The month that was

By E | Posted on: February 6, 2010

So we cruise into February, and somehow our house is still full of builders’ dust. But at least there are things to show for it, like a newly tiled balcony from which to watch the sunset and sausages crisping on the braai.

And, inspired by surprisingly great eggs benedict at the famed Roundhouse Restaurant, I set about making my very own English muffins. Easy peasy, really – just bread dough dusted in semolina and cooked on the stove top rather than the oven:

Except that I managed to very nearly destroy this brand new Scanpan frying pan in the process (I should have known better, of course, than to treat a non-non-stick pan as if it was something else). And while the muffins looked good and pretty authentic, they were lacking the nice holey holes inside. I think they were basically too big, and I blame Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for that, because I followed his recipe so precisely that I even went to the anal extent of weighing each clump of dough (90g!). Next time will be better.

I also nearly destroyed my ice cream machine with a disastrous custard thickened with cornstarch. I blame the New York Times for that.

I will, however, take sole credit for a creme fraiche ice cream I whipped up the day after some dinner guests claimed they were too full to eat the dessert I had prepared (berries and creme fraiche). With a sprinkle of toasted almonds and said berries macerated in balsamic vinegar, it was magnifique!

I’m also looking forward to sampling the batch of sesame seed and ginger ice cream I churned just a little while ago. (OK, so I lie, I have obviously tasted it already. It rocks. So I look forward to other people sampling it and telling me how brilliant I am).

In between the dust and ice cream, I even managed to get in a bit of work, and tomorrow I get to go to a fabulous garden party. So much to do, and so little time for modesty.

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Beautiful chicken

By E | Posted on: January 24, 2010

I’m experiencing the photography dilemma again. Taking a picture of a roast chicken is crap! It looked so good, and smelt so damn fine, that I had to collect my husband to watch me pull it out of the oven.

“It’s beautiful!” I said.

“It’s beautiful?” he responded, with that sceptic’s smirk of his.

Well yes, and I dragged him into the kitchen to pull out this.

Well, not that. A better 3D copy of that, complete with a mind-numbing smell of roast chicken. It’s a bit like toast, or popcorn, or bacon. Just yum!, as Roger Webb may say as Jeremy in the excellent Peep Show.

Not being one of those people who has a roast chicken in my weekly repertoire, I had to look for a recipe, so I confess this was as easy and delicious as the one who will not be named promised it would be.

But that’s not the whole truth either. This bird, you see, had also been injected – via my new favourite gadget, the Williams Sonoma Flavor Injector. Thanks to that large syringey thing on the right, this chicken was pumped full of sherry, garlic, herbs (thyme and rosemary), a bit of dijon and a touch of maple syrup. Sweet baby Jesus succulent juicy chicken breast.

Tomorrow’s chicken and chorizo risotto will rock like a rocket.

In other news, I’ve committed myself to reading a complete stranger’s blog, only because in it she chronicles the unbelievable stupidity of actually living according to Michael Pollan’s food rules for a year. I should be saying yawn, but instead I am plotting my next book. It will be a chronicle, to borrow Rob Lyons‘ excellent phrasing, of ‘organic, cattle-produced fertiliser: bullshit.’ Oh, and of this excellent revelation: ‘The only reason privacy ever existed was because Facebook didn’t.”

I’ll call it Addicted (with Security Settings) to Virtual Bullshit.

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When life gives you lemons

By E | Posted on: January 21, 2010

you obviously slice them thinly before caramelising in butter, maple syrup and chilli flakes:

Then chop them finely (including as much lemony goo as possible from the pan), and add them to a salad:

(This is particularly good with spicy fishcakes).

When life gives you ginger, on the other hand, I suggest you send it through the food processor a few times, mix with a bit of water, and make ginger ice cubes. That way your drinks get more, rather than less, interesting as the ice melts.

And if life should finally give you a craving for a really good brownie that does NOT involve beating eggs and sugar forever, or melting butter and/or chocolate, or any of the things that add a bit of effort to the process, try these Jamaican coffee numbers. No, they don’t contain anything illegal, and no, it doesn’t have to be Jamaican coffee, as per recipe. I used Italian dark roast, and here’s the newsflash: I used olive oil instead of butter (I wasn’t trying to be contrary. We just didn’t have butter). A little research tells me that substitution should be 75%, ie. 3/4 cup oil for 1 cup of butter. And since nothing has to melt, you just bung it all in a bowl, mix it with your electric helper, bake, cool, and later slather with a “ganache” of chocolate, coffee, (rum) and crystallised ginger. Hot damn these were good.

Also very good is this recipe for lamb braised in milk with fennel. I couldn’t find fennel, so let dill and a bit of aniseed stand in, which they did with aplomb. Who woulda thunk it. Life isn’t always a beech.

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1 down, 51 to go

By E | Posted on: January 9, 2010

As arbitrary as year changes often are, I definitely prefer the end of week 1 in January to the end of week 52 in December. Gone are the silly pressures about what to do to stay up till midnight – and beyond – on some prescribed day (rebels that we are, we simply ignored this requirement and went to bed, as usual, way before then). Gone are the silly forebodings about how to be “better” in the new year, and how to capitalise on the last remnants of badness before the clock strikes 12.

(Hickory dickory dock. Confession: In acknowledgment of the excellent service provided to me by my faithful liver in my lifetime, I did order a wagon for the new year. But I forgot to order one that doesn’t stock whisky.)

Yes, by the end of week 1 in January, most of the silliness has dissipated and people are either a) back at work, being conscientious, b) back at work and hating every second of it, c) cleverly on holiday, or d) none or all of the above. In short, life is back to normal.

For me, that includes the absence of Zuma the frog, whose ball-blasting revenge gave me excellent opportunity to develop my hand-eye-colour coordination, and to write off about a week’s worth of potentially productive hours. I used to be embarrassed by my addiction, but I’m better now.

I’ve instead managed to do a bunch of less fun but probably more important things, like renewing my residence permit at the god-awful Cape Town branch of Home Affairs. Enough said. I’ve also been able to catch up on some lond-overdue reading, like David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (The Harm of Coming Into Existence).

The title and subtitle do well to summarise the fact that this is not a happy book, and it has clearly already upset a number of people (this review, aptly titled “Whose miserabilist of them all”, is quite funny, while this one fuelled a response from Benatar himself). But it is refreshing to read something deeply provocative and counterintuitive (to use one of Benatar’s own favourite adjectives) by someone who is clearly intelligent, and not a (complete) nutter. I would challenge anyone who is considering childbirth to read it, and to think very carefully about their choices.

The one thing I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is the completely accidental and/or random nature of conception. I’m not talking about the accident of two strangers coming together, but the one of one particular sperm penetrating one particular egg to produce one particular zygote (yes, you were one too, Google it). Your parents could have had sex three times a night for seven nights in a row around the time you were conceived, but you have no way of knowing which seconds of those steamy (or not) encounters had the right zygotic groove.

That’s me and my lovely sister, whose name rhymes with vanilla. Now just imagine: if I had been conceived the night before, or after, or not exactly when I was (in which case I wouldn’t have been conceived) , and the same with my sister, Signe and Pernille nee Hansen might look like this:

Or like this!

But then we would have to be called Søren and Hans. (Hans Hansen. Now that would be cruel.)

Better give it up and be thankful for what you(‘ve) got.

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We interrupt this broadcast for an important message

By E | Posted on: January 6, 2010

A brand new British website, Goodtoknow, has just published the secrets of sex positions for your fat days!

Where, oh where, would we be without the interweb?

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OK, that was a test

By E | Posted on: January 6, 2010

but maybe blabla is the right commentary for this.

blabla

blabla

(Thanks to Chef Sandwich for this)

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Not with a bang but a pop

By E | Posted on: December 27, 2009

So Christmas dinner was delightfully simple this year – bit of gammon, cucumber salad, sweet and tangy mustard, followed by Lindt’s new Tiramisu chocolate (which tastes suspiciously of tiramisu).

Also, the whole thing didn’t take much longer than for us to pop a bottle of bubbles and empty its contents. (As far as I’m concerned, Christmas is over when you hit the sack on the 24th, but that’s not a “cut and dried” case, I gather).

All of which meant that we woke up well rested and neither over- or under-fed on the morning of the 25th. And with no leftover (or from scratch) lunches to fear, we headed off to Canal Walk. This would have been brave on any other holiday, given its reputation for being the biggest shopping mall south of the Sahara, and its inevitable swarms of silly shoppers (croutons, as the Philosophe affectionately calls them). But on Christmas Day, this place is DEAD. So dead, in fact, that we were lucky to find an open place for us to have breakfast and exhibit some (post-)Christmas cheer. The Cattle Baron it was.

(Here we are exhibiting (post-)Christmas cheer)

After that we subjected ourselves to three hours of wearing silly glasses for the not-unejoyable thrill of watching weird creatures from Avatar try to leap out of the screen at us. The story was Copenhagen-flavoured mega-cheese (for a useful plot summary, go here), but the pterodactyls were cool.

Now if you like cheese, I recommend you watch Invictus. It tells, as its website flogs it, ‘the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) joined forces with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help unite their country.’  Yes. Where would we be without the rrrugby. Whatever. Matt Damon does a fair accent, and so does Morgan – when he doesn’t forget to – but beyond that, this is not just cheese. It’s fondue. Be advised.

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Who is the smushiest of them all?

By E | Posted on: December 23, 2009

Continuing the pretend theme, I forgot to mention that our smushi dinner the other night culminated in a rare sighting – and tasting – of a quartet of petit fours from the esteemed Fat Duck in Bray (that’s in INGLAN).

There was a playing card, which looked just like a Queen of Hearts, but which turned out to be two weh-feh thin layes of white chocolate separated by a layer of something fruity (!). There was something which looked like a toffee but which tasted like an entire mouthful of apple pie (!). There was something chocolaty, which didn’t survive the journey all to well, and so I don’t remember what it was pretending to be.

My own favourite was the “coconut baccie”, which looked like a not-so-distant relative of my own beloved Golden Virginia,

but which tasted (and still does) of coconut.

That Heston is quite a genius.

In other news, this just in from Swaziland (Google it):

“Due to the good rain and hot climate the Violin Spider is moving into
Houses.  It is often seen as a ‘Daddy longlegs’ spider and not the dangerous
Violin spider.
Please take note of this spider – it is very dangerous.
Please warn kids and send to everyone you know to alert them as well!
This spider is breeding at a rate of speed and is found in more and more
South-African houses!!!!”

So let’s all be thankful we’re not there this silly season (condolences to friends who are), and get on with the silliness in a good and responsible fashion. Good luck to you all.


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If Gollum were a popstar…

By E | Posted on: December 20, 2009

I think he would look something like Michael Jackson in This Is It. We finally watched this fascinating and bizarre film, and when I wasn’t happily grooving along to the beat (I loved this man as a teenager, and still think Billie Jean is one of the best songs EVAH), I was struck by how slimy it was for this 50 yr old man to be pretending to be Michael Jackson. The Philosophe’s description of him was, aptly, alien.

This was the only picture I could find (=poach) of this jacket he wears quite often. Unfortunately it doesn’t do justice to how truly weird it makes him look. But I guess we all knew that about him already. And also that he did have some serious groove.

(Un)relatedly, the Sunday Times today published a picture of Queen Elizabeth getting onto a train. The caption reads: “Disguised as a little old lady, Queen Elizabeth II boards a passenger train at King’s Cross Station in London from where she travelled to Norfolk for Christmas.” Disguised indeed. (See for yourself).

Well, we all like pretending, I suppose. Just a few nights ago we enjoyed an afternoon of creating, and then an evening of eating, smushi. (Danish open-faced sandwiches pretending to be sushi. Obviously).

On the left, rye bread with herring and quail egg (plus piece of Katjes herring liquorice), a little salmon rose with caviar, and the highlight: shrimp cocktail (the crisp is the clue).

Top left, quail confit (bound with some delicious hoisin sauce) with a litte egg and a little lollipop drumstick, starry bread with salami, remoulade and crispy onions, choux bun “hotdog” with chipolatas and most of “det hele“, and finally pariserbøf (genius really: a burger pattie fried with a slice of bread) – the radish slice is a good indication of the preparation implications of this stuff. An hour in the kitchen, a minute on the lips (as they say).

There was a cheese plate too, and a dessert plate, each of which was  delicious – as was the copious good wine, which made for copious merriment. In fact I’d say we were all as full and happy as this lump of marzipan pretending to be a pig.

(The pig was the prize for finding a whole almond in a spoonful of Danish rice pudding, so it is no longer in my care. I do not know if it still exists in its present form. But I can tell you that it had a good life, and produced very little methane.)

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A silly season of silly people

By E | Posted on: December 16, 2009

So the Philosophe and I took an afternoon walk yesterday to go collect his car after being serviced. Which means it was before 5pm, and the roads were full of people eager to get home, or to the beach, or wherever grumpy people go after work on the day before a public holiday in Cape Town (today the world has shut down in observance of “Day of Reconciliation”, whatever that is).

Soon, on our narrow pavement next to said cars, we were (not unusually) accosted by someone asking for money. But (unusually, thankfully), said beggar/gangster/dirty person threatened to be hiding a big knife in his sleeve pocket, and refused all the usual refusals of money (“no, not today”; “sorry, we can’t help you”, etc). As grumpy/complacent/pussy people drove by in their cars and watched the show, b/g/dp managed to threaten us into a state of fear and submission thick enough to walk away with all the money in the Philosophe’s wallet – R100 in this case, surely a bounty for b/g/dp with his maybe-maybe-not imaginary knife, and a small price to pay for our safety.

It’s a sobering kind of experience. Mostly because in the 15 years or so that I have lived in this country notorious for its high crime-rate and “unsaftey index”, this is the very first time that I have been that fearful. It doesn’t happen every day, and it’s very unlikely that it will happen again to me or to us again in the near future. (Besides, that stuff only happens to tourists, those easy targets!).

Still, now I don’t want to walk anywhere anymore. I know that life must go on as usual – and yesterday we faced that challenge valiently, it being the cocktail hour and all, soon to be followed by the dinner hour (which consisted of ostrich burgers laced with gin, juniper and dried apricots – not to mention a salad dressed with horseradish and caramelised celery. Yum).

Statistically, yes, life should go on as usual. But is that really the most efficient way to go about life? We listened to someone call into the radio today – the program featured some sort of laughing expert – it was a preacher calling to hear how he could teach himself to laugh after losing both his wife and his daughter. That’s fair and well, a laugh might be a good form of catharsis, but wanting to laugh in the face of tragedy also diminishes the value grief and (if applicable) remorse. I don’t think I’ve experienced a freakier thing than a Baptist memorial where NO ONE cried – all song and dance in “celebration” the deceased’s life. It was actually scary.

And if a friend betrays or hurts you? Should life go on as usual? If the friendship is over, then probably yes. But if not, it must be the duty of anyone who cares about that friendship to say something, and to do what they can to prevent life-as-usual, which can only be artificial from then on.

“Get over it” may sound like the harshest and most difficult of sentences, but being in it is actually the greater challenge. It takes courage to face that which truly sucks, whether it’s random or predictable.

In a parallel universe, I suppose we could have been killed or seriously injured, senselessly, yesterday. We didn’t, and life will go on. But it’s also worth paying attention to the fact that it feels really good that none of that happened. Life can be quite shit, but it can also be very worth living, if only to reminded of the urgency, once in a while, of knowing that you always did the best that you could.

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