SIGN WITH AN E

So I’ve just experienced my first Thanksgiving. Admittedly an untraditional one, as there was no turkey bird on the table. But we did feast on these two headless chickens after they perched on soda cans filled with beer (and other secret ingredients) for a good couple of hours on the barbie/bbq/braai (during which time they were basted liberally with porter/stout for that damn fine golden finish).

The birds were very good, and we enjoyed some fine wine with the meal. Less good was the broccoli casserole which was also on the table, and which I believe was my first taste of a truly American recipe – the kind that involves combining three or four ingredients out of cans (Google apple pie and at least one with give you this list of ingredients: one unbaked pie shell, one can of apple pie filling. You know the ones). This dish involved broccoli, mushy rice, two tins of mushroom soup, a box of Velveeta (what IS that stuff anyway?) and a box of Ritz crackers (to be crushed). Mix, mash, mush, bake in oven. Stodge. I guess we were the odd ones out, because 5/7 of the table company seemed to love it, and it was even hauled out and re-heated out the next day with the epithet “excellent.”

But each to their own. Whatever. It’s just a casserole.

Much freakier altogether was sitting at a table with a bunch of people who could fall under the category “family” or “friends” (used here very expansively) with fewer than seven degrees of separation – just a “step-” here, and an “-in-law” there. Yes, we dined with rednecks (used here with all respect: Leroy did grow up on a cattle farm, and probably had a sunburnt neck during summer too). And a TSA officer (in uniform) with a military wife.

Needless to say my joke about how annoying it is to have to take off shoes and belt when travelling wasn’t well received in that company. After that I decided to keep quiet, which was the best tactic anyhow, because these (scarily authentic) Americans SHOUT. They shouted about football. They shouted about how small the pepper mill was. They shouted about a whole lot of other stuff which I hardly understood a word of.

And then it occurred to me, sitting next to the Philosophe and his father and brother on our quiet side of the table, that this wasn’t like Reality TV. It was even worse, like being inside the television set by some giant geographical accident. This was Very High Definition Television, which is about as much fun as discovering that the Jaws movie you’re watching isn’t just 3D, but that you’re in the water, and a very real live shark is about to take a big chunk out of your person. Sit still and be quiet, and if you’re lucky, it’ll all soon be over.

Yes, I even begin to see the value in user guides:

So, I ate, I drank, I got scared. Perhaps an authentic Thanksgiving after all?

There is a very particular kind of pleasure attached to arriving at a destination, particularly after sitting on your arse for thirty hours to get there. Imagine, then, that the destination is Las Vegas, and that the pleasure of being able to walk again is complemented by an arrival hall that makes no mistake about where you are:

(Yes, for those who can’t wait for the strip, those are slots)

and

Double bonus: our luggage arrived in the two pieces that we sent, so we could soon get on with getting to THE hotel (emphasis in the original),

where we were happily upgraded to a bigger, better room. But here our luck stopped temporarily, because the bigger, better room wasn’t ready yet, so we were forced to spend three hours in the casino in our 30-hour outfits (including face, hair and addled brains): not a good state to be surrounded by that much bling.

But, resourceful people that we are, we accepted our new hostage situation with grace, and when we finally got the bigger, better room, the shower that awaited made it all worthwhile. How sweet the combination of hot water, soap, fluffy gowns and clean clothes in a bigger, better room in Vegas after now nearly 40 hours with too little sleep.

Of course we should have crawled straight into bed, which is the only thing the clean re-humanised body really craves. But Vegas is the city that never sleeps. And besides, it was only 4pm local time. So after an energising concoction of vodka and taurine, we hit the streets for a brisk 45 min walk (!!) to dinner at Mario Batali’s Enoteca.

The Venetian (like much of Vegas) is famed for its superior fakeness – this time fake Venice, of course, with canals and gondolas and a sun which really never sets.

(That’s not the real sky. And the water in the canals looks clean enough to swim in. That’s fake Venice for you).

Two of our party of seven were late, so due to a ridiculous policy of not seating an incomplete party, we gave Enoteca THE finger (emphasis in the original), and relocated to Batali’s other eatery in the same establishment:

It was a good evening. The fake Batali in the kitchen obviously knew his or her stuff, so we were rewarded with fine food and wine (Batali’s rabbit may even be as good as my own). Some time later we even found our way into a bigger, better bed and slept undisturbed by babies and swollen ankles and bad movies on little screens.

Up at 6am, I think the Rousseaus are back in action. Vegas, baby: beware.

I’ve just returned from a few days in the horrible, big city (not soap opera) they call Egoli. Yes, Johannesburg has “vibe”. It’s got “buzz”. And if legend is anything to go by, it’s full of people who are much friendly than in Cape Town (we’re all inglorious basterds here). But it’s also a vast, sprawling, mass of ugliness and traffic and tension and really bad malls.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a lovely time. I got to hang out with my mother, and we stayed with a couple who we see too rarely, but with whom my family shares the kind of history that makes arriving at their house feel like coming to some kind of home. Their kitchen table stands where it has for my entire working memory (that’s something in the region of a quarter of a century), and it’s the best kind of kitchen table, where everything happens. It’s where you sit at the end of the day for a cup of coffee and feel the day morph into evening, and coffee into wine as someone gets busy at a nearby chopping board for dinner. It’s where you have morning coffee and a slice of toast before everyone goes their separate way. It’s where you park in the middle of the afternoon with a magazine and a slice of carrot cake.

For our final night my mother and I wanted to provide for a change. So we came back from afternoon mall expeditions armed with wine, snacks and a dinner plan. Snacks were simple: chips and a dip, a bit of biltong. That went well enough, until Monday’s snack of some avo-and-salmon terrine + crackers were added to the table. Then we were joined by a film maker who spends half his time in France, and once we got a bit of chardonnay into his veins, the talk turned to the foie gras he had recently brought to the very same table, and we all sang the virtues of having travelling friends who bring us exotic and delicious, and sometimes very strange, table delights. That led to the pulling out of the wasabi peanuts (which I had brought for my mother from Cape Town), and they were tasted with due caution by the film maker, and enjoyed with abandon by the rest of us.

It soon emerged that he still had a tin of foie gras mousse in his room, which he proceeded to fetch. Now, I have never eaten foie gras, partly because of my circumstance (why would I have eaten it? I grew up in Swaziland and live in South Africa), and partly because it’s never really interested me much. I anticipate something very creamy, rich, and slightly bilious because it will turn out that it’s not ice cream, and in fact doesn’t taste of much at all, but just coats your mouth in a layer of something you wish wasn’t there.

As soon as the can was opened I knew I was right. As the rest of the table salivated and drooled with their crackers at the ready, I tried to ignore my angst about having to get excited about this stuff, but I got my cracker and followed the pack. I wouldn’t say it’s nasty. But it’s not very nice. And the tin gives off the same smell you get when you open a tin of dogfood.

There. It may just have been mousse, and therefore not the “real thing”, but I had my first taste of foie gras and it was not very nice. And I don’t believe it ever will be, just as I don’t think I will ever develop a love for oysters. And while I did hate aubergines and celery as a child, and now love them after having “developed” a taste for them, oysters and foie gras are not the same because they are some of the few things in the gastronomic world which have this strange status as fetish. Anyone who loves food must love them for the simple reason that they are “delicacies”, which they are because they are hard to come by, expensive, produced by dubious methods, on the verge of extinction, etc (any or all of the above).

Well gold and diamonds are hard to come by and expensive too, but I don’t like them either. In fact I can’t think of anything worse than being given a diamond encrusted gold ring. I would pawn it instantly, and spend the money on scooters for the Philosophe and I to navigate our inglorious basterd city during the World Cup, and with the last R20 I would buy some chicken livers from Pick & Pay and make my mother’s delicious chunky, well-done (indeed crusty!) chicken liver pate.

(Anyone with diamond-encrusted gold rings you’re looking to get rid of, feel free to send them here, under my name.)

When I have the time and inclination (to waste time), I quite enjoy meandering through supermarket aisles – that’s typically also when I go in just to pick up some milk and apples, and come out with three big bags of stuff I didn’t know we “needed.” So I also sometimes get excited by the prospect of a new supermarket to explore, especially when I’ve heard rumours that it’s “amazing”, like some have said of the new SUPER Spar in the uber-chic new extension to the Cape Quarter.

It very soon became apparent to me that there is nothing amazing about this Spar. It is just like all the other Spars, just bigger, and because it is brand new, bordering on mind-numbing inefficiency. Some memorable moments:

1. Waiting 15 minutes for three people – none of whom looked at or spoke to me – to figure out how to weigh and label the portion of chicken curry I wanted (that was BEFORE realising that there were no lids to hand to close the container).

2. Checkout woman putting a piece of on the scale and asking me if that “is garlic, right?”

3. Same checkout woman scanning beetroot sprouts and being confronted with the message that ITEM NOT FOUND on her machine, which she took to mean that “something” had gotten into the (already full) bag without having been scanned. We then had to unload all the scanned items to check that they had in fact been scanned before she cottoned onto the fact that ITEM NOT FOUND means that she had to manually input a barcode for the very last item to pass the scanner, ie. the beetroot sprouts.

4. During the re-checking procedure watching the same checkout woman unable to identify what the bill listed as “mint”. At the time, she happened to have her hand on a packet of

.

Restaurant reviewers often have a healthy policy of not visiting a new establishment in the first month or so of its opening, in order to give them a chance to iron out the kinks. I think this principle might be usefully applied to supermarkets too, but I can’t help wondering: if you are not ready to open (ie. if you haven’t made sure that all the machines are functioning and competent, including the human ones at checkout counters), then WHY OPEN?

I’ll be giving that “Super” Spar a wide berth from now on, and given my experience with morons driving Mercedes Benzes (ie. Kompressor Tossers) while talking on their cellphones on my way home, I think it best to give the whole outside world a big fat miss for the rest of today.