Ancestors and two PS's

My cousin Bron invited me to have supper with her husband-to-be on Friday evening. This is an opportunity and a privilege. An opportunity to have someone cook for me for a change and a privilege because Bron comes from a long line of excellent cooks, all of whom I have loved dearly.

Bron never knew our great grandmother and I only have very scanty memories of a meeting with her when I was about four years old. But so many people in our family have spoken with supreme admiration of her, and of her skills in the kitchen. Even though I did not really know her personally, from these stories I know there would have been much love shared between us. My father tells of how she would measure ingredients on a coin and would know recipes in her soul. How she preserved food and made meagre supplies seem more than adequate and even luxurious during the harsh war years when there were rations. She was of Huguenot stock and went to Johannesburg after growing up in Graaff Reinet. She had a very limited formal education, as was the norm for most girls of that time, but acquired emotional intelligence, knowledge and wisdom through her life; beyond that which many people, men and women, who have had the opportunity to get a formal tertiary education, have today. Until age cruelly began to remove her faculties, she read the newspaper from cover to cover every day and always had an opinion to share.

Bron and I have very different memories of our grandmother. Born and bred in Johannesburg, she was a woman of the twenty first century born too early. I was the eldest of five grandchildren, so I think I got preferential treatment maybe, because I adored Granny and she never had a cross word for me. She was stern at times, but never punishing. Bron remembers her being plainly horrid at times. Almost all my childhood memories of Granny involve cooking. She loved it. She could happily spend all day in the kitchen preparing and cleaning. She always cooked a main meal for lunch, even when she and my Grampa worked in their Estate Agency. She would get up at sparrows, do all the prep, and then ask the domestic to turn the oven on at a certain time. At lunch time, Granny and Grampa would come home to a warm meal; meat and three veg which would have included something yellow/orange, green and white.

I remember when she bought the first issue of Your Family magazine in the seventies. It was such an event because there were all the new and more fashionable things to cook. She was in her element. She bought and kept every issue until she retired to the old age home. I remember in particular her first chilli con carne…will tell you more about that tomorrow when I make it for supper from the Ideas recipe. It was such an event because it seemed so exotic compared to all the rys-vleis-en-artappels she had been used to cooking for decades.

Granny enjoyed cooking huge meals for when we were all together. There were times, usually holidays, when both my family and Bron’s (my father and her mother were brother and sister) were together at Granny and Grampa’s and all eleven of us would squeeze around the dining room table for meals. Our shoulders were almost perpendicular to the table to accomplish this, but we managed. These would be epic events, with the table always set properly and with lovingly prepared food heaped onto our plates. And talk! Three generations, all talking. We were so very lucky and we did not realise it. We took it for granted.

Granny would prepare well in advance for these holiday times. She would bake up a storm weeks ahead of time and make ginger beer, pineapple beer and lemon cordial for us to drink when the adults had their spots. She drank cane and water and Grampa drank whiskey or brandy. Can’t remember what the other adults drank, but it was a lot more than normal.

The morning would start with porridge, followed by eggs done some way or other with bacon or kippers or haddock and finished off with percolated coffee from her stove top Corningware coffee percolator. Then at ten in the morning, her baked goodies would come out. These could be Boston bread which she made in a modified baking powder tin, short bread, raisin bread, soetkoekies or scones which she made with bake mix (note to self - have to write about that one day). Then the first plane would fly over by twelve and spots were served before lunch at one. There was always pudding after lunch. By three in the afternoon, whatever baked goods that were not presented in the morning were brought out and served with tea. By five the sun would be over the yardarm and spots were served again. At seven, we would all be around the table again for toast. Sometimes Granny would bake bread for this meal too. Grampa always led us in a three course supper. We would have toast with fish paste for the fish course. Then toast with Bovril for the main. And for desert; toast with jam, usually made by Granny from her own fruit trees. He would ask ’shlootikokul?’ after every meal. A word he made up which meant ’are you full as tics yet? ’ We would have such goormaag by now from the pineapple or ginger beer and over eating, but nothing ever stopped us!

The only thing Bron and I really despised during these times, was that because we were both the eldest child from our families, we were all too often thought of as the only ones responsible enough to be trusted with drying dishes! It started when we were about six and carried on until forever, and the younger siblings still never got to do it! And boy, did we spend time in that kitchen drying dishes. Eventually the dish cloths would be soaked and needed to be hung outside to dry from so much drying! And Granny insisted that dishes needed to be washed, dried and packed away before we could sit down. Today I think there might be a name for this kind of disorder.

Brons mother was my godmother as well as aunt. She too was no slouch in the kitchen. Being a more modern woman, she found new recipes and those that worked she kept. One dish she always made was a tuna noodle bake. I still have the recipe she wrote out for me and when I make it, I feel her near. For my dad’s 60^th birthday, she went up to Jo’burg and cooked up a storm of chicken breyani and other things for an enormous family gathering at my home. She cooked for big functions all the time because she was plainly damn good at it.

I remember how she and Granny had taught Bron how to crumb butter into flour perfectly by the time she was five. I guess this was the sowing of the seeds of Brons skills as a cook. Ever since I can remember, Bron has been more than merely competent in the kitchen, and like our great grandmother, has recipes imprinted on her soul. For example, she can make a crumble with anything in no time without a printed recipe in sight. But my favourite that she makes often, and she laughs at people who tell her it’s divine, is roast chicken. She shuns compliments saying she just tosses it in oven and lets the heat do the rest. She doesn’t take credit for all the preparation of the chicken, the choice of what she puts in the cavity, the judging of just the right amount of time required in the oven to get the chicken perfectly cooked and succulent. Her husband-to-be has said that her cooking is sublime, and there is little I can add to that.

For regular readers, you will remember that I did not quite get my wish a fortnight ago before the sea decided to cool us down after our dear Kiwi friend, Shaz, expressed her wish. Some people have asked what my wish would have been, and I really had not formed one in my mind yet. I think I do have a wish now. If I could have a wish, I would wish that Betty Brunette, Flo Thackwray, Denise Price, Bronwen Hanes, my mom, Michelle Thackwray and I could all sit around my dining room table for a day, all at the age of 43, eat cupcakes and pasta and drink copious amounts of moerkoffie, and swap kitchen tips and recipes, and mostly, that love only women in one family can share.

PS

I was alone at home on Saturday night, so I boiled up a small pot of spaghetti just the way I was taught by Lola Dunstan, an Italian lady of immense passion. I doused it with the rest of the bottle of Woollies olive pasta sauce from the chicken dish we made last week, and that was my supper.

As I have been reminiscing about food and my family, I remembered my earliest memory of eating spaghetti. For my fourth birthday, Granny and Grampa took me to the Eastern Cape to meet family. We stayed at the Hydro Baths Hotel in Aliwal North for a night or so. My Grampa had been a life saver at the pools there in his youth and he took me there for a swim. Anyway, I remember the dinner gong going very musically and we went into the diningroom. After some time a plate of spaghetti Bolognese was placed under my nose…literally under my nose. I was out of a high chair, but adult chairs in the dining room did not fit. Granny excused herself for some reason or other and left me with Grampa. And he showed me how to eat spaghetti because I was really battling with it. He showed me how to get the end of the strand in my mouth and the suck like blazers until it was all in. I mastered this in a flash and thought I was so clever. I was even going to try two strands at a time next, and maybe build up to a whole bunch of them!

The look of horror on Grannys face when she returned and saw me with Bolognese everywhere over mine, I still remember as a picture in my confusion. She was clearly annoyed, and I did not understand why. She cut up my spaghetti and gave me a spoon and did not look at Grampa. I think I remember her clucking and hissing and gritting her teeth. I was back to square one. I could not eat the spaghetti. I was so confused. The patriarch of the family showed me how to do something and I did it well after his loving tutelage. Only to have the carpet swept from underneath me by the matriarch of the family who clearly was not impressed when she should have quite encouraging and proud. When the penny dropped almost two decades later, Grampa and I had a good giggle.

PS

Have oven, will bake. We fitted the oven glass into the oven door in a flash on Friday evening and today we put the oven to the test. Jac baked some packet chocolate muffins. I always like to add a personal touch to short cut things like packet muffins and suggested we should melt chocolate and drizzle it over the muffins to be decorative. His reply, “Ja, we have to die of something.” I baked oats crunchies. A favourite with coffee for breakfast.

Tonight Son braaied for us. We braaied boerie and a Texan steak…enough for six people, but the reason we braaied was so that we would have leftovers. The steak was cut up into small pieces and frozen. Later the pieces will be cut into strips and used in frittatas or pitas for varsity lunches. The extra boerie will be used next weekend to make that marvellous boerie with a difference recipe from ….

Is meat loaf man-loaf? Ask Billy Joel.

Meatloaf reminds me of Billy Joel. On one of the rare occasions that I managed to see Oprah, his young wife, Katie, was interviewed about her marriage of course (it was one of those celebrity absurdities of the last decade) and her new cookery book ‘The Comfort Table’. She demonstrated how to make her family recipe meatloaf saying "I like to call meat loaf 'man loaf' because it's every man's favorite dish. (Excuse me, I am feeling nauseous) My husband loves when I make meat loaf, (I actually think he loved when she made many other things too) and it makes the best leftovers. We love it the next day on white bread with mayonnaise.(was she trying to bump him off early?)" It takes more than meatloaf to keep a marriage together honey. Especially one where there is a 32 year age difference. What were they thinking? They are divorced!

My oven glass has eventually been delivered so I won’t be ovenless for much longer. Can’t wait to get the baking stuff out again this weekend. But last night I was still ovenless. So I asked a friend if he minded if I went and cooked at his place and he could keep the leftovers. It was surprisingly easy to twist his arm!

But the meatloaf recipe I followed from the Ideas issue lacked what my dear friend Irene would call the “WOW’ factor. Granted, I could not find the pickled peppers that the recipe called for; maybe they would have made the difference. I did not know they really existed. I thought they were only things that Peter Piper picked a peck of and then lost. So I substituted with red pepper. There was still something missing. I am spoilt now with fresh herbs, so to me the 2tsp of dried sweet basil was insufficient and a poor substitute for the real thing. Katie Joel’s recipe has many more ingredients in it, and I think they are the secret to turning non-wow meatloaf into man-loaf. These are garlic, bay leaves, fresh parsley and thyme, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, salt and pepper.

But the wow-less meatloaf was not a complete disaster. I served it on basmati rice with oodles of instant gravy, and conscience clearing nuked gem squash with brassicas and carrots in the hollow. No pictures unfortunately. I felt it would have been too geeky to ask my host if I could photograph the plates.

Love and Chicken

There are so many sounds people make when they express there joy (or not) over a flavour. But to write them is difficult. Some sounds of delight cannot be well represented by any combinations of the 26 letters of our alphabet. Take for example “mmmmmmm”. It uses only one consonant, but in this written form tells you nothing really. There are a myriad of ways that this consecutive string of m`s is vocalised. It can have an element of surprise in it, where the start of the verbalisation is high pitched and then drops. It can be expressed seductively, where the pitch is low, increases and then drops off slowly again. And it can express mere adequacy; starts high, drops and then rises again. It can also be used for irony when you do not really want to tell the truth; monotone! You have to hear it in person to get its meaning.

There is one other sound that I have heard when good food is served that is impossible to express in vowels and consonants, but I will try and describe it. It’s a gasp in reverse. It’s a sudden sound made through the throat and nose on exhalation. Try it… see if it sounds like a sound you would make if you had just tasted something mouth watering.

I love that sound. It means that the food is appreciated and enjoyed…as it should always be. I have undergone a philosophy change regarding food and its preparation over the last couple of weeks. Up until this year, I viewed food as nutrition. Cooking was a necessary task to make sure the family was healthy and content and because it had to be a regular task, it may as well have been done with love. But now I am beginning to see the preparation of food as an art…as a blending of flavours and textures to bring about enjoyment. An art motivated by love. A whole new experience.

Tonight’s menu required the good old faithful skinless chicken filet. The filets were sliced with care and marinated in fresh lime juice for 15 minutes. They were gently fried; almost dry again, just a tiny dollop of olive oil in the Family Frying Pan. Once cooked, they were set aside. Time for the juices to re-mingle and settle themselves to maintain the succulence of the meat. Chicken stock was poured into the pan along with half a bottle of Woolies olive pasta sauce and the zest from the lime that was juiced for the marinade. A couple of generous handfuls of baby spinach was wilted in this delectable fluid. Cooked risoni was added and the juicy chicken bits put in last to finish of the dish…all in one pan.

The lime flavour stays with the chicken even though the risoni takes up the pasta sauces olive flavour. The baby spinach is tender but I think it is included only for colour and nutritive purposes…to clear the conscience of guilt feelings for neglecting vegetables. Again, a good healthy meal with negligible fat content and no salt, scored by Son this time as a firm 9, and a reverse gasp! Its one I would make again, but I think I would like to add some red to it…like finely chopped de-pipped mild chillies or peppadews. Just to make it look prettier.

Tonight’s dish was yet another one that would have fallen outside my gastronomic repertoire before now. I would never have served fish with noodles. Fish with chips of course, or fish curry with rice, or fisherman’s pie with mashed potatoes (my version of a seafood cottage-like pie), but never with noodles. For no good reason other than I have never thought of it.

I am a bit of a food exclusivist, with prejudices I foster to make me sound like I know what I am talking about as a foodie, when I really am a mere modernist culinary short cut taker with only about five good dishes to my personal gamut of recipes. One of the “exclusive” fetishes I have is buying fresh fish when I want fish and never frozen fish which is wrapped in blue plastic and then boxed. But I live in Durban. A seaside city with a dearth of fresh fish shops. There is also a scarcity of fresh fish counters in the supermarkets. And my closest supermarkets have no fish counter at all, just fridges full of individually-wrapped-in-blue-plastic-wrap, frozen, boxed fish. And tonight’s menu called for fish. I am in a spin at work at the moment so don’t have time to go on a search for good fish. So the standards had to drop and I walked into my local Spar to buy a box of individually-wrapped-in-blue-plastic-wrap fish. You know that awful feeling you get when you feel you are letting yourself down? Like you have succumbed to a bad habit when you have had it under control for so long? If I was a dog I would have walked out of the Spar with my tail between my legs.

However, not one to slap myself on the wrists for too long…

The filets were cut up into bite size pieces, coated with egg and then rolled in flour. The bits are almost dry fried, with only a trace of olive oil in the Family Frying Pan. They are served on a bed of Chinese noodles that has fried red and yellow peppers worked through with sweet and sour sauce. A truly tasty combination of ingredients. Son scored the dish at a worthy eight, stating how healthy it is being relatively fat and oil free.

I would however, next time I cook fish this way, add some spice for fish to the flour the fish pieces are dredged in to add some more flavour. What can I say? I am a flavour junky and think that frozen fish is tasteless.

The Family Frying Pan does fritata

I am not sure what I am more excited about. The frittata, my first ever and it worked like a bomb, or the way our darling Family Frying Pan dealt with it!

Eggs for supper have never had an appeal for me. There are some things that you eat only at certain times of the day. Like eggs. They are for breakfast and only make lunch if they are in sandwiches. And yoghurt! What is it with people who eat yoghurt for dessert after dinner? You might as well have Jungle oats or Pronutro for supper! And what about those who have steak or boerewors for breakfast? I guess that can be classified as more decadent and eccentric than bizarre, and therefore more acceptable, but only on special occasions. But yoghurt and eggs are for BREAKFAST!

However, tonight the menu had frittata emblazoned upon it as an almost solo player. I have seen Jamie and Nigella whip them up with savoir faire on TV, but have never been moved to make it for dinner. Potato wedges are cooked for a few minutes in the Family Frying Pan with a mere smidgeon of oil. The wedges are removed when just cooked and then onion and garlic are fried up. I used red onion because I thought the final dish might look a little pallid. Once the onions and garlic are soft, the potatoes are returned to the pan and eight (8, agt…a lot) beaten eggs (I added a good dose of MSG too cos eggs need legs for flavour) are poured over the veggies and cooked on the stove. Once the base is sort of solid, a generous handful of grated cheddar is liberated over the top, and I added some cayenne pepper for more colour and to enhance the cheesiness of the dish. Then the Pan is placed under the grill to cook the top and melt the cheese into it.

Under normal circumstances I would be sweating now with anxiety, wondering how to get the frittata out of the pan so that it could be served with some semblance of elegance. I would have visions of scratching pans as slices were lifted out with egg lifters, sides collapsing and an attack of Tyretts coming on. But our newest family member, the Family Frying Pan (have I mentioned how much I love this pan?) showed us just how it is done. Holding the handle in my right hand, I tipped the pan gently and watched as the eggy mass slipped out in perfect shape onto the serving plate. No loosening required anywhere. The frittata looked perfect, and the pan looked clean. What culinary gorgeousness! I am enraptured by the perfection. Oh how I have been moved to over expression!

The frittata was tasty and Son and Boet enjoyed along with a simple green salad. It’s an uncomplicated dish but gives huge returns in flavour. I would add some fresh herbs next time like basil or rosemary. Maybe some green peppers or red pepadews. Possible some freshly grated parmesan into the egg before it is added to the pan and then lose the cheddar…losing calories and not flavour. How about chopped olives? Baby marrows? Ok, now I am getting carried away, but you get the point. The basic frittata is a blank canvas on which to work. It is scrumptious and quick and easy to throw together and makes a perfect Saturday evening at home dinner, served with a fresh salad and maybe warm bread rolls! Yum!

Tiara club and hummous

I have to tell two separate stories to make our Friday culinary experience meaningful.

Tiara club

On Friday night we had Tiara Club at my home. Tiara club started in October 2008. I was newish in Durban having just moved down from Pietermaritzburg and the only Durbanite I knew was my cousin Bron. In Pietermaritzburg and Durban you are a foreigner if you did not go to a high school in the province. And you don’t make it in the social circles unless you went to certain high schools. When you meet someone for the first time, one of the questions posed in the conversation is “Which school did you go to?”, and depending on your answer you will either be friends for life or discarded as a nobody up front. Thank the Pope Boet and Son went to Michaelhouse, so they are ok, but me? I only went to Germiston High School. When the conversation about schools suddenly dead ends with me because I am not an old girl of one of the more prestigious KZN schools, I ask how many Nobel Laureates come from their school. The answer is “none” unless they come from Durban Boys (Aaron Klug), and then I tell the story of Sydney Brenner, a Germiston High School old boy who won the 2003 Nobel for Science. That usually gets me into the social circle, if I want to be there. But usually I don’t care! I am snobbish when it comes to snobs. Snobs don’t hack it for me and I coldly reject them as superficial nobodies up front.

Anyway, I was still writing up my PhD and had no time really to find a social circle of friends when I met my dear friend Michelle, who was a fellow carer of feral cats on our campus. She too was feeling like an outsider in the city, so we decided to have a group of Durban women whom we knew come together for supper one evening so that we could get some girl talk going. In October 2008, my cousin Bron and her neighbour (our dear Kiwi friend Shaz) Michelle, Brigitte (an artist friend I was communicating with online after I bought a couple of paintings from her) and I met for supper at the Keg at the Pav. And since then we have met every month.

The group has grown since then. Michelle introduced our dear Irish Friend Tracey who decided our group needed a name because when we spoke of our group we did not have a tag. We are really a book club that doesn’t share books. So she suggested Tiara club and that stuck. Last October we celebrated our first year of existence by going out to dinner wearing tiaras. Many people, particularly women, asked what we were about in the restaurant, and so many said they would like to do the same thing. And we encourage it. It is liberating and above all FUN. It is girls behaving well, intelligently and badly, depending on what the mood of the moment is. We have another two members who have joined more recently, Irene and Carrin, who have formed an important part of our girly fellowship.

Sometimes we go out to a restaurant together, and sometimes we meet at one of our homes. On Friday we met at my home. I like relaxed evenings and I also want to be part of the party and not have to worry too much about being a perfect hostess. So I decided on a meze type table that we could all eat on slowly as we shared the recent events of our lives, which usually have us in paralytic fits of laughter. Bron brought me some Karroo olives which she bought on her road trip, Irene brought mini pita breads, Tracey brought some dolmades, stuffed pepadews and falafel and I made a chilli and lime babaganoush from a recipe I found on the web, and hummus, the element of the next story I will tell.

Hummous and MDFFK

I have often made hummous because the Boys and I love it so much. It can be a sophisticated component of a meze platter, an obliging dip for chips and other more healthy things, or a humble spread ontoast for a quick snack. It is very healthy as long as you don’t overdo it because it is laden with calories. I have usually just whizzed up a tin of rinsed chickpeas with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice and its always worked. In my fridge it lasts less than 24 hours, only because it is eaten quickly, but it can stay in the fridge for a couple of days, maturing in flavour as the time passes.

While I was overseas last year I met a delightful lady from Kuwait who shared her hummous recipe with me. I will refer to her as MDFFK, (my Dear friend from Kuwait). She shared an office with me in Holland where she is completing her PhD studies. She is a devout Muslim lady who is devoted to her family and who also loves cooking and preparing wonderful repasts as an expression of her adoration for them.

She shared with me the emotions her Kuwait community went through during the Iraqi invasion of the early nineties. This war started on my birthday, so I knew what was happening from press reports that we got here and had my own narrow mental pictures of the goings on there. Its not nice sharing your birthday with other anniversaries that should rather be forgotten. But MDFFK told me of another side to this war. She told of how she woke up in the early hours of the morning to see soldiers in her street. She spoke with the soldiers asking them why they had invaded. They told her they had come to liberate the people of Kuwait – a people who were very content with the way things were at the time. She told of the individual soldier’s ignorance of the reality of the situation and how they had been misinformed in Iraq in order to get them to go into the country. She also told of how unprepared the soldiers were, that they were likely to have been newly recruited with limited training at the time. She told of the camaraderie amongst the people of Kuwait during these trying times. How they would meet on the streets after dark and plan ways to frustrate the Iraqi offensive by removing road signs and giving poor directions when asked. She tells of how she misses that part of that time.

The relationship with the soldiers was also not always adverse. They showed compassion when they could. One Friday morning when she was out an Iraqi soldier told her not to allow any of the men from her family to go to prayers that day. Being a women, her instruction would not be followed in her home, but luckily her father was not well that day and did not go to prayers anyway. Iraqi forces rounded up thousands of Iraqi men from mosques that Friday and took them to Iraq. Four hundred of those men have never been heard of again. Men who were husbands, fathers, brothers. Gone with no way of finding out what happened to them.

We had a Thanksgiving Dinner whilst we were in Holland and everyone brought along a dish that was typical of their home country. I made bobotie and MDFFK brought along hummous to die for. It was delectable and she very kindly shared her recipe with me. She used all the ingredients I usually use in different proportions, but added tahina and cumin powder. It is ntsa! I made this new hummous for Tiara club and they thoroughly enjoyed it. The boys had the leftovers on toast for breakfast on Saturday. Both Son and Boet said it was the best hummous they have ever tasted. Boet said he would give it a 9 because he might still taste a better one in his lifetime, though he doubts it

My favourite two piece and spuds!

I thought of spoiling the boys with their favourite supper, three cheese MacCheese, but they had other ideas. I was informed that sausages and mash were on the menu and that I was to bring home the potatoes.

I have a thing about potatoes. I love them. Not only because they are a perfect blank canvas on which to place just about anything else delectable, but they can be good and tasty in their own right. However, they must be treated with respect. In my opinion, noble potatoes deserve to be selected individually off the shelf and used straight away so that they are able to give their best flavour. No bags of mixed quality for me (ok, not so much Woollies tatties, but I have another THING about Woollies foods that I will regale another time) that end up making eyes at me a few days later from the veggie rack. I am lucky enough to have a Spar two blocks away from work which is en route to home which is another four blocks on, so I can get reasonably fresh stuff everyday. Or I can go to the corner Woollies near gym on the days I go there. So a veggie rack is actually obsolete in my kitchen. A luxury I truly enjoy.

But back to potatoes. Potatoes are an international food, and in each country there are some variations in their cooking. In Holland I have been served stew and boiled potatoes. I always manage to fuss enough with my serviette, or chat away as others start serving themselves meals presented in a way I am unfamiliar with, so that I can see what they do before I make an absolute eejit of myself. The boiled potatoes were placed in the centre of the plate, everyone then crushed them a bit with their forks and then spooned gravy rich stew over the top. Delish! I was served Limburg Zuurvleis, a traditional Southern Dutch stew, in a lovely boutique restaurant on Rijnstraat in Amsterdam on thick potato wedges, a variation on the way the stew was served in my hostesses home previously. Also YUM. In Sweden I was introduced to mashed potato their way. Potatoes are boiled and then pushed through what is now known in my home as my favourite two piece. Blog problems at the moment so I cannot post a pic but go to www.wakefield.gov.uk/.../TheHome/foodprep.htm to see what I am talking about. My hostess squished the potato through the masher onto the plates and all we added was salt an pepper. The texture was light and airy and I fell in love with her masher. The next week in between lectures in Linkoping I dashed off to a kitchen supplies shop and spent the GDP of a small African country on one of these for myself. And carried it all the way home, only to find them in Boardmans a few months later.

I use this handy little machine every time I mash potatoes and the mash is guarenteed to be creamy. Other potato mashers, no matter how fancy they look, are a waste of time. Depending on the meal, this basic potato cream can then be supplemented with all sorts of stuff. I have added tinned white beans, garlic, parmesan, a host of different herbs to compliment the rest of the dinner, but almost always milk and butter. Last night we added fresh rosemary and olive oil instead of milk and butter and had it with chicken sausages and steamed veggies. Sometimes the simplest foods are the most delightful.


PS - the best potatoes I have ever tasted were grown in the Lamberts Bay area.

Chicken mince EVENTUALLY, and an evil deed!

Today I did something really evil!

But I can justify it.

I have a fear of shop bought chicken mince after Mondays experience and many people have told me that this is a general chicken problem. Now I have bought chicken fillets every week just about for years and never had any issues with them, and never yet opened a packet that smelt as badly as the mince did on Monday. I accept therefore that my reaction is a little over the top. At our local Spar this evening, I saw the chicken mince in the fridge and decided to give it a pass. Also, I need 500 g of mince and the packets only came in amounts between 300 and 400 g. So what I did was bought two skinless DD (yes, double d size) chicken breasts that together came to nearly 500 g. And then I wizzed them through the food processor for half a minute and that was that! Fresh chicken mince.

But the evil thing I did… I selected the packet of chicken breasts that I wanted and then made a hole in the package and put my nose in it, after half an inhalation…just in case. And this is how I can justify it. I knew I would definitely buy the packet if it smelt ok…so I would buy the damaged package goods. If it smelt awful, I would call the manager and admit to what I had done and get him to check all the other packages in the fridge. No harm done to anyone, and I get good chicken.

The chicken rissoles are made just like good old fashioned frikadels, but with lots of lemon and coriander in them. Fresh breadcrumbs, onion, egg, chicken mince, lemon juice and coriander are mixed together in a bowl, balls are made and rolled in flour and then after about half an hour in the fridge, they are fried in a smidgeon of oil in the Family Frying Pan…have I mentioned recently just how much I love that pan?

These were served at two separate dinners. The boys had them drizzled with sweet and sour sauce and with toasted pita bread and Greek salad. I took some over to a friend, but I had no more salad left, so cheated a little. On the way over I stopped at the Chinese take-away and bought vegetable chow mein. Mmmm. These little lemony chicken numbers are a winner, scoring a good eight from the boys, and picking up a compliment I cannot quite remember from my friend!

Steak, Biscuits and Sandwiches

I am grateful everyday that we decided to follow this recipe program. This is how I used to think of steak...you buy one per person for a braai. And that is expensive, so you only do it for every other braai. The braai in between will be boerewors. Cooked on the stove, steak is not always nice, can be tough and that is a waste of money. But now that I have been tossed out of my box, I am seeing steak in a whole new light. One good steak can be shared between three people, making it less of a costly meal, and healthier too because there is less red meat per serving. Last week we grilled soy marinated steak in the griddle pan and sliced up and tossed it over salad. Tonight, the steak was sliced up first, then tossed in a mixture of flour and Woolworths steak seasoning (could not find cajun spice), dry fried in the Family Frying Pan, then thrown into toasted pita bread with lettuce and halved rosa tomatoes. Very tasty! Very healthy.

I did not get to have any because I went out to supper with my dear Irish friend Tracey. This recipe adventure has also made me more aware of what I am eating and more critical of food that is made in restaurants. Thai food is always good in my book. Anything deep fried is just lekker, and I don't do it at home cos its not healthy and I don't like recycling cooking oil, making deep frying very expensive. We went off to the Bangkok Wok because Tuesday is Ladies Night and were guaranteed of a really good meal. And we got one. But I have to beg the question, are we getting value for money in restaurants? I asked for a platter for one which included four or five pieces off the starter menu. It was served on a small plate and half the space was taken up with beautifully prepared vegetable garnishing. It cost around R5 a bite. I do realise that restaurants have overheads to cover and need to make a profit, but there will come a point when the ordinary woman/man in the street is just going to say No! I am not going to pay that much! And I think with the looming electricity price hike and the knock on effects of it, this time will come sooner rather than later, and home entertaining will become more popular.

Which brings me to my final foodie thought for the day. Catered food! This genre (if I may call it that) of food has the widest range of quality amongst all genres (I like this term for this concept actually) of food. I have been surviving an intensive lecture course by an excellent scientist from the Bronx in New York since Monday. The course has been stimulating and enjoyable and punctuated by tea and biscuits served mid-morning. The biscuits look beautiful. Perfectly shaped, a wonderful mix of caramel and chocolate colours, promising delectable flavour. NOT. Some of them score high in looks and equal cardboard box in flavour. A mistake so many people make all over, is limiting the aesthetic appeal of a dish to the visual, neglecting the most important food aesthetic, flavour.

But then there is my favourite catered food. Sandwiches that are served on those thick foil platters when the plastic wrapping has just been removed. OOOh the simple things in life are sometimes the best. Last night Bron and I went off to a Parents Evening thingie at Durban Girls High and they served weak cordial and sarmies. And they used that very dark brown bread and there was a huge variety of fillings. Its at times like this when avarice kicks in and I have to be so self controlled that my eyes wrinkle up. I always think it is fair to have one sandwich from each different filling. But I think people cater for three savouries per head at these functions, so if I have what I want I will be having someone else's serving...not very ladylike.

Today I am going to hunt down chicken mince for the lemony rissoles we were supposed to make on Monday! Here's holding thumbs...

Topics:

Heart Attack on a Platter

Eeu! We opened the chicken mince and the air around us died and wilted with the putrid reek of chicken mince past its best. Why does it happen so often with chicken? And this at 6:30 in the evening when there is very little time to get to shops for more fresh stuff! Anyway, Son and Boet dashed down to our local Spar just before it closed to return the offending matter and get some cream, rocket and a yellow pepper so that we could make Thursdays dinner instead tonight. A dish Son refers to as “heart attack on a platter” – creamy bacon on penne! Yum!

We had to chop off a chunk of frozen bacon we have stashed away, expending more energy doing that than we consumed later (I wish). But we realised just how good the inexpensive little Victorinox knife is that we bought at the Boys favourite fishing shop, The Kingfisher in the Durban City Centre. It is a little plastic handled job that will cut through anything. We tried the cleaver and a carving knife to get a wedge through the frozen block, but nothing happened. The red handled little demon cut through and we were able to break the whole piece off eventually. After our paying off our Family Frying Pan investment, our next investment will be in a few more of these little helpers and some bigger ones too.

Our Family Frying Pan is still wowing us! I get to wash it every time and after each wash it still looks like it did when we took it off the shelf in the shop. It still gets complimented every time it is hauled out of the pot drawer to work and lovingly dried and swaddled in its own dish cloth when put to bed again. We will be getting a couple of Green saucepans as soon as we have some good knives. That’s for sure.

Tonight’s dinner involved frying onions and yellow pepper until tender, adding bacon bits and then cream with a little flour to thicken the sauce. Not Weight Watcher friendly at all! This is tossed over penne with some rocket, but the shops had no rocket and our rocket in the garden is still too juvenile to use yet. So Boet made a green salad to go with the pasta. He ripped lettuce, threw in some rosa tomatoes, feta and olives that my cousin Bron brought back for me from her trip through the Karroo over Christmas. I found some stuff called pesto salad at the Pick n Pay near Kelso on the South Coast. I think it is just pesto really with a rougher texture. Boet used some of that as a dressing and it was superb! He said he could eat this kind of dinner every night of his life, giving a score of 9/10. Son said t was OK, scoring the dish without the rocket at 8/10. He doesn’t like things completely when we cannot get them 100% like they say in the recipe. I can so see myself in him sometimes!

Girls Weekend Away and chicken salad rolls

This weekend my cousin Bron and our dear Kiwi friend Shaz set off on a girls weekend away. We are all keen cooks, so food was not neglected, but seeing as Shaz is an early retiree we asked her to take charge of our tums and of course, we had better food than we would have had from a hotel or B&B; home made muffins, quiches and salads to die for. Saturday’s lunch stands out for me, but I first want to regale one of the funniest moments of my life that happened to us.

After lunch and chatting for ages, we decided to take my sarong which was being used as a table cloth, and all three of us went and lay on it on the beach. Packed like sardines on the sarong, side by side, in our clothes. We cannot answer the question why we did not get into our cozzies…we just didn’t. Anyway, we were lying there laughing at just about everything we said and lapping up the luxury of the warmth of friendship and the sound of the breakers below us. Then Shaz asked the question in her marvellously lilting Kiwi accent, “Ok girls, if you could have any wish granted within the next five minutes what would it be?”

After a minute of thought Bron answered that she would want us to be healthy and happy forever. Bron is my noblest, kindest and most sincere of all relatives and that is a wish so typical of her. Then, Shaz had her turn because she was the middle sardine. I was still grappling with trying to think what I would wish for. Then Shaz piped up that she would want her man to appear there on the spot, immediately like a genie. At that exact moment nature decided to cool us off and sent a breaker way past all the others to douse us in warm Indian Ocean water. We squealed! We were drenched! From top to bottom, and got sand in every crevice of our bodies, including our ears! And all we could do was double up in screeches of laughter. And when we looked at the beach, the only area that had been wet by the sea up til then was the six metres or so around us. Our own personal tsunami. We were a spectacle, but provided laughter for many other beach combers too. Our good deed for the day.

Back to lunch. After a glass of well chilled white wine Shaz asked us if we were ready for chicken rolls. What divine little sarmies these are. She had made a salad of chicken, red onion, avocado and tomato in a dressing of sweet chillie sauce. Then she took sliced wholewheat bread, removed the crusts and buttered the slices. She placed some salad diagonally across the slice and folded it up, making a lovely, delicate, ladylike sized roll. With summore chilled white, they were sublime.

Pineapple and kassler - a match made in heaven

Kassler is always a winner with our family. And when it is paired up with pineapple, it’s a match made in heaven. And that’s what we had for dinner last night. It’s also what we had for Christmas lunch the other day.

The Boys always have Christmas lunch with me and then go off to see their father for Boxing Day. Now that they are grown up, I need to be democratic with apportioning the work involved in planning and preparing the lunch. Last Christmas we had turkey cooked in the Weber. The boys cooked the turkey and I saw to everything else. This year was the turn of the Christmas Ham. But instead of doing the whole part-pig with glaze and pineapple and cherries precariously pinned to it, we decided to braai kassler ribs and pineapple. But, being Christmas I had to find extraordinary kassler, not just the little fillets available off the shelf at the supermarkets.

In Durban we have a marvellous butchery called Mozzies. It’s a family run business I think, with a strong Continental (I almost wrote European. Funny how continental and European mean the same thing but one seems more pc than the other) flavour. They produce delectable smoked meats and sausages and their fresh meat is always well matured and well cut. I am sticking my neck out here, but I think the difference may be that they employ true blockmen with certificates, and other places employ people who have learned on the job and have varying degrees of competence with mediocrity being acceptable. The essence of what I am trying to say, is that at Mozzies, they care about the meat and the way it is prepared for the customer, whereas at supermarkets, the meat has to be cut, packaged and displayed in the fridges and if you like it cool, if not, tough tackie. Take it or leave it. I have even seen a parsley sticker stuck on the packaging somewhere recently.

I can’t buy all my meat at Mozzies because it is on the other side of Durban, but I have a local butchery called Hennies around the corner that makes the best boerewors ever. It is run by mostly women, with a couple of men who I think are only employed because they can carry half an ox over their shoulders. When I first found the place I thought it was called Hennies because it was run by a bunch of hens. Not so. The current owner is the previous owner’s widow, and his name was Hennie. Hennies is in a little corner shopping centre in our old vintage suburb and it is also very little. It’s about the size of a small school classroom and is divided into two with the front space being for customers and the back separated by display fridges where all the work happens. There is Sharks and Blue Bulls stuff all over the show and during the rugby season, there is a festive vibe in the shop when there are games happening, with flags flying, jokes being told and huge big rugger bugger customers flirting with the already-used-to-it-and-immune-to-it lady staff. I get most of my fresh meat here because they will cut it exactly as you want it and also give you exactly the amount you need. If I want 500 g of lean mince, that’s exactly what I get. Tried getting that in a supermarket fridge?

But Hennies does not process their meats, so for kassler or sausages, I schlep across the city to Mozzies. And it’s like stepping into the previous century when you walk through the doors. I was approached at the counter by a man who looked just like a butcher as Dickens would have described him. Big, with hair stuck under a floppy white shower cap looking thing, blue and white striped apron over a portly midriff and a very pleasant “hello, how can I help you?”. It was very noisy, so after several attempts at trying to tell him what I wanted, with me leaning forward shouting and him leaning across the counter with his left ear cupped towards me, I finally got the message across that I wanted kassler ribs, seven of them. He showed me some in the fridge that had already been cut, but they were thin, and I wanted Christmas lunch sized ones. I asked if he could cut me seven that were about two fingers in width, I showed him my middle and index fingers together, which comes to just over an inch. He smiled and told me to wait a minute and then disappeared for about five behind a plastic curtain. He re-appeared carrying half a smoked pig and asked where I would like my chops cut from. I was awestruck! What a marvellous opportunity and privilege to be able to have bespoke kassler rib for Christmas. I chose the middle where the fillet would be, resisting my urge to be economical for the company, and taking the best for myself.

Then off he went and measured seven kasslers along the middle of the carcass, two fingers thick. But not my two fingers…his two fingers. We had enormous 1.5 inch thick kasslers. Take my advice now, that’s too much! If you end up in the same fortunate position as I did, be more specific about measurements.

The butcher took so much trouble over the service. He confirmed that I wanted the meat for Christmas day and with a little wrinkle as he turned up his nose asked if I intended freezing them until then. His disgust was ill disguised. It was the 15^th of December, so of course I was going to freeze them. He suggested, being so professional, vacuum packing them for me in which case I could keep them in the fridge. I would just have to check them everyday to see that the vacuum was intact. And so, until Christmas, the entire bottom shelf of my fridge was occupied by a large part of a smoked pig. Meat that had never seen the inside of a freezer!

Then we hunted for good pineapples to braai. To braai pineapple you need a really nice sweet and ripe one. Most of those in the shops looked less than ideal. Two days before Christmas we found one at the Housewives Market…thank the pope. So on Christmas day, dear friends, the Boys, and I, pigged out on kassler with pineapple and a delicious potato bake that my dear Kiwi friend had made.

Last night's kassler and pineapple was different. This time I bought off the shelf kassler. The kassler is browned off in our Family Frying pan (already proving it to be the worthy investment I had hoped for). Then onions are fried in the same pan, the kassler returned to the pan and a tin of pineapple pieces tossed in. The mixture is then cooked for about 6 minutes. No extra herbs, spices or seasoning required. We served the kassler and pineapple on top of chow mein. A meal scored by Boet at a good eight!

Soy sauce: more than just a sushi dip

How’s this for sassy? I was asked over to a friend for supper last night and I accepted saying “Yes, as long as I can cook for you?” On being questioned about this unusual and unexpected response, I said “I have a recipe challenge and a blog to keep up!’ This is clearly becoming an obsession, and I am enjoying every minute of it.

So a semi-prepared list of ingredients for tonight’s cookery lesson in a variety of uses for soy sauce was thrown in a bag along with Spray and Cook and the griddle pan (thanks JustMe for the tip on using an overload of Spray and Cook. One would think a non-stick frying pan would not need it. I hauled the pan out of the bottom of the pot drawer and intend using it again more often) and off I went.

Soy sauce is another of those ingredients like chickpeas and couscous that has been a recent addition to my pantry. I had never tasted it (that I know of) until my dear Irish friend got me hooked on sushi last year and I now dip just about anything in soy sauce ‘cos its so delectable. I bought my first bottle of soy sauce last week for a recipe where we used just a little, but tonight we used just about a whole bottle of the delightful molassesy tasting liquor.

The porterhouse steaks were marinated in soy sauce straight up from the bottle. I grilled them on the griddle pan for about three minutes a side and then let them rest and cool before slicing them into slivers to put on top of a fresh green salad which was dressed in a soy sauce dressing. The dressing included garlic, chilies, brown sugar, lemon juice and of course, the soy sauce. I let the chilies lie in the dressing for about 45 minutes before removing them so that there were no nasty surprises in the salad, and that was just enough time to give the dressing an interesting bite that made the lettuce seem so much more attractive than usual. The salad had to be well dressed to be man compatible; I was preparing this dish for a gentleman, and lettuce is not a MAN thing.

I thought it would be rude to ask for a score out of 10 for the meal, but it was enjoyed. I know, because he had seconds. Always a very satisfying feeling for a cook when extra helpings are requested. Or maybe he was just hungry! No, I think he liked it.

Son made the same dish at home for his Boet and himself. Their palate was naïve to the flavour of soy sauce so they were not as keen on the salad dressing as they were on the steaks. Being fitness and health fanatics, busy training now for the Midmar Mile, they were impressed at the leanness of the meal, albeit they were eating steak. No oils or fat were used at all during the preparation. I think that in future, our steaks will always be marinated in soy sauce because it gives oodles of good flavour without any fat at all.

Home ec classes and tinned fish fish cakes

I learned most of the rules of cooking during two years of torturing Home Economics classes when I was in junior high school. It was compulsory for all girls to suffer through these years in order to learn to be good wives and mothers. I remember when we were being taught to make omelettes, the teacher said that we would be making them for our husbands on weekends and he would love us more for it. You can just imagine how this went down with me at the time! I was a politically left wing feminist who never shut up about it. But now, several decades later, I have to admit that of all my high school education, the most useful to me has been those home ec classes. It was there that I learned the importance of precision measuring and following a recipe like a scientific experimental protocol. Skills I use in the lab every day in my day job, and had not learned in my science class.

Some of the things I made in those cookery classes I still make today. Like peppery cheese scones. Once I learned to make them, my family made me bake them almost every weekend until I grew so tired of it, I went on a twenty year long cheese scone strike. A few years ago, I went cap in hand back to my mom and she found the recipe for me again, which is once again a family favourite and I make them with love now, not typical teenage resentment. We were also taught how to make swiss roll. WHAT A WASTE of effort. They are so much quicker to buy, and tastier too. And there is no way I would put all that effort into a trifle!

There was a horror story from those classes too. It was the day we made fish cakes from tinned pilchards. This recipe turned nearly all of us off cooking. We made a mush of mashed potato and pilchards, formed them into fish cakes and fried them in at least a centimetre of oil. Stomach turning! And what made it worse for me, is that I only eat pilchards after I have halved them and removed the bone and any roe that might be inside, but we were made to mash the whole fish, eggs, bones and all and that was vile! I cannot bare crunchy pilchard bones! The crackle between my teeth grosses me out. My toes are turning up as I write this out of abhorrence.

Which brings me finally to tonight’s dish. Still being temporarily ovenless, we swapped the chicken pie of Tuesday with Friday’s meal. Salmon (out of a tin) fish cakes made with mashed potato. I am a little older now, with a more accepting nature and willing to try more than I used to before, but I have to admit, I felt trepidation! Son started dinner before I got home (I love him more and more each day, as I do his boet) so I left him to it. I ran around the backyard picking fresh parsley for garnish to make up for my deliberate non-involvement in the preparation. I watched as he prepared the bread crumbs in the food processor, shaped the fishy goo into balls, floured them, egged them then finally crumbed them. He fried them in the thinnest layer of canola oil in our Family Frying Pan while Boet made a green salad.

I had written lemons down on the shopping list on Saturday, but while shopping forgot what they were for, remembered that we have plenty of lemon juice in the fridge so I crossed off the lemons. Son pointed out that the zest of the lemon, as included in the recipe, would have made an important contribution to the flavour and that I should not have been so remiss! Mea culpa! Next time. And there will be a next time, because these fish cakes were droolicious! And very inexpensive as a family supper. Son scored the dish as a 6/10 without the lemon zest, but he would have given it an 8 had the lemon zest been there! I feel like I need to go to confession…

Another hippie (not hip) vegetarian dish...and thoughts on trifle

Chickpeas in couscous. Not inspiring! In fact, its almost scary. After our lesson with weird vegetarian food last week with the lentil burgers, we decided that we would get creative with flavours before we even started.

Neither chickpeas nor couscous are foods I grew up with. I bought my first tin of chickpeas only a couple of years ago when I found a recipe for hummus and I LOVE hummus, so I make it often. I don’t think I would recognise un-tinned chickpeas in the shop. I am only on my second box of couscous ever. These are ingredients that are just not in my culinary repertoire. But they are the main ingredients in tonight’s warm salad dinner.

The recipe is simple and quick. Make couscous with stock, add green and yellow peppers, chickpeas and freshly torn or chopped coriander. That’s it. But we decided to take it a bit further and added some dry fried smoked turkey bits and the dish was saved. And really, it was the turkey bits that saved the dish. With them, Son scored the dish at 6/10. Without them he would not have enjoyed the meal. And I am completely in agreement with him. The dish without the turkey would merely be a side dish. And then I would add finely chopped red onion.

I must share something about chickpeas that I thought everyone knew, but apparently not. If you do not wash the chickpeas from the tin, you will fart like a two stroke the next day. So I always make two big holes at the bottom of the tin and run water through it from the top for a few minutes, directly under the tap. If the chickpeas are to be mashed as they are in hummus, add a little cumin; this little spice also does the job of preventing gas attacks the morning after.

We finished off the meal with some leftover trifle which I made yesterday to take to my cousin’s place for desert. I have never been a critical foodie until now, so my trifle has always been a carefree throwing together of swiss roll, sherry, jellies of different colours, tinned fruit cocktail and boxed custard and my results have been uniformly successful. And it has always been a winner with my Boys - that's all that really matters. But this time something just was not right. I could not find swiss roll at Checkers so I stopped off at our local bakery and bought the last one there. I also used some banana bread because one swiss roll was not going to be enough.

The trifle was different. The colour of the bakery’s swiss roll was more mocha and there was cream in the roll and not much castor sugar. While I thought swiss roll is swiss roll (what the heck), I realise now that the secret ingredient to a successful trifle is that mass produced swiss roll with jam in the roll and oodles of castor sugar that you get at supermarkets. It gives a nasal flavour of caramelized vanilla which is the signature to a good trifle in my opinion. Nothing else will do. Now that I am looking at what I do in the kitchen with more care, I will make the jellies up to 400 ml and not the suggested 450 ml in future. This will make the jelly firmer. I will add maraschino cherries (when I can find them) for surprise bursts of flavour (like coins or charms in a Christmas pudding), and I will make the custard myself, making it less runny than the box custard I normally use. Maybe next weekend…

Son and I go shopping as chefs

The guilt of having left the entire dinner preparation of Friday's dinner to Son made me take our recipe book and prepare the shopping list for the coming week. Off to Pick'nPay at the Bluff this time where we found everything we need at a cost of less than R250.00. Not bad!

But I have realised that in Durban I have to become bilingual when it comes to herbs and spices. I could not find coriander at the fresh herbs, but the dhania looked familiar, so I stuck my nose into it and yes... it is coriander! I had a similar experience the other day when I went into an Indian spice shop to get some cumin I am going to need to make hummus next week. I could not find it. When I asked the shop assistant where it was, she took me to the jeera! This is going to be FUN!

One of the problems with buying ingredients like fresh herbs ahead of time is that they are likely to go limp before we can use them. Also there is no way we will use a whole bunch of coriander between the two of us within a week. So I traipsed off to the nursery section at the hardware store and bought basil, coriander and rocket seedlings to plant in our little veggie patch. If we are able to keep the plants alive, we should have as much herb stuff as we need whenever we need it. Oh I feel so Nigella at the thought!

But the really big adventure for Saturday came when Son and I bought a Family Frying Pan. Bryce Courtney wrote a collection of short stories that his wife's grandmother used to tell called the Family Frying Pan. She collected these stories as payment for cooking meals off the land as she and a group of Jewish refugees made their way out of Russia as refugees early in the twentieth century. She had taken the frying pan off the stove after finding the family that had employed her slaughtered throughout their home. She took the coat off the body of the lady of the house, put it on and then threw the pan over her back as she bolted from the house to avoid the same fate. Her fellow kitchen servants had also been murdered, the fate she escaped because she was out picking mushrooms I think at the time of the attack. When she died at very old age, a round scar was found on her back where the pan had burnt her as she ran off with it.

The book is lying on my coffee table at the moment and Son asked if I was reading it again. I said that it was returned by a friend I had lent it to but it is a very good read that I recommend for him. You know what he said? He told me he had read it when he was in primary school. That I made him read some pretty heavy stuff when he was small! In no way have I ever MADE either of my sons do anything! I said, "I suppose one day you will say that your mother made you cook every recipe in a particular recipe book for every weekday of the year?" His response .. a wry smile and a YES!

So it is appropriate that our new purchase will be called the Family Frying Pan. It has to be specially named too because it is as costly a purchase as most people-who-have-no-debt's monthly investments!

We have a Bauer casserole that is flattish and has doubled as a good frying pan too occasionally. The problem with Bauer though is that it cannot be heated up very high, you have to use it at medium heat, which is no real good when you want to sear something. So off we went to Boardmans in search of something a professional chef would use. Jamie Oliver's pots are exquisite with a red dot indicator in the middle that tells you when the pan is hot enough. But they are more costly than Le Creusette (the Ferrari of cooking wear... Oh I do dream that maybe one day... and I am not a brand snob!). Also they have a rubber piece under the ergonomically designed handle that feels really nice in the hand, but I cannot see that you could put the pan in the oven if you wanted to brown something off from the top.

We found the T-Fal range with the red dot indicator like Jamie's stuff and settled on that. But then we saw them! The marketing was perfectly directed at us! The Green Pan! Light and dark grey but GREEN. An ecologically friendly pan. I ask you with anxiety mounting within my conscience, how have all my previously used pans not been environmentally friendly?

Apparently ... other non-stick technologies contain chemicals that when heated to over 260 deg C release a 'multitude of toxic chemicals.' As a critical scientist I really do have to question this. Surely after the first heating of the pan, molecules that are not tightly bound to the pan through adhesive latent energy (is there such a thing?) will gain enough kinetic energy through the heat to remove themselves from the pan and all others will stay stuck forever? So if there is a release of chemicals it will be a once off occurrence. If this were so, then manufacturers could carry out the first heating themselves in a controlled environment to remove toxic chemicals at source. Just a thought. And I am not a physicist, so I am prepared to bow my head in deference to those who know better. Just wish I knew if the info was from the scientists who developed the pan or from the companies marketing department. The word 'constainability' has been quoined by them to emphasise convenience and sustainability. Puh-leeeze, when you have to alter a millennium old language to describe your product to the world then you may just be clutching at straws.

Anyhoo...the ecologically aware marketing does not end there. All packaging materials are made from recycled products and I think the aluminium that forms the base of the pan is also recycled. But its not the greeny marketing that sold the pan to us. It was the fact that this pan was the only one that had in its marketing paraphernalia the statement that it could withstand very high heat, and that's what we want. Last night Son tried the pan out for the first time. I did the prep of the pan, washing it by hand and then coating it with a thin layer of olive oil and then he dried fried smoked turkey in it. His comment - 'this is a top, top, top pan'.

So we are delighted with our new Family Frying Pan. I washed it again lovingly, dried it with care and put it to bed in the pot drawer after swaddling it in its own protective dish cloth.

GIn and Tonic, thai seafood curry, and immense gratitude to a chef son!

Now I am not alcoholic, a heavy drinker, a regular drinker or even a truly social drinker, but when American colleagues call conference calls at 9:30 their time on a Friday, (that translates to 4:30 our time) and want to discuss heavy issues like how many patients are likely to still be around in 12 twelve months time, I am driven to drink! I got home on Friday, kicked off my shoes, poured myself a G&T, flopped on the couch, put my feet up on the coffee table and announced that I was going to make misuse of Son's kind nature and leave supper to him, with me shouting encouragement from my seat.

Nothing extraordinary about this meal, just a red Thai curry served on leftover rice and lentils from last night. I must mention that since I had the rice and lentil mix at my dear Kiwi friend's home one dinner, I have been hooked. I hardly ever make plain rice now. The lentils give the rice flavour and makes it look pretty, a bit like freckles on a redhead school kid.

I have to find a good source of fresh fish locally. Neither my local Spar nor Checkers has a fresh fish counter and I loathe fish in a box that has been individually wrapped in blue plastic. Frozen fish collapses into tough tasteless meat and a whole lot of fluid that has nowhere to go and forms smelly insipid rivers on your plate even when you have tried to get rid of it before serving. UGH! If I am to take the trouble to cook fish, then I want to use firm fresh fish that is likely to hold its own in the cooking process. So I did not buy fish for this recipe because I could not find any. Instead, Son used half the bag of seafood mix we have had in the freezer which has almost become a paleantological find its been there so long.

And it worked. We had a really tasty supper, with mussels and tentacles and bits of unidentifiable ocean going ex-life all tasting delicious in the creamy coconut based red curry sauce. The recipe called for 30-60 ml of red curry paste. Son was thinking aloud saying he was going to use 30 ml, and I interrupted by suggesting the median amount of 45 ml. Red curry paste is HOT! He should have gone with his instincts and not listened to his decaying mother as she sipped G&T like Eve's Madam's mother.

Greek salad in your lamb casserole

When a recipe calls for cooking red meat with ingredients that make Greek salad Greek salad, then I raise my eyebrows, fold my arms, throw my hip sideways and say “humph”! I am beginning to realise though that there is a whole world of flavour out there that I have had my mind too shackled by conventions to explore. This recipe escapade that Son and I have embarked on is an adventure that will change the way we see food and cooking forever.

Tonights recipe called for cooking lamb cutlets in a mixture of red wine, rosemary, olives and feta. The cutlets are browned and then these ingredients are mixed, tossed over the cutlets and the whole lot is baked. Because we are ovenless, we covered the casserole and cooked it on the stove at a moderate heat. Now red wine and rosemary are easy to understand in a casserole, but olives and feta?

What happens is that the feta melts into the sauce to make it thick and creamy and yummalicious beyond BBC celebrity chef gastronomic ecstacy. The olives are warm and soft and burst into flavour between your teeth, with more of the flavour volatiles escaping because of the heat than you would taste when eating olives at room temperature. Awesome! The flavours conjure up images of white washed villages with blue and turquoise shutters and tiles next to the azure seas of the Mediterranean with bouzouki music and the fresh salty air of the sea.

We served the cutlets and sauce on a bed of rice and lentils which soaked up the sauce to provide heavenly mouthfuls of pure red wine sauce delight after the cutlets are devoured! We also had some steamed broccoli, cauliflower and beans mixed together as conscience food.

I have one regret. I bought the cutlets off the shelf at Spar. Next time I make this dish I will go to the butcher and have thicker lamb cutlets specially cut. I will also de-pip the olives although Son and I have fun spitting the pips, something we only do at home and when we don’t have guests. Son scored the dish at 9/10 and said the sauce may have had just a little too much feta in it. He also commented on the difference between using rosemary freshly picked from the garden minutes before it is used and that out of a bottle. There is just no comparison, the fresh stuff is just superior.

While packing the dishwasher, son licked every last morsel of sauce from the casserole. I suggested a slice of bread, and he said “No, this is just perfect”, straight of the finger!

Of sudoku puzzles and nutty beef stir-fry

I have never really been a fan of the stir-fry. Remember when stir-fry became fashionable in the eighties and you would be invited around to friends` homes for a stir-fry on the Cadac skottel instead of a braai and you would get a load of mince and rice with mushrooms and onions and odd sauces and you were expected to be impressed? Formerly living organisms were fried in a boat load of oil until they really were beyond resuscitation and uniform in lack of flavour and the only thing that stirred in me was my repugnance. Then frozen stir-fry veggie mixes were put on the market to ameliorate in the choice of veggies. And they are still on the shelves! Who buys them? The mix is good in theory but the limpness has never won me over to the continually fashionable, and ostensibly healthy, stir-fry! But tonight I enjoyed a stir-fry for the first time.

Son has been super considerate with the cooking so far. I think it’s because he is a little bored still being on vac and confined to home most of the time and I look awfully exhausted when I fall in through the back door at 5:30 after a day at work, 10 minutes a day in a supermarket getting fresh ingredients (shopping is a challenge for me) and 30 minutes at the gym. I got home tonight to find him doing a Sudoku…YAY! I have another one in the family addicted to them now! I thought I would leave him in peace to finish a puzzle and get on with dinner. It is very unfair to expect someone to interrupt their solving of a sudoku puzzle. There is an entire familiarity with the numbers that builds up as you enter the numbers and at times you just know numbers go in certain blocks without being able to rationally explain it, but you know the number layout well enough to just write them in! If you break the process, you might as well give up on that puzzle. So much thinking time is wasted if you have to put a puzzle down and pick it up again later. When I am on my own I have a SSB (secret single behaviour) which involves sudokus that I would be hard pressed to give up if I ever am fortunate enough to share my home with a magnificent significant other again (and he would have to be magnificent). I have a sudoku book in the loo and I like to complete a puzzle every morning…which means I need to be left in peace in the smallest room in my house for up to 20 minutes sometimes. And I have only one loo in my house…its an old vintage bungalow that I love more and more each day, but it has its limitations. I limit the loo sudokus to the easy ones or else I could be holed up in there all day. When my dad comes to visit, we share the puzzles, because I clearly cannot keep the loo occupied for 20 mins when there are more than just me in the house. I fill in some numbers, then he fills in a couple, then I carry on, and we can finish one between us over two days. Maybe Son can play the game too now and we can work on the more difficult ones. I digress… back to the stirfry.

As soon as I looked like I was going to make a start, Son instructed me that he was going to make the meal. Now I want peace in my home and will not challenge him on anything that does not go against our families` moral fibre, so I allow him to do what he wants. I know I will make up for it when he is studying for tests and exams and has tight deadlines during the semesters.

Chicken satay is a dish that introduced my palate to mixing peanut butter with meat. It was a mix I was unconvinced about until I tried it and I did develop a tolerance. Tonight’s recipe required a sauce of soy sauce, peanut oil, curry powder and peanut butter to be made up to fry strips of meat and then veggies once the meat was browned. Now I am not going to go out and buy ingredients that I am unlikely to use again so Son substituted the peanut oil with olive oil. We bought a magnificent 400g mature rump steak at the butchery last Saturday for this dish and today I bought a fresh Hawaiian stir-fry mix from Checkers. I do not have a working oven at the moment so I could not toast cashews, so I bought chilli cashews to add to the cooked dish just before serving. Wow... did we enjoy! The recipe is supposed to be enough for four people if served with rice or noodles. We ditched the carbs and ate the entire stir-fry between the two of us! No leftovers for lunch tomorrow! Son scored the meal at 8/10.

Lentil burgers schmentil burgers! Bleuch

Midday

I have to admit that the thought of lentil burgers for supper tonight does not hold much appeal. I am anticipating a 2/10 dinner. I have some fish fingers in the freezer so we won’t starve on days where the set menu is questionable and the experiment fails. But I did say that I would be religious in my pursuit of following the program for the year, which means that I have to do like NIKE and just do it. I am also not averse to trying new things, even though my enthusiasm is tentative, because sometimes, occasionally, rarely and seldom, one may be pleasantly surprised. In one of the later seasons of Sex and the City, I think it is Charlotte, or maybe Miranda who is regaling her horror at some unusual couples activity and Samantha, that oracle of wisdom for all single women in their forties, replies in a cool and sophisticated tone that she should not knock it until she has tried it. So I will not knock lentil burgers…yet! Frankly if I am pleasantly surprised, this will be a cheap meal that students on tight budgets could adopt as a staple because not only is it cheap, it is very nourishing, especially is served with typical burger salad vegetables.

If I am anxious that the recipe may seem a little less than palatable, I will modify it as I see fit. Today I am anxious. For the lentils, I have bought a tin of lentils in a smokey brine. For two reasons I think that this is an improvement. Firstly, I do not have to cook the lentils for ages and secondly there is some added flavour which I think may make the final product more authentically burger flavoured. Also I am not going to go out and buy chilli paste that I am not likely to use up before it reaches its expiry date, so I am going to substitute with red curry paste. I have not been able to find pita breads yet. If I cannot find them I will use ordinary burger buns.

After the fact

Several four letter “f” words come to mind on having swallowed a lentil burger; the most appropriate one being “foul”! Others are "Flop" and "Fail".Now I really was sort of open minded about this rather shoowaah, hippie, greeny, “lets save the world by lying in front of the bulldozers” type of food. But one has to draw the line somewhere. A burger has to be tangible. I mean, you have to be able to hold it between your hands with four fingers on top and thumbs underneath and when you bite into it you should see an arc shaped gap where you have bitten into it. It should be firm, solid, HARD! But a lentil burger needs help ………!

In the end, after searching Spar and Checkers for pita breads to no avail, I settled for fresh whole wheat buns for our burgers. Son got stuck into the recipe whilst I was once again hanging out laundry and he chopped onions tearfully and continued snivelling through grating three baby marrows and bread to make the crumbs. I pureed the lentils and cleaned up behind my chef-son. We got all the ingredients together as per the recipe to make a vegetable paste, let it cool, shaped the patties and started grilling them in a non-stick pan. And they browned nicely and looked very appealing until we tried to flip them. They were flaccid, yielding masses of goo! But we were not going to give up.

We prepared the burger buns with lettuce etc and made up the burgers. We held them in front of us with thumbs below and all other 8 fingers above and bit into them. And the goo squished out everywhere. Now tomato sauce and mustard dripping out of a burger is a necessary part of the burger eating experience, but it is also necessary for the burger patty to stay in shape. Lentil burgers do not stand up to the pressure of burger eating. I can see why the recipe called for pita bread. The patties are stuffed into the pita and cannot spill out.

In all fairness though, I have to admit the flavour was not half bad. If the consistency of the mix could be changed so that the patty would hold up to the burger firmness test, this would be a winner recipe. Son gave the meal 4/10. And he will not revisit the recipe. It has been axed from his repertoire. However, if anyone can tell me what can be done to firm up the patty, I may give it another shot next year, but tonight we move on to nutty beef stirfry!