SIGN WITH AN E

Recent brownie successes have apparently heralded a new bountious era for our kitchen. (The cracked brownies, by the way, were not definitive. They were so sweet that they haunted me in my sleep and the next day I got up and baked a new batch of my own – heavily intertextual – invention. This second batch was properly good. So good that I dubbed them my “F**k the rest, we is the best” brownies).

The other day a friend slipped me a brown paper full of fresh turmeric (as friends do). That night’s nightmares resulted in a batch of what I consider to be my best muffins yet. I call them my coconut-ginger-cardamom-turmeric muffins, because that’s what they are.

There’s a nice little muffin top there. Good flavour too, moist with coconut, lightly gingery, bits of crunch and a funky egg-yolk yellow from the turmeric, and not too sweet. The only complication was that they all stuck in the tin so I had to decapitate them to get them out. But since I could put them back together again fairly neatly, that turned out to be a happy convenience: you don’t have to spend all that extra energy pulling the top from the body, because it’s done already! (I think I could sell that tip to Rachael Ray).

Then there was the proper christening of the pasta machine, the result of which is hanging like an ethereal veil at the top of this post (now I sound like Nigella Lawson!). Pasta technique still needs work, but we were well-fed last night with fresh tagliatelle and springbok ragu.

This afternoon the kitchen smells of ribs. Smoked ribs from Joostenburg, a surprise (and very welcome) gift from my brother-in-law. I rubbed them with cajun spice then put them in the tagine with a bit of red wine and orange marmalade, and four hours later, this:

It may not look like much apart from a blackened, sticky mess. Which is exactly what it is, but of the very best kind. Break one of those open, and the bone falls right off to reveal a pink, smokey, salty and supremely delicious piece of pig. Very soon that meat (which has now been freed of its bones) will make its way into a righteous sandwich, methinks. Good ciabatta, slather of mustard on butter, hunks of sticky rib meat, a couple of slices of cucumber. I’ll call them my Sticky Mess Smoked Rib Sarnies. (Now I sound like the one who will not be named).

Because tonight we’re having KFC. Or, as I like to think of it, my “Wipe That Smug Smile Off Your Face, Colonel Sanders” Home-Fried Crispy Chicken.

Yes, we have our own brand of smugness in this kitchen.

Since I was gifted a pasta-rolling machine for my birthday, I have been scheming about what other great uses to put it to: puff pastry, Danish pastry. Basically, all and any variations on a rolling theme. Yesterday I finally cleared a mental afternoon for playing with dough (that’s mental as in I cleared the afternoon in my head, and I planned to have a mental time of rolling dough). But no sooner had I put together a croissant dough than I got sucked into a vortex of bureaucracy trying to legalise my beloved car.

So the dough was forced to wait until this morning, which as anyone who loves yeast knows, is no bad thing at all. The longer and slower the rise, the better the eating. After the first champion breakfast (two cups of milky coffee and Golden Virginia up in smoke), I excitedly assembled the rolling machine, and got the dough into a rectangle I thought would be just right to go through the thickest slot.

Helas. I soon realised that to get the dough through that slot I would have to roll it enough to make the mechanical part of the job not worth it. So the machine was packed away and instead I had to promise the philosophe entirely hand-rolled, all-butter croissants on his return from the house of pain (aka the gym).

Actually the rolling was surprisingly smooth and easy, the dough lovely and supple, and with everything at the right temperature, I had none of the oozing butter catastrophes I experienced the very first time I tried making croissants, (stupidly) on a hot summer’s day in Mozambique many years ago (they came out rock hard).

Not so these babies.  Neither were they perfect, though. Thinking I would save myself the trouble of consulting fifteen different recipes before getting started, I confined myself to just one, and followed it basically to the letter (apart from the overnight proving). Having since looked around, I now understand one basic flaw in that recipe, which was to roll the croissants from squares instead of triangles, giving them a thicker, more doughy inside as opposed to the flaky lightness I was hoping for.

Still, breakfast was good, and the first batch of three was devoured in its entirety. The thing I love most about yeast baking is getting to watch something like this

turn into this

And now I have a nice little fold of ready-rolled dough chilling in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow, or Sunday perhaps. Next time I’ll be working with triangles (plus another little trick I just learned to ensure super flakiness), and I wonder if there might not be enough for un petit pain au chocolat aussi…

So the pasta machine may turn out to be just for pasta. Not to worry: I am all over that too. Got some springbok shanks braising slowly in the tagine as we speak, which I think are destined for some ravioli once the rain comes down tomorrow. (Or should I shred the meat and cover with a lid of croissant pastry – venison pot pie??). When am I supposed to work, dammit?

This is how the Free Online Dictionary defines livery:

1. A distinctive uniform worn by the male servants of a household.
2. The distinctive dress worn by the members of a particular group; uniform: ushers in livery.
3. The costume or insignia worn by the retainers of a feudal lord.
4.
a. The boarding and care of horses for a fee.
b. The hiring out of horses and carriages.
c. A livery stable.
5. A business that offers vehicles, such as automobiles or boats, for hire.
6. Law Official delivery of property, especially land, to a new owner.

Etymology: [Middle English liveri, from Old French livree, delivery, from feminine past participle of livrer, to deliver, from Latin lberre, to free, from lber, free; see leudh- in Indo-European roots.]

It’s a funny word. (Free) Delivery = rental (which is what servants and horses have in common in the definitions).

I wanted to title my post something clever about liver, and liverish is neither here nor there in my Sunday, referring as it does to being irritable or bilious. Not here. I’ve had one of my favourite kind of days, with maximum time in the kitchen, close to the oven. First I baked seed loaf (intending a nice wholewheat bread only to discover I had no more yeast), then almond and ginger biscotti, then my mother’s famous chicken liver pate, and now, finally, a shaggy yeast dough containing rosemary and candied orange peel is puffing itself into a righteous loaf of bread.

As in most things culinary, my mother makes her liver pate well done. The purists will no doubt frown: what, no soft pink interior? No layer of congealed fat on top?

Nope. Baked for almost an hour, with a lovely herby crust on top, and chunky bits of mushroom underneath, this stuff is the business. And I have never made it before. I’ve fried chicken livers before – almost crusty outside, with lots of onion and peri peri (just like mother does: perhaps well done is our livery) – but I realized today that I’m very inexperienced when it comes to “cleaning” a chicken liver. How do you know for sure that you’ve found, and gotten seriously rid of, that horrible green bitter stuff? It’s a strangely textured meat to navigate, because it is so silky smooth – quite disgustingly so, actually, but also quite soothingly. I expected myself to be more turned off handling the raw stuff than I was. Unlike most meat, this actually smells good raw.

But it smells SO much better when it’s been in the oven for 30 minutes or so, and the kitchen starts taking on its aromas. Imagine not being able to smell, and to remember through your nose. Today I smelled that chicken liver pate and I remembered 100 weekends in my childhood, and the days after, and the months later, when a bowl would emerge out of the freezer and go back into the oven to remind us of those months before…

I just hope this one tastes as good.

Despite forecasts of rain, we continue to experience something I want to call an Indian summer, but that wouldn’t be quite right, because the dead of winter has already revealed itself. So let’s just say some freaky, but lovely, hot weather in the middle of winter.

Still, that’s no excuse not to get some other heat going. Like yesterday – I sat down fully intending to work, but after two hours there was no sign of a sentence, only this:

It’s “the one with yoghurt,” according to its Greek name, which translates more helpfully into a yoghurt and almond cake with lemon syrup. The original recipe calls for a good amount on brandy in the batter (probably why I bookmarked it), but since we had none, I put on my creative hat (which is full of multicultural stereotypes) and decided that ouzo would do the trick. It’s all Greek, right? Oh, and I used buttermilk instead of yoghurt (it’s all bacteria, right?), and plain flour instead of half semolina (all wheat, right? You get my thinking).

(You probably can’t see it, but the punktum in the above picture is just behind and to the left of the ouzo bottle. Celery salt. Indispensable for any self-respecting kitchen – or bar, that is).

Almost as nice as the cake itself with its crunchy almondy-sugary topping (excuse me while I show off my new camera, but the thing is in the detail, right?) –

- was the sauce I concocted to go with it for an after-braai dessert: whip up a little creme fraiche with icing sgar (not too much), a squirt of lemon and a nice glug of ouzo. It worked majestically – and so did the cake quite naked of adornments for breakfast this morning.

We braaied because it was nice and balmy on the balcony – at least while the sun was up, which unfortunately wasn’t for long. But while braaing in summer is sometimes quite silly (hmm, what shall we do on the hottest day of the year? Make a fire!), some flame action is a wonderful thing to cope with early evening chills. And flame action it was, as the philosophe tried out his new coal gadget:

I would like to say it was so hot that our fire was actually pink, but that’s just some trick of lighting that I’m afraid I didn’t author. The eery bit in the middle of the cylinder did get freakishly hot – so much so that I got nervous the metal might melt, and then proceeded to put two of my fingertips far too close to it with the result that I now only have eight fingerprints left. Oh well, who needs ten right?

Yesterday I heard one of the Cape’s more irksome radio hosts lamenting a new advertisement trying to get people to drink more milk. He wasn’t lambasting the idea of consuming more dairy, but found the ad untasteful. I haven’t seen the thing (not even Google could help me there), but apparently it satirised the crime situation in South Africa (give a burglar/killer a glass of milk to calm him down or some such?), which as most people will agree is no laughing matter.

In the course of my research, I did come across this blog post which charts some of the milk campaigns around the world, mostly famously the American Got Milk? one, but also another apparently South African one with this picture:

Here’s how the ad is described: “Let’s see, a guy gets stuck in bear trap; guy tries to free himself by sawing off foot; guy fails to saw off foot due to incredibly strong, milk-fortified bones; guy dies and rots.”

Well that might just take the cake for the most inappropriate ad I’ve ever seen – it definitely doesn’t inspire me to drink milk.

So, as I was whipping myself up at cappuccino this morning, I thought it would be selfish not to share some of the more interesting ways to consume milk, if you’re not the type who generally sports a milk moustache. I’m not a big milk au naturel drinker, but I do manage to consume a lot of the stuff in my coffee. I like milky coffee, and if there’s one thing I have grown to really appreciate about microwaves it’s their essential function as milk warmers. It’s not really that I mind cold-ish coffee, but heated milk actually tastes better.

I also love milk foam. Or froth, as some purists might call it. But I don’t like what I consider to be froth – there’s nothing worse than a cappuccino with this bobble-head of “foam” sitting on top of the cup trying to look like a muffin. That airy stuff lends nothing good to a coffee. Good foam is thick, like very softly whipped cream. And it must lie in a decent layer on top of the coffee – a situation well-captured by the name “flat white”.

Unfortunately not many places get that right. Some of the best restaurants in this town make the crappiest cappuccinos, lattes, and “flat whites” because they don’t get the milk right (and plenty don’t get the coffee part right either – and let’s not get me started on the biscotti).

The cappuccino I make at home is very different from the good ones at coffee shops mainly because the milk I foam is cold. It’s also “2%”, which puts to bed the myth that good foam has to come from hot full-fat milk. I can even throw in another one: it’s long life milk. In fact that processed ultra-pasteurised stuff (we can’t be sure it’s really milk, after all) makes the best foam. Here’s how.

1. Get a small 1-cup plunger. Many “milk frothers” at supermarkets are basically that, though with a fine mesh instead of the three-layered filters for plunging coffee. Note: the three-layered coffee plunging filter is better for frothing milk. There’s probably some obvious science, like creating more friction or suction when you get into rapid plunging mode.

2. Fill to about one third with cold, processed, low-fat milk. Roll up your sleeve and then plunge up and down very fast until your bicep feels like it’s about to go into a spasm (20 seconds? Don’t do this if you have Schwarzenegger arms: something is bound to break).

3. Now leave it alone (plunger in) while you heat milk and pour coffee as for a normal milky coffee. Remember to leave room for foam – I’d say two centimetres is a nice indulgence.

(Here comes the good part).

4. Now slowly lift out the plunger, which will have a nice thick layer of foam clinging to it. If you are not in polite company, you can lick/suck this straight off the plunger. Now pour the foam onto the coffee, stopping just before it starts spilling out of the cup. Now take a spoon, and simply eat the remaining foam in the plunger (there will still be about half left, but you can’t make good foam in tiny amounts, so eating milk is one of the sacrifices of a home-made cappuccino). It is creamy and delicious, something between whipped and ice cream.

5. Once you have this technique down, you can start to go crazy. Like cinnamon in your coffee? Don’t sprinkle it on top. Put it IN WITH THE MILK before you manhandle it: cinnamon foam. Ginger foam. Cocoa foam. Paprika foam. (Oh, this works perfectly well in a large plunger too. Good for many cappuccinos or for one very serious solo milk experience).

(In other, non-dairy news, I’ve just made oxtail for the first time. I followed a 2 hour recipe yesterday, but there was no meat falling off bones. So I added another two hours today, and the meat fell off. Neither the philosophe nor I are really bone-gnawing, marrow-sucking types, so I picked all the meat out and shredded it. That was a bit bothersome, but I now have a bowl of some seriously melting delicious meat. I see it becoming ragout for pasta, with a very zingy gremolata, or ravioli…. I’m also brining a pork belly which this weekend is destined for something along the lines of Gennaro’s stuffed porchetta. If only the damn weather would stop pretending it’s summer.

And finally, some fool has just had his eyeball tattooed.)