No it's not the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey
I’ll never forget an investigative piece I once saw on TV which suggested that something ridiculous like 45% of olive oil sold in supermarkets was actually made of a combination of paint stripper, engine oil and crushed barbie dolls. Okay not exactly, but the gist was that a certain amount of nefarious Italians and Spaniards were basically spitting in a bottle, labeling it “extra virgin” and sending it off to people like you and me who don’t know any better. Either way, I never forgot that – and it made me super paranoid as to what exactly I was forking my R80-120 over for each time I bought a bottle of the olive grove’s ‘finest’. To the extent that I tracked down an FDA study from some time in the 90s that found that a whopping 4% of olive oils on supermarket shelves were actually pure olive oil, most being cut with sunflower oil.
This is a pity, because olive oil is one of the great gifts bestowed on mankind. At least once a week some plastic-faced CNN reporter is interviewing a 178 year-old Italian nonna, asking “the secret of her longevity”, the answer to which inevitably involves a tablespoon of olive oil every day (and the equally inevitable air of disappointment on the part of the reporter when the answer doesn’t involve bathing in the blood of innocents by the light of a waxing moon, rubbing your face with goat’s testicles or something equally exotic that might get them an award at some point).
All this led to me being incredibly happy when a good winemaker friend (the infinitely gracious Andre Liebenberg of the Romond wine farm in the Cape) sent me a bottle of the new olive oil that he’s started producing. I say I was happy because I know the trees from which this oil comes, I’ve walked amongst them (okay – drunkenly stumbled, but who’s counting?) and so equally I know that it’s not a bottle of tap water mixed with cheap face cream from Diskem.
Quite the opposite.
I have a thing about ingredients, because stupidly simple recipes can be elevated (wank alert) to the sublime purely by using the best components – and I know no better way of honouring a top quality bottle of olive oil (which this is; beautifully fresh and zingy without being overbearing) than by making an enormous bowl of pasta, whipping up a huge batch of pesto and getting some people around on a Sunday afternoon to eat it all.
Which is what I did.
By the way, if you’re interested in getting a bottle of Romond Olive Oil, or indeed any of his array of wines (including a new Rosé which is particularly good) email sales@romond.co.za
Oh! And lest I forget, thank you to the towering Ryan Metcalfe for taking all the pictures.
Walnut pesto with bacon and linguini
Behold my bowl of pasta and tremble before me.
Ingredients (serves 4)
1 small handful of walnuts
1 large bunch of basil
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
olive oil
salt
pepper
a couple of rashers of good streaky bacon
1 small dried chilli, seeds removed and finely chopped
half a cup of pouring cream
a good quantity of grated parmesan (no fucking awful pre-grated stuff!! I’ll find you…)
1 pack of linguini pasta
What to do
As you may have noticed, I’m using walnuts for this pesto. This is mostly because of the fact that I don’t actually like pine nuts that much – I’ve always found them slightly too … champy (chew chew chew bits stuck in teeth chew chew), if that makes sense. And after mucking around with various substitutes I’ve settled on walnuts as being my preferred alternative.
In a dry pan toast the walnuts until they’re starting to go golden brown, and then in a blender or with a pestle and mortar combine the basil, chopped garlic, nuts, a pinch of salt and a generous glug of olive oil and bash/pulse until it’s a smooth green liquid paste. I prefer my pesto to be on the wetter side (adding more olive oil as I go) but feel free to keep it slightly thicker if that’s what you like.
Chop up the bacon and then in the same pan you toasted the nuts, fry it up with the chopped chilli and then at the last moment add the cream and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer so that it doesn’t split.
Throw the linguine to a pot of boiling, salted water and cook until al dente (throw some on the roof – if it sticks, it’s done) – drain and empty into a serving bowl. Then mix in the pesto and make sure the pasta is properly coated, then pour in the bacon/cream/chilli and finally finish it off with the parmesan and a couple of twists of black pepper.
Luckily you can't see the ropes tied to all my friends so that they can't run away...
The theme for this picture seriously needs to be Also Spracht Zarathustra. Look it up.
…and I did it the only way it should be done – by drinking most of a bottle of really cheap red wine first.
On my (ever-growing) shelf of cookbooks, I have the Granddaddy Bible Cookbook Of Them All – the incredibly unassumingly titled The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Georges Auguste Escoffier (sarcasm sarcasm).
It’s fucking huge, it has no pictures and there are something like a bajillion recipes in it. Obviously, with a name like Escoffier, the rules are all French, which means everything comes with a sauce made from cow’s feet that’s been reduced in a goat’s bladder for seven years over a temperature of exactly 72.32°F. Even the salad. As a result I honestly hardly ever look at it because frankly, I’d rather stab myself in the face with a spaniel. And besides, I’m a child of the modern world, to keep me engaged I need a large type-face, graphic design that someone has obviously paid vast sums of money for and massive oversaturated pictures to go with everything.
But the problem is that you can’t escape the French, they’re freaking everywhere – and their techniques have become entrenched. Hollandaise sauces, béchamel, rendered goose fat, reductions of everything – we have the French to blame for all of these things, and learning them is Required. And so when I finally wanted to pop one of my long-standing culinary cherries – I had to turn to bloody annoying Escoffier.
You see, somehow I have managed to never make a soufflé. Mostly because any conversation that involves soufflés inevitably includes how the bastard things never actually work, because they’re either flopping, catching on fire, leaving you for another man or stealing your money at gunpoint. If the collective myth-making of cooks around the world were to believed they’re nigh unto impossible to actually make, and so you wonder why anyone actually bothers to try. Well, I decided that I should add my legend to the collective and give it a bash, which is why I got liquored first, so that the shame of my failure wouldn’t sting quite as sharply.
Except for the fact that they bloody came out perfectly, maybe because of the drunkenness. And possibly because of the same principal that governs why first-time poker players Always. Fucking. Win.
I’m not boasting. I was shocked. And I now also know why everyone continues to try and make them: they’re more delicious than dunking your head in a bucket of …something really delicious that I can’t think of right now.
Savoury Baby Marrow and Cheese Soufflé
Ingredients
olive oil
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
half a brown onion
2 tspn thyme
1 pack of small baby marrows, finely sliced
55g butter
55g plain flour
250ml heated milk
4 eggs separated into 3 yolks and 4 whites
a handful of grated pecorino cheese (but you can actually use cheddar or whatever you have in the fridge really)
black pepper
salt
extra butter, to grease
What to do
Get the oven pre-heated to 180°C. Find a couple of what could be considered a ‘ramekin’, essentially a round, shallow cup of some kind – then grease them up good and proper with butter. Make sure you get it into the bottom and the lip of the cup as well, because that’s usually where the soufflé will stick, which is bad news for everyone
Finely chop the onion and the clove of garlic, slice up the baby marrows and heat some olive oil in a pan, then fry it together with the thyme. Keep the heat at a medium level and once they’ve browned and softened nicely, remove from the stove. Then, using a potato masher – smash it all up into a paste and put it aside.
Melt the butter in a pot, then stir in the flour and then slowly add the milk (hooray, you’ve just made a béchamel – congratulations). Stir vigorously while it bubbles for about 2 minutes or so, then remove from the heat and carry on whisking until it’s smooth and creamy. If it’s too thick, just keep adding milk until you’ve got a yellowish creamy sauce.
Then, toss that in with the mashed baby marrow, along with the cheese and egg yolks. Grind some black pepper over it all, add some salt to taste and gently beat it into a thickish sauce.
At this point you need to find a flat-based and oven-proof dish and fill it about three quarters full with boiled water and keep it at the ready.
Now, this is the crucial bit – everything you do will hinge on this next step, so maybe drink some more quickly. Whisk the egg whites until they’re stiff and properly aerated (it should look like stiff sea-foam), then gently pour it over the sauce you’ve just made, and carefully carefully fold it in.
Once this is done, pour it into your greased ramekins and the put those ramekins into the dish of water, and then put that whole thing into the oven.
Turn on the oven light and keep an eye on the soufflé from about 20 minutes of cooking onwards, because this should mostly be judged by the look. The tops should raise about 2-3cm above the lip of your ramekin and start to turn a lovely golden brown – that’s the signal to get them out of there.
Once they have, remove from the heat (desperately praying that they won’t flop like a miserable poetry-reciting teenager) and serve immediately.
So, I used to do this thing called Foodhall, and it was more fun than having a fish in your pants. Or having no pants at all. There is probably still even a brief description of all the details on the other end of the ‘Foodhall’ link at the top of the main page.
Well, mostly because I’m lame, it sort of fell by the wayside for a bit (the story of which ends with me sitting with R1000’s worth of Norwegian salmon in my fridge and no one to eat it because I was too busy looking at my dear deceased granny in a box – which is actually a lot funnier than it sounds…). However, I’ve made a premature resolution to be less lame, and with that comes this announcement that Foodhall will be returning at the end of November for a brief run up until December, mostly as a practice-run for a fully-fledged comeback in 2010.
Want to know what it’s really about? Watch the video.
I have nothing interesting or funny to say about this photograph. Bugger.
So, I’m still housesitting for my deliriously happy honeymooning friends – and while I was being supremely lazy on their fancy couch, drinking their beer and watching cricket on their criminally enormous flatscreen TV, I had an idea.
Sometimes (I assume) people get ideas in this completely random way – you don’t know it comes from, you don’t know how exactly it arrived in your head – but you’re incredibly glad you had it, because it just goes to show that your brain is still on the job, and not…you know, running an interior-decorating business on the side.
This was one of those moments, which was gratifying. Alas it was about ravioli. Which was not.
Ravioli is a fiendishly labour-intensive business, one of those things I always start off with naïve enthusiasm and then end up wondering what the fuck was I thinking, mostly drunk on the wine that should be gently reducing with some tomato in a heavy-based saucepan and cursing through my tears at whichever sniveling Italian prick first thought that little stuffed pockets of pasta was a good idea. This is a cycle, however which I’m doomed to repeat, because like most difficult things, the end result is worth it no matter how much one likes to whine about it afterwards.
I think, like a lot of slightly more involved foods, pasta is one of those things that a lot of people will try and convince you is a marvelous thing to make at home from scratch – but this is mostly so that they can sell you pasta-makers that you’ll use once and then forget on the top shelf of your store-room, like novelty socks with individualized places for your toes.
But, like a persistent woman with a low-cut neckline, the idea wouldn’t go away.
And so – my mind started to tinker with the notion of ravioli as a base for something rather than as a focus. I prefer my pasta-sauces on the dry side of things rather than swimming in sauce (foodnerdspeak alert, apologies) – it allows the flavour of the pasta itself to also have a chance of playing on the swings like a big boy. So, if you use a simple tomato ravioli as the base of a topping that’s more about ingredients rather than ‘how much cream and cheese can I pack into this bowl’, each bite should release just enough liquid to make it awesome. Well, this was the theory at any rate…
Ravioli with Broccoli, White Wine and Capers
...I'm assuming that a plate of half-eaten pasta can somehow be considered aesthetically pleasing.
Ingredients (serves 4)
Before I get into the rest of this, I wasn’t going to mess about with making my ravioli from scratch as well as a sauce – and so I got decent quality dried tomato-filled ravioli from the Italian supermarket around the corner from my house (it’s in the second story of an office block, hiding behind a dried-up pot plant – it’s the bizarrest thing), but if you want, most delis will also sell freshly made vacuum-packed ravioli that’s usually pretty good, if a bit more expensive.
Half a head of broccoli, broken into florets
2 chicken breasts
a small handful of capers, soaked in water
a medium-sized red onion, finely chopped
2 small brinjals (or Eggplant if you’re American)
4 goodish stalks of rosemary, stripped of leaves and finely chopped
paprika
flour
salt
pepper
olive oil
1 full glass of white wine
What to do
First up, slice up the brinjal into discs and then into strips, put them into a colander, sprinkle with a decent amount of salt and then leave them for about half an hour. A fair amount of juice will hopefully drain away – which is a good thing, because it’s a bitter as a horse-riding aunt.
Slice the chicken breasts into roughish chunks, sprinkle with salt, pepper and a teaspoon of paprika and set that aside as well.
Once the brinjals have been drained of their bitter juices, dry them off with paper towel and then cover them with a decent handful of flour, salt and pepper until they’re nicely coated. Get a good lug of olive oil smoking hot in a pan then add the brinjals and fry until they’re golden brown. Get them out of the pan and onto a plate layered with more paper towel so that the oil can be soaked up.
In the same pan (there should be a bit of olive oil left over) add the onions, rosemary, capers (taken out of their soaking water) and broccoli. Toss it about so that all get to know each other and get coated with the oil and crumbs from the pan. Once everything’s softened up and the onions are starting to brown, add half the white wine and let it reduce until there is almost no liquid left, at which point add the rest of the wine. Once that has also almost boiled away, add the chicken, and once that’s started to cook through add the fried brinjals.
Turn the heat down and let it all simmer gently for about 15 minutes.
Bring a pot of salted water to the boil, add the ravioli and cook it until done (usually about 20 minutes or so, but taste one when you think it’s done – if it’s nice and al dente (wanky-speak for just done) you’re golden), drain most of the liquid, but keep half a cup of it around, adding a bit of it to the simmering broccoli/chicken/brinjal extravaganza, and then give it a good stir.
Add the ravioli to the sauce, and serve with a bit of grated pecorino. Yee. Ha.
Trying to find a pot. Harder than it looks.
Found the pot. Obvs.
Cooking in another man’s kitchen is a lot like trying to wear his stokies on your head. Nothing fits the way it should, and in the end everything just smells a bit too much like other people’s feet.
I’ve been housesitting a newly-married couple’s place for about two weeks now while they’re on honeymoon (Mauritius, in case you were wondering…) and so of course this means I’ve had an entirely new environment in which to burn myself on a pot I’ve left on the stove for too long.
Now I have some incredibly nosey habits when it comes to temporarily occupying someone else’s house. For example, I will judge you on the contents of your bookshelf (one cock-punch for every book by Kathy Lette), I will judge you on the DVDs you have chosen to pay money for (one trip to the evil dentist for every Saw sequel), and I will also judge you on the content of your kitchen cupboard. According to this scorecard my honeymooning friend totally killed the first two categories, but was then sadly let down by cupboards that were almost entirely filled with bottles of Wimpy mustard and seven tubs of smooth peanut butter that wasn’t Black Cat. Two cock-punches and a root canal for him then.
I don't understand the tomato-sauce-to-mustard ratio here...
Cooking in a new environment is always simultaneously a totally fun thing and also the biggest pain in the ass ever. There’s usually only one knife for everything and it’s never as sharp as you’d like it. The oven requires you to sacrifice a virgin just to get the door open (this particular oven is a fancy-looking industrial beast with a polished metal door, the first time I opened it a piece of the handle literally pinged off it and across the room – wtf?), and there’s always some ridiculous situation where they have seven cheesegraters but no pot to boil pasta.
Anyway – I haven’t cooked properly in a while and for some reason I’d been obsessing about cauliflower cheese and so this seemed like as good a time as any.
Now firstly, the right thing to think at this point is in fact: what man in his right mind thinks about cauliflower cheese when there’s things like Currie Cup finals, Guitar Hero and naked girls with which to occupy his mind. I can’t offer any explanation other than… um, shurrup go bother someone else, cauliflower makes me happy dammit.
I have to say that I might have started this whole process thinking about alternate takes on cauliflower cheese, but ended up as something quite different, as is often the case. The guy who invented the fax machine originally started by trying to develop a waistcoat that also played vinyl.
Also, I totally didn’t have my camera with me at the time and so a Samsung cellphone had to come to the rescue.
It was like it was calling out. Uuuuuse me, uuuuuuuse me.
Ingredients: (serves 4)
1 head of cauliflower, broken into florets
1 red onion, chopped
3 sprigs of rosemary stripped of leaves and then finely chopped
a handful of strong mushrooms, either Shitake or Porcini, chopped
half a chorizo sausage sliced into rounds
6 new potatoes
2 cans of whole peeled tomatoes
1 handful of grated mature cheddar cheese
salt
pepper
Mr Spice Portuguese Chicken Spice (hey – I found it the cupboard and was intrigued….what can I say?)
What to do
Fill a medium sized pot with water, add a general sprinkle of salt and bring it to the boil, then add the potatoes.
In the mean time, chop up the onions, rosemary, mushroom and chorizo and then break the cauliflower into florets.
Heat some olive oil in a pan, and add all the ingredients with a generous seasoning of salt and pepper and Mr Spice Portuguese Chicken Spice (or nearest crappy alternative). Once everything has started to brown, turn the heat down and go and play Guitar Hero for as long as it takes to not get booed off stage during Muse’s Knights of Cydonia.
You can't tell, but this solo was EPIC.
Drain the potatoes and cut them roughly into halves and then add them and the two tins of peeled tomato to the pan, put the lid on and let things simmer gently for about 30 minutes.
Spoon portions into a bowl and grate some strong (mature) cheddar cheese over it and serve.
It seems that Wimpy tomato sauce is good for something after all...
Just because it's thick doesn't make it "Deep Dish"...
So, in case you haven’t noticed – I have been away.
Yes, without sounding similar to something you’d find on the side of a cereal box, I have been doing exciting and wondrous things that you probably wouldn’t believe if I told you.
Hint: It may or may not involve Handel’s Messiah sung entirely by a collection of women, all of whom missed out on the chorus-line for Cats.
A funny thing happens when you’ve been away from something for a while – even if it’s something you reckon you’re pretty good at: you lose your mojo. Or at least, you think you do. And then suddenly you’re paranoid you can’t do it anymore – that the knack has left you for lack of repetition, which would go some lengths to explaining my sex life in 2007.
The long and the short of it is that the intrusion of metallic birds on a kind of stick thing, slow-motion babies, some people getting married and a kid with a golf-club has meant that I haven’t chopped, diced, burned, or roasted a single thing in my kitchen for over three weeks now. Not even to peel a banana or open a packet of Big Korn Bites.
I have however been eating enough fast-food to cause kidney problems in a weekend conference of CTM Sales Executives, the highlights of which have included: never-before-tried Chicken Licken slyders (which make me feel dirty but at the same time gave me the impression I’d just ascended to a small piece of heaven and weirdly enough it looks like a mini-burger), Kuai wraps, Roadhouse BBQ burgers, KFC hotwings (before which I don’t think I’d ever truly understood the meaning of the phrase ‘ring sting’, and now that I do I’m not sure I’m a better man for it…), Cheese Chip ‘n Dip, hotdogs bought from a very suspicious man at the cricket, deep dish pizza from Romans (which should actually be re-named “pizza ingredients on bread”), Wimpy combos, a Cornish Pastie from the Sasol Garage and a pink coconut thing which I don’t want to talk about.
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. And possibly will again....a lot.
Incidentally I’m thinking of pitching a show called “Jono Eats the Whole World” and seeing how it flies.
So, if change is as good as a holiday, then I’ve just done the culinary equivalent of a dirty German sex-vacation in Mexico.
Now that I’ve come out the other end of this pornographic excess, this new week is going to be dedicated to erasing the memory of Things I’ve Put In My Mouth That Make Me Ashamed and losing the 3 kgs I’ve put on while doing it. Hopefully some of this will stack up in my karmic favour and I wont have to spend the afterlife shaving Julius Malema’s back.
When It All Goes Wrong – Update. REVENGE! Or: When Life Gives You Lemons, throw them at someone who needs lemons.
I will not be defeated by a Hake fillet, this is not a world I want to live in. So, in a follow-on to the Weekend Fish Disaster (When It All Goes Wrong), I rolled up my sleeves, opened the fridge and rested my steely gaze on the massive lump of Hake (still in it’s wrapping – So. Unbelievably. Arrogant.) that was the only remnant of my lunch-preparation folly.
That lump of fish was an insouciant bastard, staring at me with the condescending quality of a twelve year-old that’s just got an iPod and thinks that entitles him to respond every single question with “Who gives a fuck what you think, old man? I have The Zutons on repeat.”
And so I decided right there that I was going to make sure I cooked the damn thing, and not only that – I was determined to enjoy every last bite of whatever I ended up making, even if it killed me.
This was personal.
It seemed that what the moment called for was simplicity – and so Fish & Chips it was going to be, because not even I can fuck that up.
Well…. I mean I can, but I was determined not to.
I made a home-made tomato relish, well...because I'm wanky that way.
Ingredients
For the Batter:
Milk
Flour
1 egg
salt
pepper
juice of one lemon
a splash of white wine
What to do
Firstly, sprinkle some salt and pepper on both sides of the fish and set it aside. Then, in a bowl combine the egg, half a cup of flour, half a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and a few twists of black pepper and whisk it into a smooth batter. If it’s a little thick or of course a little too liquid, just adjust it by adding a bit more flour or milk as necessary. Squeeze in the lemon juice and the splash of wine, whisk it in and then you’re ready to go.
Add some oil to a pan, get it hot, and using a fork, dip the fish in the batter until it’s good and coated, then add to the pan – frying on both sides until golden brown. Serve with chips, tomato sauce and nasty white vinegar and RELISH IN YOUR REVENGE ON THE FISH THAT TRIED TO RUIN YOUR LIFE.
Don't be fooled...evil lurks on that plate.
I’m more afraid to skydive than I am to purposefully implant spider-larvae in my face. Seriously. The prospect of throwing myself out of a plane at 30 000ft seems to rank up there with the great human follies like the Bedazzler, SABC International and sending Lance Bass to the Moon (actually scratch that, Lance Bass is probably more useful on the moon than he is here…). And there’s a very simple reason for this fear: I don’t trust human beings. We’re monumentally crap at a lot of things, and even the stuff we are sort of good at gets a little iffy from time to time, and so there’s no freakin’ way I’m going to put my life in the hands of a parachute that was packed by a guy who may or may not have been simultaneously watching a very exciting Currie Cup final and not really paying attention to how many times the rabbit goes round the tree before disappearing down the hole.
And so, it’s no surprise that despite the enormous amount of time I spend cooking, thinking about cooking and practicing the things that are needed to become a decent cook, I fuck things up in the kitchen all the time. And usually in front of a large audience of people who’ve come to dinner hoping to be fed rather than have hazardous biowaste lobbed at them on a plate. And this weekend was one of those occasions. What was meant to be a lovely fish poached in a tomato broth with roasted butternut and new potatoes, ended up being something that probably wouldn’t have been chosen by 9 out of 10 cats. The thing is that at the time, it was almost impossible to tell where things started to go wrong. But then obviously when I was sobbing amongst the wreckage of what should have been lunch, it all became glaringly obvious.
1) The fish wasn’t right: huge hunks of Hake that were a lot more frozen than I originally thought. I wanted some lovely fresh-cut fish fillets, but took a shortcut because I didn’t want to drive to a proper fishmonger.
2) The basting sauce for the butternut was horrifically overpowering rather than distinctive and sharp (always too much with the cinnamon – it’s like I’ve got some genetic disorder that makes me sprinkle the stuff like I’m Santa distributing toys to all the kids on the Nice list).
3) The poaching liquid looked fucking fantastic, which means I ended up not tasting or seasoning it properly – which is always the biggest fuckup ever. Because if I had, I would have realized that it tasted like something that had been marinating in my shoe for a day or two instead of something I actually wanted to serve to real live people that I’d like to keep in the ‘breathing’ column.
4) I used the excess basting liquid from the butternut to coat the roast potatoes, which meant that everything just ended up tasting the same flavour of ‘not nice’.
I got suckered by all the bubbling and the simmering and whatnot...
The problem with these sorts of things is that a lot of the time nothing really looks wrong: it all seems to be getting along just fine. And that’s usually where all the problems start. It might seem like a horrifically obvious thing to say, but a lot of the time, we (by this I mean ‘I’) don’t taste things enough while they’re being cooked (I make this mistake all the fucking time). The more you taste as it’s going along, the more you can adjust the flavours before it’s too late. It’s all very well to say that you’re doing it by ‘feel’ and whatever, but then taste it and then you’ll know for sure if what you’re doing is actually nice. I’ve always said that a really good sign is when whoever’s cooking can’t actually eat anything of what he or she has made once it’s served, because they’ve stuffed themselves tasting while they were cooking. The other thing is taking shortcuts. A shortcut will always taste like a shortcut. And that comes down to things like making sure that meat has been properly defrosted before you use it (rather than “Oh the last bit will thaw out in the pan” – and then it’s a complete mystery as to why the chicken has more bounce than a badly-supported boob and the mince tastes of grey). Also, don’t rush. Cook it for as long as it supposed to be cooked: cut a slice of that potato, squash or whatever vegetable you’re serving – if it’s glassy, put it back in the oven. Trust me people would rather wait a few extra minutes for something that’s actually edible than eat now and lose the will to live.
I’m not one for Morals At The End Of The Story (unless it’s ‘always accept the free marijuana’), but I guess this may call for something that vaguely feels like one, and so here it is: Kitchen fuck-ups are inevitable, so accept them when they happen. Just try and make sure that the same one never happens twice.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ll be at the top of the tallest mountain dispensing iffy homilies to Greek mythological figures.
Date and Bacon pretend tagine.
A leaning tower of coucous.
I love tagines. A lot. Which is why I find the disappointment I experience from eating bad ones (I don’t do this on purpose, it just happens) so crushingly painful. It’s kinda like being kicked in the nuts by a slutty Finnish gothic pixie right after she’s told you that the sex you’re about to have with her is going to require half a pound of melted chocolate, a splash pool, special lubricant made from the skin of alpine rabbits and a seven day recovery period: the promise of pleasures to come is enough to moisten your pants-region right then and there, and then comes the severe pain, the inability to have children and the general air of regret that will last for at least the rest of the weekend.
The problem with getting a really good tagine is that you have to go to Morocco to get it. And Morocco is far. Unless of course you live in Morocco. In which case you probably hate stewed lamb and are just desperate for a decent cheeseburger.
So, the other night I had some leftover couscous that I wanted to use up and so started fooling around with a couple of things and this is what came out. Now, before you start jumping up and down with your hand up saying ‘me sir, me sir’, this is nothing close to a real tagine which is a rich, beautiful stew slowly cooked in clay pots buried in ashes, usually filled to the brim with lamb and preserved lemons and shaven bits of infidels – but there was just something in the spirit of these flavours that made me make the comparison.
Ingredients (serves 4)
1 pack of streaky bacon
a handful of dates – depitted.
A bunch of fresh coriander
2 large cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 medium white onion, also peeled and chopped
5 tomatoes
1 tbsp brown sugar
a handful of baby marrows
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 dried chilli
a handful of sliced raw almonds
grated parmesan
half a glass of dry white wine
olive oil
salt
black pepper
...for some reason I want to sing "Strangers in the Night" when I see this.
What to do
Wrap each rasher of bacon around a date, and then using a toothpick (I break them in half so they aren’t so long and I don’t have to use quite so many) fix it in place. Chop up a smallish bunch of the fresh coriander leaves and stalks, and have it ready along with the garlic and onions.
Heat some olive oil in a pan, add the onions and garlic and sweat them for about 2 to 3 minutes. Just when they’ve started to crisp at the edges, add the bacon-wrapped dates and the chopped coriander, turn up the heat and fry until the bacon is golden, then set aside. Once it’s cooled a bit, don’t forget to remove the toothpicks – the bacon-rolled dates should hold their shape very well once cooked.
Boil some water with a generous pinch of salt in a pot, then add the tomatoes. After about 3 minutes or so of boiling, the skin should start to split, which is the signal to get them out of there. After they’ve cooled, use your fingers to remove the skin (it’ll come off really easily), then chop them up roughly, sprinkle with salt, fresh ground black pepper and the tablespoon of sugar and set aside.
Heat up a pot, add the almonds and toast them, shaking them about to make sure they’re evenly done, then set aside.
In the meantime chop up the baby marrows (however you like to do them – I just slice them into thickish coins), de-seed and finely chop the dried chilli, soak the tablespoon of tomato paste in about 400 mls of just-boiled water and pre-heat your oven to about 160°C. Chop up the rest of the coriander.
Then, in a fairly spacious casserole dish, empty the bacon-dates, onion and garlic from the pan onto the bottom. Cover with the chopped tomatoes and baby marrow, sprinkle over the toasted almonds, most of the rest of chopped coriander (keep some to finish) and the chopped chilli. Then pour in the tomato juice made from the soaked paste and the white wine. Season with salt and pepper, put on the lid and the bake in the oven for about 40 minutes. Then take it out, sprinkle generously with parmesan and bake for another 5 or so minutes without the lid.
Serve with couscous.
Is it possible to forget the horrors of yesterday? No, not unless you cut off the front bit of your brain. Okay – I’ll just drink this coffee instead.
Yeah, brown on brown on other brown isn't exactly the most attractive colour-scheme.
I have a big expensive coffee-making machine. I didn’t buy it – my mother brought it for me as a wedding present from Sweden, where the national pastime is having a sense of humour that no-one understands (I mean how funny can a joke about austere-yet-functional interior design actually be?), eating bags and bags of really cheep sweets shaped like earrings and trying to figure out if there’s a way to fit even more brushed steel and retro dials that don’t really do anything onto a coffee machine.
For the last two years it’s mainly just sat on my kitchen counter where it was used as a thing to hold down hysterical letters from Woolworths asking if I want a Special Credit Card (in exchange for which they won’t come to my house and murder me with hammers). My excuse for not using it was that I didn’t have a two-prong adaptor or an extension chord long enough to actually plug it in, obviously the idea of going and buying one was far too great a mental leap. Until of course I just moved it across the room, closer to the two-prong plug in the wall that was kindly provided by the people who built my flat in the early 60s. Thus far I’ve mostly just been making mediocre cappuccinos with the wrong kind of milk (which seems to be what happens no matter how big or expensive or Swedish your home coffee maker might be), until this morning – when a combination of an apocalyptically bad meeting the previous day and massive consumption of red wine as a result of that bad meeting combined in a chaotic mess of ‘please could everything stop hurting me’.
I suddenly really needed some iced coffee, and raiding my cupboards and a bit of improv turned out this little gem of a recipe which works like a morning-rescuing charm.
Iced Coffee
Ingredients (for 2)
2 shots of Espresso
8 ice cubes
1 tbsp Condensed Milk
What to do
While the espresso is gurgling and dripping out the machine, into a blender or plastic jug – empty the 8 blocks of ice and the tablespoon of condensed milk. When the espresso is done, add it to the ice and milk, and then blend until it’s smooth and creamy.
Pour it into a glass.
Yeah, not exactly a jus of reduced Lark’s beaks in a creme Rapponaiseblondepriment, but still…
Needless to say I’m not the hugest fan of the ridiculous Freezofrappelattesmoothaccino trend that seems to be the sole fault of Lindsay Lohan (I seriously hope there was a vast wad of back-end endorsement cash attached to the fact that every. single. photograph. she was ever in for a while had her clutching some sort of ice-blended coffee drink – wtf?), but as a summer morning-beverage, this is definitely a winner.
Just in case you didn't know what a half-drunk glass of iced coffee looks like.
