Archive for the ‘Food’ Category
by Thando on May 13th, 2013
The master of South Africa’s favorite past-time, Jan Braai, recently made a road trip from Cape Town to Mossel Bay to explore the back roads of the Southern Cape.
Braai writes that the N2 is not at all unpleasant, despite his initial misgivings, and shares his experiences in the towns along the way. For tasty braai recipes, get your hands on Jan Braai’s Fireworks:
There may be worse stretches of road that I don’t know of, but in my world the most unpleasant is the N2 highway between the Hermanus turn-off and Mossel Bay. For the first bit from Cape Town, you still see False Bay. Then the road snakes through the mountains past the edge of Grabouw, but beyond the Hermanus turnoff, it’s a vast desert of fields in various shades of dust and heat. It’s a three-hour chasm you want to cross safely, with minimum damage to your wallet, both in terms of petrol expenses and traffic fines.
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by Thando on Apr 24th, 2013
Andrea Burgener has shared a recipe for Beer Cake with Eat Out, taken from her newly published cookbook, Lampedusa Pie.
This malty cake is filled with raisins and baked with a cinnamony crumble topping. Burgener recommends eating the cake warm, topped with custard or cream and stewed apples:
for the base:
125ml + 1 heaped tbsp butter
500ml sugar
3 eggs
560g self-raising flour
250ml raisins
500ml beer (lager style or similar)
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by Thando on Apr 19th, 2013
Andrea Burgener, author of Lampedusa Pie and owner of The Leopard restaurant in Melville, discussed her distinctly non-conformist career in the food industry with Matthew Burbidge.
Prior to The Leopard, Burgener owned Superbonbon and Deluxe and all three of her restaurants have offered something fun and adventurous. Of her quirky approach to food and dining Burgener says, “I make decisions like somebody in their own house … It’s not brain surgery; you’re just serving someone some supper.” She discusses working with Braam Kruger at the Kitchenboy restaurant in the mid-1990s and mentions roasting a liquorice allsorts studded lamb with him one day at his house.
Burbidge picks out some of the recipes he’s enjoyed from Lampedusa Pie, saying that “‘Potatoes cooked under a brick’ was a revelation”:
Food is an adventure for The Leopard’s Andrea Burgener, whose sense of fun shines through in her book, Lampedusa Pie.
Andrea Burgener is the enfant terrible of Johannesburg chefs. You won’t be pandered to at her restaurant, The Leopard, where you have to bring a doctor’s note if you want your salad dressing on the side.
“Don’t they trust us to dress a salad?” asks the ebullient Burgener, who has kindly agreed to cook something for me at her home out of her new cookbook Lampedusa Pie (Macmillan), out now.
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by Thando on Apr 16th, 2013
An obsession with food.
A nostalgia for the taste of childhood.
Living in a fractured and constantly shifting city.
These are the strands that Andrea Burgener weaves together to create an irresistibly quirky collection of recipes in Lampedusa Pie.
Andrea describes herself as a magpie cook attracted to an eclectic combination of tastes that evoke her world. She reinvents breakfast expectations with crème brûlée and pumpkin fritters but also reveals the secret to the perfect hollandaise sauce. Discover the recipes that elicit a sigh of comfort from Andrea – roast chicken with bread sauce or a Sri Lankan potato and mustard curry. Delight in the playfulness of making your own butter. Celebrate the exuberance of a party with a bright crimson soup or the seventies nostalgia of strawberry friandise and devils on horseback. Stretch yourself to explore an Ethiopian-inspired steak tartare, an Ivorian fish or the famous Lampedusa pie.
Drawing on recipes from her restaurants Superbonbon, Deluxe and The Leopard as well as the inspiration of other local and international food experiences, Andrea will take you on a journey of discovery in your own kitchen.
About the author
Andrea Burgener is a self-taught chef and food writer based in Johannesburg. Her first professional kitchen experience was in Braam Kruger’s Kitchenboy restaurant, before that she studied Fine Art at Wits University. She juggles her time between her family, running a busy Johannesburg restaurant, The Leopard, and writing food articles for a range of publications.
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by Thando on Mar 14th, 2013
Jan Braai has written about the basics of fire-lighting for the Getaway Blog as he suspects this is what may be standing in the way of cooks who are reluctant to take their culinary skills outdoors.
He has broken the process down into easy steps, starting with what wood to use and ending with getting an even spread of coals to cook on:
There’s a ridiculous notion among South Africans that women cannot braai. This is simply not true. On average, and I must be very clear that I’m generalising here, women in South Africa are slightly more experienced in cooking than men. Hence, logic dictates that they will also be better at it. Which leads me to the question, why don’t women braai more often?
I think the answer is simply that many of them don’t know how to make a fire. That is the stumbling block. Because, let’s be frank, once that fire has burned out and you have a bed of red-hot coals, it’s simply a source of heat on which to prepare your food, similar in operation to a stove, but resulting in meals with more flavour. (Make no mistake, there are some atrocious male braaiers out there, but their failure usually stems from the habit of completely overcooking, drying out and/or burning the meat.)
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by Thando on Feb 21st, 2013
Even if you didn’t have the kind of day you wanted for Valentine’s Day, Jan Braai, author of Fireworks, has great braai ideas in the Getaway Blog that should hold you in good stead for next year.
Prawns are always a great way to entertain, and just about everyone enjoys them. So, you want that special someone to love you? Get over to that braai!
Most people can speculate with varying degrees of confidence on the date of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. It’s on a Sunday – or is it a Saturday? – and it falls either on the first or last Sunday of some month. That month is not February, but it’s not as late as July either.
There’s no such confusion about Valentine’s Day, though. Everybody knows that date – 14 February – in the same way, South Africans know to recognise National Braai Day every 24 September. But while this name gives you a very clear indication of what you’re expected to do on the day, the how-tos of Valentine’s Day are slightly more ambiguous. Here’s what I suggest you do.
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by Thando on Feb 18th, 2013
Spar’s Savour Magazine has named Marlene van der Westhuizen’s cookbook Abundance: City Food from the Cape as their book of the month. Lisa Wallace describes the book’s photography as skilful and the recipes as flavourful:
The idea behind Marlene van der Westhuizen’s newly released cookbook , ‘Abundance’, captures life in the city and offers ideas for cooking that any city slicker would appreciate – fast, easy-to-cook recipes that are flavourful and exciting.
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by Thando on Feb 14th, 2013
Leonie Joubert recently talked to Bruce Whitfield on 567 Cape Talk, about her book The Hungry Season. Joubert said when she started the book she realised that when it came to food security most people only think of it in terms of what happens to commercial farmers and aren’t aware of the other factors. With South Africa’s population mostly in urban areas, it is important to look at how food secure people actually are, as food production is no longer directly linked to the land.
She visited eight families in different urban contexts in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland and ask questions about how and why food reaches certain areas and how people access it. She found that the modern food complex that provides us with cheap highly processed but nutrient-poor foods is problematic.
Listen to the podcast:
The podcast was also featured and discussed on Future Cape Town:
Our #CityTalk last week which crowdsourced ideas under the heading “Food and the City”, looked at various ways and ideas in which food security, urban farming, economic growth, food wastage and many other food factors impacted cities.
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by Thando on Feb 8th, 2013
Business Day‘s Penny Haw has written about the extensive research that went into writing The Hungry Season: Feeding Southern Africa’s Cities.
Leonie Joubert and photographer Eric Miller travelled around South Africa to look at how issues of food security are affecting people in different ways. Haw writes that “food security is not just about the hunger and malnutrition that comes with unemployment and poverty, but also that which is hidden behind veils of prosperity and comfort” and this is what Joubert reveals in The Hungry Season:
To most of us “food security” is about having access to enough safe and nutritious food, with the inevitable ominous subtext being that the world’s future food needs cannot be met by present levels of production. But in The Hungry Season: Feeding Southern Africa’s Cities (Picador Africa), the Cape Town-based science writer and journalist Leonie Joubert reveals there’s a great deal more to it.
Food security is not, she says, just about “how to optimise calories per hectare”, but also about what we do with those calories. It’s about why, when a country appears to produce enough food to sustain its population, it is inaccessible to many. But food security is not just about the hunger and malnutrition that comes with unemployment and poverty, but also that which is hidden behind veils of prosperity and comfort.
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by Thando on Feb 6th, 2013
Three lucky readers stand a chance of winning a copy of Abundance by Marlene van der Westhuizen, courtesy Betty Bake blog.
There are four ways to enter: by subscribing to the blog, tweeting the competition (using @randomstruik and @bettybakeblog with #WinWithBettyBake), “liking” the Facebook page or posting the following as your own Facebook status: “I’ve entered to WIN THE ABUNDANCE COOKBOOK on Betty Bake … Here’s the link to enter http://www.bettybake.co.za”.
The blog also requires you to post a comment on their “Win the Abundance Cookbook” post, specifying which of the above you have done. The more of these you do, the better your chances will be.
Get the full details and rules:
THE GIVEAWAY:
3x copies of ABUNDANCE by Marlene Van Der Westhuizen from Pan Macmillan Publishers
THERE ARE 4 WAYS FOR YOU TO WIN – you will get an entry for each thing that you do AND LEAVE A COMMENT FOR. (No comment no entry)
BE A FOLLOWER OF BETTY BAKE BLOG
1) Be a follower (Please enter your email address in the subscription on the side bar to your right) then leave a comment telling me you that you subscribed 1 – entry
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Download this eBook at LittleWhiteBakkie.com
