Things to do with wine and Danish blue

By E | Posted on: January 31, 2007

Yesterday started with three hours of staring at bottles in an empty wine shop (I was behind the counter), but that was redeemed by the lunch that followed. We were going to go to a coffee shop, but decided against small, public spaces and having to pay for something you can do much better at home.

So at a friend’s kitchen table I was served a good, simple meal: sliced mushrooms with a hint of olive oil, lemon, pepper (from Elizabeth David), a salad of leaves from the garden, avocado, mini corn, more olive oil and lemon, and bread. There was conversation which, with the food, restored me to some sense of self. The powers of a kitchen table are something else.

Later I returned for more from the same kitchen: roast lamb, steamed green beans with garden leaves and Danish blue. Piece incroyable: baby leeks braised in red wine (also Elizabeth David). The meal was not at the table but in a garden with herbs and a fig tree, and there were parents and children and some bottles of wine consumed.

Driving home I thanked myself for resisting the temptation to see no one and do nothing but stare at a television screen and I also wondered about the stars that I care little about. Not only the real ones (I had been chided for showing no interest in the comet that is in our skies these days) but also the mumbo-jumbo of horoscopes. Traits of the Cancerian are sometimes all too obvious in me: the comfort of home, family, a fig tree (knock yourselves out, Freudians).

And then of course there’s Eliot:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

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Later

By E | Posted on: January 28, 2007

So, in response to my previous post, Mr. 302 said the “best [he] could come up with was Buck Fizz: champagne and orange juice”. Well I don’t know about your fridge but any day that that’s the best mine can offer is a good one.

Speaking of champagne, and dinner with friends, I had the privilege of being invited round to partake in a special kind of bubbly: it was a Nitida Shiraz champagne. Yup. Red bubbly. It was actually lovely.

The problem with red wine in the summer is the heat, so you end up drinking reds that work well chilled, like Sangiovese or Carignan. Being light reds, they like the fridge, but they still have that “red” edge, slight tannic bitterness that in the end make whites preferable.

The bubble element takes that away and makes this the perfect wine to share with friends on a Sunday evening. The dinner that followed complimented the occasion beautifully: gnocchi with home-made pesto and a salad of rocket, basil, feta, olives and tomato. All the herbs had been picked from the garden during the first glass of bubbly. Talk about organic. And clean, homemade food with company to match.

It has been an unexpectedly lovely conclusion to a dire few days where friends have been good to have.

Gnarls Barkley:
I remember when, I remember when I lost my mind
there was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo
and so much space

…

hahaha bless your soul
you really think you’re in control

Gnarls is great to funk up any time. But it is not great to lose your mind. It just happened to a friend and it has been the most twisting experience to see someone you know disappear, even if for a few hours. We must guard our saneness.

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Innervation

By E | Posted on: January 28, 2007

It’s been some time since I have found myself at home in the favourite company of myself. Days and weeks have been busy and I always find myself longing for solitude when I can’t have it and then mildly anxious when I do find it. You get used to distractions as much as you loathe them when they appear as obligations. But Cassandra Wilson always manages to soothe me into myself. She’s got this voice that longs for a smoky jazz bar (where you will find her, in fact, in The Score) and makes loneliness sound sad and sexy…

“Once again I’ll search the darkness of the night
All alone
I walk each street until I find someone who is,
just like me,
searching for
some company…”

Anyway. Sunday night. Alone but not lonely. I came up with this little number to inaugurate the sunset:
Take:
1 (large) part vodka
1 good dollop of homemade lemon sorbet
lots of ice
dash of Angostura Bitters
shredded basil

I think I’ll call it Debored’s Second Vice.

It’s not for nothing that my mother calls me the queen of leftovers.

(Postscript: mid-writing I received an invitation for dinner with friends. I did not refuse. Yeah well. Friends are good too)

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Le canard

By E | Posted on: January 23, 2007

Look, so I made the duck confit that’s been sitting in my cupboard for almost a year now. (And someone asked me, when I told her, “do you mean the one that’s been in your cupboard for 10 years or so?” “No”, I answered, truthfully, “only a year. But it is in a can; that stuff lasts forever.”) Well I don’t know if forever is the entire truth, but it was certainly a fine thing when it hit the table this Saturday evening.

I admit I botched up the appearance somewhat (and dissenters of my cooking methods will argue that I didn’t use enough fat for the frying), but I think you can see that the result – however “messy” – was a mass of meat that was falling off the bone and tenderised by its long sleep in its own fat. It was quite splendid, and moreover kept up its act for sandwiches the next day.

Since then and now I have experienced something of a nostalgia. When things are not as they seem or how you would want them to be, I suppose it is natural to visit other pastures (and how the cliches flow at the slightest hint of morbidity!). And so it occurred to me that some three years ago I was living in Southeast Asia (Tainan City, Taiwan) for six months, and I had a view from a 10th storey apartment that looked like this:

It was an odd and solitary six months. But it was time well spent, and I forget, too often, to marvel at how I coped in such a foreign place.

The “nostalgia” bit should perhaps be a reminder that I need not marvel at “coping”. But the truth is that we get so locked into whatever life we’re leading at the moment that anything else seems inconceivable. So I think it is good to stop, now and then, and see yourself as the different person that you were. And remember that life goes on, no matter how different. And, quite frankly, often completely regardless of you and your “crises” of the day.

Obesity? Poverty? HIV? I think not. The biggest disservice that faces us now is self-indulgence.

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Oysters

By E | Posted on: January 18, 2007

Now, I’m not really a fan of oysters. I’ve eaten them a few times, and found them not exactly unpleasant, but neither have they left me dreaming about the next time. Let’s put it this way: it wouldn’t be a calamity if I happened to never eat one again.

Nevertheless, I have been, in the last two day, s(h)ucked in by Mark Kurlansky’s “Molluscular” history of New York. I, for one, had no idea that oysters were one of the Big A’s claims to fame. Consider this: when the city started developing, the estuary of the river Hudson was found to house no less than 350 square miles of oyster beds.

Other interesting facts: one of the oyster’s biggest predators is the starfish. You thought they were just fun things to find with the kiddies on the beach? Think again. These evil stellar organisms travel in armies across ocean beds, and when they find their prey they simply attach themselves to the shells and methodically disintegrate them until they can get to the flesh.

The other devil in oyster-land is the oyster drill, a snail with a ‘long toothy tongue’ that bores down through the shell to suck the oyster out. Sounds like a slow, horrible death.

This doesn’t mean that I’ve suddenly become oyster-soft, or oyster-hungry, but it really is a fascinating book. Kurlansky (who also wrote Salt and Cod) writes well and enticingly, and it is always a pleasure for me to find a piece of history that grabs me (I always hated history in school and never remembered a thing. I blame that on Mr. Malaza).

Here’s a final piece of trivia before I return to the finish the Epilogue: ever wondered where the term Yankee comes from? It originated from the British, who took over from the Dutch (the first European colonisers of New York). The Brits called their predecessors “Jankees”, ‘a sarcastic joining of the name John and the word cheese’.

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Out of necessity

By E | Posted on: January 17, 2007

comes greatness.


Take:
1 part Augusto Herb Liqueur
1/2 part Dry Vermouth
squeeze of lemon
dash of Angostura bitters
a couple of ice cubes
fill up with sparkling water (soda water could do)

and you have a surprisingly delicious and refreshing end to a long summer Wednesday (especially when the kitchen offers no better alternatives).

I think I’ll call it Debored’s Vice.

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Dem belly full

By E | Posted on: January 11, 2007

Highlights of the festive season that was:

A well executed Danish Christmas eve in Woodstock, Cape Town, complete with: three perfectly roasted turkeys, agurkesalat (cucumber salad), rødkål (braised red cabbage), brunkartofler (caramelised potatoes) and ris a la mande (Danish rice pudding with a French name), good cheer and too many gifts. Somewhere on that night I managed to fit in a Woolworths mince pie too.
Beverages: Simsonsig Kaapse Vonkel (that’s Cap Classique to you) and a surprisingly fine Cabernet Sauvignon from Wildekrans.

A Christmas lunch courtesy of the lovely family of Mr. 302. In attendance were more than one published author and a lot of people from BP. I ate corned beef for the first time and enjoyed that, but I enjoyed the gammon smothered in mustard sauce even more. I managed trifle and ice-cream for dessert and wished I had room for the cheesecake that was hauled out when everyone was far too full. I got a pair of tweezers in my cracker.
Beverages: Some rather lovely Chardonnay which I forgot to remember.

Christmas to New Year: more turkey, turkey, turkey, no, not more turkey! Gobble yourself.

A four-man New Year’s eve with a feast for eight: flash fried prawns with green (in truth, yellow) mango salad and dukkah bread; later, lebanese flatbread with diced spiced lamb, hummus, baba ganoush, olives and chillies; later still, a little ice-cream for some.
Beverages: bubbles, obviously.
Highlights: sucking helium out of the balloons to say “Resistentialism is a serious business”, and watching the city from a mountainslope after sunrise.

007: a very civilised vodka tasting with 302, including Stolichnaya Premium, the one with the Bison grass (yum), a French one made of grapes (tres chic) and three or four fine Polish ones. I will have to drink them several times before I remember their names, but I do know how to say Na zdrovia!
302 served a fine meal of rye bread with locks and cream cheese, hot smoked salmon and boerekaas (Dutch/farm cheese), followed by espresso and whisky chocolates. I got to watch BBC’s The Smoking Room for the first time and had a good laugh. I also finally got to hear the Prefab Sprout Albuquerque song, which I haven’t been able to dislodge from my head since.

Can it be true that I am still hungry?

It’s been a well-nourished change of year. And these were just the name days. In the words of Gnarls Barkley, I could go on and on and on. But who cares?

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What do the stars know

By E | Posted on: January 5, 2007

So a recent horoscope told me that money would be thrown at me in the new year. Well, I’m still waiting…

and in the spirit of waiting rooms, here’s a bit of reading to keep us occupied:
1. a nice little whetter of vodka appetites (more on my own recent tastings with 302 to follow shortly)
2. a piece on Roman cookbooks, which interestingly combine Latin with old Danish…

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OK

By E | Posted on: December 30, 2006

Contemplation time is over. The new year looms like a giant Monday.

In less than two months time I’ll be travelling to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a four day conference on popular culture (they say: “if it isn’t popular, it isn’t culture”. Hmm). Got my hotel room booked, got the fancy shoes (to make me look grown-up. If I can walk in them, that is). Got a pretty good idea of what I want to say, but this still needs to be word-processed.

Since I haven’t yet travelled to (fanatically) terrorist-paranoid countries, I thought I should check out the new regulations on what kind of stuff I can pack in my hand luggage. I went to TSA (that’s Transportation Security Administration) and found the following:

“All liquids, gels and aerosols must be in three-ounce or smaller containers. Larger containers that are half-full or toothpaste tubes rolled up are not allowed. Each container must be three ounces or smaller.”

Question: if I buy new toothpaste for the trip and don’t finish it over there, does that mean I can’t bring it home again??

Next bit of interest:
“Items used to augment the body for medical or cosmetic reasons such as mastectomy products, prosthetic breasts, bras or shells containing gels, saline solution, or other liquids” ARE ALLOWED, with NO limitations.

This means Pamela Anderson can bring her boobs and a couple of spares with her when she travels. Lucky her.

I can also bring – onboard, in my handluggage – a corkscrew and a cigar-cutter and knitting needles and a nail file. But no knives!! I may, in addition, bring toy weapons with me to play with during the flight and (this is a relief) I can keep my gel-filled bra on as I pass through the security check. I’ll have to check in my meat cleaver and swords, though, and leave my teargas at home all together.

Good thing that’s all sorted.

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Deck the halls with

By E | Posted on: December 28, 2006

trucks of logging
’tis the season to be blogging

but I be lazy (besides, Bob Marley is the only one who can actually pull off rhymes)

so I’m just gonna relax a bit and watch the sea. Skål.

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