There’s more to life than rumballs

By E | Posted on: December 23, 2008

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):

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And dip them into this:

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Followed by a sprinkle of coconut, and you get these babies:

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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.

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Porn shot:

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Now who wouldn’t welcome a bag of those in their stocking?

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Things to do with crayfish. And muffins.

By E | Posted on: December 20, 2008

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:

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After much consultation with the experts and the interweb, we settled on steaming them for ONLY ten minutes, which transformed them into this:

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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!

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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.

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Another muffin f**k-up

By E | Posted on: December 12, 2008

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):

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No scream

By E | Posted on: December 10, 2008

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.

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I scream, he screams: not the peanut butter!

By E | Posted on: December 4, 2008

Since the philosophe gifted me with an ice-cream maker for our anniversary which is turning out to be a ridiculously fun way to use up wierd things in the (bar) cupboard, I suppose I should start a catalog of the thousand and one flavours which look set to emerge from our (fabulous) kitchen.

So far:

1. Coconut and saffron (inspired by the master himself). No booze in there. Delicious nevertheless.

2. Lemon and almond frozen yoghurt. Booze: honey liqueur (and note that making ice-cream is not just a way for me to sneak more alcohol into my body: it helps keep the stuff from going rock hard in the freezer).

3. Peanut butter and cardamom “frozen yoghurt” (there is yoghurt in there, but also sour cream and milk, but no eggs. So call it what you will). Booze: grappa.

No tasting notes on 2 and 3 yet; so far they patiently await dinner guests tomorrow evening. (But a small sample before wouldn’t be an entirely stupid idea.) More on that. Later.

(Sneak preview of an idea that is taking hold: bloody mary sorbet. Isn’t it just too obvious???)

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The problem of evil Scandiwegians

By E | Posted on: December 3, 2008

Inhabitants of Færøerne, or the Faroe Islands – aka the evil Danish people who brutally slaughter seals [is there any way a slaughter cannot be brutal??] – must be delighted to hear that the Swedes are now in trouble too, for selling reindeer meat in Ikea. Children around the world must be terrified that they won’t get their presents, now that Santa’s lost his wheels.

And just last week a friend of mine fed a party of 7 year olds a cake in the shape of a DOLPHIN. It was so life-like, I’m surprised the mothers didn’t launch a campaign to save them.

It’s a cruel world indeed. But, thank god, a tasty one.

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A (modest) philosophy of greed

By E | Posted on: November 29, 2008

I have recently taken it upon myself to sit in on a philosophy class. I’ll get no university credits (who needs them?), but hopefully a chance to plug some of the large gaps I have in my philosophy repertoire. This may make me cleverer, or it may just make me a cleverer interlocutor. (Either way, it’ll surely lend a more interesting, perhaps even sophisticated, edge to kitchen conversations with the philosophe – my beloved husband, who also happens to be the teacher).

I suppose one of the reasons I chose not to specialise in philosophy is that I have a lay perspective (not yet uprooted) of a bunch of people making way too big a deal about the idea of life rather than getting on with it: just how fruitful can it be to question whether absolute truth exists, or how well you can trust your perception that the sky is blue? Still, these are some of the “big” questions, and I remain open to being convinced of their importance.

Another of the big questions is what makes you “you”. This is both highly subjective – what traits, stories, and impulses make you different from someone else (or why would someone choose to spend their life with you and not the neighbour?) – and much broader: what makes human beings different from animals (do animals have knowledge, or merely instincts? And given that so many of our instincts are actually learned rather than “instinctual”, is there a difference?).

One compelling argument for a difference between us and the beasts is that we all experience hunger but, as the philosophe pointed out, we can choose to ignore ours. It’s unlikely, in other words, that a hungry cat would turn down a bowl of food because she’s too busy to eat, saving her appetite for lunch, or because she has an eating disorder. (This argument of course rests on the fact that we don’t know what animals are thinking).

Following this logic, animals probably don’t “experience” greed either. Sure, we can see them being greedy – our little cat Mogwai has a seemingly monstrous greed for food from other cats’ bowls, not to mention for popcorn and the milk leftover from muesli – but I suspect that’s really a combination of a healthy appetite and the fact that she likes the taste of those things. Her “greed”, then, is still a biological drive or instinct, just an imperfectly regulated one.

Consider the stampede, another perfectly normal animal drive. Why do animals stampede? Normally out of fear. At least the ones in front are normally reacting to fear, the ones in the middle or back might well have no idea why they’re running, they’re just following the others and so represent the crowd or pack mentality, which I believe is another perfectly normal animal drive.

Why do humans stampede? Also often enough out of fear. There are countless examples, but I remember one particularly sad case of children being crushed to death in a zoo in Maputo years ago when someone thought it would be funny to pretend that the lions had escaped from their cages.

They also apparently stampede out of wilful greed. Like the crowd who trampled a man to death yesterday as they were trying to get to post-Thanksgiving bargains in a New York Wal-Mart:

‘Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”’ (from the New York Times)

Perhaps the only real difference between humans and non-human animals is our access to motivation. And sinister as that too often is, perhaps it’s better not to know at all.

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A final note on the fish

By E | Posted on: November 27, 2008

So last night saw us at yet another famed-to-be-the-”best” sushi place, which just happens to be down the road from us. (The irony of moving into a new kitchen is that after spending all afternoon sorting things out, the last thing you feel capable of doing is cooking.) I had heard great things about their cocktails (all tweaked, like Bloody Mary with Wasabi; cosmopolitan with sake and so on), the fact that they serve freshly grated wasabi – straight from Japan, we were told by the owner, whose gimmick is clearly going around to all the tables grating the stuff himself – and, of course, the sushi.

Well the sushi was great, as was the tempura. Until, that is, said owner walked by and noticed my conceit at dipping a piece of tempura into soya sauce rather than the  dipping sauce provided on the tempura plate.

“Are you dipping tempura into soya sauce?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

And then in that most irritating of manners, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, whatever, if you like (read: “you stupid moron, what kind of a philistine are you?”)… but the tempura sauce is really better. But it’s up to you (chorus: “you philistine”).”

Apart from the fact that the bill was pretty monstrous for an easy Wednesday-night-let’s-grab-a-bite, that pretty much confirmed that I won’t be going back there, no matter how good the damn sushi is, and no matter that we were given a complimentary teaspoon full of ginger ice-cream to enjoy with our plum wine.

I only wish I had asked him if he had meant to come to work without combing his hair. No biggie, but…

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Sushi mania

By E | Posted on: November 25, 2008

Initially delighted at how many places are doing sushi and cocktail “specials”, it’s now become boring. Boring in the way that fashion becomes boring, because it’s become all too clear that restaurants are simply scrambling to keep up. Also boring because in just scrambling to be fashionable, too much of what you get is simply crap and not worth eating. How is it that one of the most artful of foods has become the most commonplace?

I admit that my amateurish approach to sushi is often little more than searching for a wasabi and ginger kick – and keep sashimi away – which is why I deigned to get a (non-sushi-specialist) supermarket take away for dinner one night and ended up with this:

As much as I like wasabi, it was difficult to get my appetite excited about that dull little turd (though admittedly, that came from a tube in my fridge, and has nothing to do with the supermarket in question). The actual sushi was fine. But nothing more.

Having recently sampled what some consider to be the best sushi in town, I’ve decided that there is no point in eating sushi that is just fine. It comes with a price, of course, because it’s not really about the wasabi but using superior ingredients all round (and yes, this should be an obvious reason to stay away from cheap sushi – if I can’t afford to buy a piece of fresh Norwegian salmon to cook in my kitchen, how could I imagine restaurants would just be giving the stuff away? Economics 101).

But happily there exists a middle ground. I can’t afford to eat the “best” all the time, but I do know a place where I can get a dependably good plate of sushi for no more than an overpriced salad or sandwich:

Need I say more? This is actually mouthwatering. (And that salmon did melt in the mouth)

I will say one more thing, though, about something better than a middle ground. And that’s our brand new kitchen, ready to roll as of today. And I also have a husband who is newly equipped with all the goodies to reproduce the above without having to leave the home. We got the rolling mat, the rice, the sake (NB!), the ginger. Hell, we even have ponzu sauce for the day that I deep-fry a soft shell crab destined for a spider roll. All I need now is a crab.

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How to waste perfectly good bananas

By E | Posted on: November 21, 2008

Try making microwave muffins. Seriously.

And since I can’t get them right in the oven either, I think I will anoint myself with the coveted title of Master Muffin F**ker-Upper. Hail the season of good cheer.

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