WTSIM Boeuf Bourgignon

Winter is really here now, a chill in the air and cold fronts bustling over in a hurry to get somewhere, showering us with torrents of rain as they pass. The scarlet vine leaves are dropping fast now, our only real autumn colour carpeting the ground with its finery.


Today was the perfect day to cook a slow stew in the oven, the aroma of its winey juices pervading the house, and the warmth of the oven giving me a place to lean against and warm up, after sitting at the computer too long. Squalls of rain drumming on the roof have no power to damp your spirits when such uplifting scents keep enticing you back to the kitchen to draw in deep satisfying breaths. If you can remember the Bisto kid, being pulled home by the wafting, come-hither tendrils of steam from the gravy on the stove, boeuf bourgignon has to be the inspiration for that! It’s worth cooking on every rainy winter weekend, just for the feel-good factor.

In fact the real title of this post should be: Waiter there’s something in my Boeuf Bourgignon and it looks like a dumpling!


The purists would be turning in their graves, after all, boeuf bourgignon is a classic French dish that should ideally be served with garlicky croutons on top, but dumplings… ? Dumplings come from a Northern European heritage and are a staple of English country culinary tradition. They are designed to fill up hungry farm labourers, soak up the stew juices and make the meat go further, distract attention from the fact that there is hardly any meat in the stew at all. They are frugal cooking at its finest. And I have another confession to make: I didn’t use burgundy, I used a South African Merlot, so this isn’t boeuf bourgignon except in the method. It is something that I am hereby classifying as Bistro Fusion: Merlot Beef with Parmesan Dumplings, invented especially for the May edition of WTSIM Bistro Food!

I’d been wanting to make dumplings for ages, ever since Homemade Heaven made them and reminded me what good winter fare they are. They don’t form part of my usual repertoire and the kids didn’t even know what dumplings were, so it’s been a long time. I went for a simple flour dumpling recipe in one of Nigel Slater’s books, that promised light and fluffy dumplings, and then left out the herbs, as I wanted the kids to eat them without being put off by green bits. They were incredibly quick and easy to make and puffed up to double their size without any fuss. These are going to be on the menu more often! Please excuse the inartistic photography - it was dark and I was hungry!!


But the proof is in the eating… I had the timing down exactly right to fit in with half time in the most exciting rugby match in years (according to my husband... it was the final of the Super14 where the Bulls trashed the Chiefs, if any of you are rugby fans!), so the dish had serious competition in making an impression. But it went down a storm with my husband and with the two girls, so it took me a while to notice the heavy silence emanating from my son’s place. He had that neutral, set look and a barely touched plate. My pickiest eater wasn’t going to be fooled into believing that dumplings are really just another version of bread. As his sisters enthusiastically ate their platefuls and eventually discovered the filling properties that dumplings are renowned for, he sloped off to the fridge and got himself an apple. Never mind – he won’t fade away – we’re having guests for lunch tomorrow: roast potatoes and roast chicken, so I’ll allow about ten potatoes just for him.

Here is my version of the recipe:

Boeuf Bourgignon or Merlot Beef with Parmesan Dumplings

About 900g/2lb chuck steak (I used stewing steak)
1 medium onion
2 cups red wine – burgundy or Merlot!
2 cloves garlic
bay leaf
2 sprigs thyme
100g/4 oz mushrooms
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon flour

For the dumplings
200g/7oz flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons grated parmesan
1 egg
about 120ml/half cup milk
(add chopped parsley and thyme if your kids eat green things!)

Cut the meat into largish chunks. In a heavy casserole heat 2 tablespoons of oil and brown the meat on all sides in batches. Put the meat aside on a plate, while you soften the onions in the same pan. Return the meat to the pan, sprinkle the flour over and stir it all in till it has soaked up the juices. Pour in the wine and stir it all together, allow to bubble. Add the chopped garlic and herbs, season with salt and pepper. Cover with a tight lid and cook in a low oven (140C/275F) for about 2 hours. Add the mushrooms (the recipe also added bacon and small onions at this point, but I didn’t have any and it still tasted great) then return covered to the oven for another hour. It can be cooked to this point in advance and reheated later, when you want to add the dumplings.

Fifteen minutes before you want to eat, make the dumplings: sieve the flour together with the baking powder and salt (the sieving helps lighten the dumplings so don’t skip this). Add the grated parmesan. Mix in the beaten egg and then add milk a bit at a time, until it comes together in a soft but not too sticky dough. Form into 8-10 balls. Slide them gently into the top of the casserole and let it simmer covered for 10-12 minutes, until the dumplings have doubled in size. I did this last bit on top of the stove, to make sure the liquid was simmering properly.

Serve with some green vegetables.

This is my last minute entry for Johanna’s WTSIM Bistro event - the deadline is today, so get moving if you haven't already submitted your entry!

WTSIM Avocado and Prawn Cocktail

Jeanne has asked us to cast our minds back to the Seventies for this month’s WTSIM – the theme is retro classics, things that we would now blush to present at a dinner party but which were the epitome of cool way back then.

My childhood memories of food are mostly of traditional home-cooked fare, ageless dishes like shepherds pie and Sunday roasts, and then the unchanging school-food themes of stews and pies, sausages and mashed potatoes, none of which were the height of food fashion even in the Seventies. But I do remember going out as a family for meals as a special treat at half-term or to start off the holidays. In our early teens the Berni Inn was our favourite venue, a chain of steak houses that served steak and chips in all its permutations, followed by ice cream with chocolate sauce and, as a hugely daring end to the meal, one of those Irish coffees where the cream floats in a thick layer on top leaving you to create swirls and patterns as you stir it in.

Very occasionally though we would dress up and be taken to a more sophisticated, grown-up restaurant called The Pheasant, usually with grandparents or to celebrate a momentous birthday. There we would order from big menus in the lounge by a log fire and only be shown to our table as the starters were about to be served. The main courses have faded from my memory, but I do remember my favourite starter, which I thought was incredibly sophisticated – half an avocado filled with a prawn cocktail heaped into the hollow left by the stone. Avocados were still a bit of a luxury then, and getting them to ripen, as now, was a challenge, so scooping out the succulent smooth flesh with a spoon with the addition of the prawns and a dash of sauce was the ultimate in indulgence.

I don’t think I have had a prawn cocktail since the Seventies and certainly couldn’t remember what went into the sauce, so I Googled it and found Delia’s recipe (and she should know the authentic Seventies style, as that was the era when she was really cool too!). My memories of the prawns in prawn cocktail back then, reveal them to be small in size, so probably not actually prawns at all but what are sold here as shrimps. And though Delia suggests organic ketchup and home-made mayonnaise, I am sure the Seventies wasn’t big on those either, so I went for good old Heinz tomato ketchup (bought specially for this as I am mean and never brought my kids up to eat it, though two of them acquired a taste for it regardless!) and bought mayonnaise. She also says to use lime juice but I don’t think we could get limes back then, so have used lemons for the sake of authenticity (also because I can’t get limes in my local town either!)


One thing I was sure I wouldn’t have a problem with was getting good ripe avos, as the avocado season has started here now and I bought two specially last week for this. But they stayed stubbornly hard and I had to resort to putting them in a bag with a banana in a belated attempt to ripen and soften them sufficiently to be eaten with a spoon. The flesh should be velvety and seductive, not hacked out in solid lumps sending prawns flying in every direction.

I did very little measuring for this, just mixing up the sauce ingredients to taste, though I overdid the Tabasco to start and had to increase the quantities of everything else.

Avocado Prawn Cocktail

2 ripe avocados
a couple of handfuls of peeled small prawns or shrimps
4 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons tomato ketchup
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2-3 drops Tabasco sauce
squeeze of lemon juice

Mix up the sauce to taste. Cut avocados in half and remove the stone. Put a dollop of sauce in the hollow of each avo, fill with defrosted prawns and top with either a squeeze of lemon juice or more sauce depending on how much sauce you like. Sprinkle some shredded parsley on top for contrast. Eat with a spoon and add more sauce and prawns if you like.

The dog has to be part of the photo shoot

The kids were unimpressed by my culinary retrospective and fled down the hill to lunch at their aunt’s, but my husband gamely sampled his. We were both rather underwhelmed however – it didn’t live up to my fond recollections – probably because I don’t really like cocktail sauce much! The frozen shrimps were fairly flavourless and need the clout of a strong sauce, but next time I would forget tradition and go with a strong balsamic vinaigrette and good sea salt.

The other reason that this dish has lost its glamour for me, besides the fact that I seem to have a more sophisticated palate, is that in South Africa the avocado has never been an exotic rarefied ingredient. My husband remembers having avocado breakfasts as a child in the Sixties and Seventies, when they would each fill half and avocado with a selection of toppings, ranging from crispy bacon, to cream cheese or plain vinaigrette and guzzle however many they could manage, as in winter here avocados are plentiful and cheap. All you really need with a perfectly ripe avocado is some good olive oil, a dash of lemon juice and some sea salt for an exquisite lunch or starter. Who needs prawns and cocktail sauce when it tastes so good alone?!

We did enjoy the novelty though and there is an intrigued candidate for finishing off the de-frosted shrimps!

Fluff is into Seventies haute cuisine

WTSIM Plum and Apple Crumble

We are yo-yo-ing between summer and autumn here in the Cape, though it's almost unheard of to even have a wisp of autumn in February. Usually we are gasping from the heat of a week of 40 degrees, suriving only by constant immersion in the pool and living off salads and braais... bread-baking a trial to undertake only when the relative cool of evening brings the temperature down a notch or two. This week we’ve had two or three mornings of light mist, chill and dew that sent the kids off to school in warm tops and long pants, and last Sunday it was crazily cool enough to cook a Sunday lunch and even brave a hot pudding, so that I can blog it for Johanna’s latest WTSIM event, the theme of which is hot puds.

Writing this a week later, when we look set to be hotting up for a scorching summer day, my seasonal antennae are totally confused and even thinking about hot puddings is enough to bring me out in a light film of perspiration, but it tasted good enough last Sunday and the kids were all really happy to be at the roast chicken and roast potatoes again. We’ll be back to braaiing again today though!

I had big plans for the hot pudding theme, to strike out in a new direction, and I’d rifled the recipe books and come up with Nigel’s Lemon Surprise pudding to try. But then time pressure and oven space constraints sent me hurtling back to the familiar domain of fruit crumble and custard, which turned out to be a better choice for the weather, which was coolish summer rather than the chilly winter that the lemon pudding is aimed at combatting.

Since the plum, apple and cinnamon combination turned out so well in the sweet quiche recipe, I went back to that and, though I went looking for variations and found Jeanne’s grown up spicy plum crumble, I ended up just going the child-friendly cinnamon spice route. I was glad I had as even our son went for seconds and ate up the whole lot.



Plum and Apple Crumble Recipe
6 generous portions

For the topping
150g flour
100g butter
1 teaspoon cinnamon
75g sugar
100g oats
2 tablespoons water

Fruit
8 large plums
3 green apples
1 teaspoon cinnamon
sugar

Rub the butter into the flour and spice. Stir in the oats and sugar, then add the water and mix so the mixture has rough crumbly texture. Chill in the fridge till needed.

Stone the plums and cut into chunky pieces. Peel and core the apples and cut into similar sized pieces. Butter a roasting dish or other oven proof dish and put all the fruit in, so it covers the base and at least half fills it. Sprinkle over the sugar and cinnamon. The amount of sugar depends on the sweetness of the fruit and how sweet you like it. Spread over the crumble topping and bake at 180C for about 40 minutes till golden. Serve with lots of custard or cream...or both!

WTSIM Plum and Apple Quiche

My head feels like we’re in the middle of winter, fogged up with the cold that the kids were so kind as to bring home from school and share with us. Snowy pictures all over the internet feel totally appropriate, except that our summer has reasserted itself and a hot wind is blowing off the mountains to give us an afternoon of 37C.

And yet, despite the oppressive heat, I’m in the kitchen baking, with the oven on, breathing in the scents of cinnamon, if only I could smell it properly. It’s the last day before the deadline for WTSIM and Jeanne has set us a challenge to do a sweet/savoury swap – to make a dish that is usually sweet with savoury ingredients or vice versa. I couldn’t quite get my head round it to start with, but then I started pondering the quiche. There’s no reason why that combination of pastry, egg and cream shouldn’t work as a dessert, with fruit instead of vegetables, sweet spices instead of salt.

I settled on plums and apples to go in it, with liberal amounts of cinnamon to convince us it was pudding. The plums weren’t very ripe, so I gave them a little help by turning them a la tarte tatin in a frying pan with butter, sugar and cinnamon until they started to soften a little. I didn’t quite get the caramelized effect I had in mind, but it did give them more depth and flavour.

For the pastry I used a sweet pastry recipe from Nigella’s How to Eat, that usually goes with our favorite apple tart. And then the egg and cream mix had sugar and cinnamon added to it instead of salt and pepper. Now I have to confess that I was a bit rough and ready measuring ingredients but I will try to make a guess, so that I can repeat it another time and share it with you, just in case you like the sound of it.


Because it actually did work! Our son , who refuses to eat savoury quiches but loves cinnamon, gobbled up his first slice and had seconds, and it got an accolade from my husband too, who isn’t so hot on egg dishes either.

Next time I wouldn’t serve it as a dessert when we had just eaten a quiche for a main course. Today I was just trying to minimize the cooking by doing two at a time and providing supper as well as a frivolous experiment for my blog, but the sweet quiche definitely deserves being made for its own sake and maybe I will add it to our pudding short list.

I think it was the tartness of the plums contrasting with the sweet creaminess of the filling that made it work, so it would work well with any other tart fruits, perhaps rhubarb or gooseberries would be good.



The Recipe – off the top of my head

Sweet pastry enough to line a quiche dish

For the fruit
6 large plums
2 apples
30g butter
1/3 cup of sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon

For the filling
3 eggs
1 cup 250ml cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup of sugar

Quarter the plums and remove the stones. Peel, core and cut the apples into thick slices. Melt the butter in a frying pan, add the sugar and cinnamon and allow to bubble a bit. Add the plums and apples and turn in the buttery mixture, till they are all coated. Cook gently for 5-10 minutes until they are just starting to soften but still keep their shape.

Line a quiche dish with the pastry.

Whisk up the eggs, cream, sugar and cinnamon.

Arrange the fruits in the pastry. (You can keep the left over liquid from cooking to use as a sauce if you like.) Pour over the cream mixture. Sprinkle with a bit more cinnamon.

Bake at 190C for about 40 minutes until golden and set.

Feel free to play with the amounts. I was doing it by guesswork anyway. You might like more or less sugar depending on the fruit and your taste.

WTSIM Sunday Roast

The scent of roast chicken wafts through the house – the reassuring smell of Sundays, leisurely family days spent at home, everyone doing their own thing in different directions until lunch gathers them around the table. One nose buried deep in a book, another child intent on an elaborate game with toys and animals, another off at an aunt’s house until recalled for the meal. Sunday lunch is a family ritual that holds fast through winter, but loses ground to Saturday evening braais in summer, when just the thought of a roaring stove at midday would bring you out n a sweat.

Johanna announced the roast for the theme of this month’s WTSIM and I wondered whether the weather would allow me to sneak one last roast in before summer took hold. Luckily this weekend was sunny but not too hot, with a cool wind that dissuaded the children from swimming, so last week’s summer braai by the pool has been followed by a return to a wintry Sunday lunch round the table.

Crispy roast potatoes are the draw card in our house – even without the meat the kids would be happy with a plateful of them. The meat can be chicken or lamb, we hardly ever do beef or pork. This week it was a chicken: lemon-scented, a whole lemon in its cavity keeping it fresh and juicy as it cooks and preventing it from drying out; a clove or two of garlic and some herbs underneath it, with a quartered onion or two grouped around in the tin and a liberal splash or olive oil to anoint the skin. The lemon makes sure there are plenty of juices (don’t forget to pierce the lemon skin) and the onions caramelize to give a wonderful rich colour and flavour to the resulting gravy. One tip I learned from Marcella Hazan is to start the chicken off breast down in the pan, so the lemon juice soaks it and the underside browns, then turn it over for the second half of cooking. It doesn't keep so perfectly shaped but it really does taste better.

Besides the chicken and potatoes we always do a tray of baked butternut, sprinkled with cinnamon and just catching at the edges for a sweet caramelly taste. Some fresh steamed vegetables are needed to offset all this roast richness, something green like broccoli and some carrots or peas.

Roasts are simple enough, once you have mastered the rhythm. Most of the work is in the preparation: peeling and par-boiling the potatoes, anointing the chicken with whatever oils and herbs you’ve chosen, peeling and dicing the butternut. Then you can shove it all in the oven for an hour and a half and leave it to cook, just checking in a couple of times to turn the potatoes and butternut and baste the chicken. Too much attention and you let all the heat out of the oven, losing the necessary degrees to achieve crispness and perfection. At the end there is another flurry of activity, draining vegetables and making gravy, carving the meat. The potatoes stay in the oven until the last minute, so they are as crisp and crunchy as possible and don’t sit sulkily in their bowl going soggy in their steam, while people are called to the table.

I have written a whole article on the perfect roast potato, so I won’t repeat the secret here and anyway, everyone has their own pet way of getting them just right, from Nigella Lawson’s semolina to those who swear by using goose fat for flavour. Mine just require short par-boiling, a shake in the pan to rough the corners and just enough hot olive oil to coat with a bit over, followed by an hour and a half in a hot oven.

Gravy is another controversial topic. My mother always used the juices from the meat, without any help from Bisto and that is what I like best, while my brother-in-law likes ‘army sauce’, thick brown Bisto blanket sauce, so sometimes we have two jugs on the table. To make my gravy, I roast onions in the pan with the meat to get a good caramelised flavour and brown colour, as chicken juices are pretty anaemic looking. When the chicken is cooked I take it out of the roasting pan and keep in warm, draw off most of the fat from the pan and then add in a liberal dash of wine, some water reserved from par-boiling the potatoes and then bubble it all up. The flavour is usually fairly concentrated, so taste it and see if you need more water. The only problem is it almost never quite makes enough gravy for my family, who love it soaked into their potatoes, even on their third helping!

After at least three weeks without a roast, there were a series of yums around the table as everyone tucked in happily to their favourite meal. The potatoes were shared out equitably, totaling six each and there were very few leftovers. I remember in my childhood, my mother managed to carve a chicken, so one half was Sunday lunch and the other half eaten cold with salad the next day. I think chickens have shrunk since then, as ours was a quivering ruin of bones with a few shreds of leg meat still attached by the end! And they had room for pudding...

WTSIM picnic basket

Picnics and I have a complicated relationship. I love them, I really do. Going to a beautiful spot and unpacking a simple but delicious meal, to eat in the fresh air, looking at a beautiful view…what could be better?

However, and this is a big but… I spent most of my twenties in beautiful parts of the Italian countryside, making picnics for sixteen people, every day for many weeks at a time.

My previous incarnation of picnic-maker extraordinaire

After about nine years of that, even though ten years have since passed, I am still totally saladed out. I've done the tomato in every possible computation. I've produced cannellini beans in a hundred different disguises. I've arranged prosciutto and salami in attractive presentations on just about every hilltop between Siena and Montepulciano.

Now when I make picnics for my family they get sandwiches.

So with Johanna's latest WTSIM theme being picnic fare I had to think long and hard what to make. Mini quiches were my first option. I love anything with pastry and don't often make it, so they are a treat and their small size means you get more pastry per portion, which is even better. Except I forgot to buy cream, and cream for the filling is a must in my quiches.

One good thing about my Italian culinary past is that it never included baking. I was catering for the five thousand from the side of a Mercedes minibus. At the most I had a gas camping stove in the colder months. Sometimes I could cook something up quickly in a hotel kitchen before heading off to my picnic spot at a picturesque abandoned farmhouse on a hill, but never ever did I even think about making bread. Who needs to anyway in Italy, where even the smallest town has a bakery wafting enticing smells of fresh bread into the morning air, where school kids stop off first thing for a slice of rosemary topped focaccia to get them through the rigors of the school bus ride.

With the deadline tomorrow I had to think quickly and decided to go for the simplest thing I could. I was making white bread anyway, to get a head start on the week. I diverted half the dough, divided it up into about six balls and flattened them into disks pressing my thumb down hard in about seven places on each. Once they'd risen again, I sprinkled them with sea salt, a generous brushing of olive oil and several rosemary leaves each and baked them for 15 minutes.

They made the perfect fake focaccia and are ideal as rolls to fill for the picnic-fatigued. I can guarantee that any filling, however plain, tastes a hundred times better with the rosemary and salt zing on top, cheese being a particularly good combination. They are just normal white bread inside, so are less oily than real focaccia. Next time we plan a picnic I'm going to make these the night before and add a bit of class to my sandwiches. You never know, I might even get around to making a salad to go with them one of these days and serve them on a red checked tablecloth!

P.S. Apologies for the photo of my fake focaccia. I had to photograph it under an electric lamp as there were only seconds to go before the lot got gobbled up for supper. My son found the perfect filling to be ... baked beans!

WTSIM Summer Pudding

It still seems so strange to be spirited into the middle of an English summer, the weirdest thing being the evenings that stay light until ten o’clock. The children are in bed, but still wide awake and chatting away, unconvinced that it really is bedtime, even though it’s way past their normal time.

We’ve had soft summer weather, some sun, some cloud, a threat of drizzle that fades to nothing, warm enough for T-shirts, with a gentle breeze now and then that teases you into a warm top, if you stay still too long. It’s hard to remember that we still need to wear sunscreen even under a cloudy sky.

Out in the garden the children have discovered wild strawberries nestling under their leaves and found that they are only sweet once they are red all round - the one in the photo looks completely plastic but tasted wonderful!

Today was the village street fair and my mother had our roles all organized – our son was to run the marble race that Grandpa used to do every year, with a wooden marble run that takes two marbles hurtling down parallel to see which is the fastest. She ended up manning it herself most of the time, as he wandered around watching all the other attractions.

I helped on the bric a brac stall and took my children’s money from them as they repurchased several of the things that we had donated, including half my old keyring collection! They couldn’t believe the purchasing power of three quid in bric a brac and have now amassed a collection of ceramic birds, soft toys, little boxes, cushions, bags and stuff that will need to be fitted into their cases on the return journey … I was kept so busy inventing prices for pots, ceramic knick-knacks, a playstation and all sorts, that I didn’t take any photos at all, even of my two older children, who had been persuaded into presenting the bouquets, after the fair had been pronounced open.

The hardest part was clearing up at the end, when we had to sort the leftovers into piles for the dump or to take to a charity shop. It was hard for me to send anything to the dump, when it was perfectly good to use still. In South Africa there is always someone who will be able to use something, however well-worn it is. Here we had to send a load of mismatched glasses and unwanted electrical goods to the dump, as nobody could think of anyone who would take them off our hands.

When I saw the theme of this month’s WTSIM event hosted by Jeanne was Berried Treasure, I knew that I’d be making a Summer Pudding at least once after I got here and in fact my mother had already planned one for this weekend, just in time for the deadline.

It has always been one of our favourite family puddings, the epitome of an English summer. Purple berry juices transforming stale bread into a luscious, jeweled slice of flavour to be smothered in cream and savoured. The classic version has redcurrants and raspberries in I think, but ours has always majored on blackberries, with raspberries and loganberries and had apple in to bulk out the berries. Blackberries are really an early autumn berry but my father was always an industrious gleaner from the hedgerows and usually picked enough to freeze for the rest of the year. You can use any sort of berries for this but they need an edge of sharpness, so strawberries and blueberries on their own would be too bland and sweet.

Summer Pudding Recipe

500g / 1 lb mixed berries

500g / 1 lb cooking apples

½ - 1 cup sugar

1 loaf stale white bread

These quantities are approximate, as it depends on the size of the bowl you use and how many berries you have. This does a medium size pudding basin. The sugar needs to be added to taste as the berries vary in sweetness. You are aiming to sweeten them enough to be pleasant but not sickly sweet.

Slice the bread thickly and cut off the crusts. Line a pudding basin with the slices, patch-working them together so that there are no gaps.

Peel, core and chop the apples and put them in a pan with a little water and sugar and stew gently for 5-10 minutes until starting to soften. Add the berries, which can still be frozen, and plenty of sugar.

Warm them over a medium heat, but don’t let them boil. As soon as a simmer is reached they are usually already tender enough, as you want the berries to retain their shape.

Spoon the stewed berry mixture into the bread-lined bowl until they are level with the top of the bread. Any left over juice can be kept to pour over it later. Put a layer of bread slices on top to seal in the berries.

Put a saucer or small plate that just fits into the top of the bowl on top of the bread layer and weight it, so that the berries are compressed and the juice soaks into the bread. Leave it for at least twelve hours and make sure that it stays weighted down.

Serve by turning the pudding onto a plate and pouring over a little of the leftover juice wherever the bread still shows white. Serve with double cream.

WTSIM breakfast

Breakfast on a school day is a bleary-eyed assembly of cereal packets, a 2l milk container, with maybe some raisins and banana for embellishments. We've always been a family that collects an extensive assortment of different cereals, each one of us having a different preference and some, like me, combining four of them in a very specific formula. When I'm breakfasting against the clock, with one eye seeing that the children eat something, one hand hurriedly spooning yoghurt into Youngest's bowl after she's spent ten minutes making up her mind what to have, I don't need the burden of any decision making process on my part - I can cope with the exact same breakfast every day, as long as I do have some. Going out to do the school run on an empty stomach would be unthinkable, put the day on emergency adrenaline mode ever after.

So when Johanna announced a WTSIM breakfast theme, it was hard to know what to write about. The full English breakfast fry-ups are my South African sister-in-laws' domain - once in a while we are invited to one or other house on a weekend morning to overindulge in bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and fried potatoes.

I have fond memories of breakfast in Italy on days off, when we'd saunter down to a bar in Siena, that was merely functional looking but well known for its pastries, and slowly down a couple of cappuccinos accompanied by pastries from an enticing range of flavours that always had you wanting to try the next one and the next. In the end I settled on a favourite which had a tang of orange zest and sprinkling of raisins.

I could of course depart from my normal breakfast pattern and experiment with a brand new recipe, wowing my family with muffins or a fancy bread, but with us only just crawling out of the flu slump, last weekend went by un-embroidered with culinary adventure.

Sometimes the children beg for pancakes for breakfast and occasionally I give in, in the hope of earning a few brownie points to start the weekend off. So I thought I'd give it another go tomorrow for the May Day holiday.

It usually ends up with me slightly frazzled at the edges with so much pre-breakfast activity, eating one or two pancakes hastily at the stove while the children douse theirs with cinnamon sugar and apricot jam and scoff them as fast as they're cooked. Tomorrow I resolve not to get flustered when the first pancake sticks irrevocably to the pan. I will just ditch it and the rest will turn out perfectly. Of course writing about these before I've made them this time round means that I haven't yet got a photo to illustrate the post with, but if I sneak it in belatedly tomorrow morning I can still make today's deadline for the WTSIM event!

The nicest, easy recipe I've found is of course one of Nigella's from her book Feast, for banana and buttermilk pancakes:

Banana and Buttermilk Pancakes

1 ripe banana
150g/6oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
250ml/ 1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon caster sugar
30g/ 1 ½ oz butter melted

Liquidize all the ingredients except the butter to a smooth batter in a food processor.

Stir in the melted butter when you are ready to start frying the pancakes.

Use a heavy bottomed non-stick frying pan or griddle.

Heat it to medium hot and dollop tablespoons of the mixture on to it. I usually fit four at a time on my biggest pan. (They turn out like what we called drop scones in England, not like the sort of pancakes that we had on Shrove Tuesday)

Flip them after about a minute, once the underside has set and allow to cook on the other side - check after half a minute.

Pile them onto a warmed plate until you have cooked the rest or serve straight into the mouths of the hungry hoards. Mine like these with cinnamon sugar.

I mix a teaspoon of cinnamon with a tablespoon of caster sugar and they just sprinkle it over the pancakes. Apricot jam is good or honey too. This recipe makes enough for three hungry kids and two abstemious parents.

Of course if I were breakfasting at the Nelly here in Cape Town my unswerving cereal habit would be abandoned in a flash. The tables piled high with every sort of breakfast food imaginable, cornucopias of fresh fruit, encyclopaedias of pastries and baked goods, as well as a hot counter where the eggs are freshly cooked in front of you however your whim dictates, not to mention the stunning setting of old world grandeur and lush gardens, would rather dim the appeal of corn flakes, oats and rice krispies and lead to scenes of over indulgence too painful to contemplate! Just as well that it's my husband that contrives breakfast meetings there occasionally rather than me!

I have to say that my mouth is drooling at some of the breakfast recipes I've seen on everyone else's blogs so far, almost enough to convert me to cooking weekend breakfasts properly ... !

Edited to add: Well if I thought I got frazzled just making pancakes on an empty stomach, adding a camera into the mix didn't really help to make a serene start to the day! It nearly did go into the mix and get sprinkled with cinnamon sugar! And the pancakes disappeared mid-photo session. Still you get the idea and the sun was slanting in through the window for a true South African autumn morning scene.

WTSIM Lentil Soup

Food and Family is two today! I had meant to celebrate my blog's second birthday with a post on cakes, as Charlotte did when her blog turned two recently, but then I remembered that the deadline for WTSIM is tomorrow, I haven't posted anything foodie for ages and happen to have just cooked an enormous batch of lentil soup which fits in with Jeanne's theme of pulses. So I'm celebrating extremely quietly on leftover soup and bread from our Autumn Festival, amid the fallout of piles of dirty dishes from feeding twenty people and then finding our borehole pump has broken on a Saturday night. This effectively means no running water until we can get the electrician out tomorrow morning (hopefully). Buckets are filled from our rainwater tanks and drinking water bought in 5 liter containers from the supermarket. Luckily it was hot enough to swim today, so we're not too smelly!

We didn't get much mists and mellow fruitfulness for our Autumn Festival yesterday - instead we had summer drawing out an extended last blast, so I was baking and cooking soup with the doors shut to keep out the hotter outside air.

My lentil soup recipe is a classic Italian one from Marcella Hazan. Perfectly simple it brings out the flavour of the lentils and then I add my secret ingredient - ham stock from our Christmas or Easter gammon, hoarded in the freezer for just such a moment. It brings an extra background smokiness that lifts a great soup to the sublime. Don't worry if you don't have any though - this soup has enough flavour even just made with water. In Italy I used to get the wonderful tiny Castelluccio lentils for this soup, in England I bought the Le Puy ones from France. Here I just use the ordinary cheap, small brown ones. Each sort bring their own character to the soup, the exquisite tiny Castelluccio ones are my favourite, with a firm texture and nutty flavour but it is worth making even with the cheapest lentils, as long as they are the brown ones.

Here is the original recipe from Marcella Hazan:

Italian Lentil Soup

2 tablespoons finely chopped onion
3 tablespoons olive oil
40g/1 ½ oz butter
2 tablespoons finely chopped celery
2 tablespoons finely chopped carrot
30g/ 1 ¼ oz bacon
220g/8oz tinned tomatoes, chopped with their juice
220g/8 oz brown lentils
1 litre/ 1 ¼ pints broth
salt and pepper
3 tablespoons parmesan cheese

Saute the onion in the oil and butter over a medium heat, until light gold.

Add celery and carrot and sauté for another few minutes.

Add bacon and cook for another minute.

Add tomatoes and their juice and cook at a gentle simmer for 25 minutes uncovered, stirring every now and then.

Add the lentils stirring well into the tomato mix then add the broth, salt and pepper.

Cook, covered, at a steady simmer until the lentils are tender (usually about 45 minutes, but taste them to make sure). Add water if the lentils absorb all the liquid.

Just before serving stir in the parmesan and a tiny knob of butter.

I tend to make it with rather less precise amounts and don't always have fresh parmesan available, so often serve it without. When I'm using ham stock I leave out the bacon, as it doesn't need it then. If you ever have a fresh parmesan crust leftover, you can add that to the soup at the lentil stage for even more depth of flavour.

Of course we also made pumpkin soup yesterday to use up the insides of these...

Posts to post

There are so many posts mulling in my mind but a faulty connection between my head and my computer has left them there, probably marinating nicely, but the blog cupboard has been sad and bare this last week.

I wanted to tell you about the school photos that I took again this year, coaxing smiles out of all but the coolest kids in the older classes; of my newly discovered Photoshop skills, whereby the spotty foreheads of the newly teenage girls have been smoothed gently into the background like a miracle acne cure, still discernible but not glaring out angrily in the spotlight - if only we could apply Photoshop to real life spots and wrinkles!

I've been meaning to post about my first ever attempt to cook artichokes - and still will, soon, soon, soon.

I've missed several food blogging events that I meant to write for - Apples and Thyme at Vanielje Kitchen, a lovely idea celebrating the food heritage that mothers pass on to daughters and shared kitchen moments, but we get another chance in December, so I'll make sure I do then; Cooksister's WTSIM topless tart has a deadline soon - I baked quiches last weekend and an apple tart today and, sin of food blogging sins, forgot to photograph them - maybe I'll write them up anyway.

Then Middle Daughter wanted her dolls house family to have their own story, so ideas have been swirling in my head for that. Her dolls house is currently occupied by a two-by-two procession of animals and the dolls have moved all the furniture out, with leopards prowling past the bunk beds, so I'm sure there is plenty of material there.

My son's first ever Class camp happens tomorrow - the whole class is spending its first ever night away at a nearby National Park and I blithely offered to go along as a helper.

I also undertook to bake enough bread for everyone for the two days and then added crunchies and muffins to the list, because I can't bear to think of the possibility of us going hungry. So this weekend I have been turning our kitchen into a bakery and churning out the loaves, as I also need to put enough in the freezer for the family while I'm away - for one whole night!

In a minute I'm going to tear my son away from the cricket and we'll set about the serious business of packing - the park has a gorgeous lagoon and we're supposed to have plenty of relaxed time on the beach …only there's a cold front predicted, so we need to pack minimally for all eventualities.

So I'll leave you with Youngest's latest work of art

Christmas is coming and the Princess and her Child have been decorating!

WTSIM Strawberry Cake

Belatedly catching up with the food blogging world I checked out this months wtsim at SpittoonExtra today, to find that the theme is cakes - a subject after my own heart - in particular layered cakes. This immediately brought to mind the strawberry sponge cake that I made for youngest's birthday, which I unfairly tantalised you with here a little while ago. So I thought I would risk repeating myself and give you the recipe this time too.

Her birthday falls at the beginning of our strawberry season, and apart from the year she was two, when overindulgence in strawberries had given her an allergy rash, she has demanded a strawberry cake for her birthday every time.

When you have good strawberries to lavish on a cake, all you need is a simple background to frame them. A plain sponge cake with just a hint of vanilla, proper cream whipped with just a smidgen of sugar to enfold the strawberries and relieve any residual tartness …no more. Anything else would be overkill and distract your taste-buds from the strawberry stars of the show.


Any Victoria sponge recipe will do, as long as it is a generous one and not too dry. Here is the recipe I used for a good basic sponge cake. It comes from Nigella Lawson's 'How to Eat' and takes advantage of her propensity for using a food processor to whip up a cake batter in a few hassle free moments - just what I needed in the last minute rush of getting a birthday ready, when I was thoroughly disorganised and still had the treasure hunt to think up and presents to wrap. The cake turned out light, moist and springy and completely restored my faith in sponge cake recipes after a few bad experiences.


Strawberry Sponge Cake Recipe

For the Cake
200g self-raising flour
25g cornflour
225g caster sugar
225g soft butter
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 eggs
4 tablespoons milk

For the Filling
250ml cream
500g ripe strawberries
1 tablespoon caster sugar
icing sugar to dust

Oven 180C/360
2 x 21 cm cake tins (I used slightly smaller ones than this but it worked fine) greased and lined.

Put all the cake ingredients in the food processor, except the milk and blitz until smooth. Add 2 tablespoons of milk and mix again. Check consistency - it should be of a soft dropping consistency. Add the rest of milk if needed. Pour equally into the two tins and bake for 25 minutes until the top feels springy and a skewer comes out clean. Cool for 1 minute in the tins then turn onto a rack to finish cooling.

When cool, whip the cream till fairly stiff with 1 tablespoon of sugar. Prepare the strawberries. I usually cut half the amount into quarters or chunks to go with the cream inside and just halve the rest to go decoratively on top. Spread a bit over half the cream in the middle and spread over the strawberry chunks, press the top layer on gently, then decorate the top with the rest of the cream and arrange the halved strawberries on top. If you like sift icing sugar on top, but don't over-do it, you want the scarlet strawberries to shine forth in all their glory.

Braai is South African for Barbecue

I wasn't born to a braai culture, I married into it. Barbecues in my childhood were a bit of a novelty, juggling English weather and recalcitrant charcoal to produce smoky burgers and sausages. Only when I found the South African I was to marry, did the finer points of cooking over a fire penetrate my consciousness.

Our wedding lunch in an apricot orchard here in South Africa was a braai of exceptional quality. Whole beef fillets encrusted with sea salt and black pepper, carefully cooked over glowing wood embers, tender as butter and rare inside, were the centrepiece of a South African feast. Under the auspices of his family I learned about cooking vegetables in foil parcels straight on the coals to achieve smoky, caramelised succulence - onions, butternut, potatoes. My husband, the braai master, has an unmatchable way with the tongs, turning the meat and foil packets frequently, so that they cook evenly without burning and has now refined his braai technique to use a Le Creuset casserole with a dash of wine in, at the edge of the braai, to finish off the sausages in, which produces a heavenly jus tasting of smoke, wine and sausage spice to be soaked up with plain boiled potatoes.

When we were still living in South London, we braved the neighbours' displeasure and English weather to produce many a varied barbecue, to refute a certain Radio 2 DJ's blasphemous assertion that to make a barbecue edible you have to precook everything in the oven first. In a European city you are handicapped by the smokeless fuel laws. Charcoal is OK but to get a true South African flavour to your braai it must be cooked over wood embers and there are even certain woods that are considered the best for braaiing over, the finer points of which I have yet to grasp. (For a full-on introduction to braai culture here is a site wholly dedicated to the fine art of the South African braai)

August in South Africa is however the off-season for braais, at least here in the Western Cape where we're having the wettest winter in decades. We may have barbecued in the rain in England, intrepid desperation driving us, but here we wait for the weather, assured of several months of summer and then only limited by the strength of the south-easter winds.

The deadline for WTSIM is today, the rain is pelting down outside and on Saturday when I could have braaied in the sunshine we were too busy making daisy chains, photographing flowers and lolling in the sun to set about building fires and photographing food. Such are my excuses! So for the WTSIM meatless barbecue event hosted by Cooksister, I'm having to relive last summer's braais and choose some of our favourite braaied vegetables to share. Looking back through my photo files though I discover a lapse. No photos of the vegetables to prove their existence. We must have gobbled them down too quickly. Please forgive me then if the photos are of the meat. I'll try to describe the vegetables and hope that you can visualise them without the pictures.

Our usual family braai centres on chicken wings, coated in a spice mixture that is patented by my brother-in-law. To go with it we often have a coil of lemon sausage or boerewors and a veggie pack wrapped in foil. Last summer a friend gave us a fresh marrow from his vegetable garden and on his recommendation we decided to try it on the braai. It was delicious. Thick slices of marrow, seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper, seared with grid marks on the outside and juicy with a delicate smoky flavour within.

Barbecued Marrow Slices

Take one medium sized marrow, as fresh as can be. Cut into thick slices (approx. 1.5cm / ¾ inch) and peel. You can leave the inner seeds in till after cooking. Brush both sides generously with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Then leave for a while for the oil to soak in. Cook on the grid, turning every few minutes, until the slices are cooked through and easily pierced with a fork. Serve straight from the fire as an accompaniment to the meat.

Barbecued butternut squash takes on a wonderful sweet, smoky flavour when cooked in foil on the embers, caramelised edges melting into inner softness, which I intensify with a liberal dash of cinnamon, to create a satisfying vegetable dish with enough flavour of braai to make vegetarians feel loved. Do plenty though because the meat eaters will also be clamouring for some. Warning - the cubes can go past caramel to charcoal if overcooked. It needs a thick layer of foil and an attentive braai chef to turn the package every so often

Butternut Squash cooked in foil on the fire.

Make a double layer of heavyweight tinfoil, which is big enough to fold over on itself to make a parcel. Smear a generous layer of butter over the centre part. Peel, de-seed and cube the butternut squash. The cubes should be roughly 1 - 1 ½ cm (½ - ¾ inch). Put them on the buttered foil. Season with salt and pepper and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. Put several more slivers of butter on top of the butternut squash. Fold the foil over the squash and make into a loose parcel, folding the edges over securely. Cook directly on the glowing embers at the edge of the fire and turn carefully every five minutes. It should take about 30 minutes but could need a little longer depending on the heat of the fire. Open the parcel carefully to check and watch your fingers, as plenty of sizzling steam will rise up from the squash. The squash should be tender and starting to caramelise at the edges.

Vegetable kebabs

If we have vegetarians to a braai I usually do some vegetable kebabs for them and remember to keep one side of the braai grid meat free.

An assortment of red, green and yellow peppers, mushrooms marinaded in olive oil, herbs and lemon, or yoghurt and spices, alternated with chunks of courgettes and soft dried apricots, all threaded onto wooden skewers, brushed with the rest of the marinade and cooked over the fire makes a delicious vegetarian substitute for meat. The edges of the peppers char slightly, the apricots caramelise and keep the vegetables next to them moist and the marinade flavours the absorbent mushrooms and keeps them succulent.

A braai isn't just about the food though, it is a social activity, an opportunity for the family to gather around the fire, watch the sun go down, put the world to rights over a beer or a glass of wine and to cuddle up under blankets and smell your supper as it cooks in front of you.

WTSIM Apple Dumplings

Apple and mulberry dumpling

This month my entry into WTSIM.. dumpling is more of a voyage of culinary experimentation than a recipe to be triumphantly passed on and heralded as an unqualified success. Johanna decreed stuffed dumplings to be the theme this month. I come from an English background where dumplings are to be found unstuffed, floating in stews, to bulk out the meat and sop up the gravy - robust fillers for hungry labourers and school children. I'd never before eaten a stuffed dumpling, let alone cooked one.

Coincidentally, I am reading Elisabeth Luard's Still Life at the moment. It is an account of her travels around Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia in the mid-Eighties, researching traditional country recipes for her book European Peasant Cookery. I love her style which is forthright, inquiring and persevering and am lost in admiration of the quantities of pickled herring and black bread that she managed to endure and, more to the point, persuade her accompanying husband to endure, in the pursuit of more enticing culinary traditions. She starts her journey in Munich and as she traverses Austria is challenged by a mammoth meal which culminates in four plum dumplings per serving. She offers the recipe and, with the WTSIM event in mind, I thought I'd spend a blustery Saturday afternoon conducting my own dumpling research.

I compared Elisabeth Luard's recipe to Johanna's suggestion and also found an Austrian cookery site here. All the recipes looked pretty similar and though I had no plums, I thought I could try with a combination of apples and mulberries. I'd already come across the concept of using potatoes combined with flour to make a dough, from the Italian potato gnocchi, that I'd once helped make in a family home on my travels through Italy. They are savoury, served in a tomato sauce, so I was interested in how the potato dough would turn out with a sweet filling.

I slightly softened the apple chunks in a little butter first, as the recipe seemed to demand soft fruit. The potatoes duly cooked, peeled and mashed, I made up the dough, divided it into twelve and started wrapping the fruit. This was achieved reasonably well, though I didn't know quite how much fruit to try and encase, and odd corners of apple chunks insisted on poking through then the mulberry juice also wanted to escape.

I ended up with twelve tidy balls and set to boiling them. I danced attendance expecting disaster but the cooking was achieved uneventfully, no exploding dumplings and I felt quite pleased. The final step was to fry breadcrumbs in butter to coat them in. I think Elisabeth demanded too much butter though, as they ended up soft and glistening rather than the crispy coating described, but here they were - dumplings on a plate.

The acid test of consumption was where I encountered a hitch. My chief tasters lined up with bowls in anticipation, sprinkled the dumplings with sugar and cinnamon and I awaited comments. I was none too confident, as adventurous eaters they are not and my first exploratory tasting had come away with an impression of rather doughy potato flavour.

Well the verdict came in: youngest rejected the dumpling, due to its tasting of potato (in indignant tones) though she ate the fruit from inside. My son returned the whole thing barely nibbled at. My six year old sprinkled on more sugar and consumed the whole thing with gusto, soon ready for seconds. My husband loyally tasted it, though I knew he'd find it too heavy, but he nobly ate half his. I.. well, in the spirit of culinary curiosity, I ate one and then a second, to examine how I could have made them lighter, fluffier or generally more appealing. This excess of fervour made it rather hard to contemplate cooking supper a bare couple of hours later with my stomach still loaded with dumplings!

I'm putting up photos so that you can all tell me where I went wrong. I think I needed much more fruit in the centre and to have made the dumpling coating much thinner, though I don't know how well they would have stayed together if they were too thin. Should I have seasoned the dumpling dough with either salt or sugar? Should I have dried them on paper towel before enveloping them in the crispy crumbs? It's very hard to judge, when I've never eaten the genuine article as prepared by an expert. I only know that mine were way too heavy and the dough rather bland.

Dumpling post mortem - please help with the verdict!

Nevertheless, it was stimulating to try cooking something so completely different to our usual fare, though I've a long way to go before I'll be doughty enough to tour Eastern Europe Luard style on a diet of herring, tripe, black bread and sauerkraut!

Here is Elisabeth Luard's recipe anyway:

Plum Stuffed Potato Dumplings

500g/ 1lb floury potatoes
25g/1oz butter
1 tablespoon cream
1 egg
275g/6oz plain flour
12 small plums (I used 2 apples and ½ cup mulberries)
12 small sugar lumps
½ teaspoon salt

to finish:

75g/3oz butter
4-5 tablespoons breadcrumbs
cinnamon
icing sugar

Boil the potatoes in their skins till soft. Peel them while still hot and mash with a fork, together with the butter and cream. Leave to cool for 10 minutes, then mix in the egg and flour. Knead until it comes together in a soft dough. You may need more or less flour, depending on the potato consistency.

Prepare the fruit. If using plums take out the stones and replace with the sugar lumps. If using apples cut into chunks and toss in a knob of butter over a gentle heat until just starting to soften (2 minutes). Divide the dough into 12 pieces and form into a ball then flatten to make a disc. Put the fruit in the middle and squash the dough around it and seal making it into a closed ball of dough.

Fry the breadcrumbs in the butter with a sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar until just crisp.

Bring a large pan of water to a simmer. Lower as many dumplings in as fit without crowding. Bring back to a gentle simmer and cook for 10-12 minutes until the dumplings have floated to the surface and are white puffy and firm.. Remove, rinse quickly under cold water, then toss in the breadcrumbs to give a coating.

Serve sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

Any tips on achieving the perfect dumpling are welcome. My six-year old would happlily eat them again, once I get up courage for another attempt!

Here is the WTSIM dumpling round-up, if you would like to see the huge variety of successful recipes contributed.