SIGN WITH AN E

you obviously slice them thinly before caramelising in butter, maple syrup and chilli flakes:

Then chop them finely (including as much lemony goo as possible from the pan), and add them to a salad:

(This is particularly good with spicy fishcakes).

When life gives you ginger, on the other hand, I suggest you send it through the food processor a few times, mix with a bit of water, and make ginger ice cubes. That way your drinks get more, rather than less, interesting as the ice melts.

And if life should finally give you a craving for a really good brownie that does NOT involve beating eggs and sugar forever, or melting butter and/or chocolate, or any of the things that add a bit of effort to the process, try these Jamaican coffee numbers. No, they don’t contain anything illegal, and no, it doesn’t have to be Jamaican coffee, as per recipe. I used Italian dark roast, and here’s the newsflash: I used olive oil instead of butter (I wasn’t trying to be contrary. We just didn’t have butter). A little research tells me that substitution should be 75%, ie. 3/4 cup oil for 1 cup of butter. And since nothing has to melt, you just bung it all in a bowl, mix it with your electric helper, bake, cool, and later slather with a “ganache” of chocolate, coffee, (rum) and crystallised ginger. Hot damn these were good.

Also very good is this recipe for lamb braised in milk with fennel. I couldn’t find fennel, so let dill and a bit of aniseed stand in, which they did with aplomb. Who woulda thunk it. Life isn’t always a beech.

A brand new British website, Goodtoknow, has just published the secrets of sex positions for your fat days!

Where, oh where, would we be without the interweb?

So Christmas dinner was delightfully simple this year – bit of gammon, cucumber salad, sweet and tangy mustard, followed by Lindt’s new Tiramisu chocolate (which tastes suspiciously of tiramisu).

Also, the whole thing didn’t take much longer than for us to pop a bottle of bubbles and empty its contents. (As far as I’m concerned, Christmas is over when you hit the sack on the 24th, but that’s not a “cut and dried” case, I gather).

All of which meant that we woke up well rested and neither over- or under-fed on the morning of the 25th. And with no leftover (or from scratch) lunches to fear, we headed off to Canal Walk. This would have been brave on any other holiday, given its reputation for being the biggest shopping mall south of the Sahara, and its inevitable swarms of silly shoppers (croutons, as the Philosophe affectionately calls them). But on Christmas Day, this place is DEAD. So dead, in fact, that we were lucky to find an open place for us to have breakfast and exhibit some (post-)Christmas cheer. The Cattle Baron it was.

(Here we are exhibiting (post-)Christmas cheer)

After that we subjected ourselves to three hours of wearing silly glasses for the not-unejoyable thrill of watching weird creatures from Avatar try to leap out of the screen at us. The story was Copenhagen-flavoured mega-cheese (for a useful plot summary, go here), but the pterodactyls were cool.

Now if you like cheese, I recommend you watch Invictus. It tells, as its website flogs it, ‘the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) joined forces with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help unite their country.’  Yes. Where would we be without the rrrugby. Whatever. Matt Damon does a fair accent, and so does Morgan – when he doesn’t forget to – but beyond that, this is not just cheese. It’s fondue. Be advised.

I think he would look something like Michael Jackson in This Is It. We finally watched this fascinating and bizarre film, and when I wasn’t happily grooving along to the beat (I loved this man as a teenager, and still think Billie Jean is one of the best songs EVAH), I was struck by how slimy it was for this 50 yr old man to be pretending to be Michael Jackson. The Philosophe’s description of him was, aptly, alien.

This was the only picture I could find (=poach) of this jacket he wears quite often. Unfortunately it doesn’t do justice to how truly weird it makes him look. But I guess we all knew that about him already. And also that he did have some serious groove.

(Un)relatedly, the Sunday Times today published a picture of Queen Elizabeth getting onto a train. The caption reads: “Disguised as a little old lady, Queen Elizabeth II boards a passenger train at King’s Cross Station in London from where she travelled to Norfolk for Christmas.” Disguised indeed. (See for yourself).

Well, we all like pretending, I suppose. Just a few nights ago we enjoyed an afternoon of creating, and then an evening of eating, smushi. (Danish open-faced sandwiches pretending to be sushi. Obviously).

On the left, rye bread with herring and quail egg (plus piece of Katjes herring liquorice), a little salmon rose with caviar, and the highlight: shrimp cocktail (the crisp is the clue).

Top left, quail confit (bound with some delicious hoisin sauce) with a litte egg and a little lollipop drumstick, starry bread with salami, remoulade and crispy onions, choux bun “hotdog” with chipolatas and most of “det hele“, and finally pariserbøf (genius really: a burger pattie fried with a slice of bread) – the radish slice is a good indication of the preparation implications of this stuff. An hour in the kitchen, a minute on the lips (as they say).

There was a cheese plate too, and a dessert plate, each of which was  delicious – as was the copious good wine, which made for copious merriment. In fact I’d say we were all as full and happy as this lump of marzipan pretending to be a pig.

(The pig was the prize for finding a whole almond in a spoonful of Danish rice pudding, so it is no longer in my care. I do not know if it still exists in its present form. But I can tell you that it had a good life, and produced very little methane.)

The grass was this green in Maryland two weeks ago when we were there. And it’s taken me almost that long to shake the grass-is-greener-over-there feeling that I often get when I return from long, cool trips.

Don’t get me wrong – I was glad to be home the moment we set foot in the door. I’m talking about that (mostly pleasant) travelling hangover that hits you when you regale friends with your adventures, especially in that “hmm” (“pensive”) moment after everyone has finished laughing about the absurdity of pretending to be from Djibou or about scary dinners. “Hmm,” you chuckle wisely, “those people are just weird.” And yet you wish you were still there.

I’m over that now. (I also  think we’ve run out of friends to bore with our Djibouti stories). Cape Town summer is upon us, and when it’s not horrible, it’s very nice (Doctor’s logic). I’ve even gotten over regretting not getting to Plato’s Palate in Bethesda – which I wouldn’t have been able to even if we’d tried, as it’s apparently closed. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about an ouzo burger since the Philosophe told me he once ate one there. (Meat that tastes like liqourice? My inner Viking was aroused).

Well, you don’t have to be in Vegas or Maryland to make fantasies come true. We had ouzo burgers for dinner last night. Armed only with my imagination, a little common sense, and the dregs of a ten-year old bottle of ouzo, I took on the curious task of reconstructing a taste I’d never experienced.

This made sense: Meat + generous slosh of ouzo + slosh of Worcestershire sauce + lots of garlic and pepper + less oreganum and hot English mustard.

Wisely (according to some, anyway – see below) salting the patties only before cooking, we fried those babies up and topped them with slices of Brie, crispy bacon and caramelized onions. I don’t know if they would live up to Plato’s Palate, but I do know they were fine, and it is a matter of a short time only before I start introducing the weird and wonderful contents of our liquor cabinet to much more meat. (It’s genius really, like Bloody Marys: food and drink in one).

This photograph is not mine, but comes from the always-entertaining A Hamburger Today, where KenjiGoodEater has yet again gone to some lengths to figure out what works (check out his post on the Blumenburger). His latest topic is salting – before, during, or after? – and he came up with these two pieces of evidence as to what happens when you salt the meat before grinding (right), and just before cooking.

I in fact did add a little salt just before I formed the patties, and some more in the pan. I also cooked the burgers well-done (as I do), but they were totally juicy, and if I do say so myself (it’s my blog), f**king delicious. The powers of alcohol!

And maybe some other random factors. Like the right appetite, the constant attentions of Mogwai (the cat), and the solid conviction, as I sat down and tucked into my ouzo burger, that there was no place in the world I would rather be. Yes, the grass is pretty darn green in Cape Town too.