Because I’m a disgusting coward (I was like 12, okay? Even if I had gone, I wouldn’t have known what the hell to do to have a good time anyway, maybe listen to some Roxette albums? I don’t know…) I didn’t want to go, fearing maybe that it was a trap and that someone was going to try and pull my pants down. Anyway, a friend of mine who had a bicycle said he’d go and check it out, because then at least he’d have the means for a quick getaway if ‘the good time’ was a setup.

After being gone for about an hour, he eventually reported back that he’d snuck up to the hockey fields and seen some dark-haired girl hanging around looking disappointed. To this day I have this faint suspicions that he was either fibbing, or that there really was a ‘good time’ involved, but he’d had it instead of me. The little shit.

So naturally – when I do get invited to things these days, and the invitations are actually printed on paper and the word ‘mystery’ is included and there’s a specific dress-code, my suspicions become immediately awakened. Although, to be fair, it was highly unlikely that the editors of House and Leisure were going to get me all dressed up and to a secret location in Braamfontein just so that they could pull my pants down and have older boys point, laugh and take photographs.

Quite the opposite in fact.

First, they gave me some champagne, then fed me duck, more champagne, some pinot noir (from the excellent Creation – who honestly do make the best Pinot in the country but whose labels look like they’ve been designed by a dolphin in Windows Paint), then salmon, then Chardonnay and pumpkin pie, then asked me to try some artisanal tequila that had been wooded in oak barrels for 5 years.

Our secret knock was defective. Hanging around in minimalist bathrooms is more fun than you think. Configured duck (that's an inside joke for exactly one person, sorry everyone else in the world...)

Godammit. If that stupid mystery girl who left me the note when I was twelve had just said that this was what was going to happen on those hockey fields, I would never had sent Jeff Nathanson instead of going myself.

The purpose of the evening was to have those of us who don’t know about these things (although considering the good looking, well-dressed and high-powered nature of the people in the room, that might have been only me) awakened to the biggest lifestyle trends for the coming year. Mystery Dinners were one of them (which explained a lot), as was ‘things made out of cardboard’. This was a relief to hear, because it means that all the home-made cards I’d given for my family for Christmas instead of presents, could be justified by an apparent and new-found adherence to decor trends.

Jenny Crwys-Williams was a good sport, not so much as blinking an eye when I started to say fuck a lot after dropping most of my fig and yoghurt tart into my artisanal tequila, because no matter how delicious my fig and yoghurt tart might have been, it had certainly not been wooded in oak for five years and kind of diluted the one trend I’d really been looking forward to.

Thanks H&L people, I’m a slightly better person because of you, and the next opportunity I get to have a good time done to me, I’m totally going to be a lot more ready for it.

House and Leisure’s trends issue should be everywhere round about now. In it you can learn about how black flowers are cool and that you can apparently serve tea on a Bunsen Burner. 

Niknaks on a roll, *totally* befitting a man who claims to write a food blog.

Holidays have changed over the last couple of years.

These days if you don’t social media the shit out of every mozzarella ball that lands in front of you, there’s this overriding fear that no-one will know you actually had a good time. And in our socially-networked era where pictures of you looking great in a pair of Wayfarers is social currency – its a miracle that any of us get anything done in-between all the instagramming. Fuck you hipsters, you’ve made it impossible to just go and be somewhere without it having to be the Blog Event Of The Year.

It also means that I’ve painted myself into something of a corner, because I’m desperate to tell this story about how a carnivorous bantam stole a piece of ham from a sandwich I happened to be eating at the time, but I can’t now because I’m too busy being righteously indignant.

The second anyone so much as tweets that they’re off to some remote beach in the middle of wherever-the-fuck, it basically means we can all strap ourselves in for an atomic stream of smartphone-snapped cocktails on some seemingly art-directed beach with painstakingly photoshopped de-sat contrast, studiously ‘Oh, what? There’s a camera? Psssh…’ expressions, and a new profile pic that’s been culled from a photo-roll of about a billion, especially chosen to make the person in it look thin.

I was recently stopped at the first Neighbourgoods Market of the year by someone who asked me why I’d gone so quiet over the last couple of weeks. Of course the answer was that I was on fucking holiday and that I was kinda too busy doing that to be preoccupied with how I was going to tweet about it.

Said the guy. With a blog.

Next week I’ll tell unicorns and fairies to go fuck themselves, I promise.

Now of course my hypocrisy-o-meter has totally just gone off the scale, because if I didn’t write about things that happen to me on weekends away and special dinner parties and all that stuff, this little corner of the Internet would suddenly dry up into three mediocre dick jokes and a grainy picture of my cat. Maybe it’s just because there seems to be such a huge amount of hysteria around the end of the year and where you’re going and with who and for how long, that it seems to have become the massive Internet *event* that it is, based on ultimately not much. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just grumpy today. It’s entirely possible that someone messed with my yoghurt this morning and now I just think everything in the world is crap.

I guess my point (such that it is), is that if something fucking insane and unique and wondrous and brilliant happened to you while you were on holiday, then sure … tell me about it. But you know what? That picture of your feet you took in the toilets of that club you went to doesn’t fall into any of those categories. Just the fact that you went on holiday isn’t enough to warrant trying to dress it up as the greatest thing that’s happened to humanity since the invention of the toilets in that club you went to, on every social media platform you can get your hands on.

Okay – enough of that, I’m tired now, and have probably alienated just about everyone who reads this blog. So, here’s the best thing you can do with some cubed kudu. So much so that I think the new collective noun for kudu should be ‘kebab’. To go along with ‘a flange of baboons’ – which is a real thing by the way…

Spicy Kudu Kebabs

If I'd taken this picture on a mountain top, the things in it would still have tasted pretty nice.

Ingredients

1 kg of cubed kudu (or other venison)

2 fat cloves of garlic

2 tsp of cumin seeds

2 tsp of coriander seeds

2 tsp of fennel seeds

2 tsp of smoked paprika (if you’re struggling to find any, Woolworths have it in a small red tin in their spices section)

2 tsp of dried thyme

4 tsp of lemon juice

4 tbsp of olive oil

1 large red pepper

Pain Greek yoghurt

Freshly chopper coriander or parsley

Salt

Pepper

12 bamboo kebab skewers

What to do

Peel the garlic cloves and cover them with some salt, then, using the blade of a flat knife, crush the garlic into the salt so that it absorbs the juices and forms a thickish paste. Mix up the garlic salt paste with the kudu, add a little more salt and a generous twist of freshly-ground black pepper.

Grind the fennel, coriander and coriander seeds into a powder, and in a bowl mix together with the paprika, lemon, olive oil and thyme. Mix this up with the kudu and put in the fridge for a couple of hours to get all intimate and stuff.

Meanwhile, soak the bamboo skewers in water, and slice up the red pepper into thickish chunks. Thread the kudu cubes onto the skewers alternating every now and again with pieces of red pepper, and lay them out on a roasting tray, covering with any remaining marinating juice.

Get the grill in your oven good and hot, pop the tray in and let it brown for about 20 minutes. Turning every seven minutes or so.

Once they’re out, drizzle with Greek yoghurt and sprinkle over the freshly shopped coriander, or parsley if coriander offends you. You can serve it with flatbreads if you like or just eat as they come.

This is the story of how that happened.

So, I used to be married.

I’m not anymore – but at one point in my life I was in love, had the ring on my finger, struggled to remember anniversaries and all the rest of it.

Around about the time that we’d just gotten engaged, her family organized for the whole lot of us to spend a weekend away at a bush lodge in Natal. It was a big deal and I was apprehensively looking forward to it (apprehensive because I’m not great with people at the best of times, and abseiling off a waterfall is probably not the best way to overcome that. Or maybe it is and I’ve been missing out all these years).

Now, at the time I worked the kind of job where one was never entirely sure what one’s schedule was going to be like. It was possible (and almost routine) to make plans for a weekend only to be told at the last possible second that in fact you were going to be needed in the office. It’s one of those things you see in movies that feature An Evil Boss, but I guess anyone who’s been employed anywhere quickly realizes that this is one of the things that just happens when you’re at the bottom of the gravel-pit. You kinda just have to accept it, grit your teeth and get on with things, or resign in a hail of righteous indignation and possibly a flaming bag of poo.

Now, I expected that my fiancé and her family were going to have a good time. I expected to hear stories about how much of a good time they’d had. And I had fully expected to feel pangs of Fuck My Life at having missed out.

What I didn’t expect was exactly how much of a good time it was going to be. You see, if a Standard Good Time is say… The Ancient Monument of Stonehenge, or perhaps the Arc de Triomphe in the center of Paris – both in their own right, magnificent and miraculous achievements of human creativity, then what they had was The Fucking Great Wall of China of good times. You could see it from space. People visited it and took photographs of themselves pretending to hold it up. There may have been a range of stamps. It was a truly awful feeling, both knowing that I’d missed out on this incredible experience that probably would have brought me closer to my new family, and then also having to endure the 32^nd story in the space of a day that started with “Oh! And remember when …”, and ended with people literally slapping their thighs in uproarious laughter, while the most interesting thing that had happened to me in the same space of time was a takeaway plastic tub of potato-salad.

The one positive that came out of it however (and this would be odd for anyone but me…), was a description of a spicy lentil soup that everyone had had, which they all agreed was incredible. I was seriously taken by the idea, and quizzed them closely about what had gone into it, to the extent that I hunted down the recipe and then spent the next 7 years or so adapting and perfecting my own version of it, only settling on a final incarnation a couple of months ago. I even cooked it when the House and Leisure folks came to visit (the recipe is here). The point being that a place I hadn’t gone to, and had only heard described by people who’d been there once, fixed into my brain and became the emotional definition of ‘happy times’ for me.

Then a funny thing happened.

I became friends with the family who owned Zingela. Quite by accident.

I think I probably tried to tell them a couple of times what this place of theirs meant to me, but I don’t ever think they really understood – especially since I hadn’t actually ever even been to the bloody place.  Then, I got to go there on a weekend that was as wild, brilliant and chaotic as anything I could have invented in my head, and if I’d been in puppy love before, now I was red-hot with fairly embarrassing lust.

Long time readers of this ridiculous little corner of the internet will remember a post from a couple of years back when I mentioned that I’d been invited to cook for a wedding of two close friends, and that in a fit of impulsive craziness I’d actually said yes. They were smart those two, they got me drunk, kept the guestlist small (70 people) and appealed directly to my brash sense of adventure. Basically they know I’m an idiot – and preyed cleverly on my weakness.

Well, this was the family that owns Zingela, and it was to be the venue for the wedding. And so, years after cooking recipes from a place that I’d only really heard about, I was now going to cook in that kitchen. For a wedding. With 120 guests. With no experience or training of what it’s like to cook for more than a dinner-party of 20 drunk people who probably don’t have the highest standards.

Fuck.

One Hundred and Twenty.  It’s a lot of people. You order 120 quarter pounders with cheese from McDonalds and see if you can even fit them in your car. Try and imagine 120 cats stuffed into a toilet (okay that’s weird don’t think about that), or that the average domestic flight has less people on it than I was going to feed three courses of food to in a single evening.

I’m not going to lie, but in the final run-up to the big weekend, I was starting to seriously consider just buying a one-way ticket to Macau, changing my name to Jorge and taking up a job as a yak-whisperer. Which, considering they don’t have yaks in Macau, would have made my job-related stress-levels fairly low.

But, not to sound like the chapter from the motivational video entitled: How To Access Your Power Animal And Break Through The Barriers You Didn’t Even Know Existed, there comes a point where you’re strapped in, the roller-coaster has made all the clanking noises that mean it’s starting up now, and no matter your views might differ on the matter, you’re going on this fucking ride whether you like it or not.

Farm kitchens. Roomy.

So, for 48 hours (the final 3 of which were during a monstrous rainstorm) I chopped, peeled, roasted, diced, blended, mashed, baked, rolled, mixed, tasted, fried, crushed, sliced, boiled, glazed, crumbled, and finally… plated my way back to sanity and 120 successfully-fed wedding guests. Oh and the couple said ‘I do,’ and everything, which was nice.

After that, I smoked the fattest cigar I’d been able to get may hands on a few days earlier, danced ‘til 4am and woke up with a penis drawn on my arm in koki-pen.

I’d call that a pretty successfully weekend.

From the beginning, to (almost) the end.

This was the menu.

Starter

Potato & Leek Cupcakes, with hickory-smoked trout, garlic béarnaise and chili, lime and ginger dressing,

0r

Potato & Leek cupcakes with roasted red peppers, braised in white wine.

Main course

Individually hand-rolled Greek salads with olive paste (Neil Roarke’s excellent recipe from his Freedom Café book)

Venison pie, cooked in ale and a hint of dark chocolate.

Wild mushroom, Artichoke and Crème Fraiche bake, topped with rye bread crumbs and parmesan.

Spicy Moroccan chicken.

*****

I wish there were more pictures. But you know…all that chopping etc. was fairly intense. 

*****

Lastly – I’d just like to thank everyone who helped in the final moments (Claire, Morne and Schalk – you were magnificent), and for everyone who said nice things when their mouths weren’t full.

Too small to jump through, we'll have to figure out something else to do with them...

Sometimes, the simplest things are the ones that end up being the most difficult to do properly. Of course, by extension, they’re often also the most satisfying to get right.

Shoelaces. A prime example.

I’m still ecstatic with surprise and delight every time I actually send the rabbit around the tree the right amount of times and in the right order, and my shoes don’t fall off 20 minutes later.  Similarly, rice has been my fucking nemesis for years – no matter how many ancient and wizened Chinese women I lure and trap in my basement then torture for information, I’ve never quite gotten the knack of making it anything but a glutinous, champy mess, best used to get RDP houses to actually stay up rather than to serve with a curry.  Of course most of you are silently sniggering at my unreasonable incompetence, but everyone has his or her thing. Like my aunt – who can’t say ‘herbaceous’. Go figure.

Maybe its because complicated things food-wise often need concentration – you know they’re complicated, and so you act accordingly. At least trying to make sure that every little thing goes in the right order in the right amounts and in the right place and whatnot, which is why (paradoxically) they often come out great. But when it comes to like … toast, there’s just this ridiculous assumption that it’ll just take care of itself and that we don’t really need to pay any kind of attention. Which is how we spend our lives scraping off the black bits into the bin.

This is why it’s a special kind of satisfaction to master something that feels simple, but isn’t really. This Sunday it was calamari – the kind that any Z-grade chippie on the coast can churn out by the bucketload, but try it at home and it’s usually like trying to eat old condoms.

Spicy Calamari Rings with Naartjie, Olives and Coriander.

Hold still damn you, you're going in my mouth.

This is based on a Spanish salad that uses salt cod and blood orange, but I really wanted to find a similar feel, but using things that felt more distinctly South African and also seasonally appropriate.  Naartjies are a citrus fruit unique to South Africa (they’re easy to peel and their sweetness is slightly denser than that of an orange), but you could easily substitute Clementines or Tangerines for a similar effect. The combination of crunchy, spicy calamari and the tart sweetness of naartjies is a madly unexpected, but lovely combo, and doesn’t really need anything more than a splash of citrus juice and olive oil as a dressing.

Ingredients (serves 6)

6 large calamari pouches, cleaned and sliced into rings

4 naartjies, skinned and separated into segments

1 red onion, sliced

1 handful of olives, de-pitted and halved

1 small bunch of fresh coriander leaves, finely chopped

half a tsp cayenne pepper

half a tsp turmeric

a generous pinch of salt

a generous pinch of black pepper

1 and a half cups of plain flour

half a cup of corn flour

1 bottle of sunflower oil (for deep-frying)

What to do

Sift together the flour, corn flour, black pepper, cayenne pepper, turmeric and salt together, then dust the calamari rings thoroughly in the mixture so that they’re generously coated.

Heat the oil in a large pot (making sure the oil doesn’t go any higher than one third up the side – spitting oil and grease fires are no joke, ask me I know…), and when a bit of bread bubbles immediately when lowered into the oil, you’re good to go.

It's like playschool for squids. Except instead of naptime you get eaten.

With a slotted spoon, carefully lower the calamari rings into the oil one by one, until you’ve used up available frying space (don’t crowd them!). After a minute (max! – this is the secret to non-condomy calamari, resisting the urge to over-fry…) the coating should be crispy and golden, so get them out the oil and onto some paper towel to drain. Keep this going until you’ve gotten through all your calamari.

In a wide, flat salad-bowl, mix up the calamari, naartjies, olives, red onion and fresh coriander. Squeeze over some naartjie juice, add a splash of olive oil and you’re good to go.

So, this was part of a lovely Sunday lunch on a ridiculously hot day – the rest of which went something like this:

Mad and beautiful friends. Sorry Justine, for some reason I don't have a pic of you, even though you were totally there.

The best compliments are always unspoken.

Organic radishes that prove I am a Friend Of The Earth

Oh dear.  So, I must warn you that today we’re tackling Serious Issues and Possible Threats To Humanity.  It’s best I’m clear about this up front – because there’s nothing worse than being suckered into watching the movie that the trailer marketed as an uplifting family story with a cute dog in it, which then actually turns out to be about How We’re All Going To Die.  But don’t worry, it’s not all gloomy, there’s also an okay joke about Lady Gaga, which is something.

I recently had an argument with a beautiful and headstrong actress about pigs.  She wasn’t saying the usual things that get said by an actress who has an opinion about pigs (that they’re constantly staring at her cleavage and she just wishes they’d stop borrowing her money to pay for new Xbox games).  Instead, she was determined to impress upon me that, for someone who’d like to make sure that any pork-products she ate weren’t ‘factory farmed’ as such, South Africa presents very few options.  She felt very strongly about this, and by the end of the conversation I sort of felt like I’d been punched in the face quite a lot.

Now, I’m incredibly aware of the problems presented by the intersection of Food and Environment.  I’m surrounded by enough Vegetarians, Vegans, Fruitarians, Pescatarians, Eco-Conscious Consumers, Radical Foragers, Organic Warriors, Jamie Oliver’s never-ending TV shows about fat people and Those Who Don’t Eat Seafood Because The Japanese Are Really Really Horrible To Dolphins (which they are) – all of which are legitimate ideologies and represent some of the most pressing environmental issues faced by humanity, to know that this is a problem and that someone should probably do something about it quite quickly.

And all this is before we even get to cow farts.

The difficulty creeps in when one tries to properly balance an awareness and sensitivity towards to the practices used in generating the bag of groceries you’ve just paid for, and feeling like you’re personally responsible for the heinous rape of the planet every time you put a fork of grilled chicken breast in your mouth.  Because, surely there has to be a middle ground, right? Or is that something we don’t do any more since the invention of Lady Gaga.

The real problem for most of us, is that they have a point.  And it’s an uncomfortably good one.

I love food. I love cooking.  I love the pleasure it brings to the people I invite to share in that process.  And it feels like it should be an innocent and joyous thing, surely?  What I stick in my mouth feels so far removed from something that people protest about and blockade Russian ships for and create websites dedicated to deformed chickens that may or may not end up in your BBQ nugget.  And yet, increasingly the seemingly innocent routine of making lunch tacitly enters us all into a proper honest-to-goodness battlefield whether we like it or not.

You see, just because information is difficult to come by, doesn’t mean you can automatically default to the ‘ignorance is bliss’ line of defense.  That’s how truly kak things Nazism and Child Labour Camps happen. At the end of the day we’re not twelve anymore and we can dress ourselves and everything, so why do we insist on acting like we are when it comes to the food we eat, the stuff that actually keeps us alive and healthy? Sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting “La la la, I’m not listening” just makes us all look stupid.

My suggestion is this: don’t rush straight off and become an activist who alienates people at parties by being loudly obnoxious about supermarkets – because no-one likes those people and Occupy Pick n Pay is woefully unsexy.  Instead, perhaps read up a little (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s excellent cookbook Meat is a good place to start), think a bit, maybe walk into a butcher and ask where his animals actually come from.  Maybe skip meat on Mondays.  Maybe visit a fresh produce market once in a while, and then who knows where it all might go?

But, most importantly remember that food is meant to be a positive experience and these days, that extends way beyond whether or not it tastes nice.

On another note, I do *promise* promise that recipes and amateurish pictures of iffy dishes produced in my kitchen will return. Promise.

Give me meat and fork. Plates are for pussies.

Men are good at meat.  And I’m not just saying that because that sentence has a certain alliterative allure.

Or wait, are they?  I don’t know so much anymore.  The last couple of braais I went to, everyone stood as far away from the fire as they could, desperately ignoring the stack of chops that needed cooking in the hope that somehow it would magically get done, while simultaneously trying to avoid being the one who’d actually have to do it.

What’s happened?  This is meant to be the one area where we step up, where we deftly and confidently take charge, while all around us lesser beings cower in the presence of our general awesomeness, while the coldest beers in the land are offered up in gratitude.

Maybe its because these days our shoes are more expensive than they used to be, maybe it’s because it takes us longer to do our hair in the mornings, or maybe its because the internet has taught us that anything that takes longer than the amount of time required to download a video clip of a guy getting kicked in the nuts by a horse isn’t worth doing.  Lets face it, ‘braaimaster’ is a title created mostly so that the guy who now reeks of wood-smoke, is blinded from the bucket’s worth of ash he now has in his face, a snotty nose and most of the hair burned off his forearms – feels slightly better about spending the last three hours cooking everyone else’s dratted sosaties while the girl he was hoping to speak to was getting chatted up by a guy who has a Chinese-symbol tattoo that instead of saying “hope” actually says “finest cat meat”.  Oh sure, everyone will sling a torrent of compliments your way once their faces are happily stuffed full of boerie, but 20 minutes ago the only sentence you were likely to hear was, “Howz my sausage bru?”  And this spoken with the slight edge of someone who’s suspicious enough that you’re doing it wrong to come and check, but not concerned enough for its welfare to pick up the braai tongs.   You know what?  If that’s your attitude I’d rather be at home polishing my Spicy Christmas Nuts thanks.

This is how most social circles have come to appoint their Grill Warrior – the person who (whether they like it or not) is default braai guy. It’s a thankless task, but usually there’s someone who feels strongly enough about properly flame-grilled meat to wearily step up when the time comes.

Girls of course do salads (and by salads we mean something with potatoes in it, not this leafy crap we have to secretly scrape off our plates while we were pretending to go to the kitchen looking for chutney), for which we are thankful because girls are nice.

And yet at the same time – I’m faintly worried that we’re in the midst of a secret cultural coup that none of us are really paying much attention to.  What with every second person I know investing in a massive and fancy gas-braai unit that’s bigger than most people’s first car, I fear we might be watering down the cornerstone of what makes us stand apart from the rest of the world: we like the hell out of our protein, and we’ll build a fire to cook it on.  That’s our thing.  No doubt, gas braais are super fancy. They gleam mysteriously in the evening light with their exciting chrome bits and the trimming that was looted from an experimental military vehicle intended to detect unflattering attitudes toward American foreign policy.  But there’s something distinctly and uncomfortably functional about them – because what’s the point of inviting people around for a ‘braai’ if what you’re actually going to do is just cook some meat on a thing more sophisticated than your actual stove, which just happens to be within eyesight of the swimming pool?  Might as well just microwave a curry and let everyone get on with watching Idols.

Surely the point is that all you need to braai is a couple of bricks and a grill? You want to infuse your meat with the distinct sharpness of woodsmoke, the juices that send good smells and hot ash into your face, revel in that unique heat that burns the hair off your….oh, hang on.  Ah.  Hmm.

Yeah, I think there’s a braai I need to go and attend to.

The off-screen dialogue was a lot saltier than this plate, and featured people saying 'fuck you ref' a lot.

So, I had this cute idea the other day.

Wait, let me re-phrase:  I had an idea the other day.  In my head it seemed like a good one, but then again the last time I felt that way I ended up carrying a girl with a sprained ankle on my back for 2 kms at 5:30 in the morning. So….

A bunch of us were planning on getting together for the first South African game in the Rugby World Cup. But because the whole thing’s being held at literally the bottom of the world – it means rugby at breakfast time – which is a slightly different dynamic than a lot of us are used to (in the pub you always see large, confused men resolutely ordering coffee, usually to reckon ah fuck it, and getting rounds of beer by half-time).

So the plan was some mates, breakfast and early morning drinking – a conversation that inevitably turned to talk of me making the breakfast and then doing a lot of the early work when it came to the drinking, so that everyone else didn’t feel quite as bad about cracking the champagne. Yes, I’m selfless that way.

Breakfast for ten people is never really that much of a big deal – mostly because there’s a lot of frying involved and just about everyone can do that.   You fry enough things and the happy silence that surrounds the hardening of a room full of arteries is music to a breakfast-maker’s ears.  So the cuteness of the idea came when I was thinking what to do for the breakfast itself, and I was struck by the fact that we were playing Wales, and so we should have a Welsh-influenced meal so that we could literally eat the Welsh for breakfast.

I will now break off for applause.

The first problem is that, when it comes to breakfast the Welsh are fucking insane.  Because sure as I don’t really fit into my pants as well as I should, aint none of the people who were going to gather at nine in the morning to watch a rugby match going to be interested in savoury cakes made of seaweed and clotted-blood sausage.  No sirree bob.

Thankfully the Welsh are famous for something else which not enough people have discovered  because they think it’s made of rabbits, but is in fact one of the more glorious things you can do with bread and cheese.  Clue, you add beer to it.

It was a good thing the boks managed to cling on for the win (Francois Hougaard you ridiculously idiot-hairstyled beauty) – otherwise the whole idea would have been fucked, this post would have been pointless, and I would have been sad and possibly wandered out into traffic, come what may.

Rugby Breakfast Welsh Rarebit. (feeds 10)

It’s probably best not let anyone actually see you make this, as it’s just chock-full of butter, cheese, more cheese, more cheese and then some beer – just to seal the deal. It also looks like vomit when it’s being made – but trust me, tastes like golden naked angels when it’s all done.

Ingredients

100g butter

60ml Dijon Mustard

2ml Tabasco

2ml Worcester sauce

210 ml good beer (if you can get hold of a good micro-brewed ale you’ll be smiling – I used the new Robsons East Coast Ale, excellent)

100g camembert (make sure you cut off the rind)

300g mature cheddar

2 egg yolks

2 eggs

1 large handful of chives, finely chopped

salt

pepper

1 large loaf of bakery-fresh sourdough bread, cut into thick slices

What to do

Get a large pot, and into it put the butter, Worcester sauce, Tabasco, mustard and beer.  Turn the heat up to a gentle simmer and let it all melt together, stirring occasionally.  Turn the heat up slightly and add the two types of cheese and the chopped chives.  Stirring gently but constantly, let all the cheese melt and mix with the rest of it until you’ve got a thick, velvety, cheesy sauce – maybe about 20 minutes worth.

Now this is key. Take the pot off the heat, and let it cool for at least ten minutes.   The reason for this is that you’re about to add the eggs and the last thing you want is for them to scramble the second you add them to the sauce.

While the cheese is cooling, turn the oven to 220ºC, then separately beat the two yolks together and the two eggs and have them ready.  Then add them to the sauce and gently mix them in – it should create an extra silky sheen and thicken it slightly.

Rarebits in a row, bubble-and-squeak cakes, and many many roast tomatoes. This is not a nursery rhyme.

Lay all the sliced pieces of sourdough onto a baking tray, then spoon a goodly amount of the cheese sauce onto each slice.  Season generously with salt and pepper, whack them in the oven and wait for them to toast up until golden brown.  Serve on their own, or with poached eggs and fresh rocket.

Right after this photograph was taken, everyone dispensed with all drinks that weren't beer.

I once had to take a train trip from Pisa to Florence.  I was in Italy for the first time, I had stupid hair and was being very South African about it all, which generally meant being sweatily uncomfortable about anything that wasn’t Mrs Balls Chutney or songs about beer.   Needless to say that for the first couple of days I was there, I permanently looked like someone who’s just realized that they’ve tripped on something and are about to fall down in front of people who will judge them.

So, I duly got on the emptiest carriage available, because that way I could just get on with being awkward in as much privacy as possible. It turned out however that the emptiest carriage actually had someone already in it, a wistful and darkly beautiful girl of about my age sitting in the corner.  Naturally I sat as far away from her as I could and proceeded to furiously ignore her, because that of course is Universal Guy Language for, “Wow, you look fascinating – fancy a coffee or perhaps a Spicy Christmas Nut?”  Of course about two minutes later, a smallish, balding fat guy with a moustache stepped in, looked around, saw the girl … and without any hesitation whatsoever, made an infectiously enthusiastic beeline for the seat right next to her.

Of course.  He was Italian – and that’s how they do.

Within about twenty seconds, they were having the most animated conversation ever, and I’m pretty sure he got her number when she got off the train about three stops down the line and that right now they’re up to their elbows in olive oil, babies and mamma’s secret recipe for tuna sauce.  And that could have been me (maybe without the babies), if I’d just had the balls.

If Italian food were an animal, from an evolutionary perspective it’d be the annoying furry things that mopped up whatever was left of the dinosaurs after they’d gotten the crap beaten out of them by the giant meteor.  So successful has the exportation of Italian food and culture (same thing really) been over the years, that in many ways it’s superseded the national cuisines of a lot of the countries it’s been exported to.  And no-one’s complaining about it, because they’re all too busy smashing their faces full of thin crust pizza and laughing at Eddie Izzard jokes about Penne al Arrabiata (youtube it).

You can go on about pasta, ciabatta, parmesan, tinned tomatoes, capers, salami, pizza, pesto, expensive cappuccino machines – or any number of amazing contributions the Italians have made to the global food landscape  (arguably more than any other nation on the planet), but I’d say that none of those things are actually what’s made their food so popular.  For me it’s more the unimaginable and endless ocean of rampant enthusiasm they have for food and eating that’s done it.  It’s a stupid cliché – but one that has basis, because if the rest of us got half as passionate about whatever it is that we do as the your average Italian is about sausage – we’d have figured out how to make gold from the bits of hair that get stuck in the shower-drain ages ago.  This probably explains a lot about the fact that there are more Italian restaurants in the world than research-centers dedicated to Teleportation and/or Immortality.  It’s infectious – and you can’t help but wanting at least some of that in your life, and so we rhapsodise about prosciutto and mozzarella.  Weirdly all it really requires at the end of the day, is turning on the stove.

Some Italian kids, showing how enthusiastic they can be in a dark corner...

Without resorting to joining the endless ranks of people determined to fetishise food (thanks El Bulli), I like the idea that more kitchens become rooted in a genuine awareness and love for the pillars of Italian cooking: the best possible fresh ingredients, simplicity and good times (also, possibly some shouting and talking with your hands), all of which are dead easy and don’t require expensive kitchen gadgets designed by a depressed Swede.

At the moment, by virtue of where most of us end up eating out at least once a month, we’re all a little bit Italian, but I reckon that in spirit it wouldn’t hurt to be a little more (except maybe for Silvio Berlusconi, because he’s about as appealing as a dead dog sock puppet), because at the end of the day, no-one ever got anywhere by being too shy to speak to the pretty girl on the train.

An empty plate? We're just getting warmed up...

There’s no place on this planet to bring out the worst in humanity quite like a buffet.  Although this is perhaps followed closely by an art gallery opening where the drinks are free.

Seriously, it’s as if the presence of a set price and a potential ‘unlimited’ amount of food short-circuits our central nervous system and we revert to some lizard-brained opportunistic sneak machine whose only motivation is to just consuuuuuuuuuume bitches! Kill! Destroy! Maim in the name of Meatballs!

You want to see a petite Chinese woman punch someone in the face to get the last ginger-lemongrass grilled prawn?  Just hang out anywhere that says “R100 a plate”.  Old people are suddenly transformed from reserved, slow-moving sweeties to ruthless, sharp-elbowed, queue-jumpers with no sense of anything other than how the fuck to lever more roast potato onto that plate.  Suddenly the dude who was best man at your wedding is locking you in the toilet so that he’s got a clear run at the lasagna.

My dear friend Candice – who I love and adore, once worked her way through thirty-six oysters in a single sitting, because some restaurateur was dumb enough to put them on his all-you-can-eat Sunday buffet.  He was later seen smoking cigarettes with emo teens in the parking lot, kicking cans and wearing a T-Shirt that said Fuck The System… and there may or may not have been tears.  Candice didn’t care – she’d just eaten thirty-six oysters for R100. Go her.

I myself grew up taking such unbelievably cynical advantage of the Salad Valley (R15 a plate back then) at the Grahamstown Spur, that I’m fairly sure I could have gotten an honorary engineering degree for some of the gravity-defying Heaping and Balancing that was carried out in an attempt to get as many fried pumpkin balls back to my booth as possible. Students – they’ll find a way.

It’s a murky, devious environment where the good go hungry, and only those who don’t mind a bit of collateral damage can kick back at the end of the day full of the pride that they didn’t flinch at that crucial moment when a man in a wheelchair (most likely fake, rookie) needed to be shoved out of the way in order to get the last pizza slice.  That, my friends, is a man who has conquered all before him and earned his Beer at the End of the Day (Carling Black Label I hope your overpaid advertising team is paying attention…).

The reason I bring this up, is that – on a recent trip to Capetown – I actually had the pleasure of a very good lunch-time buffet at Café Paradiso in Kloof Street.  It was a bargain at R45, and with a couple of very carefully applied rules – made for an excellent lunch on a day where old friends were around a table for the first time in forever and time was ours to do with as we pleased, because it was raining outside and no-one felt like being anywhere else in particular.

However – if you’re going to brave this Amazon Jungle of eating – you need to know these rules, otherwise you’re going to be one of those guys sitting miserably staring a plate of lettuce and shattered self-esteem.

The Rules of Buffet

• Close students of the buffet will know that restaurateurs will always put a lavish basket of bread on the table: DO NOT DARE TOUCH IT.  Send it back immediately, put it on another table or throw it out the window.  This is fool’s gold designed to fill you up on relatively cheap starch, reducing your impact at the business end of the deal – the meat platters.
• Be careful with drinks – for a buffet the prices are usually hiked up a bit, because that’s where the restaurant is planning on making their money for the day. Order lots of water and wine by the bottle, it’ll work out better that way. Stay away from beers, hard tack and wine by the glass.
• Eat little of lots.  There’s a reason all the cheaper, bulkier stuff is placed enticingly up front – because these clever bastards know that with eyes bigger than our stomachs, we’re going to pile into the dratted pasta salad and then have no fucking space left for the fillet medallions. They’re sneaky these guys, so you have to be sneakier. Smaller portions of a wide range will make you the ultimate winner.
• Know your enemy, and watch their every move.  Trust me, that sweet-looking little lady with the determined look in her eye is going to clean the fuck out of EVERYTHING – so whatever you do, time your run before she even thinks about pushing back her chair for the main attraction.  Also, big families and lone wolves are also mega-threats. The extended family of nine from Bryanston will feel nothing for throwing their screaming 4 year-old in your path as a smoke-screen while they totally clean out the seafood – down to the last crumbed mussel.  And the single assassin will strike quickly and with laser-efficiency – somehow always getting to the things you wanted just before you manage to get there.
• Learn the fake out: duck left before you jink right… the dummy is one of your greatest assets.  Basic frenzy psychology tells us that what other people want is always one of the greatest factors in deciding what’s valuable.  I’ve eaten huge mounds of cold, minted potato because I saw some other slobby guy making for it like a fake mouse on a string: ‘it must be good – so I want it too’.  Pretend that the thing you hate is actually what you want, so while everyone else is scrabbling for the grated beetroot salad you so sneakily suggested was just scrummy, you’re loading up on chicken wings with barbecue sauce.

Simple Simon says Fuck You to Architecture and Yes to Paper Umbrellas

Beer and Burgers, who says modern civilisation is a decadent mess headed for inevitable decline and ultimately moral implosion? As long as there's Veal I say...

Commune1 in Wale street Capetown. It's rad. I know this because I dressed up for the opening.

Breadsmiles. It's the new planking.

Sunrise, sunset - and the meals in-between.

I’ve spoken about good buffets before, recently here, but if you guys know of places that do a particularly fine all-you-can-eat special, post it in the comments section.  There’s nothing quite like an informed, hungry mass that knows exactly where and how to take advantage…

The particularly good thing was that it was meant to be a printed version of the kind of stuff I do here – with the same tone and subject matter – which was great and all very exciting.  Alas for one reason and another, it ended up not working out,  but not before I’d written the first four columns.  So, I’m going to put them up here in the order and with the timing that they would have appeared in the newspaper.  

Spring Cleaning or Where Exotic Ingredients Go To Die

Right now, my kitchen cupboards look like they were packed by blind, OCD meth-addicted nut-collectors (yes, this is a thing).  But you know what?  That’s okay, because at least I can find the Marmite when I need it.

Most of the time.

My kitchen is tiny – around the same size as the single bed you wish you didn’t have when you start having girls over, and there’s not really a lot of space to go around. And so, I haven’t got neat storage spaces with special places for the Tabasco sauce, but rather a sliding door that holds back the Condiment Apocalypse Of Death And Things That Smell Funny But You’re Too Nervous To Find Out What They Are.

I’m sort of at peace with this, because I think that’s really the purpose of a kitchen cupboard – a place to keep the two or three things you actually use (recognizable because they’re usually at the front), and then also a whole heap of other crap that you bought when you were either a) trying to impress the girl who’s later going to be disappointed by your single bed, or b) inspired by some smarmy cooking show to make some ridiculous exotic recipe called Fakmung, the primary ingredient of which is rat poo. But only the expensive kind that you get in supermarkets.

You think this is exaggeration?  Pah.

A quick rifle through my cupboards and without even having to try – I’ve already found:

• Some Japanese whole-wheat spaghetti that honestly looks like someone cut strips of carpet and then put them in a packet with a logo of a dandelion holding a dagger on it.

• A tub of novelty ‘Christmas Spiced Nuts’ that taste awful (is it sweet, is it savory? It’s so confusing).  Because, “Hey, do you want to come up for my spiced nuts?” is a killer line even when it’s not Christmas.

• A bottle of Vietnamese snake wine – complete with an actual hooded cobra artfully coiled up in the bottle, preserved forever with an expression that makes him look like he just thought up a concept for Survivor: Uitenhage.

• My watch, which I’ve been looking for for about 6 weeks now.

The snake wine was a present from my mom.  She’s a fairly weird (but lovely) lady who has literally dressed only in purple since about 1999 and frequently interrupts conversations about the petrol price to say things about ‘spiritual envelopes’.  I still have it because what else do you do when your mom gives you a bottled snake?  Well, shove it in the back of the cupboard and forget about it of course. The problem is that this gets to be a habit (and this is the point) even for the stuff that’s not weird or life threatening.

So although I might be okay with the fact that my storage spaces look like an alien nest, this is the time of year where people get twitchy and start to clean things for no apparent reason other than it’s slightly hotter than it was last week.  Which means that for me, and I suspect a lot of other people, the whole process of ‘Spring Cleaning’ can sometimes be a chastening exercise, because at the end of it you’ve got a heap of stuff that represents every single culinary brainfart you’ve had in the last 12 months, and would rather not be reminded about.  It’s the same for clothes, and when men get slightly older, Personal Assistants.  I can’t tell you how many things I’ve bought during flights of fancy when I think that I’m suddenly Rick Stein and that I actually know what to do with dried lime leaves.  The thing is, Spring Cleaning isn’t really about order or neat rows of vanilla essence – it’s actually about sloughing off the silliness of a previous year and clearing the decks for another round, which is entirely fine and part of being someone who has a stove that they make things on.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to make Fakmung, with a side order of snake-wine whole-wheat spaghetti flambé and spicy Christmas nuts.