Locals abounded, the decor was unabashedly nautical kitsch, and our watiress was friendly. Nuff said.

Morning Glory Bakery
Rodick St
207- 288-3041

Cafe This Way
14 ½ Mt Desert Street, Bar Harbor
207-288-4483

Mt Desert Island Ice Cream
Kennebec Street (overlooking the park), Bar Harbor
207-735-5911

Jordan Pond House
Park Loop Road, Acadia National Park
207-276-3316

West Street Cafe
76 West Street, Bar Harbor
207-288-5242

Categories: Bar_Harbor, Maine, Lobster, Acadia

Report: Route One, Maine

2006-07-11T01:59:00.000-04:00

Maine, continued...
The next day we rented a car and headed north for Acadia National Park. We rejected the faster motorway in favour of a leisurely five-hour drive along Route 1, which took us alongside the sea, through rural areas, and little towns. I was smitten by the assortment of signs we passed, advertising small home industries – quilts, eggs, jewelry, furniture. It was a glimpse of ‘real’ America, and the hard-working, enterprising Americans who inhabit it, so far from the typical tourism of the larger cities. Although the region is popular with local holiday-makers, we were there one week before Labor Day Weekend, so most of the shops and attractions were opening, but the hordes had not yet descended.

Now, one thing drummed into my head by all my research into the area is: you haven’t visited Maine unless you’ve eaten lobster (especially a lobster roll). And blueberries, and fried seafood. Poor Big Spoon – he didn’t know what hit him. On our way to Acadia, we stopped at Red’s Eats, which is a tiny takeout shack in Wicasset, alongside the highway. You order at the hatch, wait for your name to be called, then take your food around to the little deck around back, which overlooks the water – and the highway. We enjoyed our meal, although it sat like a rock in our stomachs for hours after. A common problem with deep-fried anything! We shared a lobster roll, which is tail and claw meat, on a toasted, buttered hot dog bun. With this quintessential Maine dish, arguments over mayo versus butter abound, but all research sources were unanimous: no fancy other ingredients, the bun must be a simple hotdog roll (none of this ciabatta or baguette bull, now), and it must be cold. Now, Big Spoon and I are not connoisseurs of this particular dish, and so have the temerity to critique our specimen at Red’s Eats thus: the lobster roll was as good as Maine tradition lets it be. The meat was generous and tender, but its flavour is dulled by its cold temperature. While I applaud simplicity, I would not have turned down other, additional sandwich fillers. Criticisms aside, we enjoyed it, and our onion rings too. Big Spoon tried his first clam here, a big belly clam, deep fried, with less success. As a clam lover, I can attest to the fact that the clams were good, tender (not overcooked, a fatal clam-cooking error) and flavourful. I guess that clams are just not Big Spoon’s thing, and he spent the rest of the meal simultaneously wolfing down our lobster roll, and gazing at me reproachfully for ‘tricking him into eating a rubbery intestinal thingie’.

Red’s Eats
Water and Main Street
Wicasset, ME

Categories: Maine, lobster, clams

Fresh Chickpeas

2006-07-08T01:20:00.000-04:00

It’s totally ridiculous: here I am, the mecca of American agriculture, and only one post about the food in almost a month. I’ve been so embarrassed by my atypical silence that I have even been avoiding other people’s food blogs: the sight of so much creativity, abundance and deliciousness shames me. Well, I have been out and about, at Monterey Market and the Berkeley farmers’ markets, and I have been eating well – just not in any way that might be considered fascinating to other people. After a long day at work, and with the summery weather, all I have the energy and desire to rustle up is: fruit, fruit, fruit, and maybe a little something on toast. Oh, and I’m quasi-afraid of my new, beautiful camera, too.

But I have overcome my fears/apathy/blahness, and present to you:

Chickpeas. Baby steps.

I found these beauties at the Thursday market, and was entranced by their cheery bubble-pods, and the cool, green, brainy marbles inside. I’ve never eaten fresh chickpeas before, and they tasted slightly crisp (like raw peas), green, and oh-so-slightly nutty. Although I nibbled on them raw, I did simmer them for five minutes in salted water before eating, to make them slightly more digestible.

Simple, South-West Chickpea Hash

This can hardly be called a recipe; it’s more of an improvisation. The South-West part was dictated by my ingredients - tomatoes, onions, corn - rather than a desire to go all retro on you. You will need:

- Fresh, podded chickpeas, or other legume (fresh beans are nice, too)
- One ear of corn, lightly boiled/microwaved/steamed, then shucked
- Chopped red onion
- Minced garlic
- Chopped tomatoes
- A mild but tangy cheese, chopped (I have a delightful young asiago from the Cheese Board)
- Avocado, sliced at the last minute
- Torn leaves of basil

Simmer the chickpeas (or beans) until al dente. Saute the garlic in some olive oil until softened. Add the onion, and cook until the edges soften, but the flavour is still quite fresh and sharp. Add the corn and chickpeas, give the pan a good shake, then add the tomatoes and some salt and pepper. When the tomatoes are melting into the other ingredients, add the cheese, stir to initiate gooey, stringy cheesiness, then pour the hash into a bowl. Top with basil and avocado, and eat with a spoon.

I often eat variations on this theme, with eggs, other herbs, mushrooms, or baby potatoes. Summer in a bowl.

Categories: Chickpeas

Report: Portland, Maine

2006-07-07T01:49:00.000-04:00

Big Spoon came out to visit me in America in May. It was his first-ever trip to the States, and since most of our time together would be spent in Providence, Boston and New York, I made sure we took three days to explore a slightly more picturesque side to the East Coast: Maine. Here is what we ate, divided into three parts: Portland, Route One, and Bar Harbor.

We spent only one night in Portland, so I can’t comment much on the town. It’s a friendly place (one sign firmly stated, “Serving Nice People Since 1954”), with cute shops and quirky cafés downtown, pleasant wharfs for promenading, and all the amenities of a fair-sized city.

We ate at a casual little place called Duck Fat, whose name - and fame - stems from their french fries, twice-fried in duck fat. Very tasty, too, as I can attest! We also tried several of their sandwiches, which were small by US standards, but perfect for a light meal. The Long Island Duck Confit panini was filled with a tender, juicy and flavourful duck meat, and the Slider – little hamburger patties on one long roll with cheddar, grilled red onion, pickles, mustard and ketchup – was an explosion of different tastes and textures. The legendary fries were crisp and coarse without and softly potatoey within. We chose truffle ketchup as our condiment, and it was an intriguing balance of robust tomato and subtle, truffle-infused olive oil. I wanted to try a beignet for dessert, but regretfully ran out of steam.

Duck Fat
43 Middle Street, Portland, ME
207-774-8080

Categories: Portland, Maine,

Welcome to Berkeley

2006-06-12T01:11:00.000-04:00

Well, I've said goodbye to Providence, and spent a hectic three weeks visiting Montreal, New York and Maine. I'll post on those trips as soon as I find the time, but for now, here is a picture of my supper, eaten on the front steps, overlooking my new, jungly front garden in Berkeley, California. I'm working here over the summer, and then returning home to South Africa.

A barely seared beef steak, tiny, mottled fingerling potatoes (boiled and then mashed with a drop of olive oil and some salt), and a tomato and red onion salad. The salad's always the first thing I make when I arrive in a new place in summer. Olive oil, salt, pepper, finely slivered red onions and chopped ripe tomatoes, left to marinate while dinner cooks.

It's going to be a delicious summer.

Categories: Berkeley, tomatoes,

Melissa's: Nutella Hot Chocolate

2006-05-22T11:35:00.000-04:00

Maki over at I Was Just Really Very Hungry has just hosted a food blogging event, entitled “Food Destinations”. The idea is for bloggers in all corners of the world to submit a list of their favourite (respective) local eats. Since I was away in Maine over the past week, I have also missed the submission date, but let's pretend I'm merely running on African time, ok?

Since my blog is supposed to be about Cape Town (although I keep on forgetting), I really wanted to participate, but of course, I am currently in the States, so much as I want to, I can’t use this event as an excuse to rush out and photograph (ok, ok, eat at) all my favourite Capetonian haunts. I’ve already blogged one of my favourite Winelands eats, Hillcrest Berry Farm (see photo, right), and any list would have to include places like Olympia Café, Kauai Health Food and Juice Co., Bukhara... the eclectic, random list goes on.

My American flatmates came to visit me in Cape Town two and a half years ago, and we had a marvellous time. And when I ask them about their favourite food memories, they invariably reminisce about our visit to Melissa's Food Shop.

One day I will blog about Melissa’s Food Shop in detail, explaining how it revolutionized the Cape Culinary scene. For now, I will stick to the important stuff. Namely, their nutella hot chocolate.

Now, the recipe is no secret. I’ve watched with anticipation while the wait staff make it. Assiduously slather the inside base and sides of a mug with nutella, then fill with steaming hot milk. If you use a pretty glass coffee mug like Melissa’s does, you can scrape some of the nutella off the mug sides with a spoon in artistic squiggle patterns, turning the milk slightly chocolatey. Then it is up to the drinker to adjust the milk’s chocolateyness by scraping more of the nutella into the hot milk, where it dissolves. If you don’t scrape all the nutella into the milk, you can always eat it with aforementioned spoon once all the milk’s gone.

This is as good – and deadly – as it sounds. My father, the only person I’ve ever seen eat All Bran Flakes with cream and condensed milk, is understandably addicted to the stuff. Once, when my mother was waiting in line to pay for some bread at the Constantia branch of Melissa’s, she called my father who, of all the coincidences, happened to be drinking a hot chocolate at their Newlands branch! The employee at the till, who knew my family through our numerous visits, overheard my mother’s exclamations and said, with something akin to horror – “Your husband can’t be drinking a nutella hot chocolate at Newlands! He drank one here, only two hours ago!” Like all drug addicts, my father tries to hide his addiction. But sometimes, ‘coincidence’ gets the better of you.

On another occasion, I joined Dad for a hot chocolate run after school. Several hours later, I realized I had accidentally left my school jersey behind at Melissa’s. I returned with Dad, and we found the jersey, neatly folded behind the counter, with a label someone had attached: “Mr Hot Chocolate’s Daughter’s Jersey.” ‘Nuff said.

Melissa’s Food Shop
Locations:
- 94 Kloof St, Tamboerskloof
- Shop 3, Cardiff Castle, Kildare Rd, Newlands
- Shop 1&2 Constanti Courtyard, Main Rd, Constantia
- Cnr Sportica and Bill Bezuidenhout Rds, Tygervalley
- Somerset Road, Greenpoint

Categories: Cape, Ingredients, Food Destinations

Kitchen Improv: Banana Custard Tart

2006-05-12T23:56:00.000-04:00

I was supposed to make a melktert (a South African custard tart) for a potluck on Sunday. The melkert had other plans, however, so thirty minutes before we were supposed to leave, I had a beautiful, crisp, empty tart shell, patiently waiting on the counter, and a resolutely runny custard on the stove which just wouldn’t thicken. When life gives you runny custard… pretend it’s crème patissière, otherwise known as: vanilla custard that’s meant to go in the bottom of a fruit tart. So I schloomped some into the tart crust, and topped it with three bananas which I’d sliced, tossed in brown sugar and lime juice, and sautéed in butter with a splash of rum. I sprinkled a bit of cinnamon on top, and since I was left with fifteen minutes to spare, I drizzled it generously with melted chocolate. It is a rare dessert which isn’t improved by the addition of melted chocolate.

But I cannot take all the praise for this delicious concoction. It was inspired by:

1) Watching McFix-It attempting to flambée bananas a couple weeks ago. She won herself the dubious title of Only Person to Ever Struggle to Set Fire to Rum-Soaked Bananas on a Gas Stove. It must be years of instinctive Bunsen Burner safety measures kicking in.

2) My mother, who chatted me through the melktert crisis, while she worked in her kitchen nine thousand miles away in Cape Town. There’s something very calming, envisioning my mother, phone sandwiched between her shoulder and ear, pottering around the kitchen at home, while I pottered slightly more frenetically around my kitchen in New England, in identical phone-sandwich pose.

3) Bananas on the Rum, my New Favourite Flavour at Ben and Jerry’s. Hey, their Ice Cream Bill of Rights clearly states that I have the right to change my favourite flavour without warning, at any time. Banana ice cream, caramel swirls, slight tang of rum. Mmm…

4) The Banana Cream Tart at Pastiche, my most favourite foodery in all of Providence. Words fail to describe the nirvana that is their Banana Cream Tart (proper noun, if you please).

Categories: recipe, banana, tart, melktert, chocolate

London: Alperton Indian Food

2006-05-12T23:42:00.000-04:00

London is rightly famous for its Indian food; the standing joke is that the British national dish is curry. If you want to get off the beaten track, see how an immigrant population lives, and have good food too, I’d recommend you ditch the guidebook and hop on a tube for Alperton.

Alperton is a multi-cultural suburb in London with a large South Asian population. Saturday is a good day to visit and walk along Ealing Road, as all the market shops are out in full force. This is a good place to pick up some spices, saris, gold jewelry, bright bangles and bollywood movies and films. And, of course, good food. I get off at the Wembley Central tube stop, turn left and then left again at the first traffic lights, onto Ealing Road. A block or two further down the street, and you’ll pass Jashan Vegetarian Restaurant. Now, I’m sure you can get good, reasonably priced food all over, but I’ve gone several times to Jashan, and enjoyed the breadth and depth of the food on offer. I have a particular weakness for their hara bara kebabs, multi-coloured nuggets of lentil and vegetable goodness. Last time I was there with my boyfriend Big Spoon, we went a bit crazy and ordered £23 of food for the two of us, but as I said, we were greedy and left stuffed. If I recall correctly (and when it comes to food, I invariably do), our lunch included tandoori roti, mixed appetizers plate, tomato onion appam/rice pancake, paneer, mango lassi… what pleasurable memories. We waddled down to the markets to browse, stopping at a small Indian supermarket to get me an almond - or was it pistachio? – kulfi (Indian ice cream) popsicle/ice lolly. Good times.

Alperton
Wembley Central Tube Stop
If you go far enough down Ealing, you’ll actually hit Alperton tube stop, but you can always turn around and return to Wembley if you’re feeling less adventurous.

Jashan Vegetarian Restaurant
1-2 Coronet Parade
Ealing Road, Wembley HA0 4AY
Tel 020 8900 9800

Categories: Indian, London, Alperton, Vegetarian

London: Chinese Food and Dim Sum

2006-05-11T17:32:00.000-04:00

My Top Three London Culinary Experiences continues with... Chinese Food and Dim Sum.

In all the places in the world that I have eaten Chinese food, the London standards of my childhood remain my yardstick. Typically Szechwan in influence, British Chinese food is less greasy, quite spicy and (yet again, according to my standards) extremely delicious. Some stellar dishes which I have rarely seen elsewhere, but my top three, all common in London, are:

Crispy fried seaweed. Not actually seaweed, this is normally spinach leaves, finely minced then deep-fried, liberally sprinkled with dried fish powder, sugar and salt. And no doubt MSG. It’s crunchy, sweet, salty and tangy all at the same time, and no Chinese meal in London is complete without it as an opening nibble.

Aromatic crispy duck. OK, I see this all over the place, but for some reason the Brits (or rather, the British Chinese) do it as it should be done. The meat is succulent but not greasy, the skin is crisp but not oily, and the pancakes to wrap it all in are always warm and tender. Enough said.

Pan-seared noodles. American restaurants take this description as an opportunity to deep-fry a whole bowlful of noodles, and usually burn the edges to a brittle, dark brown. But when perfectly executed, the middle of the pile of noodles is a soft, moist tangle, and the edges are only just starting to tan, crisp but still recognizably noodle, rather than charcoal. Chicken strips, the typical topping, should be almost pink, and so heart-breakingly tender as to melt in your mouth. Or preferably, my mouth.

And when it comes to dim sum, I invariably go to:

The New World Chinese Restaurant
Chinatown’s largest dim sum establishment, the New World has a traditional set-up, with a never-ending flow of dim sum wheeled past your table on waitress-run trolleys. Point to what you would like, and it gets added to your tab. Don’t expect an indepth discussion on the merits of various dumplings; English skills vary from fluent to nonexistent. On my last visit, a lovely and well-meaning lady tried to get me to take a plate of chicken feet, all the while repeating “Asparagus! Asparagus!” over and over. So unless you are fluent in Chinese, be brave, shut up, and try everything. Personal favourites include their mushroom and chicken baked buns, and their wonton soup, which is assembled table-side by an efficient lady pushing a soup-trolley that looked like the bulkhead of a steel ship.

New World Chinese Restaurant
1 Gerrard Place
London, W1D 5PA
Dim sum trolleys: 11am-5pm daily; dim sum appetizers a la carte with supper.
Tube stop: Leicester Square

Categories: London, restaurant, dim_sum

London: Borough Market

2006-05-10T02:12:00.000-04:00

I have a deep affection for London.

As someone who often exclaims “I could never live in a big city! It’s a relentless, concrete jungle – only, without trees! Bah!” this might seem an unusual statement. But I was born in London, and spent the first seven years of my life there. I feel nostalgic, the way most people do when considering their childhoods. Perhaps I would see things differently if I had to commute by tube every day to work in the concrete jungle, in the concrete-grey British weather, rather than waking up under Devil’s Peak, to another perfect, laid-back Cape day. But the short spans I spend in London, visiting close friends and childhood haunts, appreciating the galleries and museums, and watching amazing theatre are small glimpses which leave me nostalgic for the Old Girl, and all she has to offer. Which includes some of the most varied and well-executed food in the world.

As an active avoider of big city living, I sadly must admit that some of the best eating is to be found in the Concrete Jungle. Urbanites are snobbish and demanding, culinary competition is aggressive, and immigrants from all over the world are magnetically drawn to the opportunities cities offer. Which results in a heavenly cross of cuisine variety and culinary depth. My friend, Mrs Malva, is meeting up with her boyfriend for a regrettably short holiday in London, and asked me to list my definitive three top (affordable) food experiences. So I’ve done much thinking, and decided on: Borough Market, Alperton High Street, and British-Chinese food. I recognize that any choices will be controversial, and that these are merely mine. Take them, or leave them.

Today, I will indulge some musings on Borough Market.

Borough Market is the oldest continuous market in London. While the community of Southwark has had a market since before the Romans arrived, a market has been run from the current site since the mid-eighteenth century. During the week, it thrums with restaurant sourcers, but on Fridays and Sturdays, it’s fair game for every home cook and foodie tourist. Now, there are many great farmers’ and food markets all over the world, and I have been lucky to visit some of them as a tourist. Usually, I leave feeling upset that I don’t have a kitchen to return to, thereby allowing me to purchase all the gorgeous and often unusual produce I see. Which, as a hotel-bound tourist, isn’t going to happen. Borough, however, has realized that you can only sell so much to home cooks, and has balanced them out with a wonderful range of ready-to-eat and prepared foods, to delight tourists and local office workers alike. Obviously, you can buy fudge from the nice fudge man, and eat it straight from the bag (try the salted one! Do it!), but Borough takes it up a notch. So if you cannot justify the purchase of an entire loaf of organic five-grain bread, there are delicious sandwiches and pies available too. And that’s only the beginning.: there’s a smoothie stall, a lamb kebab-pita stall, an oyster bar, the famous scallops with bacon vinaigrette… the list goes on and on. I left feeling very full and spiritually satisfied. You will, too, if you’re smart enough to go.

Borough Market
8 Southwark Street
London SE1 1TL
Fridays Noon-6pm
Saturdays 9am-4pm

Tube Stop: London Bridge Station

Chorizo, arugula and red pepper sarmie

Categories: London, Borough, Market

Eureka Moment: Barquettes

2006-05-09T17:02:00.000-04:00

+

= Finally understanding why my jam ‘boats’ made with hamantaschen dough wouldn’t stay closed at the ends like those jam cookies which entranced me so much at the Terminal Market in Philadelphia.

They are called barquette molds. Barque means rowboat in French. How amazingly, mind-blowingly cool is that? I’m in love….

Oh, and the delicious mini-pissaladiere barques are from Stephen at Stephen Cooks. Anchovies, onions, olives and cheese, baked in little puff pastry rowboats. Delish.

May this be the last time I ever post such a sad, sad photo:

... and all the little jam passengers drowned. Sigh.

Categories: barquette, tartlet

Chicken Piccata

2006-05-09T01:11:00.000-04:00

I’ve mentioned three of my flatmates to you so far: the Persian Princess, Mrs Malva, and Wendy Bird. The fourth, McFix-It, should have been introduced first, since I met her during my first week in America, shared a room with her for a year, and a flat with her since August. McFix-It is the Responsible one in the House; she actually owns a toolkit, feels comfortable in Home Depot, and organizes our housekeeping accounts. She’s a willing eater, kitchen sweeper, and doesn’t stop me (or the Persian Princess) from blowing our weekly food ‘budget’ (ha) on imported cheeses: all-in-all, she's a pleasure to cook for and eat with.

She majors in chemistry, and treats the kitchen as an extended lab, where recipes are to be closely followed At All Times. As a result, she is a firm fan of America's Test Kitchen (ATK) Cookbook, known for its exhaustive testing of popular recipes and cooking equipment. They’ll buy every major blender on the market, put them through rigorous testing, and then try and break them on purpose (rocks in a blender, anyone?) until they can finally declare which is the Ultimate Blender. Same goes for recipes: roast chicken, chocolate chip cookies, etc. I’ve skimmed their authoritative tome, felt happy that their tart crust findings were similar with my own, and then I happily returned to my latest arcane cookery book, which describes in tiny detail how to salt, gut and behead fresh sardines, among other fascinating things.

ATK is more reliable than most cookery books, but not infallible, as McFix-It discovers, crest-fallen, from time to time. But one dish which we all adore is their Chicken Piccata, which consists of tender, sautéed chicken cutlets in a light, glossy and intensely lemony sauce. Cheap to assemble (no imported French cheeses), easy to make: an all-round week-night winner.

McFix-It's ATK’s Chicken Piccata

For four people, take:
4 chicken breasts

If there’s a flap of meat attached to the underside, remove with a knife. You can fry this separately. Then carefully cut the chicken breast in half horizontally to yield two, thin cutlets. Pat dry with paper towels, and season with salt and pepper. Dredge in flour (you’ll need approx. ½ cup for eight cutlets).

Heat 2 TBS oil in a skillet over med-high heat until starts smoking. Add half the cutlets and cook until light golden brown on both sides, about 4 min. Transfer to plate, and keep warm in an oven preheated to 200F. Repeat with the four remaining cutlets.

Take :
1 shallot, finely minced
1 clove of garlic, finely minced
Add them to the pan, and cook over medium-high height until they are softened but not browning, approx 2 minutes.

Add:
1 cup chicken stock
½ large lemon, cut into thin half-moons

Stir to loosen any yummy brown bits stuck to the pan. Simmer this mixture until it has reduced and become slightly syrupy, approx. 8 minutes.

Add:
¼ cup lemon juice (from approx 1-2 lemons)
2 TBS rinsed capers
Any juice that’s accumulated from the sautéed cutlets, sitting in the oven.

Turn the heat down low, and whisk in, a little at a time:
3TBS chilled butter

Add:
2 TBS minced fresh parsley

Spoon over the chicken cutlets before serving.

Verifying visual data with a biothermic analysis, followed by a brief gustatory cross-check...

Categories: Recipe, Piccata, Chicken

Mushroom Soufflé Roll

2006-05-08T01:26:00.000-04:00

There are few sentences where the words ‘soufflé' and ‘reheat’ reside happily together. And you can forget about ‘fail-proof’. Here is one of those precious few:

If you think my mother’s fail-proof mushroom soufflé roll is good, try it reheated - it’s fantastic.

It’s one of my mother’s tried-and-true brunch dishes, where egg and vegetables metamorphose into something elegant and addictive. Imagine: a buttery, sautéed tangle of mushrooms and onions, enfolded into a cocoon of melt-in-the-mouth, crisp-crusted soufflé. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

The recipe comes from a cookbook by Phillippa Cheifitz, a well-known South African cook who develops simple, tasty recipes for cookbooks and food magazines. Soufflé roll variations include spinach (with ricotta and sour cream) and smoked salmon (salmon, ricotta, sour cream and caviar), but I think the best version is the mushroom one. Here it is:

Mushroom Soufflé Roll

Soufflé layer:

4 TBS butter
½ cup flour
Pinch salt
2 cups milk
1 tsp sugar
4 eggs, separated

Preheat your oven to 160C/325F. Grease a jelly/Swiss roll tin, or a big brownie tin, and line with unwaxed parchment paper.

Beat the egg yolks to combine. Set aside, next to the stove.

Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Add the flour and salt and stir for one minute, being careful not to brown the flour. Gradually add milk and cook, whisking constantly, until the butter-flour has dissolved, and has thickened the milk to the texture of smooth mashed potatoes. Congratulations – you have just made béchamel, a thick, bland base sauce. Remove from heat. Stir in the sugar.

Using a ladle or measuring cup, add a little béchamel to the egg yolks, and stir quickly. Add a little more, and whisk briskly. Continue doing this until the yolk mixture feels quite hot (test with the tip of your pinky; it should be hot, but not at all uncomfortable). This should take a couple ladlefuls of béchamel, and tempers the eggs, so they won’t turn scrambled on you when you do the next step.

Take the egg yolk mixture, and pour it into the pot containing the rest of your béchamel. Whisk like mad to incorporate.

In a clean bowl, whip your egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Fold this into your béchamel. Gently pour this mixture into your parchment-lined tin. Use a spatula to spread it into an even layer. Bake for 45 minutes, or until golden. Turn out onto a sheet of parchment paper. Peel off the original parchment paper.

Mushroom filling:

2 med onions, chopped
2 TBS oil
2 TBS butter
400g/13oz. mushrooms, finely chopped
1 cup sour cream
1 TBS lemon juice
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Chopped chives

Melt the butter with the oil in a large frying pan. Sauté the onions until tender and lightly coloured. Add the mushrooms, and fry until the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat, and stir in the lemon juice, and 3 TBS of the sour cream. Season to taste.

Spread this mixture over the soufflé layer. Use the parchment paper it lies on to roll the soufflé layer around to form a roll, and onto a waiting serving plate. Don’t worry if it cracks a bit; it just makes it look a bit more rustic. Sprinkle with chopped chives, and serve the roll sliced, with a dollop of sour cream on each serving. It should feed six to eight as part of a brunch, or as a starter.

According to Mum, this freezes well, and I can personally verify that it’s even better when reheated for ten minutes in a warmish oven: the surface of the soufflé gets ever-so-slightly crispy, which contrasts beautifully with the tender, creamy soufflé texture. Yum.

Categories: Recipe

Taleggio, Pear and Arugula Tart

2006-05-07T03:39:00.000-04:00

Today I experienced one of those moments where I realize how food-obsessed I am.

It was one of those typical kitchen accidents: I was rushed, trying to monitor and fuss over three different dishes at once, and distracted by background noise. I attempted to lift a piping, just-out-of-the-oven tart out if its tin, by pushing upwards on its removable bottom while holding onto the fluted tin frame with a clumsy oven glove. Recipe for disaster, I know. Well, the inevitable happened, and just as I lifted the tart free on its tin base, I lost my precarious grip on the circular frame, which started sliding down the arm which was holding the tart. There’s that split second, where everything slows down and in a moment of blinding clarity, you think a naughty word, which for the sake of this blog I will rephrase as damn. Damn. You think. This is going to hurt. And it did, hot metal bouncing down my forearm. It probably took me a good five seconds to slide the tart onto the counter and release the evil, hot frame from its hoolah-hoop embrace of my arm. When one of my flatmates entered ten seconds later to find me with my arm under the tap, frantically trying to stop the residual heat searing through my skin, she asked, puzzled, “If you saw it happening in slow motion, why didn’t you just drop the tart?”

It never even occurred to me that dropping the tart, my perfect, beautiful tart was an option. Pain is the price you pay for insulting that perfection with clumsiness, and like all dedicated cooks, I paid it. Although I doubt I’ll act any differently next time!

My Taleggio, Pear and Arugula Tart

This trinity forms one of my favourite flavour combinations. Tonight it was supposed to recline on a sourdough pizza base, baked on the braai (barbeque), but my sourdough starter refused to cooperate. So I used a shortcrust pastry crust instead, and the results – flaky, crisp base, sweet roasted pears, gooey, ripe cheese and peppery, fresh leaves – were spectacular.

1 disk shortcrust tart pastry
2 pears, ripe but still quite firm
1 small wedge taleggio, camembert or other sharp-tangy, soft aged cheese
A handful of rinsed, dried arugula leaves
Two onions, finely sliced and sautéed until soft and caramelized (optional)

Prepare enough shortcrust pastry (or use my pie dough, here, without the sugar) to line one 23cm/9-in. round, fluted tart tin (ideally with a removable base). Rest it in the fridge for at least twenty minutes, then roll it into a circle, and place in the buttered tart dish.

Prick the base with a fork, and rest the tin in the fridge for 10-15 minutes. This prevents the crust from losing its shape in the oven. Place the tart tin in a 400F/200C preheated oven. Immediately turn the temperature down to 350F/180C, and bake until the crust is crisp and beginning to darken, maybe twenty to thirty minutes. The crust should still be able to take another fifteen minutes in the oven without getting too dark.

Remove the crust from the oven, but don’t turn the oven off. Peel your pears, quarter them and remove the seed core with a paring knife. Slice into 3-4mm (1/8-3/16th of an inch) thick slices. If you’re using the caramelized onions, spread them over the base of the tart. Then place the pear slices in overlapping, concentric circles to cover. Cut the cheese into small chunks, and drop these over the surface of your tart. If your cheese has quite a hard rind, slice it off first. Sprinkle lightly with salt and freshly ground pepper, and perhaps a splash of olive oil if you wish.

Return to the oven, and bake for another 15-20 minutes, until the pears are softened but still hold their shape, and the cheese has melted. The crust should be golden but not brown. Remove from the oven, and gently lift the tart from the dish (without burning yourself). Throw over the arugula leaves, and serve immediately.

Categories: Recipe,

Grapefruit Two Ways

2006-04-23T19:00:00.000-04:00

The most popular dessert in my flat at the moment is 'Grapefruit Two Ways'. I halve a grapefruit globe through its equator, carefully remove the segments with my handy grapefruit knife, and hack out any membranes left behind to create a nice, grapefruit bowl. Then I replace the grapefruit chunks in the bowl, sprinkle over half a teaspoon of dark brown sugar (or given my current hoard, drizzle over some maple syrup), and pop it all under a hot broiler. The edges of the grapefruit bowl will invariably singe, but the fruit pieces should turn slightly glassy, the tips barely hint at browning, when you slide the halves out of the oven and onto a plate. The idea is to warm the flesh and dissolve the sugar, not brûlée the heck out of it. Eat with the aid of a teaspoon, but don't get greedy and scrape out every morsel of flesh clinging to your pleasing citrus bowl; you've only had grapefruit one way so far.

While the g-fruit (not to be confused with g-spot) is in the oven, boil a little jugful of water and set some rooibos tea to steep. After you've eaten all the chunks of warm, tart-sweet grapefruit, pour the tea into the grapefruit cup, and gently scrapple the walls of the grapefruit with your teaspoon to release any remaining scraps of juicy flesh into the swirling tea. Carefully lift the grapefruit cup to your lips, and sip with pleasure.

There you have it, Grapefruit Two Ways; a palate-cleansing, soul-calming end to a weekday meal. We enjoy using rooibos (redbush), which is grown only in the Western Cape, but is now available all over the States, thanks to its healthful properties. Its mildly spicy taste really dances with the grapefruit, but feel free to be unSouth African and try other herbal teas.

Categories: Recipes, Ingredients

Cape Malay Pickled Fish

2006-04-17T21:47:00.000-04:00

Judeo-Christian-Islamic holidays often come in pairs. They don’t all keep the same days every year (or indeed the same years!) but one pair that often stays in sync is Passover-Easter. Now, I don’t celebrate Easter, but I can never resist the opportunity to enjoy celebratory foods! So this Sunday I made pickled fish.

You might assume this is a Jewish dish, given the Ashkenazi fondness for pickled herring, gefilte fish and smoked salmon, but I am proud to say I made Easter food, and a Cape classic at that.

I wrote in my last post on spices that Malay slaves were brought from the east (mainly Indonesia) to work at the Cape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They introduced the colony to Islamic faith and eastern foods. Both still flourish in Cape Town to this day, but following to the segregation and racial classification of the Apartheid era, the Islamic community is closely connected to the Christian descendents of multiracial – black, white, Khoi and Malay – ancestry. They collectively form their own racial group – coloured. This is a controversial term, assigned by Apartheid and considered insulting in other countries. But my friends who belong to this community proudly identify with the term, so who am I to question their identity? While Cape Malay implies Islamic ancestry, it is used somewhat interchangeably with coloured in describing a people, a culture and a delicious cuisine. It combines local ingredients with eastern flavours – tender stews, spicy-sweet desserts, tangy pickles and mouth-watering chutneys. And pickled fish. Which is not, despite its name, pickled! It is eaten year-round, but is traditionally consumed on Easter, sandwiched in a hot cross bun. While Cape fish are ideal - oily snoek, meaty kingklip, flavourful yellowtail (God, I wish I were home!) - any firm white fish can be substituted. This recipe came from Big Spoon’s mother, a delicious cook.

CAPE MALAY PICKLED FISH

For the fish:
1kg/2 generous pounds of firm white fish, filleted, skinned and sliced into manageable pieces

Wash the fish fillets and pat dry. Season with salt and pepper, then dredge in flour. Heat some oil in a pan, and fry, approximately 6 minutes per side, until brown. Set aside.

For the sauce:
6 medium onions, peeled and sliced
375ml/12.5oz. white vinegar
1 cup sugar
10 black peppercorns
1 TBS mild curry powder
1 TBS turmeric
3 bay leaves
1 cup water

Roast turmeric and curry powder in a hot pan for ten seconds, being careful not to burn the spices. Add the vinegar, sugar and other spices, and bring to the boil., Add the onions and water, and cook for about half an hour. Check flavour and consistency; you want a good sweet-sour, light curry sauce. Add more sugar if needed.

Ladle some of the oniony sauce into a rectangular dish. Arrange fish on top. Cover with the rest of the sauce. Allow this to stand in the fridge for a day or two before serving.

I couldn’t bring myself to eat this on a hot cross bun, although Big Spoon assures me it’s delicious. I ate some for lunch today, on matzo*, in a satisfyingly multi-faith meal. The dish is wonderfully tangy, almost sweet-sour from the blend of caramelized sugar and tingly vinegar, intermingled with toasted spices and jammy onions. It has a fruity, rich taste that makes me think of juicy apricots eaten in Cape summers past.

*The fish can be dredged in potato starch instead of flour for those avoiding flour during Passover.

Categories: Cape, Recipes

Spices, Past and Present

2006-04-15T02:34:00.000-04:00

Cape Town wouldn’t be the mighty, multicultural city it is today if not for spices. Or the Spice Route, rather. Since the fifteenth century, Europeans traveling by ship to the East needed a place to replenish their onboard rations, and the sheltered bay at the bottom of the African continent, a half-way mark on the perilous journey from Europe to India, seemed a likely spot. So the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established the Cape as a sort of vegetable garden colony in the seventeenth century. Because let’s be honest; Europeans had no other reason for establishing a desolate colony on the southernmost tip of Africa. Later, gold, diamonds and other minerals would be discovered, and local people, settlers and European colonial powers would fight fiercely for the country that would one day be known as South Africa. To this day, South African political parties continue that battle to control the Cape of Good Hope, one of the wealthiest, most multi-cultural and fertile regions in the country, but that’s another story. Back in 1652, it was really all about the veggies.

A hot stop on the Spice Route, the Cape has always had access to many exotic spices from India, Indonesia and other Asian countries. In addition, slaves brought from Malaysia to work the land brought their own culinary wealth to the Cape, introducing new dishes and flavours, and greatly influencing other cuisines. Today, Cape Malay food is alive and well, and it’s hard to find any other South African cultures whose food is not informed in some way by their influence. Afrikaners use coriander seeds in both boerewors, a spicy sausage at the heart of Afrikaner kos (food), and biltong, the dried meat which usually tops the list of foods which expats miss the most. I’ve seen recipes for umngqusho (the popular Xhosa samp and beans) including allspice or cloves, and Chakalaka, a widely adored cooked vegetable condiment, always has a bit of this or that spice thrown in for good measure.

When you combine this spice-laden heritage with the upbeat creativity found in the Cape food scene today, you get… The Cape Herb and Spice Company. Probably already at a store near you! Wholefoods stocks them in the States, I’ve seen them in Holland and London, and I’ve read that they’re in Paris. Their products combine kitchen staples like salt, sugar and pepper with a range of other spices, herbs, dried fruit, vegetables and flours to add instant, eclectic flavour to a range of sweet and savoury dishes. They even make an exclusive range for Jamie Oliver! Growing up, my mother would always top her home-made cappuccino with a sweet sprinkle from their chocolate-cinnamon-sugar grinder, and I have two of their fleur de sels with me here, seaweed mélange (good with seafood, photographed above) and citrus zest (good with everything!).

But my hands-down favourite seasoning I brought from home is a lot less imaginative, but fantastically flavourful. It’s a little bag of smoked salt I bought for a couple of rands at Bread and Wine Deli over the summer, and it adds a note of smoky woodfire to just about everything in my kitchen. Bread and Wine is located on the Môreson wine estate in the Cape Winelands, just outside of Franschhoek. They have a restaurant, and a little shop. It's deli-meets-farmstall, and full of delicious things like jams and homemade breads. Another thing I adore is their unfiltered kalamata olive oil, which they decant into a bottle while you wait. At about R40 for a tall, thin bottle, it's a luxury item, but I can’t get enough of it when I am home. It is a cloudy, golden grass-green, and more viscous than the stuff from the supermarket, with a earthy, strong flavour. It makes the perfect lunch, with some flour-dusted, springy ciabatta on the side.

Categories: Cape_Town, Ingredients, Winelands

Maple Apple Pie

2006-04-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

Continuing with the Maple Syrup Madness… Maple Apple Pie!

I’ve been focusing on apple pie in my weekly pie experiments for two reasons. Firstly, apples are widely available throughout the year. While they are admittedly at their peak in the fall, they remain of an acceptable quality for baking throughout the winter. Secondly, there’s the whole, cheesy ‘American as Apple Pie’ cliché, which I find deeply appealing in a Martha-Stewart-Little-Women-Gee-Whizz-Culturally-Symbolic kind of way!

An apple pie usually consists of apples, seasonings, a sweetener and a binder, mixed together, then baked in a double crust. Since I’ve discussed crusts ad nauseum, let’s focus here on the filling.

APPLES
I favour organic braeburns at the moment, but I like to use a couple different varieties in my pies (the one to the left is a cortland). Some apples tend to get saucy, others hold their shapes, some are more sour, and others are more sweet. Mixed together, they create a more interesting and flavourful pie. Traditionally, apples are peeled, cored then sliced into half-moons, because chunkier cuts don’t cook as evenly, and tend to fall out of the crust when you slice into the pie. To the other extreme, very thin slices tend to disintegrate too quickly. I find 5mm (1/5in.) thickness to be a happy compromise.

SEASONINGS
Traditional seasonings include cinnamon, allspice, clove and nutmeg. As I’ve mentioned in earlier pie dissertations, I am not a fan of these spices combined, whether in a pumpkin or apple pie. My favourite spice is probably dried ginger, and I think this goes really well with apples. A touch of minced fresh ginger is unusual but lovely. A bit of lemon juice is often used to keep the apple slices from oxidizing and turning brown, but I genuinely enjoy the sharpness, so I tend to be generous with the lemon juice, and often add a bit of finely grated lemon zest, either to the apples or in the crust.

SWEETENERS
Sugar is the natural choice, whether white, superfine (castor), light or dark brown, or a combination. This is actually one of those rare occasions where I favour white over brown, because I find the darker sugars overwhelm the apple. Other options include honey and molasses. This week, I’ve been using maple syrup, with lovely, rich results.

BINDERS
This is something added to absorb any excess juice, which might make the bottom crust soggy. Flour, cornstarch, potato starch and ground tapioca are all popular choices.

ASSEMBLING YOUR PIE
Then you put them all together! Peel, core and slice your apples. I use 4-5 apples for a 25cm/10in. pie. In a bowl, toss the apple slices with your wet ingredients (such as lemon juice) first. Then add dry ingredients, like spices, herbs, and sugar. Taste a slice here and there to check it’s both evenly and tastily seasoned. You can’t really give fixed amounts here, because ingredients (such as apples, or even honey) vary in taste, and your tastes will vary, too. Add enough binder so that the apples don’t glisten with juice.

I hate to leave you on a cliff-hanger, but…
Later this week, I’ll describe how to assemble the pie for baking.

Categories: American, Recipe, Ingredients

Maple Syrup and Baked Beans

2006-04-11T23:04:00.000-04:00

While I was eating myself silly in Philadelphia, my dear friend Wendy-Bird was driving through Vermont with her boyfriend. Deeply familiar with my food obsessions (thanks to her years as a guineapig to some of my stranger culinary experiments) she thoughtfully brought me back a pint of Grade B Vermont Maple Syrup.

Maple syrup is a uniquely American product, because Canada and the United States are the only countries blessed with the right environmental conditions to sustain forests of maple trees. When all green and growing things awaken in the spring, the tree sap, so sluggish in winter, begins to flow again. Knowledgeable individuals ‘tap’ the trees by inserting a small pipe through the bark, letting the precious, sucrose-rich sap to drip out. Not enough is taken to injure the trees, because that would be cruel and, well, the end of all maple syrup! The sap is traditionally boiled in a vat over a wood fire, until it has reduced to a sweet, amber syrup.

I say traditionally, because all sort of sugary, tasteless junk is labeled ‘maple syrup’ on the supermarket shelves. But Wendy-Bird's delicious gift from the heartland of maple syrup is the Real Deal. True maple syrup can’t be confused with golden syrup or sugar syrup; its taste is totally its own. It’s no coincidence that this manna comes from trees; it is how I imagine antique, patina'd mahogany would taste if it was edible, all woody and smoky and rich. Yes, it is sweet, but with a depth that lends itself to savoury applications, too. And as for the grading system: Grade A is the lighter syrup typically poured over waffles. Grade B is thicker, with a stronger, richer taste, and is recommended for cooking. I, however, see no reason not to add a judicious amount of Grade B to anything I fancy! So the question is, how to use it? So far, I’ve been drizzling it over my morning porridge to good effect, and earlier this week, I made baked beans.

And I don’t mean the kind that comes in a can. Baked beans are a proud, New England tradition. I read somewhere that devout Puritans did not want to cook food on the Sabbath, so before they went to bed, they’d place a clay pot of beans, molasses, pork fat and spices in their wood-burning ovens. Come Sunday morning, there was no need to break the Sabbath; over the course of the night, the beans – a cheap, available staple – would cook in the residual heat of the oven, softening into a sweet-smoky mess of saucy, flavourful beans.

I unfortunately do not have a wood-burning oven, or the minimum eight hours needed to slow-cook beans. My highly inauthentic version is to soak beans overnight, then simmer them along with an onion in my dutch oven for two hours or until soft. The water must not be salted; I’ve learnt the hard way that dried beans will not cook if placed in a salty or acidic liquid. When they’re soft but not disintegrating, I remove the lid to let excess water evaporate. When they’re peeping out of the water, I throw over a mixture of molasses, brown sugar and mustard powder, and stir in some chopped turkey ham (out of consideration for the anti-porkers I live with). Then I simmer them for another thirty minutes or so, uncovered, until the beans are meltingly tender and enveloped in a syrupy, spicy-sweet sauce. Then I eat ‘em.

Apparently maple syrup is substituted for molasses in maple tree regions, and I so I substituted the molasses with maple syrup, to good effect. The beans held that delicious, mapley richness to perfection, and made for an excellent lunch of beans on toast.

Categories: Ingredients, American, Recipes

Lovely, Lemony Persian Chicken Soup

2006-04-05T22:22:00.000-04:00

Spring is definitely in the air, and the university is abuzz with excitement. Rhode Island springs are notoriously unreliable, and in past years, the weather has remained cold, wet and generally miserable as late as mid-May. So it came as no surprise when we backslid into winter yesterday. I didn’t feel too sad, though, because the weather persuaded the Persian Princess to take a break from her MCAT studies, and hit the kitchen. And when the Persian Princess cooks, it’s inevitably Persian food.

I knew nothing about Iranian food before I met the Princess; if you’d asked me, I no doubt would have given some vague response about shish kebabs and shwarma, and other ‘generic’ Middle Eastern food. But Iranian cuisine is, well, different. With a culinary sophistication inherited from the mighty Persian Empire, Iranian food encompasses a wealth of dishes, flavours and ingredients. It’s rich in complex seasonings and subtle sauces, with an affinity for sweet and sour flavours (which explains the Princess’s addiction to rose water and lemons), and a fondness for herby, fruity stews, fire-roasted meats, nut- and fruit-studded rice, and savoury, creamy egg dishes. This is the food of One Thousand and One Nights, redolent with saffron and rose petals. And while this is all second nature to the Princess, it’s wonderfully exotic to me. I like nothing better than to visit her family for religious holidays, when I get to sample authentic Sephardic-Persian festive dishes.

After one overnight visit, the Princess awoke to find me eating three different types of stew for breakfast. While I am still teased about it today, I maintain that only a person without taste buds - or, like the Princess, someone who has constant, enviable access to Persian food – would have had toast for breakfast when there were stews of fennel and lamb, beef and quince, and herbs and fish waiting in the fridge.

Unfortunately, Persian food is not that simple to recreate at home; a lot of dishes require hard-to-find ingredients (barberries, dried whole limes, angelica, etc.) or a lot of time (ever tried deseeding twelve pomegranates by hand?). So imagine my delight when the Princess made a dish that anyone, with a minimum of ingredients and equipment, could make at home. So it is with much joy that I present to you: Ab Gosht.

The direct translation from Farsi is, “Water Meat”. Which is a pretty accurate description of chicken soup, if somewhat unromantic. If I had to give it a name, I’d say something like: Golden Chicken Soup, or, Lemony Chicken and Legume Stew. But then the Princess would give me a name, and it wouldn’t be so complimentary. As it is, I struggled to get her to give me anything resembling a recipe, because there is no one right, measured way to recreate this dish. Since she insists that every person makes it differently, I present to you… the Persian Princess’s Ab Gosht.

Take a whole chicken, and rub its skin with turmeric, salt and pepper. Put it in a large pot. Add one large, roughly chopped onion, and two cups of dried, white beans; this time, she used a combination of lima and great northern beans. Whatever you have in the pantry – navy, cannelli, haricots, white kidneys, no-name-nondescript – is fine. If you like, you can add a couple peeled, chopped up potatoes, too. Add enough cold water to just cover the chicken. Cover the pot, and place over medium-high heat. When the water comes to the boil, lower the heat to medium, and simmer for two hours. Towards the end of the cooking time, add one drained can of chickpeas,and the juice of three lemons. Simmer for only another five to ten minutes (you don’t want the lemon juice to lose its sparkle), and remove from the heat. The chicken meat should almost fall off the bone when you prod it with a fork. Either break the chicken into more manageable pieces, or remove the chicken from the pot, take the meat off the bone, and return the meat to the soup. Serve the golden, turmeric-scented broth in bowls, making sure that each serving gets a good ladleful of beans and chickpeas, too. We sprinkled limoo amoni (dried lime powder) over ours, but some freshly cracked black pepper would be wonderful too. Since no Persian meal is complete without rice, we made a ‘cake’ of saffron basmati in the rice cooker, fluffy within and embraced in a golden, crunchy crust. A feast fit for Sheherazade.

As the Persians say, Nush-e jan! Eat to your heart’s content!

Categories: Recipes

Oysters: the Breakfast of Champions

2006-04-01T03:33:00.000-05:00

Family friends are getting married on my family's farm in the Cape Winelands this weekend. I sadly won't be there, but it got me thinking about the last large celebration we held on the farm. My father turned sixty last December, and family and friends descended from all over the world to celebrate. Good company, funny speeches and delicious food, all on a glorious Cape summer day.

But my favourite memory is from the morning after, when I woke to find my father and the farm manager in the kitchen, finishing off the last of the oysters. My presence was greeted with a fork, so I sat down and joined them, leaning sociably over a tray of naked, shucked bivalves.

Oysters from the small, tough Namibian mining town of Luderitz are anything but small and tough themselves; particularly tender and almost creamy in texture, a Luderitz oyster is a joy to behold, and heavenly to eat, cold, with a squeeze of lemon and some freshly ground black pepper. And probably the best breakfast I’ve ever had.

Categories: Winelands, Ingredient

Philadelphia (Part III)

2006-04-01T03:05:00.000-05:00

Lancaster County.

No overenthusiastic visitor can drive through Pennsylvania without stopping by to visit the Amish, a Mennonite sect that's famous for following a strict, traditional lifestyle. A little research confirmed what I suspected: it is almost impossible to have an ‘authentic’ Amish experience, thanks to rampant tourism, and the Amish desire to live apart from the modern world and its inhabitants. So we drove into Lancaster County resigned to our tourist-fate, and looking forward to a day in the countryside.

Every gas station, shop and shed along Route 340 has hung a shingle advertising Amish or Dutch this-or-that. We stopped off at the town of Bird-in-Hand and, although the market was closed, admired the quilts in the quilt shop, and sampled some free nibbles of wet-bottom Shoofly Pie at the bakery.

We spent most of the day driving around, trying - and failing- to appear nonchalant at the sight of yet another horse-and-buggy on the roadside. I did not find the landscape beautiful, but its desolate, windy fields, punctuated by sturdy wooden barns and clapboard houses, were striking. The prevalence of motorcars, farm machinery and modern conveniences sometimes made it hard to see where the modern world ended and the alternate, Amish universe began. Often the only sign was a clothesline of black, somber purple and blue overalls and long dresses beating in the wind. It must be a strange life for them, especially those who run and work in stores which depend on tourists buying quilts and pies and rocking chairs. The handful of Amish people I met in grocery stores, markets and shops were all polite but distant, and I can’t blame them. Given the Amish aversion to photography, I couldn’t bring myself to whip out the camera, tempted though I was.

The one experience we had ‘off the beaten track’ was when we spontaneously followed a sign advertising root beer, pointing to a farm a little way off rt. 340, between Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse (yes, that really is the name of a town). A rough, wooden covered tuckshop, not much more than some shelves and a counter, stood next to the dirt road, a couple yards from a cluster of barns and farmhouses. A sign said “Please Hoot for Service”, but as we arrived, a woman bustled out of a house, several dark glass bottles cradled in her apron. She sold us three bottles of homemade rootbeer, while her small son stared at us, eyes barely showing over the counter. Sadly we were too late to buy Shoofly Pie, but I bought a little whoopie pie for fifty cents. It was sweet and fresh, two chocolate, cakelike cookies with a snowy whipped filling - not at all like the mass-produced ones I've seen in stores. The rootbeer was yeasty, with a herby, slightly medicinal tang. If I return to Lancaster, I think I’ll follow more of those signs. But not, of course, on a Sunday!

Categories: American

Philadelphia (Part II)

2006-03-31T02:16:00.000-05:00

Reading Terminal Market.

It took me three days, but I have finally taught myself to correctly pronounce Reading as “Redding”. A lovely, lovely daily market, in a giant, brightly-lit warehouse which is attached to the central train station. I went on Wednesday, when Amish vendors are out in force. The market offers a wonderful mix of fresh produce – vegetables, meats, bread and cheese – and cooked food, so the whole place buzzes with eager shoppers and hungry office-workers.

I was slightly dazed when faced with such a cornucopia, as were my two brave companions, who trailed loyally after me for over an hour and a half. After a thorough browse of each and every store, we managed to consume a restrained amount of nosh, namely:

A chocolate chip cookie at the Famous 4th St Cookie Co.
Nice use of oats results in a pleasing, toothy/chewy texture. Yummy, but not extraordinarily so.

A Metro Cookie and a lemon canelé at the Metropolitan Bakery
The canelé, while pleasant, was more cakey than custardy (a contentious issue, I know; I prefer the latter type). The cookie, however, was marvelous: two crisp chocolate cookies sandwiched together with a gooey mascarpone cream. An appointment with a pork sandwich was all that kept me from returning to try the meyer lemon and chocolate éclair. I didn’t try their breads, but I definitely wanted to!

A roast pork sandwich at DiNic’s Roast Beef and Pork
According to the Chowhound board, a roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe greens is the (not so) secret cousin of the famous Philly Cheese Steak hoagie. To be honest, I was a bit intimidated by the legend that is the hoagie; I mean, once that powerful symbol is conquered, what reason would I have to return to Philly (aside from Capogiro, Penang and Lakeside Chinese Deli)?? That and, as a Jew, I naturally gravitate towards pork, especially when consumed with dairy. DiNic’s was DiLicious (sorry). The combination of sharp cheese, slightly bitter greens and moist pork is particularly genius. The pulled pork looked good, too.

A bowl of roast duck noodle soup at Sang Kee Peking Duck House
I was delighted to see this stall, since I hadn’t had time (or gastric capacity) to visit this restaurant in Chinatown. The broth was flavourful, the noodles perfectly, slurpily al dente, and the duck meat was juicy, with plenty fatty, crackly duck skin.

I left feeling very full and somewhat wistful; why oh why don’t we have a Reading Market in Cape Town???

Categories: American

Philadelphia (Part I)

2006-03-30T17:08:00.000-05:00

I just spent three glorious spring days in ‘the city that loves you back’. It’s a good motto; while Philly is very much a modern, big city, it’s both friendlier and more manageable than New York or Boston. It was my first visit, and Mrs Malva, my South-African-Philadelphian flatmate here in Providence, was my guide. While we visited both the Franklin Institute Science Museum and the Rodin Museum, much of our time was spent pounding the streets and hunting down the food, armed with many recommendations from the Chowhound Pennsylvania board. I will divide my reviews into three sections – downtown Philly, Reading Terminal Market, and Lancaster County – and post them over three days.

Downtown Philadelphia

Lakeside Chinese Deli
207 N. 9th St (between Race and Vine)
Pretty much a unanimous recommendation, which is quite unusual on the Chowhound boards. As one poster noted, this is neither a deli, nor on a lake. But Chinese it indubitably is. A small, no-frills place run by friendly, competent servers, we ordered dim sum off the menu, which included normal entrees (specials were posted on the wall). Lakeside does traditional dim sum, but with a skilled, light hand. The steamed buns positively floated, the rice rolls were positively ethereal, and the sesame balls were airy (no mean feat for what amounts to deep-fried rice gluten). Other highlights included chiu chow (tofu skins stuffed with shrimp, which were juicy, crackly and soft in all the right places), pak choy with garlic (tiny, tender, leafy, green bulbs served with whole, roasted garlic cloves), and lotus paste buns (the lightest I’ve ever had). Okay-ish but not encores include black bean squid (some pieces were strangely tough) and the vegetable rice roll (slightly watery; the beef ones packed more flavourful punch). Three of us shared eight plates, left comfortably full and paid $23 before tip.

Penang Malaysian Cuisine
117 N. 10th St (between Race and Arch)
I was taken for dinner here by Mrs Malva’s parents. I’ve never had Malaysian food, so I cannot comment on authenticity, but everything was delicious. This restaurant was wonderfully airy and beautifully decorated – something of a rarity in Chinatown. Five of us shared:
Roti canai, a crumpled pile of crispy-soft, translucently light Malaysian crepe, with a curry dipping sauce.
Roti Telur – a similar crepe, filled with onions in an egg batter, also served with a curry sauce.
Phoenix Shrimp – shrimps encased in a crumbed, taro (a bit like a purple potato) batter, deep fried. Juicy, moist, yummy.
Seafood Chow Fun – Slithery, soft wide noodles tangled up with shrimp, squid, vegetables and scraps of egg, coated in a barely-there, moist sauce.
Nasi Lemak – a perfect bowl of coconut rice, served alongside a crunchy, sharp anchovy chicken curry, sliced hard-boiled eggs and cooked vegetables.
Penang Kari Ayam – Chicken cooked with lemon grass and chili paste, in a rich coconut curry sauce.
And a whole, deep-fried red snapper (taken from a tank of live, wriggling fishies) in a black bean sauce, blanketed with handfuls of coriander leaves.

We finished with red bean ice cream, and deep-fried coconut ice cream (which came with deep-fried bananas, a generous touch). I cannot tell you how much it cost, because I was a fortunate guest. Regardless, I now want to go to Malaysia, if this is any indication of what to expect.

Capogiro
119 S. 13th St
This was a wildcard, thrown in by Mrs Malva, and turned out to be the surprise triumph of the trip. After living in Italy for a year, I am highly critical of so-called ‘gelaterie’, which are often nothing more than glorified ice cream bars. Capogiro, meaning somersault in Italian, is unequivocally the best gelato I have eaten outside of Italy. The flavours change daily, and offer both old standards and exciting, creative newbies. And above all, they all provide that elusive, light, creamy, almost moussey gelato consistency. We visited twice, my favourite flavours were:
Bourbon Vanilla – very moussey, not too sweet.
Rosemary, honey goat's milk – I do not like goat's milk cheese, but this gelato was barely tangy, and definitely not farmy. The spicy rosemary hits you first, followed by a lingering note of honey.

Other gelato and sorbet flavours on display included: heirloom apple, cilantro lime, Chinese five-spice, pineapple sage, tangerine honey, and many, many more.
Two scoops are a steep $4.50, but are worth every penny.

Places I didn’t get to, but wish I had:

Dmitri’s
At 3rd and Catherine, also at 23rd and Pine.
Affordable, simple Greek seafood.

Nanzhou Handdrawn Noodle House
927 Race St
Hand-pulling noodles is a dying art, both fun to watch and delicious to eat. Next time.

Other places I ate at but don’t particularly recommend:

Continental Mid-Town
1801 Chestnut St
We were hungry, and a friend of Mrs Malva’s recommended this place. It’s a funky, bustling, bar-meets-diner joint, better suited to the start of a night out on the town. The American-fusion dishes weren’t bad, but not good enough to make this place a food destination in itself. I paid $17 before tip to share a calamari salad, quesadillas, crab-brie wontons and shoestring fries.

Miel Patisserie
204 S. 17th St
I had high expectations that weren’t met. As a space, the patisserie felt cold and awkwardly decorated. The expensive, $5.50 desserts - we tried the Miel Gateau and the Gateau Bebe - were well executed but failed to excite or even elicit moans, unlike some of the delights of Reading Terminal Market. For which you will have to wait until tomorrow…

Until then, the South African flag, flying in Logan Square...

Categories: American

Pi(e) Day: the Sequel

2006-03-24T23:54:00.000-05:00

For those who complained that my previous representation of my science-obsessed friends was exaggerated, I bring you...

An unposed portrait of my baking utensils, resting on a handy paper plate. That was the victim of an earlier MCAT/chemistry scribble-and-run.

Let them eat pie, I say!

Categories: American

Pie Crust: the Odyssey

2006-03-22T01:17:00.000-05:00

The Search for the Perfect Recipe is the blight of all perfectionist cooks everywhere. The bug bites, and suddenly all you want to do is cook the same dish, over and over again, until everyone around you swears that they cannot look at – let alone eat- another roast chicken/banana mousse/egg custard/your-current-food-obsession-here. You, of course, feverishly exclaim that it’s not the same roast chicken; each recipe is a slight modification of the previous one, edging painfully closer to that ideal that only you can mentally taste. Until one day you find yourself eating banana mousse for breakfast, and realize you can’t taste it any more. And you sadly, regretfully, move on. But once in a blue egg-custard-moon, you actually reach your goal. You make something that fulfils the restless craving, that lives up to the fantasy, that – in that first, incredulous mouthful – doesn’t make you think, “Well, maybe if I tweak it just so….”. It sates you. At least for that moment.

I have conquered the American pie crust.

“Easy as Pie” is a misnomer if ever I heard one. Pie is a complex process, and the crust is probably the hardest part of all. A pie needs a flaky, buttery, golden crust, both light yet satisfyingly crispy, to perfectly balance the juicy, soft fruit (or other) filling. Like most baking recipes, pie crust depends on three elements:
- the ingredients,
- the ratio of ingredients,
- and the technique.

Its bare-bones composition is a combination of fat (butter, lard), flour and ice water. Then you can add acid ingredients like orange juice, yoghurt, or vinegar, to tenderize the crust. The worst-kept secret in the American culinary establishment is lard. Butter makes things tasty, but is difficult to work with, and lard makes things flaky, but is totally tasteless. So most recipes call for a mixture of the two, but I still find that marvellous butter taste is compromised. The really hard part is combining it together, because flakiness depends on the flecks of butter staying cold in the dough. So you have to keep your hot little hands off as much as possible!

In my odyssey, I experimented with recipes, techniques and tips from the beatific pie stall lady at my local farmers’ market, prize-winning, pie-baking Chowhounds, Cooks’ Illustrated “America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook”, the Pie and Pastry Bible, Epicurious, Williams Sonoma, and Nigella Lawson’s "How to Eat". My final recipe is a sort of modified pâté sucrée, using butter for flavour, cream cheese for flakiness, orange juice for tenderness and an egg yolk for richness and easier handling. Since poor students sadly don’t have Kitchenaids, I adapted the recipe to be made by hand.

For one 9- inch open pie crust, you will need:

1 cup all-purpose flour
3 generous tablespoons sugar
4 TBS unsalted butter, frozen
2 TBS cream cheese, cold, cubed
1 egg yolk
cold water
cold orange juice
A pinch of salt

Leave the butter in the freezer until it’s rock hard. Put the flour and sugar in a bowl, and mix with a whisk to remove any lumps. Put the cream cheese in the flour, and toss lightly to coat. Take a dinner knife in each hand, with the blades facing outwards, and use a scissor motion to slice through the flour. Your right hand knife draws a line from left to right, and your left hand knife draws a line from right to left, the two knives narrowly missing each other in the middle. This way you cut the cream cheese into the flour, and any larger, unyielding lumps will hopefully get caught between the two ruthless blades, and mercilessly squished. When there are no big lumps of cream cheese left, take the butter out of the freezer, and grate it into the flour using the coarsest side of a box grater or other device. Repeat the slicing motion with your knives to cut the butter into the flour. When you cannot see any shreds of butter, run a hand lightly through the mixture. You should still feel little nubs of butter, but no pieces larger than skittles.

In a bowl, whisk the yolk with the salt. Pour this over the flour, and stir in with a wooden spoon. Stir in a tiny splash of cold water. Alternate splashes of water with splashes of orange juice, until the dough is not sticky, but can be pressed together with your hands into a slightly crumbly ball. Remember, dry dough is going to be impossible to roll out, so err to the side of moistness. Press the ball into a smooth disk, wrap in cling film, and leave in the fridge for at least half an hour, and as long as two days. It might be slightly elastic if used within an hour, but the dough shouldn’t shrink while baking.

When you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven according to your recipe (I typically preheat at 400F/200C, and then reduce to 350F/180C when I put the pie in). Take the dough out of the fridge, and roll it out on a floured table or counter. Place in your pie tin, and trim the edges so there’s a ¾in./1½cm overhang. Tuck this overhanging pastry under your crust, but over the pie rim. This should give you a thicker edge to your crust. Indent this edge with the tines of a fork all the way around the pie rim, to create a pretty pattern and lightly anchor the crust to the dish. Prick the bottom of the crust with a fork, then place the pie tin in the fridge while you prepare your filling. Put the filling in the crust, sprinkle the edges with sugar, and place the pie in the oven.

Cook for 30-50 minutes, depending on your filling and recipe.

Optional: A lot of tarts in Italian pasticcerie have a bit of lemon zest in the filling or the crust, and I find adding the fine zest of half a lemon adds a different element to normally plain pie crusts. It usually doesn’t impart a strong, lemony flavour. The sugar seems to neutralize its acidity, leaving a bright, fresh taste which goes very well with fruit fillings. I also love a sprinkling of dried ginger in apple pie crusts.

Categories: Recipes, American

American as Apple Pie

2006-03-20T03:17:00.000-05:00

There’s not many dishes as American as apple pie. Or any pie, for that matter. South Africans aren’t big on ‘pies’ in the American sense of the word; pies summon fond memories of tuck shop beef and veg pies, maybe a Malay curry pie, a Cape fish pie, and certainly the ubiquitous chicken pie. Yes, our pie proclivities are deeply influenced by our British forebears, who gave us a fondness for their rib-sticking, dense, savoury dishes. But it’s rare to come across a sweet pie (except maybe lemon meringue) on a dessert menu, or see it regularly as part of a home cook’s culinary repertoire. So I was totally unprepared for the onslaught when I came to America. Cherry pie, peach pie, blackberry pie. I’ve even had green tomato pie. The pie that really singles out the foreigners is of course pumpkin, a sort of American culinary shibboleth, which I can only describe as pumpkin mush mixed with roasting spices, then baked in a thin, afterthought-of-a-crust. Even I, culinary crusader, have had to regretfully add pumpkin pie to the list of Foods to be Actively Avoided. The shriek of nutmeg against the roar of cloves seems to stay in my mouth long after I’ve forced the pumpkin pap down my throat, then the spices ascend, cloudlike, through my nose, lodge in my temples, and produce a throbbing headache. Yes, pumpkin pie seems to be the one food I am allergic to.

Unfortunately, my estimation of other pies is not much higher. I typically find the sugared fruit filling way too sweet. Even when well executed, pie fails to tempt me beyond mild interest. I think I just prefer my fruit fresh off the tree (or bush), or baked into a cake, where it’s less overpoweringly syrupy. But as a witness to American culture, I remain fascinated by the pull this deceptively innocent dessert continues to exert over my friends. Last semester, an off-the-cuff attempt to make a pie for a flatmate grew into a cultural culinary challenge when I realized how hard it is to make a decent pie. So pie-try I will, especially as spring days – and my local, seasonal farmers’ markets – approach.

Tomorrow, I’ll give you the dish on the crust…

A juicy slice of green tomato pie from last summer's farmers' market. Best enjoyed on the grass, with a peach to follow.

Categories: American

Reductio ad Absurdum: Pi(e)

2006-03-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

Being friends with a whole bunch of scientists and engineers gives me an interesting take on the world. No restaurant dinner is complete without some algebraic equations scrawled on a paper napkin; matches exist solely as tools for building geometric, free-standing 3D shapes. My kitchen equipment is more interesting than my high-falutin’ recipes: my tiny, cute crème brûlée torch is the subject of much mockery (“I’ll borrow the butane flame thrower from the lab and then you’ll see what compressed gas can do!”), biochemists offer to grow me real yeast when they see my stubborn, apathetic sourdough concoctions, and there’s always that one person who cuts off one corner of my silpat to examine the internal structure of silicone. And if I say “pie”, the response is always ‘3.14159265’. So it came as no surprise to be told that yesterday was pi day. I mistakenly responded by saying that the American Pie Council celebrates January 23rd as National Pie Day, only to have someone smarter than me point out that in the American system, where the date is written month/day, yesterday was 3.14.

Pi Day Q.E.D.

So for my scientific readership, and especially my computer scientist friends who are sweetly supportive of my puny battles with infantile, program-generated java script (no, that’s not coffee, food friends), I hereby celebrate Pi Day.

Hamantaschen, Oy!

2006-03-14T00:52:00.000-05:00

As we were clearing away dinner tonight, one of my flatmates, the Persian Princess, was recounting the trials and tribulations of her week. “And,” she finished off, “I’ve been dreaming about poppyseed hamantaschen all day”. I was surprised to hear this. “Do Sephardic Jews make hamantaschen?” I asked. “No,” she said baldly, “But I sure as heck eat them”. This sounded very much like a challenge to me. “We don’t have poppyseeds,” I said carefully. There was a delicate pause. She cocked one eyebrow. “Want to go buy some?” she said. And so, the race was on. We got in the car, hurtled through the foggy streets of Fox Point, skidded through the sliding doors of Wholefood, and in my quickest shop ever, bought a jar of poppyseeds. And some bananas, and five shitake mushrooms, and three types of gourmet cheese (don’t ask). We got out within two minutes of closing time. And then proceeded to spend the next two hours of our evening making poppy seed hamantaschen.

A well executed hamantaschen is a beautiful thing; crumbly, buttery, sweet, and best devoured still oven-warm. Although there is a breadlike-hamantaschen-camp, I take a strong sugar-cookie-hamantaschen-stance. I must admit that a yeasted hamantaschen is probably more authentic; Eastern European Jews are sadly better known for their dumplings and breads than their sugar cookies. But who can say no to a dollop of jam or creamed poppy seeds, enclosed in a moist sugar cookie crust?

Thanks to their addictive yumminess, hamantaschen are available at Jewish bakeries year-round. But for those who try to eat seasonally, hamantaschen come but once a year. Baked goods may not be an obvious candidate for Slow Food’s sustainable agriculture movement, but for hamentaschen purists, there you have it.

If Easter eggs encapsulate Easter, then hamantaschen are the universally recognized symbol of Purim. Purim celebrates the events in the biblical Book of Esther, in which all the Jews of Persia were rescued from genocide by Esther, the queen of Persia. Perhaps my own Persian Princess is a descendent of Esther, which would neatly explain her addiction to hamantaschen. But hamantaschen, as I said, are not Persian, but Ashkenazi in both name and origin.

I once read that Jewish holidays could be defined as: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” So it should come as no surprise that Ashkenazi Jews took Purim as an opportunity to tie a delicious food to a religious holiday, which other holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover – you name it) have shown is a great way to guarantee the annual reappearance of a tasty thing. “Tasch” (related to the Afrikaans ‘tas’) means pocket in Yiddish, and Haman is the baddie from the book of Esther. So once a year, Jews wolf down Haman’s pockets. Victory never tasted so sweet.

For my hamantaschen dough, I used this recipe, substituting melted butter for the vegetable oil. I filled some of the hamantaschen with jam.

Next time, I will stir in a bit of thickening agent (cornstarch or flour) to keep them from liquefying! For the rest, I made some poppy seed paste with the gorgeous smoky-blue poppy seeds I bought from Wholefoods.

Lightly toast a ¾ cup (45 grams) poppy seeds in a non-stick pan. Keep a careful eye – and nose – on the lookout for burning. Bring ¾ cup whole milk to the boil on the stove. Add one tablespoon butter, three tablespoons sugar, then the poppy seeds to the pan. Stir constantly for 8-10 minutes over medium-low heat, until the mixture has reduced and thickened. Blend with a small handful of bread crumbs in a blender or food processor to form a thick, nutty paste.

The rich, roasty, poppy seed filling is hard to beat. But a gooseberry jam hamantaschen might just have a wildcard chance...

Categories: Recipe

Tucked Away in a Crescent of Mountains…

2006-02-26T04:28:00.000-05:00

I went to San Francisco last weekend, and stayed with my cousin in the Mission district. He came to Cali many years ago to work, and then just ended up staying.

Middle-class, white South Africans often work overseas; we wait tables, we program computers, we run other people’s countries. It’s practically a rite of passage to take a year off between school and varsity, do grunt work in London on an ancestral visa, and come back home with enough money to buy a car, or even put down money on a flat. Those that come home, that is. Post-Apartheid, affirmative action makes it harder to get a job, so many head overseas. The braindrain of skilled South Africans does the economy at home no favours, but most talk about coming home at some point. They miss the weather, the people, the biltong. I know I do, and I think my cousin does, too.

Opening his fridge made me smile; there was Mrs Balls' Chutney, peri-peri sauce, and of course, Castle lager (in his meats/deli drawer). But most importantly, three different types of Ceres fruit juices.

Generations of South Africans grew up on Ceres. We practically learnt how to read from spending years staring at the inspirational spiel on the back of the carton: Tucked away in a crescent of mountains… In fact, word-perfect recitation of the Ceres creed could be a sort of South African shibboleth. I think Ceres knows how nostalgic its juice makes me; on its website, it states that:

Although it was developed predominantly for family consumption, its appeal extends to discerning adults with solid family values.

Adults with solid family values, hmm? As opposed to…? Anarchists? Porn stars? Floor-crossing South African politicians? It's a pity, because these juices make mean cocktail mixers.

It goes without saying that it's great juice. 100% fruit-based, Ceres cleverly adjusts the sourness of certain fruits by mixing in a little bit of apple or grape juice to balance out the flavours. You can buy it here, with a horrendous mark-up, at Wholefoods stores. They don’t have the apple juice I lived off as a kid, only the ‘exotic’ flavours like youngberry and guava. I’d still recommend them to all discerning juice connoisseurs!

And seeing them in my cousin’s fridge gave me hope; hope that if he still needs Ceres, perhaps one day he’ll come home. For good.

Categories: Cape_Town, Ingredients

Amarula Canelés

2006-02-12T19:19:00.000-05:00

My third confession: I know nothing about alcohol. Many glossy cookbooks sternly warn the home cook to only cook with a wine you’d be willing to drink. They never tell you what to do if you’re infamous for liking terrible wines. For my bad education, I blame the cheap bottles of montepulciano and sangiovese I’d buy at the corner store in Bologna. And since I don’t really drink hard spirits, my kitchen cupboard is invariably always missing this-or-that liqueur called for in any given recipe.

Which leads me to another problem with being a wimpy drinker with bad taste: if a recipe calls for something that I don’t have, I often substitute in another type of alcohol totally unsuited to the purpose. So when last making canelés, and discovering that I had no rum, I happily subbed with several glugs of frangelico. And I must say in my defence, it tasted great, if somewhat inauthentic.

Which got me thinking, why not amarula?

Amarula is a South African liqueur made with fresh cream and the nut of the amarula tree. The resulting product is a creamy ivory, and tastes somewhat like kahlua; sweet, nutty and slightly musky. It goes great with coffee, and is simply splendid poured over vanilla ice cream (the dessert of choice for many discerning South Africans!). And let me tell you, it tastes good in canelés. Which I am thinking of renaming canalla (please in Cape slang) in honour of its South African make-over. Now, the recipe’s not quite perfect; the canelés puffed up alarmingly, and refused to get all black and burnt sugary. But with some tweaking, perhaps… I’ll keep you posted.

Until then, you can make the real deal. Here's a great recipe and description, on of the best foodblogs ever – Chocolate and Zucchini.

Categories: Ingredients

Apricot and Soy Salmon

2006-02-04T21:56:00.000-05:00

The Yanks have their molasses and maple syrup; the Brits have their treacle and golden syrup; the Thais have their palm sugar. And the South Africans have apricot jam.

Apricot jam gives many traditional dishes a sweet - but not sugary - note, which is both rich and tangy. A spoonful of the lovely stuff is put in many of the country’s favourite dishes. It stars in some Afrikaner desserts, such as malva pudding, a sticky, moist dessert which is cooked in a cream custard sauce. It is used extensively in Cape Malay cuisine, in everything from ingelegde vis (pickled fish) to sosaties (curried kebabs) to bobotie (curried mince baked with a creamy topping). No South African pantry is without it, and it can be found in any shop worth its salt (or perhaps we should say, worth its apricot jam).

Tonight I used it in one of my mother’s favourite ways: mixed with soy sauce and smeared on fish. The slippery, salty soy contrasts delightfully with the sweet, jammy apricot, creating an instant sweet-and-sour sauce. I jazzed it up a bit with the addition of a panko crust, so you bite through a crunchy, garlicky exterior, hit a sweet-sour, jammy layer, before sinking your teeth into the moist, meaty salmon.

Apricot and Soy Salmon

For a filet of boned salmon large enough to feed two people, you will need:
Several tablespoonfuls of smooth apricot jam
Soy sauce
1 clove of garlic, chopped
A small handful of panko, or fine, crisp breadcrumbs
1 TBS Slivered or finely chopped almonds, and/or sesame seeds
A teaspoon of lime zest
Lime juice
Salt and pepper
Freshly chopped dhania (cilantro/coriander leaves)
Half a tablespoon of butter, chopped into little pieces

Preheat your oven to 400F/200C, and lightly oil a baking sheet.

For the apricot-soya glaze:
Take several tablespoonfuls of apricot jam. If it’s quite thick, microwave for twenty-odd seconds to loosen its consistency. Add a splash of soy sauce, and stir until the mixture is smooth.
Pat dry your piece of salmon, and place skin-down on the oiled baking sheet. Spread the soy-apricot mixture all over it (if the salmon’s damp, the glaze won’t stick!).

For the panko crust:
Toast the almonds/sesame seeds in a frying pan. In a bowl, combine them with the panko or bread crumbs. Add the lime zest, chopped garlic, and some salt and pepper. Mix, and then spread over the glaze, on top of the salmon. The glaze should help the crust stick to the fish. Dot the crust all over with your little pieces of butter.

Admire how professional it looks, and then place in the oven. I turn the heat down to 350F/180C after ten minutes. Depending on the fierceness of your oven, and on the thickness and type of your salmon (king salmon dries out quicker than Atlantic salmon, for example), it should be done five to ten minutes later. If you’re nervous about undercooking it, gently try to break apart the flesh in the thickest part of the salmon. It should shred easily, but still look moist. If it feels like steak, or the middle looks glassy, you need to give it a bit more time. Remember, it will keep on cooking a bit after you take it out of the oven.

Squeeze some lime juice over the crunchy, golden salmon, sprinkle liberally with the chopped dhania, and serve immediately.

Categories: Ingredients, Recipes

A Maynardville Picnic

2006-01-31T18:14:00.000-05:00

Cooking and eating often revolve around traditions. We cook (and long for) certain dishes because we remember our grandmothers making them when we were little. We mourn the closure of one specific, crappy Chinese restaurant because our parents took us there every Sunday.

One family ritual that I, at least, associate with food is the annual Shakespeare production at Maynardville. Every January, a Shakespearean play is performed at the open-air theatre in Maynardville, a public garden in the Cape Town suburb of Wynberg. My family goes every year without fail, and I must admit our outing has very little to do with an acute appreciation for Shakespeare. Some productions are strong, others disappointing, but we rarely heed bad reviews. It’s about more than that.

We pile into the car with cushions (the seats aren’t very comfy at Maynardville), fleecy tops and heavy rugs (even Cape summers can be chilly at night), chocolate and thermo’s of coffee and hot chocolate for interval, and a gigantic picnic. We arrive forty minutes before curtain-up (ok, there’s no curtain) and picnic on the grass. Over the years, more and more theatre-goers have latched onto this idea, but our picnic is naturally still the most delicious and generally over-catered.

In the afternoon, we start an assembly-line to make sandwiches. It’s the usual nonsense – one person wants pickles, another will only eat wholewheat bread – so we end up with several varieties, some with warnings scribbled on the wrapping: “NB! P’s Sandwich!”, “Pickle-free cheese for T” “Hand’s off! This one’s MINE!”. At least one of which my father invariably eats by accident, anyway. This year, I was designated chicken mayo chef. Much to my brother’s disgust, I mixed shredded chicken with a mango atchar-yoghurt-dhania(coriander/cilantro) dressing, and then added some roughly chopped arugula. Apparently it’s not chicken mayo without, well, the mayo. Oh, well. Aside from sarmies, we had little grilled chicken sausages, seedless grapes, chopped nectarines and a box of pasties de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) from Vida e Caffe (deserving of its own blog post… one of these days!). And a wide selection of cooldrinks and fruit juices.

We feasted well, and on top of everything, enjoyed the Shakespeare, too.

For anyone in Cape Town, Twelfth Night is playing through February 18th at Maynardville. And don’t forget to bring your own picnic.

Categories: Cape_Town

Buttery Sourdough Noodles

2006-01-30T03:29:00.000-05:00

This is Ira, the American man in my life. Otherwise known as my sourdough starter.

I grew him myself last year. Having read up on how easy it is to grow your own bread starter (mix flour and water together; wait), I of course ended up trying the most complicated starter recipe I could find. So smart… Much as I love baking bread, and eating waffles and pancakes and cakes (and all the other delicious things the internet promised me a sourdough starter could do), the thing that really caught my imagination was sourdough noodles.

I’m a bit of a noodle freak. Pasta, udon, mung bean – you name it, I love it. So I ended up making an obscure pelmeni starter from whey, egg yolks and durum (semolina) wheat. And to my total amazement, it worked. Ira was born. And he’s yeasty, bubbly and faster rising than any of the online sources suggested he would be.

I’ve been a keen follower of Is My Blog Burning for a while. A sort of recipe and photo potluck for foodbloggers, each monthly IMBB gives me a slew of new ideas. So now that I have my own blog, and this month’s theme is noodles…

I present to you… buttery sourdough noodles! The first meal I ever shared with Ira, and one that I happily recreated this evening. I just scooped up some recently rested starter from the fridge, and let it sit until it was at room temperature, and slightly bubbly. Then I mixed in some flour to make a slightly firm, no-longer-sticky dough. I rolled it out on a floured board, and sliced it into the thinnest strips possible, and draped the noodles over a chopping board (easy transportation to stove) draped in a kitchen towel (to prevent sticking). When I had enough noodles, I dropped them one by one into simmering salted water. When they’re in the water, they tend to seal quite quickly, so sticking is only a problem if they are all tangled together before they hit the water. A stir with a spoon and they quickly rose to the surface. I scooped them up, tossed them with butter and a smidgen of salt, and ate them like that. They’re thick and almost dumplingy in their heavy, al dente goodness. In fact, they’d probably make great spaetzle in broth. As a pasta, butter is the best dressing because it doesn’t overwhelm the sourdough flavour – yeasty and slightly tangy. The original pelmeni sourdough starter recipe (whose site no longer exists, I'm afraid) says that sourdough noodles are easier to digest than normal pasta. Well, I haven’t made a study of it, but I definitely can eat bowlfuls of this without getting sick from eating (cooked) dough, as my mother no doubt believes I should.

The rolling and slicing by hand reminds me a bit of Italy, where I once made spaghetti the same way, with my Italian flatmates. Although they’d think I was crazy if they saw Ira…

Categories: IMBB, Ingredients
IMBB#22 Noodles

Blood Oranges

2006-01-27T18:18:00.000-05:00

Nothing takes me back to the crisp chill of a North Italian winter like the taste of a blood orange.

From August 2004 to June 2005 I studied at the University of Bologna, I lived in a flat with Italian and American students, and, for the first time, I cooked by myself, for myself. An interesting and challenging and deeply fulfilling experience, which I hope to revisit here when the mood strikes me. Like today.

A huge part of cooking in Italy is of course shopping for food. I would buy my groceries daily, at a variety of different stores. Italian eating and cooking is very seasonal, and the cornucopia of summer fruit and vegetables just wouldn’t be there at my fruttivendolo (greengrocer) in winter. It really brought home how artificial the year-round offerings of American and South African supermarkets are. In Italy there would be a lot of green, leafy veg like chard and kale, and root veg like squashes, but nary a strawberry or asparagus shoot. Which sometimes led to traitorous longings for Wholefoods and Pick ‘n Pay! Despite these occasional falterings in my loyalty to seasonal, locally grown produce, the saving grace of an Italian winter was the citrus. And of all the lemons and naartjies (clementines) and oranges, the tarocco ruled supreme.

Grown in Sicily, the tarocco is the blood orange to end all blood oranges. I can’t tell you what makes it better than all the other blood oranges, but it just is: tastier, juicier…bloodier! I had never seen nor tasted a blood orange in South Africa, but on my first bite in Italy, I was sold. My friends and I would stop by at a fruttivendolo after university classes, and carry ice-cold tarocchi (plural of tarocco – one is never enough!) home in our coat pockets. We’d sit around someone’s kitchen table, peeling and eating until our fingers were dyed blood red. I could never lick my fingers fast enough to catch all the juice…

So in celebration of those memories, I bought some California blood oranges yesterday at the supermarket. They were not as good as my memories of tarocchi, but a refreshing winter treat, nevertheless.

Blood oranges have a strong, bold flavour which is richer and tarter than your run-of-the-mill navel orange. While their skin usually looks very innocent, their disconcerting name comes from their magnificent, colourful flesh, which can range from orange to a bruised, potent purple-red. Usually the flesh will be a mottled mix of orange and scarlet, but I have often come across totally orange or totally crimson fruits: no two are alike. The flesh is delicious by itself, cooked with fish, chicken or duck, tossed in an arugula (rocket leaf) salad, eaten with chocolate or, as I did this morning, stirred into my oatmeal with some honey.

If you visit Italy in the winter months, don’t be surprised if you order spremuta d’arancia (orange juice) at a café and receive a glass of bright red juice. The Italians take the initiative and use blood oranges whenever they are in season. Be smart, and follow their example.
Categories: Ingredients, Italy

Hillcrest Berry Farm

2006-01-24T23:19:00.000-05:00

If you want to celebrate gooseberries in the Western Cape, the best place to go is Hillcrest Berry Farm. This is actually one of my most favourite restaurants, situated on a working berry farm, between the town of Stellenbosch and the village of Pniel on the Hellshoogte Pass.

So many people come to the Cape Winelands, but only dine at the ‘Greats’, such as Reuben's and Le Quartier Français. Well, that’s all good and proper, for those who can drop R690 ($115/₤65) on the gourmand tasting menu at the latter, and actually get a booking at the former. For the rest of us, the creativity, peacefulness and value of Hillcrest Berry Farm continues to delight.

Drive up a little winding road, park and walk into Hillcrest’s lovely farm store, where after your meal you should be sure to pick up some of their famous jams, a berry vinaigrette, frozen or fresh produce, or something similarly berry-themed. But first head right to the back, where a friendly lady will greet you in both English and Afrikaans. You can sit indoors, or if the weather’s pleasant, on the terrace, surrounded by roses, where you can look out over the Stellenbosch valley. Another equally friendly lady will give you their menu, and their menu of the day. Now this is the hardest part: what to eat? A croissant brimming chicken and a gooseberry cream cheese salsa? Perhaps a cheese and berry soufflé, or springbok carpaccio with a berry dressing? Maybe a berry smoothie or juice on the side? And how about a fresh berry tart, or one of their homemade berry ice creams to finish? Whatever you choose, a gently warmed scone with your selection of jams (get the four berry jam! Or the fig and walnut jam! Or the marmalade! Or…) is compulsory fare in my mind. Most dishes are accompanied with a salad strewn with berries, just in case you missed the theme.

It’s always my first choice for Last Lunch, before jetting back to the States, and Big Spoon, my boyfriend, was happy to oblige last week, when we enjoyed a slow, ninety-minute lunch. This is the stuff of which dreams are made.

Although tourists do pop by, most customers are local families who have popped up from Stellenbosch, or stopped by on a Sunday drive. Children scamper around, and grandparents reminisce over the teapot covers. And at the end of the meal, after drinks, main courses and dessert, you discover that heaven is attainable for as little as R70 ($12/₤6) a head, including tip.

Categories: Cape_Restaurants, Winelands

My Second Confession

2006-01-23T10:53:00.000-05:00

My second confession: the cape gooseberry is not actually named after Cape Town.

It’s actually native to South America, and the ‘cape’ refers to its papery brown husk, which it wears like a little cape. But South African cuisine was – and is – informed by global influences. Our love for heavy desserts comes from the Dutch, our famous Peri-Peri sauce from Portugal and our Cape Malay recipes were naturally created by Malaysian slaves. Locals took foreign dishes, techniques and spices and adapted them to the wealth of local ingredients. To this day, our most famous restaurants generally celebrate a fusion of South African produce and Pan-Asian, European and American traditions.

So it doesn’t feel too out-of-place for me to take as my symbol a humble fruit which made a journey from South America, many years ago, to flourish like weeds at the bottom of my childhood garden. My favourite appellation of this berry, this intrepid, golden traveller, is its Afrikaans name: Appelliefie. Apple-beloved.

Check out the website of the California Rare Fruit Growers organization to learn more about this special, be-caped fruit, including the fact that it is related to the Strawberry Tomato and the Clammy Ground Cherry. Mmmm…

Categories: Cape Town, Ingredients

My First Confession

2006-01-19T19:32:00.000-05:00

My first confession: I am a total blog beginner.

I’ve only been reading food blogs for the last year. It is a dizzyingly large community, and one of the main reasons I have been putting off creating my own blog is the simple question: when there’s already so much out there, what can I hope to add? Well, I will probably never cook as well as Stephencooks, nor shall I take as glorious photographs as Nordljus, nor write as concisely and appealingly as Chocolate and Zucchini. But one thing that is missing from the lexicon of food bloggery is a site focusing on the culinary cornucopia of Cape Town. Aside from my personal fondness for my hometown, I believe that Cape Town has so much to offer in its own, unique food culture, so this blog is going to look at all things delicious and South African, with a focus on the Cape, looking at restaurants, shops and recipes. And the odd foray into the culinary struggles of a Capetonian cooking in America!

So, welcome to the Gooseberry, and happy eating.

Categories: Blogging, Cape_Town