Foooooood

Winter has hit Cape Town. Wet, cold and miserable. The perfect weather for staying indoors and cooking soup.

I found some whole baby clams at the Fruit & Veg. Just the thing for clam chowder (something I’ve been wanting to make ever since having the Real Thing in San Francisco. Problem being that Tanya doesn’t like fishy dishes, so I needed an alternative.

Enter General Tso’s chicken, another recipe that’s been keeping a tab open on Firefox for quite some time.

Basically, you dredge the chicken (breast fillet cubes) in cornflour and fry it, then it goes into a slow cooker with a Hoisin / soy / rice vinegar sauce for four* hours. Add some more sauce at the end and you’re done.

For the chowder, I used Christina’s recipe, except that I had whole clams which I first needed to steam open. I then incorporated the water / clam juice into the white sauce, boiled the potatoes (small cubes) and onions, and added the bacon and chopped clams at the end.

Now I need to figure out how to make a sour dough starter so that I can serve the chowder properly next time.

* Recipe calls for four hours. We were hungry well before the three hour mark, so that’s how much time we gave it. Worked well enough.

A little restaurant called Satori.

Food is good (this is the Pork Belly – Beetroot Mash – Maby Marrow & Mushroom with Soya, Honey and Ginger dressing — apologies for crappy cell pic), waiters are excellent, the wine menu is above average for this kind of establishment, and the prices are not bad.

What is there not to like?

* Presumably Kalk Bay’s best kept secret is so well kept that I don’t know it. Yea I know, I’m a nerd.

Because it’s a bit like Beef Wellington but wrapped in pork.

It’s dead easy too. You start with a hunk of springbok rump, which you marinade in a mixture of Jimmy’s or similar and maybe some red wine. Whatever works for you. I didn’t get around to it for a while so the meat spent a week in the fridge. Remember to turn it once a day or so.

Then get hold of a large piece of pork skin. SPAR sells it as “pork spek”. It’s cheap. Liberally sprinkle the fatty side with pepper, mixed spice, herbs, garlic, maybe even some chopped mushrooms.

Wrap the meat in the skin, tie with string, stick it in the oven at 160 to 180 C for an hour to an hour an a half, and Napoleon’s your uncle.

I still had some gemsbok shin from last year. Started out with this allrecipes beef curry recipe, which ended up a bit watery — but that worked out fine, since I ladled all the liquid out of the slow cooker into a pan, and cooked some pumpkin in that, then added it all together.

And it was good.

So this is what you do. Get hold of some gemsbok shin. Or whatever. Cut into cube-like shapes and brown in the oil (with a lean meat like game you need to keep adding oil, don’t worry, it’s good for you). Meanwhile, slice an onion (or two if they’re small) into rings and put that in the bottom of your slow cooker. Put the browned meat on top, season with salt and pepper.

Cook two cloves of garlic, a teaspoon fresh ginger, and a chopped green chili for a few minutes, then add your curry powder (I used two tablespoons hot and one tablespoon extra spicy, but I suspect my hot curry isn’t, your mileage may vary). Add a tin of chopped tomatoes.

At this stage the recipe calls for stock, I mixed in two heaped teaspoons stock powder and added some water. Same thing. Spoon the mix over the meat, leave it to cook overnight.

If you use a slow cooker often, you’ll know that you need to add very little liquid. True, but for this recipe a bit more liquid is good. Because this is where you ladle off as much liquid as you can and cook about two cups of diced pumpkin in it until tender.

And then you add the pumpkin back into the curry and serve. Easy and pretty damn good. You probably want some rice on the side, sambals and raita can be good, poppadums always are.

No, not the one where you find a corpse and drop it off the coast of Spain. This is the one where you find a container full of gemsbok intended for biltong at the bottom of your freezer, and realise that half of it is a bit chunky and / or stringy, and that mincing it would be a better idea.

Enter a handraulic meat grinder, originally acquired to mince perlemoen in the pre-poacher days when we still had perlemoen.

I’m going to end up with a right arm like a teenage boy.

I learned to make chili from the Foodie Handbook. It calls for beans and plenty paprika. We like beans in our chili. And get your paprika from the good guys, that brown stuff from Robertson is useless.

So while digging through the freezer, I found a hunk of meat labelled “silverside”. I thought it was eland but when I started working with it I realised it’s gemsbok. Half of it went into a tomato bredie with the other half earmarked for a curry of some sort. Put it in a bowl, covered it with buttermilk, left it in the freezer overnight.

Found this recipe for venison chili (the one halfway down with the “crab bake” which I don’t have and didn’t use). Adapted it a bit.

Olive oil + butter in the flat bottom black pot, shake most of the buttermilk off the meat, fry the meat in batches and remove. Fry two chopped onions, one green pepper, about a tablespoon of garlic. Add the meat back in, add a tin of chopped tomatoes, a tin of kidney beans, a tin of borlotti beans and a tin of red beans (that’s what I had in the cupboard). I used less chili powder than the recipe calls for, small people in the house. Three four heaped tablespoons paprika, tin of tomato paste, heaped teaspoon cayenne. Some mixed spice and a tablespoon chicken stock powder. And some herbs, can’t remember what, probably rosemary. Add fresh (well, fresh from the freezer in this case) danja right at the end, serve with creme fraiche if you have (we didn’t, used normal cream).

It could have cooked for longer but we were hungry. That’s also why there are no pictures.

I can really recommend Pioneer Woman’s turkey brine, two-step roasting process, and turkey gravy.

Ree says she uses a 20 pound turkey — that’s huge. The biggest turkey I could find was about 3 1/2 kilograms, call it 10 pounds. It fed seven of us, with enough meat left over to make turkey stroganoff (strongly recommended recipe) while leaving the drumsticks for whoever wants to gnaw on them.

The “10 minutes per pound” rule of thumb is only linear around 20 pounds, I guess, because at the end of the 100 minutes my turkey was already clocking 160 degrees. Maybe the thermostat is off.  So I cranked the oven down a bit while boiling the gammon, and the little red jobbie popped up pretty much when I needed the oven for Yorkshire Pudding. Which isn’t a pudding but the brits have strange names for things. Came out pretty well.

This is the only pic I have — it got a bit busy in the kitchen.

Gammon: 1.8 kilograms, browned, covered 3/4 with water, 20 minutes / lb, then stuck in the oven to brown. Nothing funny.

I had some complaints about the gravy. Well, one complaint. There wasn’t nearly enough of it. What I did was to Maillard an onion in the slow cooker for an hour or so, then I added the giblets and water and cooked it overnight. Used the pan drippings, some flour, and the stock to make the gravy. Unlike Pioneer Woman I didn’t add the giblets to the gravy, all the flavour was in the stock already.

Being the second of two completely coincidentally very similar recipes.

Still the same eland shin, defrosted in water.

The recipe is from Perry’s Plate. For this one I used some stock I made a while ago, using quite a lot of green and yellow bell peppers. And I used cocoa powder instead of chocolate chips.

Again, I had to reduce the sauce at the end. I’m still a bit nervous about the slow cooker boiling dry (which I’m pretty sure it won’t) so I add too much liquid as a rule.