When you are invited to spend the weekend contemplating scenery like this, it is only proper that you devote a few days to thinking about food before the fact, so that nothing can get in the way of two days of carefully planned indolence (not to mention that there are no shops, so if you don’t have it with you, you aren’t going to eat it).
The brief: four (maybe five) adults, two children. No hunger.
How could I not fall down the brownie hole once again? We needed snacks. And I needed to try two recipes that my pathetic poor willpower could not resist. “Peanut butter brownies with chocolate chunks” (you see? Though we may argue about whether they are brownies or blondies, seeing as they came out, well, “blonde”):
And continuing with the healthy theme (I had to think of the children!), there was of course the King Arthur Flour recipe for “Tasting is Believing Whole-Grain Brownies”. These I imagined turning into an adult (=boozy) dessert by topping them generously with sticky-brandy-and-coffee-prunes and a dollop of brandied mascarpone. (I tested this latter idea on the hapless Philosophe the night before we left. It worked. So, apparently, does wholewheat flour in a brownie.)
Well, we never got to that dessert (a coconut pie got in the way, as well as a box of those evil Lindt chocolate balls), but we did manage to scarf most of the brownies, and the prunes and mascarpone have been churned to a delightful (=boozy) ice cream, awaiting the attack of Signe’s sweet tooth later this evening.
More importantly, a delightful weekend in the country was the perfect opportunity to get busy with Ottolenghi’s caramelized garlic tart. Three whole heads of garlic, and a lot of goat’s cheese. I was all over it.
That was a damn fine tart/quiche/lunch, and if you like garlic and goat’s cheese you should do yourself a favour and get Plenty and get cooking.
And if you like lobster and pasta and wondered how the twain should ever meet, consider Alfred Portale’s lobster bolognese. That was our (superb) dinner on the first night, and lunch for some two days later.
In fact, after days of eating (and drinking) magnificently, no meal was perhaps more so than our final one, even though to look at the table you may have struggled to see the narrative thread. It was lunch on the stoep in the sun. There was a delicious Asian-y salmon salad. Warm crusty bread and butter. Guacamole. Salami. A slab of White Rock with Cranberries from Fairview (a most delightful little cheese, tart and sweet and cheesy all at once. And so good for your urinary tract!). There was a slice of caramelised garlic tart which no one wanted to claim but still managed to disappear, crumb by crumb. There was a small bowl of lobster bolognese which went the same way.
We first washed it down with some De Trafford Chenin, and then we carried on washing it down with the Secateurs Chenin.
For dessert there were peanut butter “brownies”. Wholewheat brownies. Some coconut pie. Sticky koeksisters brought by our travelling friend the extra adult the day before. And there was of course also a selection of “sweet shop” goodies from nowhere less than The Fat Duck in Bray (Heston is a genius).
Needless to say we were happy and full when we packed up and got into our cars to roll back to the city. And doubtless already thinking about the next occasion for cornucopia. That’s just how we roll.
We are not unlucky people.
Things you don’t want to know – but probably should
I recently watched a new Danish film called The Woman That Dreamed About A Man (or Kvinden der drømte om en mand, if you’re a native). It’s certainly not director Per Fly’s best work, but decent enough psycho-thriller entertainment when that’s what you need. Anyway, there’s one of those typically raunchy scenes when two strangers who have been eyeing each other across various rooms finally find themselves alone on a dark road, next to a conveniently located alley that they slip into without saying a word. The air is thick with erotic tension as they silently play the yes-no game, and then finally give in to an anonymous screw against the wall.
If that last sentence came across as rather lacking in finesse, good, because that’s exactly how sex between strangers in an alley should be. But what irritated me was that when their 30 seconds of heavy breathing (anti-)climaxed into a rather awkward button-closing, zip-locking silence, they suddenly lost all credibility as characters. No remorse, no guilt, and more importantly, no mundane panics about contraception, STDs, or the possibility of having just f**ked a psychopath. Just some inevitable exchange about when they can see each other again.
Fine, you may say, films are supposed to be in la-la land. But in 2010, that just doesn’t fly, no matter how much of a psycho you turn out to be (the woman did become one of note). Good films don’t let the banal stuff go. They linger on it, like that brilliant film Japanese Story, where Toni Collette has an affair with a married Japanese man who accidentally dies when they go skinny dipping. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, and with no one around, she has to get his body into her car, and it turns out to be quite a mission to manoeuvre a dead body. The scene goes on for ages, and is admittedly a little boring, but it’s also thoroughly captivating because it is so “real”.
Too much food media suffers from the same rubbish unreality as those two strangers in the alley. Everything is “dead easy”, or even if it’s complicated but “worth the effort”, it looks fabulous and tastes “divine”. But no one ever talks about how they feel after eating all this beautiful food – and here I’m not just talking about cooking shows, but also high end restaurant reviews. Which is why I was delighted to read the bit in Anthony Bourdain’s new book, Medium Raw, where he talks about how exhausting it can be to eat poncy tasting menu after poncy tasting menu at some of the “best” restaurants in the world. He wasn’t just jaded because luxury gets boring (surprise!), but because a lot of those menus are seriously taxing on one’s digestive system. So post-prandial romance is often off the cards – to paraphrase him very liberally – because the two of you flop into a taxi trying to suppress burps and farts the whole way home, and all you really look forward to is 24 hours later when you’ve managed to get all the crap (literally) out of your system. (A general note on the book: a fun read IF you haven’t followed Bourdain’s speaking gigs over the last year or so, in which case you will realise that he has become his own speaking puppet. He speaks in quotes rather than thoughts. I call it the Michael Pollan syndrome).
Which leads me to the actual topic of this post: stuffed steak.
Tired of plain old steak, I wanted to make beef olives. But when it came to the whole pounding, rolling and tying bit, I was overcome by laziness, so decided to just stuff the steaks instead.
Pretty simple really. Make some kind of delicious stuffing (for instance, white anchovies, capers, olives, lemon zest, breadcrumbs, garlic, rosemary, pecorino, chilli flakes: all the major foodgroups). Then use a good sharp knife to transform your steak into a meaty pita pocket into which you stuff as much of the stuffing as you can possibly cram in. Now wrap tightly tightly in cling and leave in the fridge for an hour or so (to “set) while you enjoy a spicy Bloody Mary (it being the cocktail hour of course). When you’ve slurped the last of your Mary, get a pan nice and hot, dredge the steaks in a little flour, and get frying:
Look, so they aren’t exactly pretty. In fact we joked that I had produced a Rousseau version of KFC’s Double Down “sandwich” (where chicken stands in for bread, and cheese and bacon stand in for chicken). But apart from the meat being a touch dry, it was pretty delicious. It’s like steak and puttanesca, all in one. What’s not to love?
Should you try this at home? By all means, but I have two recommendations. Don’t forget to deglaze the pan with some sherry (or something), and perhaps a touch of cream, to create a bit of a gravy which you can serve as “jus”. Secondly – and this is important – do make absolutely sure that all your ingredients are good and fresh, and particularly that you don’t use anchovies which may have passed their best-before date.
Otherwise expect to spend most of the night on the loo. Bon appetit!