From the food world:
The rise of the “breastaurant” (via Coldmud, via the Food Section)
From “life”:
Paris Hilton names Gordon Ramsay as the UK Prime Minister (via Coldmud)
From “politics”:
A good before-the-fact take on Elizabeth Alexander as Obama’s inaugural poet
Turkey is a particularly cool word in bowling. When you get a turkey, that means three strikes in a row (I also once had a six-pack, but that’s neither here nor anywhere anymore). Turkey is also the bird you sometimes have left in your freezer after a late Christmas meal, so it was only obvious that late Christmas should meet recent holiday in Franschhoek for some mole poblano, otherwise known as the original chilli-chocolate sauce (on turkey, though the Wiki entry on mole doesn’t mention turkey, but what does wiki know?).
Stage one of the sauce resembles muesli, somewhat:
But the aromas are far from breakfast: think pepper, and anise, and clove, and cinnamon (OK, breakfast), and chilli, and garlic, and nuts and raisins.
The best bit is adding the chocolate to the paste you’ve made out of the above, and tomatoes, and stock, and your indispensable Braun handheld kitchen whizzer:
Once the chocolate has melted, it turns from dubious-looking pale brown sludge into a rich, brown (Nigella: gloriously glistening) mole, or molli, or sauce. Slather that on some turkey, or chicken (or whatever), stuff into a taco, and everything becomes pretty much alright. (A state that just a little attention makes surprisingly achievable).
It was in great anticipation that we set off on our weekend of gastronomic adventures in Franschhoek, famed as the culinary capital of this South (with more than one award-winning restaurant, and at least one that ranks in the world’s top 50). We booked ourselves a room at the ever-faithful Protea, which did not disappoint (Protea Hotels do well because they never claim to be more than they are: clean beds, good service and even a decent breakfast, all at a good price).
Alas, the culinary side didn’t fare as well as the hotel. I won’t bother with reviews here, but suffice it to say that the two restaurants we were really looking forward to eating in (having made reservations a week in advance!) just weren’t worth it. One of those unfortunate situations where good-quality, well-prepared food just isn’t matched by service or atmosphere, and therefore fails as an “experience”.
We did have a fantastic lunch at the famed Bread and Wine (thankfully, as expected) – just look at this:
You really can’t go wrong with great charcuterie, good wine, and yumfull bread (not pictured here, but they make bread with a righteous crust, perfect for olive-oil and balsamic dippage).
Other than that, the best times were in the more unexpected places, like a village square full of real people and some non-stellar but very decent food. That’s where we got to do the one thing that we do best, and that should be the only real pursuit in a town called Franschhoek: be French!
Don’t ask me why he bothered to read to the end of a longish review of The Secret, but courtesy of the Philosophe, I share with you one of the most brilliant reviews of not only this book, but the entire pathetic industry of “life-changing”, “groundbreaking”, “New Age”, “self-help”:
[Plot summary: reader X lives a bad life and ends up in jail. On day one he is purchased by mean-ass prisoner Y who tells him to prepare for unauthorised sodomy and other prison delights. Cellmate Y gives him a copy of The Secret, which is frankly too difficult for him to understand. Yet...]
‘The next day in the exercise yard I carried “The Secret” with me and when Marcus [X] approached me I opened the book and stabbed him in the neck. The next eight weeks in solitary confinement provided ample time to practice positive visualization and the 16 hours per day of absolute darkness actually made visualization about the only thing that I actually could do. I’m not sure that everybody’s life will be changed in such a dramatic way by this book but I’m very thankful to have found it and will continue to recommend it heartily.’ (from Amazon)
This is almost as good as the story of how Rachael Ray saved a woman’s life because a suspected intruder never materialised while she was brandishing one of Rachael Ray’s knives.
Brilliant not only in its utter stupidity, but the complete absence of self-irony.
Speaking of which, I hear Immanuel Kant’s ghost rustling in the tree-tops. Sapere audere, he whispers. Dare to know, you imbeciles, that you have brains (of your own)!
Postscript: The philosophe has just brought it to my attention that he tricked me. The post was a spoof. But as he said, I cannot rewrite history (yes that’s right, WordPress), and neither do I want to. I remain convinced there are enough fools in the world to justify the spoof as potentially true. (Just an hour ago I enountered yet another of them on the road, driving a big old Chevy truck – in Cape Town – with two bumper stickers. The one said “I love country music”, which I thought was kind of apt. The other was an advertisement for Herbalife. If a cowboy hat could exhibit EDD, er, Erectile Dysfunction Disorder, it would surely be from taking Herbalife).
This was our Christmas table, delightfully devoid of “Christmas” food. Instead, a middle Eastern mezze feast, including some pretty delicious Maldivian specialty labelled as tuna/coconut-chilli-and-onion mush. And we did feast in style: this assortment of goodies stretched to three (if not four?) solid meals for ten people.
We weren’t entirely without Christmas delights, though: next day’s lunch did see the addition of a lovely ham, and there was Christmas cake too (oh, and mince pies, but only special people got to eat them, in secret. I was one of the select few. They were good).
It’s a nice way to get around some of the tedium of a routine celebration which most of us don’t subscribe to anyway (thankfully all graces at the table were aimed at each other, or at people we have known to be true, living people who were present in their absences).
But the best thing about not doing Christmas food at Christmas is that you get to crave it. So today, on the 2nd of January, when most people are slogging away at the gym trying to convince themselves of the virtue of whatever detox diet they’ve recently enslaved themselves to, we are getting ready for a proper (Danish) Christmas meal. There will be turkey (just a little one, 6kg of bird for the three of us). There will be red cabbage, and cucumber salad. And caramelised potatoes too.
We’ll skip the rice pudding with the hidden almond, but if we can handle any more, we can have some fried Christmas cake crumbs (think hot and crispy) over salted caramel ice cream. It seems an appropriate way to retox into the new year. Skål!
If you have, like me, decided that there’s no point in Christmas (which is silly anyway) being confined to just one day of the year and that it therefore makes sense to extend the silliness into an entire week, you can keep yourself and a glass of wine busy on a Monday afternoon with, for example, coconut eggs. Take these (a mixture of coconut, butter and a touch of ginger, heated, shaped and set in the fridge):
And dip them into this:
Followed by a sprinkle of coconut, and you get these babies:
Or you can get creative by tweaking David Leite’s recipe for spiced, toasted nuts, here flavoured with a touch of sugar, plenty salt, cumin, heavy on the cayenne and, as our friend Jamie puts it, just a “gesture” of cinammon.
Porn shot:
Now who wouldn’t welcome a bag of those in their stocking?
It’s a happy day when your mother arrives for a long-anticipated holiday in Cape Town, and you can treat her to a perfect sunset walk on the Sea Point strip, followed by fried calamari at one of the best settings in town (I wish I could say best calamari, but they must share that honour with others. It is damn good, though, even if service isn’t always all that.)
It’s an even happier day when later that evening you get a drop by from a diver who wants to spread his bounty with you. And so it was that we ended up with two beautiful beasts in the fridge for a night (alas, we had already eaten enough for one day).
But the next day we were all over those babies:
After much consultation with the experts and the interweb, we settled on steaming them for ONLY ten minutes, which transformed them into this:
The rest you will have to imagine (most interestingly, that one of them had the most curiously pink flesh – experts assured us that this was nothing to worry about; most likely a female full of roe that coloured the flesh while cooking). But we split them, brushed them with a bit of oil and garlic-lemon butter, and under the grill for a final 3 minutes, so as not to exceed the MAXIMUM cooking time of 13 minutes (experts are experts for a reason, non?).
With a bit more melted butter for dipping and some crusty bread, it was a truly lovely way to begin a meal that otherwise consisted of Mario Batali’s surprisingly delicious polpettine al limone (lemon-scented meatballs: do yourself a favour and try them).
Phase two of the crayfish involved turning their shells into stock, which now sits in the freezer awaiting the next unexpected drop in, so we can make a righteous risotto or some such worthy bed for lightly grilled fresh tails.
Speaking of worthy beds, I am happy to report that the great muffin f**k-up has resulted not in ice-cream, nor even poor unsuspecting visitors being forced to eat them toasted, but instead: rumballs. Genious, even if I say so myself!
If I could, I’d offer one or three of these to Paris Hilton to console her for her recent loss. Because shame, every girl needs to indulge a broken heart with a bit of bran disguised as chocolate.
So I’m sitting here trying to read about free will, and instead I am willed to the kitchen (why get a brand new one if you don’t spend every minute in it??). I want to bake, but what? If I had a bunch of girlfriends I’d invite them over for what the Danes called julehygge – Christmas “cosiness” – and we’d drink champagne and make a big mess producing too many little goodies that no one wants to eat. Alas, no girlfriends on call. So it had to be muffins, those other little goodies that no one wants to eat (I myself only want to eat the ones at UCT, and apparently other people only want to eat the monstrously huge ones that parade under the name “muffins” in coffee shops). Perfect. (As the incompatibilist philosophers say, I couldn’t have done otherwise because I have no free will.)
So some evil chain of antecedent events, combined with some freakish laws of nature, compelled me to bake muffins yet again, and face failure, yet again.
I just ate one, and in fact they taste very good indeed (especially with a little piece of goat’s milk pecorino to cut the raisin-bran sweetness), but the fact that they don’t have the requisite muffin tops means they are consigned never to meet human beings in their original form again. It simply can’t be otherwise (I have a reputation to protect). I’ll throw them in the freezer, and one day when I need to feed some bubbly girlfriends (or some such), I’ll whip them out, slice them, toast them, and adorn them with a little slice of strong cheese and a glass of sherry.
Or if I’m feeling more destructive, I’ll tear them up and throw them right into the ice-cream machine while it’s busy churning some rich vanilla concoction. Add a generous splash of brandy (rum? whisky?), and f**ked-up muffins become gourmet dessert. I love my ice-cream machine. It’s so deterministic.
In the meantime, here’s the lovely dolphin that is no longer (courtesy of Tammy, its baker, and mommy of one of its destroyers. I’ve ordered a Prince cake from her for my next birthday):
So I kind of regret that I can’t post a series of pictures and tastings of my various ice-cream endeavours, but I suspect I am “merely” experiencing the same delight that countless other first-time ice-creamers have been through (and blogged about, ad nauseum). But let me tell you this: peanut butter ice (milk/yoghurt) cream is pretty darned delicious. Especially if you left it in the fridge long enough to get perfectly soft and scoopable, and even more especially if you are able to garnish it with a liberal sprinkling of little chocolate covered chewy things (think turkish-delight flavoured jelly tots, covered in chocolate, and then think of that in conjunction with peanut butter and a hint of cardamom. ‘Twas the taste of an Arabian night).
The sprinkles were leftover from those that decorated the philosophe’s birthday cake, not so long ago. It was a humble cake: still unequipped with a functioning oven, I had to make use of a chunk of the beetroot-chocolate cake I baked a while ago and had (cleverly!) stashed in the freezer. But even previously frozen beetroot-chocolate cakes can shine for a special birthday. With the help of a few jabs with a fork and a generous drizzle of rum, it became freshly moist before I covered it with a thin rum-and-cardamom (ok, I like cardamom) icing, and topped it with some nicely garish sweets from Woolies: chewy chocs, liquorice allsorts and sour gums. It all went down pretty well (the philosophe had the last piece for breakfast (dessert) the next day), especially after a lovely evening on the balcony of the Royal Kitchen, where we dined like kings around the most incredible carrot landscape:
We didn’t eat the carrots – which drooped towards the end to let us know it was time to go home (ingenious!) – but we did eat pretty much everything else, and it was all delicious. Crunchy salt-and-pepper calamari, lemon chicken, Ma Po tofu, sweet and sour pork, rocking sizzling beef, and some outrageously good sizzling fish with pepper. For (pre-cake dessert), toffee banana, but not just any kind. The kind that you dip, hot, into ice-cold water to turn their toffee into cold, hard caramel. (I’ve had this once before, but with sweet potato chunks, introduced to me on that very balcony by the dear temporarily-absent sailor). Whether you like bananas and caramel or not, it’s one of those great textured hot-cold mouthfeel experiences, like deep-fried ice-cream, or tempura avocado.
I’m hungry.
Earlier that day we went to the aquarium to look at a multitude of amazing frogs which weren’t there. But we did meet these jumbo spider(roll)s again:
(Dude on the left, by the way, has not been squashed up against the glass: that’s aquarium perspective). I’m not sure how to scale these, but I think it’s fair to say that those bodies are about the size of my head.
But after all that culinary goodness, I won’t leave you with that scary image of prehistoric monsters. Instead, imagine this on a hot summer’s night:
(If you need details, it’s a chilli mojito. And as you’ll notice from the seeds, the word chilli is not taken lightly in this baby. It will bite you. And then it will soothe you with its own built-in minty-icy-slightly sweet freshness. Avaialble from the very new and very chic HQ [that's Headquarters] Restaurant and Bar. Where they also make a damn fine steak. In fact that’s all they do: sirloin, frites, and salad. One menu, one price. Just that, but just right.)
Now I’m really hungry.
Freaky cakes
From Cake Wrecks, via the Telegraph.