Indian food in South Africa - where to get your fix of crab curry and vindaloo.A short history on the bunny chow plus samoosas around the world- called chamuça in Goa and Portugal! If you have faves to add to the list, please do.
Angelfish is inexpensive, on the SASSI green list and has the perfect delicate texture for pies and a pasta like this, where the Champagne cream sauce is the star. It's a fish I buy whenever I can. Using smoked angelfish in this recipe is sublime- I've made it to rave reviews. Now, please don't break open a bottle of your treasured expensive bubbles for this- local sparkling wine is perfect, but a rule that's worth following is, don't use it in your cooking if you won't drink it. Enjoy what you Don't use in the sauce with the meal.
I wrote this piece for Mango Airlines Juice Inflight mag. Some of the local food stars I interviewed are featured in it too.
For this week's Woolworths MasterChef SA Spice Challenge, I delve into the wonders of Zanzibar the Spice Island and make a Parsi dish, a prawn dhansak. Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar and was Parsi- did you know? Dhansak uses a variety of spices, lentils and in this case mango and pineapple pulp and lime juice. Serve with a mango and pineapple salsa.
In this recipe I used the Sasko Flour Quick Treats Bran Muffin Mix in combination with grated sweet potatoes to make a rosti. I think this combination would also work well using peeled, mashed sweet potato with the mix to make a fat flap jack, also to be served with smooth, salty snoek or smoked snoek paté or even a thick dollop of creme fraiche. I served this with lemon zest which always adds such lovely lift to dishes sweet and savoury.
When Woolworths gave me the challenge of preparing a meal for four for R150, a "budget" meal, I knew three things should into play so that the eater (and the cook) would not feel deprived in any way: flavour, easily available ingredients and there had to be dessert!
An easy but indulgent semifreddo. I love this semifreddo because of the unexpected, refreshing scent of lemon and and the freshness of the zest. It goes surprisingly well with rasberries and is creamy and satisfying.
My Sri Lankan style Aubergine Curry is based on a favourite recipe from Rick Stein’s Sri Lankan Crab Curry found in his beautiful Far Eastern Odyssey (Uncle Rick is one of my favourite celebrity chefs- he really understands food, its origins and people). I have made versions of the crab curry with great success and thought the aubergines would stand up to and display these flavours wonderfully. Featured by Woolworths for the MasterChef SA series.
I was invited to present a dish on the Expresso Breakfast show to celebrate the Thai New Year. I am no expert - the cuisine does not form part of my cultural heritage. But, I have been cooking and eating Thai food since my late teens. I decided to prepare a Tom Yum soup, ideal for this drastic change of weather in Cape Town. That lovely balance between sour and hot. Nourishing but not fattening. Flu-blitzing but moreish. Tom Yum soup, that Thai classic -you can control the heat and the zing as you choose. I often use a sachet of Tom Yum paste but enhance the flavour with fresh limes, chilli, lemon grass, dried lime leaves and a little palm sugar.
I was asked to be a part of the Afrikaans lifestyle programme Pasella and to showcase a cheese not often used. I chose Ricotta cheese and made these very simple ricotta cheese and double mushroom tartlets- using fresh and dried mushrooms, rehydrated for double the flavour in a crispy phyllo outer. I drizzled them lightly in a lovely white balsamic truffle glaze I brought back from Andorra last week.
