Cook sister!

Slow roasted tomatoes in olive oil

I have an admission to make.  For a large part of my life, I didn't eat tomatoes.  I picked them out of sandwiches, I ordered salads without them, I arranged them on the side of my plate in a line of evil, red half-moons.  I remember having debates with friends at university on why exactly the tomato was the most revolting of all fruits (I think in the end the consensus was that the slimy pips get everywhere and then petrify - who hasn't encoutered a library book where the pips from a long-forgotten tomato sandwich have become a permanent attachment to the prose?).  My friend Bronwyn was always happy because when we dined out together, she got double rations of tomatoes as I ditched mine.  And she was none too pleased when Nick (aka Tomato Boy) appeared on the scene and took her place as my preferred recipient of discarded tomatoes.

But then something happened:  I discovered sun-dried tomatoes.  Something about the intensity of their flavour struck a chord in me.  And, of course, because they were dried, the slimy pips were no longer an issue - hurrah!  From there, it was a short hop to eating baby plum tomatoes.  Oh, that sweet flavour, oh how cute, and popping them in your mouth whole once again meant no pips.  Things were definitely a-changing.  And sometime after that I went full-blown: I started eating tomatoes.  Any tomatoes.  I started expressing an opinion on good tomatoes and bad tomatoes. I started ordering caprese in restaurants.  Nick's days of double tomato rations were well and truly over.

But I still hanker after that intensely tomato-y taste of dried or semi-dried tomatoes, which is why the current flurry of slow-roasted tomato recipes doing the rounds on the food blogs caught my attention.  In particular, I took a long look at Alanna's master recipe and Kalyn's take on it and soon my mind was made up - I would spend a Sunday roasting tomatoes! One quick trip to the Queen's Market later and I had about a dozen large tomatoes and a whole day at home.  Bliss.

I made a couple of modifications to the recipes, but basically followed their route.  Why argue with the experts ;-)  I must warn you - don't do this unless you have a LOT of time as it does take all day.  I also could not find Roma tomatoes, so I just got vine-ripened ones and it worked just fine.  The herbs can vary according to your taste or what you have available, and the sugar is my personal preference.

 

SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES

Ingredients

About a dozen large, ripe tomatoes
2 Tbsp good olive oil
2 Tbsp dried basil
1 Tbsp dried oregano
1 Tbsp dried sage
1 tsp dried rosemary
salt, pepper and sugar
enough olive oil to cover cooked tomatoes when placed in a jar

Method

Wash the tomatoes and cut into halves or into quarters, depending on the size and your taste.  I did quarters.

Miw the oil and spices together in a large bowl and toss the tomatoes in the mixture until well coated.

Spray a baking sheet with olive oil and arrange the tomatoes on it, cut side down.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper, as well as a tablespoon or so of sugar.  You can also spray a little more olive oil on them.

Place the baking sheet in an oven that has been preheated to 120C or 100C (depending on how patient you are!).  Sit back, relax and wait for the house to start smelling glorious.

You will begin to see a difference after 2-3  hours - a little shrivelling.  Check them after about 7 hours and if using quartered tomatoes like me, flip them onto their other cut side. 

After 9-11 hours, depending on the temperature of your oven, they should be ready. The tomatoes should have shrunk to about half to a third of their original size, the skin should be puckered and should be able to be pinched off with relative ease. 

Remove from the oven when done.  Alanna and Kalyn both say to remove the skins while they are still warm, but I rather like having the skin on (plus it's less work for me!).  From there, you can either use them immediately, freeze them in batches to use throughout winter, or do what I did - put them in a glass jar, add a couple of garlic cloves, cover with olive oil and store them in the fridge while thinking about recipes in which to use them. Should you be slightly more serious about preserving them for longer, sterilise your glass jars before adding the tomatoes and oil and seal before storing in the pantry. 

Don't be put off by the long cooking time - these are seriously worth it.  The slow roasting intensifies the tomato flavour and the sprinkling of sugar gives a slightly caramelised flavour.  I have had them on pasta (recipe to follow soon), on pizza and in sandwiches and they are fantastic in all three incarnations.  Or eaten straight from the jar as a snack. Not that I would do such a thing...!

This post is my entry for this month's Waiter There's Something in My... savoury preserve!  The host is Johanna - keep an eye on her site for the roundup! 

Heartsore

“His name was never mentioned in dispatches

Nor was he hero of the desperate stand

His death obscured no headlines...

…

Yet one there was for whom his life held meaning

And with his passing grief walled up the sun”

From The Inarticulate - Andrew Taylor

Every day of our lives we meet people. Some, only fleetingly – the shop assistant, the petrol attendant, the person we chatted to in the queue at the bank. Others linger in our lives for longer – school friends, varsity friends, colleagues. And others shape the way we look at the world. Peter was one of these people.

I can remember the day the foundation of our lifelong friendship was forged as clearly as yesterday. It was during the December school holidays in 1982 and Peter was about to go to Wits. I had been visiting my schoolfriend Alison that afternoon and up to that point, Peter was always “Alison’s brother” to me - five years older and living in another social sphere altogether. But for some reason that afternoon we got talking about cars. Having been born to a car fanatic father, Peter’s obsession with four-wheeled machines struck me as perfectly normal, and soon we had a little pocket car book out and we were going through it page by page, with me expressing the opinions I’d learnt from my father on each and every vehicle, and Peter amazed that I’d even heard of some of them. I was star-struck and he must have been mildly impressed because he proceeded to write to me from Wits – a first year engineering student writing to a 14-year-old girl – imagine! And although we never lived in the same city after 1982, the foundations were laid for him to become one of my closest friends.

After all these years, when suddenly called upon to describe the essence of what made him who he was, I panic. What if the words don't come?  But then slowly they do, and suddenly the page fills up with a list.

Cars is obviously the first. Oh man, he loved them. When he first got his driving license, he used to say that the family dog Charka wanted to go to the airport to watch the planes take off, when secretly he just wanted an excuse to drive. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that my father was an avid collector of cars and pretty soon I arranged for him to pop round to my parents house during university holidays and see the collection. I remember Peter and my dad standing in front of an open car bonnet and warble on about “the sheer visual impact of the engine”. I thought they were nuts, but to Peter a beautiful car was the stuff of dreams.

Teacher is another word that springs to mind. When we were studying, Peter never aspired to be a lecturer. In fact, he and I for many years had a bet on as to who would get their company car first. But by the time he had finished his studies it was so blindingly obvious that he was a natural teacher that this is what he pursued as a career. I was privileged on one occasion to be around to see the kind of loyalty and love he inspired in his students. In the early 1990s my mom and I happened to be in Johannesburg at the time of his birthday. In cahoots with us and with Alison, some of his students arranged for a fake menu to be printed with a picture of Peter inside, and to be delivered to our table together with champagne. Peter was still trying to wave away the unordered champagne when he spotted the picture of himself on the menu. “Bloody hell!” was about all he managed to splutter before the laughing students leaped out of hiding and joined us. He was a natural teacher who clearly inspired a deep affection amongst his students and I for one can’t think of a more inspirational teacher.

Optimism is another word I strongly associate with Peter. He was never one for moping and I don’t think I ever saw him be negative or expect the worst. He was relentlessly cheerful even in the face of adversity; he believed passionately in the future of this country; and he always believed the best about people. Sometimes this seemingly unfounded optimism could be infuriating, but eventually he would always win you over and you would end up seeing the world through his rosy spectacles.

But above all, Peter was a true gentleman. So much so that when he acquired his cat, for a long time he did not know if it was a boy or a girl. I said to him “but for heaven’s sake, just lift up the tail and have a look – it’s pretty easy!”. He replied in horror “but that would be an invasion of its privacy!” In a world where these things are sadly less and less valued, he would still open doors for ladies, make seemingly effortless conversation with absolutely anybody, watch his language around girls, help strangers, and be kind and courteous to everyone he met. Even the nurses in the oncology department where he spent his final days could not stop remarking on how polite he was and how he actually bothered to thank them when they did things for him. It was as if he had stepped into this world from a previous, gentler age and although he was destined never to make an impression with his physical size, his kind and gentle ways made him more of a man than those twice his size.

On 7 September this year, Peter's sister Alison let me know that he had been ill and was in hospital for tests.  He had a swollen lymph node in his neck and had been diagnosed as anaemic so they had done a biopsy on the lymph node and a lumbar puncture. I texted him immediately and he said not to worry - it was probably an infection of his lymphatic system. But when they had not allowed him to go home from the hospital almost a week later I did begin to worry. On 14 September Alison let me know that the test results were back - cancer. The word struck me like a blow to the solar plexus and memories of Christelle came flooding back. By 16 September Peter was allowed home for the night and I could finally call him and talk privately. He sounded so weak and unlike himself that I was shocked, even though Alison had warned me to expect some decline. He told me that he had Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and that he was unlucky on two counts: the cancer had spread to lymph nodes on both sides of his diaphragm (making it stage III), and it was a particularly aggressive form of NHL. Still, the doctors seemed hopeful that it would respond well to chemotherapy and had decided to start Peter on a 6-month course as soon as possible.

During the next week, we exchanged text messages regularly as he was readmitted to hospital to prepare him for chemotherapy. He told me how emotional he was finding facing his own mortality and told me to be grateful for every morning that I woke up and could get out of bed with no problem.  But the conversation still ended on a positive note and we both sent our love.  My weekend was busy and I only got home again late on Sunday, when Alison called me out of the blue and in tears to say that Peter had become incoherent sometime between when she left him on Saturday evening and returned on Sunday.  In desperation she had tracked down his doctor who told Alison as gently as possible that the cancer was marching on relentlessly and that Peter probably had days rather than weeks left to live. 

Peter passed away peacefully on Monday evening, having spent his last day in the company of his family and close friends. 

My brain tells me quite cheerfully that this could not have happened.  Obviously there must be some mistake!  When the Rugby World Cup started on 6 September, he was having tests for some unspecified infection and worrying about getting his fourth years' projects marked on time, and before we even got to the rugby quarter finals, he was dead?  How the fuck does than even begin to happen?? Surely bright, cheerful, clever, funny Peter must be OK?  Surely there was far too much life-force in that body and optimism in those eyes to fade so fast and so soon?

It seems surreal to think that I will never meet him at Johannesburg airport again, that he will never send me another e-mail, and that I will never hear his cheery "Hi, doll" at the other end of the phone.  I will no longer be able to reminisce with him about the teddy with champagne and chocolates I extravagantly sent him for Valentine's Day in 1988; about the night we went to dinner with my mother and convinced ourselves that the lights of the Union Buildings in Pretoria were flicking on and off; about the night we drove home from Sun City listening to the second movement of the Emperor Concerto; about doing the Vietnamese Waltz and the Wits v UPE quarters tournament in Plett over new Year 1989. 

I could go on, but none of it changes the essential fact that he is irrideemably gone, and however incredible we may find that, we are all going to have to find a way to accept that over the coming months and count our various losses.  John and Barbara have lost their only son; Alison and Linda a brother; Danielle and Joshua an uncle; Ken and Simon a brother-in-law. And as for me, I have lost my first love and one of my dearest friends. 

May you rest easy, my dear friend, and may you find the peace that so often eluded you in this world.

Peter Roberts, 1964 - 2007

Gingery baked nectarines

You know how sometimes you have guests around, whip a dish out of the oven, plate it, serve it, snap off a couple of photos that you think will be OK, and then put away the camera and get back to socialising?  And you know how sometimes those unplanned photos can be the best?  Well, sometimes the opposite also holds true and the photos are just ghastly, and no amount of fiddling in Photoshop will fix them :-(

So you are going to have to take my word for the fact that these taste a lot better than the photo makes them look.

I love nectarines - they come in useful as a breakfast, as a summery starter, as an addition to salads, and as a dessert.  Together with some sort of baked apple dish, they are my favourite short-notice standby dessert, but when my friends Greg and Gail came to visit over the summer, I decided to try something a little more ambitious than my usual stick-em-in-the-oven approach.

I had some leftover ginger nut (ginger snap) cookies from making my glorious white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake, so I decided to use them to make a filling of sorts for the nectarines, to make the dessert slightly more substantial and to add a bit of zing to the sweetness.  Coming after the starter of green bean, broad bean and mozzarella salad and a main of salmon en croute, these were the perfect light ending to the meal.  If only the camera could have captured their taste instead of their looks!

GINGERY BAKED NECTARINES (serves 4)

Ingredients

4 large, ripe nectarines
4-6 ginger nuts/snaps
25 ml medium cream sherry
soft brown sugar
mascarpone or Greek yoghurt to serve

Method

Place the ginger biscuits in a single layer in a flat dish and pour the sherry over them.  Leave to stand for hald an hour or until the sherry has softened the biscuits enough for you to mash them into a paste. 

Pre-heat the oven to 200C.  Halve the nectarines and remove their pits.  Fill the hollow of each half with the ginger biscuit paste and sprinkle with soft brown sugar.

Place the nectarines halves hollow side up in an oven proof dish and bake for about 15 minutes or until the flesh is soft and the sugar has melted.  Serve warm with mascarpone or Greek yoghurt.

Oh, and make sure your dining room is well-lit so that your pictures look vaguely edible!

I was planning to submit this for this month's Heart of the Matter event but I see I have missed the deadline due to various unhappy events in my off-blog life.  So I'm just going to fling myself at Ilva's mercy and even if she does not include me, do go and check out her roundup of heart-friendly fruit recipes.

DMBLGiT September - only a week left!

The entries are rolling in at a steady clip for the September edition of DMBLGiT and let me tell you, there are some stunners. 

I just thought I'd remind those of you who still want to enter that the deadline is midnight GMT on 1 October - details on how to enter can be found here.

I have created a web album here so that you can all admire the entries.

And I just want to let all of yuo who still plan to enter know that I will be at the Munich Oktoberfest from Fri 28 Sept to Mon 1 October and I will NOT have internet access.  This means that if you leave your entry to the last minute and send it in over the weekend, there is no way that it will appear in the album before 2 October.  And no amount of e-mailing will change that as I won't be checking e-mails either ;-) 

So... get your entries in over the next 2 days and I will put them in the album before I go.  All the weekenders will have to wait till Tuesday to see their name in lights. 

Happy snapping!

Cheese olives

Life likes to throw little surprises our way.

Some of them are good.  Like having something you lost returned to you by a good samaritan.  Or being upgraded to business class for free on a long-haul flight.  Or a longed-for gift bought by an attentive partner.  Or winning the lottery ;-)

Some are not so good.  Like finding your lover in bed with somebody else.  Or finding out that the flight left at 2pm, not 5pm like you thought.  Or opening your phone bill and finding out your teenage son's girlfriend lives inTimbuktu. 

And some are culinary.  Like taking a tentative bite of something you've never eaten and finding it delicious.  Or taking a big bite of food and finding out it's drenched with hot chile.  Or following a recipe to the letter, only to find out you've written down a vital amount incorrectly.  Or biting into what you think is a cherry cookie, only to find out it's a cheese olive.

I confess - the last two examples are, shall we say, not entirely hypothetical.

One of the things my mom and I regularly baked together was cheese olives.  We had got the recipe from an unusual source - one of my brother's school friend's mothers.  That in itself is not unusual, you might say, and you'de be right.  But if you met the mother in question, you might think unusual is far to restrained a description!  On one occasion when my mom went to fetch my brother, said friend's mother (let's call her Mrs S.) came to answer the doorbell.  For reasons known only to her - whether safekeeping, adornment or otherwise - when she opened the door she was wearing her hair in curlers and a pair of her husbands Y-fronts on her head.  On another occasion she had a long discussion with my mom about buying shoes and regaled her with how the pair she had recently bought was too small, but she was determiend to stretch them.  Sure as nuts, my mom looked down and Mrs S. was wearing a pair of shoes on the wrong feet - to stretch them of course.  And when she fell pregnant with her fourth child, my mom asked whether they were planning many more.  Mrs S. replied "no - now that we know what is causing it, we are going to stop". 

I feel the need to point out that both she and her husband were qualified attorneys. 

So surprises were always on the cards there.  But Mrs S. did have her head on straight when it came to baking. And the recipe for which I will always remember her is the one for cheese olives.  As you can see from the pictures, these little babies were basically little balls of cheese-straw-style dough, but hidden inside each ball was a pimento-stuffed olive.  Sometimes, if you weren't careful, a crack in the dough would allow the pimento to seep out during cooking, looking for all the world like a bit of red cherry flesh.  So when my brother came into the kitchen one day and found a tray of these cooling, he spotted the red, assumed it was a cherry cookie of some sort and popped one in his mouth.  Oh the face he pulled when the decidedly un-cherry-like flavour hit his tongue. Surprise!!

About a year and a half ago, I decided to retrieve this recipe from my mom's hand-written recipe book, so on a trip home, I copied the recipe down by hand to bring back to London with me.  Shortly afterwards, Johanna and I had our joint blog-birthday party and I decided to make cheese olives.  I followed the recipe carefully, although I did think at the time that the dough was stickier than I remember, but I put this down to a trick of memory.  Put the baking sheet in the oven and opened the door 15 minutes later, expecting to see little bite-sized cheesy doughballs.  Instead... there was a lava-like sea of melty cheese that had spread clear across the cookie sheet, dotted here and there with lumps where the olives were smothering under their cheesy blanket.  Um, oops.  Turns out the correct recipe was a cup of flour and half a cup of butter, not half a cup of each.  Surprise!!

Now, having rectified this little mistake, I have resumed my successful baking of cheese olives.  So when I had half a dozen food bloggers coming over to my place yesterday for a honey tasting followed by a tea, I decided to redeeem myself after the disasterous rendition last summer and treat them to proper cheese olives. 

I'm also submitting this post (belatedly!) for the lovely Stephanie's Blog Party where the theme this month is "It's what's inside".  As is customary, Stephanie wants bite-sized snacks as well as drinks and music.  WIth these babies I suggest (what else) a dry martini with an olive.  And on the stereo, unquestionably INXS with Devil Inside ;-)  Enjoy the party!

CHEESE OLIVES (makes about 3 dozen)

Ingredients

about 36 pimento-stuffed olives
2 cups grated mature cheddar cheese
1 cup plan flour
1/2 cup butter
1/4 tsp Tabasco sauce
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp paprika

Method

Rub the butter into the dry ingredients.  Mix in the cheese.  Flatten small balls of dough into circles and wrap each around an olive, returning any excess dough to the mixing bowl.  Roll the ball between your hands to get it round and to make sure there are no cracks.

Bake on a baking sheet lined with baking paper at 200C for about 15 mins or until beginning to turn golden brown.  Serve warm, with cocktails.

Sticky BBQ chicken sundowners

I love food on sticks.  Hot, cold, sweet, savoury... you name it, I love it.  I don't know what exactly it is about food on sticks that's so perennially appealing either, but I'm guessing it's that whiff of the fairground or of streetfood that appeals to me.

When I think back to my childhood, I remember the total fascination that I had for candy floss.  We only really had it once a year when Playland (later Pleasureland) rolled into town with their rollercoaster, the House of Horrors, the bumper cars, the swings, the myriad of games to win soft toys and, of course, the funfair food.  I don't think we ever ate any "real" food there (my parents were never fans of either hamburgers of hot dogs!) but I always made sure I got some candy floss.  I was fascinated by the machine that seemed to make this pink fluffy stuff as if by magic, and I loved how you got a ball as big as your head to carry around on a cardboard stick.  For an extremely slow eater like me, having some sort of candy on a stick that didn't melt messily was paradise! 

Later, there was my toffee-apple-making phase, which started when our local supermarket started stocking toffee apple kits: basically a bunch of lollipop sticks and a bag of sugar with red food colouring added).  My brother, my best friend Andrea and I would take over the kitchen for the afternoon, making the caramel (while my mother hovered by the phone, ready to dial 911 should the need arise!) and getting threads of red sugar all over everything.  The result was 6 gleaming red apples sitting on a strip of wax paper, some of which would get eaten and some of which would have their toffee picked off, the apple slightly nibbled and then tossed away.  The irreverence of youth. 

And still later, Saturday nights in our house meant only one thing:  Magnum PI on TV at 9p.m. while having chicken sosaties (kebabs) from Woolworths.  The whole family adored the sosaties and thus my lifelong love of sosaties began.   Myfavourite thing on a braai has for years been chicken sosaties.  Most supermarkets in South Africa (and definitely the Spar near my house) sell these as a matter of course.  At the butcher's counter, there are various flavours of chicken sosaties - sweet & sour, peri-peri, lemon & herb and BBQ being popular flavours.  These are particularly delightful because they are made out of thigh, not breast meat, meaning that they have more fat and remain far more succulent than diced breast kebabs.  Why they are not more popular in this country, I do not understand.  I have in a never-to-be-repeated fit of nostalgia grabbed a pack of chicken kebabs off the Sainsbury's shelves, only to discover that they were chicken nugget-style reformed chicken mush, shaped vaguely into cubes and totally inedible cardboard once they had been on the braai.  McSosaties, anyone??

And then of course, there are chicken sundowners.  These are a fairly recent addition to the pantheon of South African braai meats but they have caught on in a big way.  Basically, it's marinated chicken wings, each threaded along its length onto a skewer, ready for the grill.  Stretching the wing out like this means that you get properly crips skin all over (usually, the skin in the folds around the joints remains resolutely uncrispy), and the stick means you can serve it straight off the grill - guests simply hold the skewers until the meat is cool enough to eat.  No mess, no fuss!

Seeing as we recently had 14 people at our house for the annual Big South African Braai, the concept of no mess, no fuss was doubly appealing, which is how Nick and I came to make these fantastic sticky sundowners as appetisers.  The recipe is an adaptation from our dearly beloved South African Kettle Braai Cookbook and it was a hit - so much so that Nick and I had to scramble to make sure we got a taste before the guests finished them all!

Now if I can serve mint Magnums as dessert next year, my eat-on-a-stick-no-mess-no-fuss-entertaining bliss will be complete...

STICKY BBQ CHICKEN SUNDOWNERS

Ingredients

About 24 chicken wings
60 ml mayonnaise
60 ml tomato sauce
30 ml Hoi Sin sauce
45 ml dark soy sauce
60 ml smooth apricot jam
45 ml cider vinegar
30 ml clear honey
2 cloves garlic, crushed
45 ml chicken stock
45 ml water
black pepper

Method

Combine all the marinade ingredients in a small saucepan and heat until warmed through, stirring to create a smooth mixture.  Place the chicken wings in a large (or a few smaller) resealable freezer bags and carefully pour in enough marinade to cover them.  Make sure you squeeze out as much air as possible before sealing the bag so that the wings are properly coated.  Allow to marinate in the fridge overnight. 

On the morning of the braai, soak wooden or bamboo skewers in water for 10 minutes, then thread the wings onto skewers.  If you are feeling energetic, for proper sundowners the wing should be extended in a straight line and skewered along its length.  But let me assure you that with slippery marinated wings, this is tricky, so we simply skewered them two to a skewer as you see in the picture. (For the Real Deal you should skewer the wings before marinating, but then you will not be able to use the freezer bag method described above.)

Prepare an indirect fire on your kettle braai and place a foil drip pan between the coals.  Place the chicken wings on the grid over the drip pan. Cover the kettle and cook for about 20 minutes, brushing with marinade once during this time.  Serve hot off the grill.

The Baskerville, Shiplake

Following on from my post about our delightful food blogger picnic at the Henley Royal Regatta, I though I'd tell you about the wonderful meal we had the night before in Shiplake, just up the road from Henley itself.  Andrew very kindly invited us to stay over and so Nick and I drove up from London on Friday after work.  All was smooth sailing until we got to the north-western corner of the M25 and then things ground abruptly to a halt.  Okeydokey.  Lots of panicky phonecalls to Andrew later, we finally arrived in Shiplake - considerably later than I would have liked, but at least Andrew had acted as the advance party and secured our precious table.  As it was, the staff had been eyeing those two empty seats speculatively, so Andrew was rather glad to see us! 

The Baskerville is the epitome of a small (affluent) village pub - usually the only one around and packed exclusively with locals.  If you're lucky, such establishments will take pride in their locally-sourced ingredients and put on a fine culinary show.  If you're not, you can expect microvawed-to-within-an-inch-of-oblivion chicken kievs from Asda.  Luckily, the Baskerville falls squarely in the former category and, in fact, it won the Counrty Dining Pub of the Year award for 2007 (awarded by the Good Pub Guide).  On my previous visit here with Andrew, we had a drink at the bar and it was indeed full of quiet locals.  However, seeing as this is the Big Social Weekend of the year around these parts, the place was packed to the rafters with blazered and bladdered visiting Hooray Henrys, talking at top volume about their sometime rowing exploits and their trust funds, or suchlike.  Not exactly ideal, but I doubt anywhere in the area would have been any diffferent that night!

No sooner had we sat down than we were served, and soon we were happily sipping our wine (the El Coto Crianza Rioja 2000) and perusing the menu.  I started with the irresistible smoked monkfish which the restaurant apparently smoke themselves.  It was served on a small potato and pickle salad, along with daubs of rather pretty chile jam (pictured above).  Not only did it look lovely and delicate, but the flavours really worked together.  The dense exture of monkfish lends itself rather well to smoking and the salty, smoky taste married well with the sweet chile jam.  A lovely light and summery starter.  Andrew started wth scallops which were among the plumpest I have ever seen, in a lightly curried sauce.  These were so delicious as to make me momentarily regret having ordered the monkfish but my regret was short-lived.  As I may have mentioned before,  I find it very hard to resist duck if it is on the menu, and so for my main it will come as no surprise to hear that I had the duck breast, served with new potatoes.  It was done to total perfection – moist and pink on the inside but with skin done to crispy deliciousness.  It was also one of the biggest portions of duck breast that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting - I could not finish it!  Both Nick and Andrew had the lamb which was fall-apart tender and again, generously proportioned. 

The only painful part of the evening came when we attempted to pay (why is this always the hardest thing to do in any restaurant?). There was some sort of problem with their card machines and although the restaurant was packed, only one was working. Despite asking for the bill twice, all we caught were tantalising glimpses of waitresses clutching the one precious machine, darting here and there in the restaurant, but never anywhere near us. In the end we stood up en masse and loitered furtively by the bar in an attempt to grab the attention of whoever had the machine in their possession at that moment. The waitress who eventually processed our payment seemed to forget halfway through the transaction what she was doing and Nick had quite a job getting his card back from her.

But that (I hope) transient complaint aside, there was a lot to like about the Baskerville Arms. The food speaks of good ingredients and is neither fussily prepared nor served. The room is pleasant (especially where we sat in the bay widow by the bar) and I suspect if would be even lovelier if you went when it was emptier. In fact, this is the kind of pub that everyone dreams of having up the road from their house but sadly, very few of us do. When that big lottery win comes in I guess I'll just have to move to Shiplake...

Food: 8/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience:  6/10 (would be higher on a quieter night)
Value:  9/10

The Baskerville
7 Station Road
Lower Shiplake
Oxfordshire
RG9 3NY

Tel.: +44 (0)1189 403332

Does My Blog Look Good in This - September 2007

Seeing as Andrew recently posted the winners of the enduringly popular Does My Blog Look Good in This? event for August, I guess it must be time to announce the next round.  Yes, folks, the Cooksister herself will be hosting this month's event! 

So... what are the rules?

• Only one food photograph may be entered per person
• The photograph must have been taken by you
• The photograph must have been posted on your blog during August of 2007
• The deadline to submit your entry is October 1 at midnight, UK time
• A panel of judges will assess the quality of all of the entries before eventually selecting winners from the pictures.  There will be winners in the following categories:
  
  • Aesthetics: composition, food styling, lighting, focus, etc.
  • Edibility: Does the photo make us want to take a big bite out of our computer monitor while drooling on our keyboard?
  • Originality: a photo that makes you stop, look twice, and think "wow, I never thought of photographing it like that before!"
  • Overall Winner: the photograph that scores the highest when individual scores for Aesthetics, Edibility and Originality are added up.

So how can you join in?

• Draft an e-mail with DMBLGiT in the subject line.
• Attach one qualifying food or drink photo, preferably 350 pixels in width.
• Include the following:
  
  • Your name
  • Your blog URL
  • The title of the image/what it is
  • The URL of the post where the photo first appeared
  • The camera you used
• Send me the e-mail

The standard of entries has just been getting higher with each passing month, so I can hardly wait to see what you come up with!

Spicy plum crumble in a flash

So you've heard of speed dating?  I predict the next craze will be speed pudding.  Well, it will be in my house, in any event.  Old married ladies like me don't have much use for speed dating ;)

Speed pudding happens when you've had a nice meal but you still feel inexplicably peckish.  Ice cream does not sound like it will fill the gap, and maybe (like me) you're just not a sweets and chocolates person.  So... you simply head for the kitchen and make a pudding, speedily and from what you find lying about in the kitchen.  I have on occasion had friends staying and after dinner I've announced that I wanted to make pudding - who votes for chocolate and who votes for apple caramel.  Said friends would look at me nonplussed.  What - you have TWO kinds of pudding in your freezer?  Because surely a pudding is something you buy from Sainsbury's and heat in the microwave or oven? 

Au contraire.  Warm puddings are some of the most forgiving things you can make.  They don't have to look stylish and delicate, and their ingredients are such that, even if things don't turn out as planned, the result is usually edible ;-) Many of them can be made with store cupboard ingredients (like self-saucing chocolate pudding) or fruit that's a day or two past its best.  And hardly any of them need to take you more than 10 minutes to prepare.

My favourite speed pudding of all time was when I was living in South Africa and Nick in London, and he called me one night asking "what dessert can I make with apples?".  I was about to launch into a long explanation when he hissed "the guests are at the table - we finished dinner and they're still hungry!"  No pressure!  And so I talked him through microwave stuffed baked apples which the guests were enjoying no more than 15 minutes later.

These days, it's far more likely that I will wander into the kitchen and make a fruit-based pudding to accompany some late-night movie on TV for just the two of us.  Once again, friends will say "but it's just the two of you!  Surely it's too much trouble to make a pudding?"  But I dare you to try this recipe and rell me it's too much trouble.  To me it's more like a huge return for an embarrasingly small effort.

And the consequences are far less complicated than with speed dating ;-)

SPICY PLUM CRUMBLE (for 2)

Ingredients

250g plums (about 4 plums depending on the size)

50g sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ground cloves

2 cardamom pods

25ml sherry (medium cream)

40g flour

50g oats

50g butter

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 170C.  Wash the plums and slice them in half to remove the stone.  Then cut each half into 3-4 pieces.  Remove the seeds from the cardamom pods and crush as finely as possible with a pestle and mortar.

Spread the plum slices over the base of an oven-proof dish.  Sprinkle with the sherry, half each of the cinnamon, cloves and cardamom.   Also sprinkle with half the sugar. 

Rub the butter into the flour and remaining spices.  Stir in the oats, remaining sugar and spices and spread over the plums.  Bake uncovered for 40 minutes. 

Serve with whipped cream, mascarpone or ice cream.

NOTES:  This is a great way to use up plums that are either slightly past their prime or were picked slightly green and never really improved.  ("Ripen in the bowl"? My ass!).  I reduce the amount of sugar in this recipe if the plums are sweet and fully ripe.  The sherry is optional but I think it makes for a more grown-up dish.  If you are not into spice, you can also reduce the spiciness by leaving out the cloves and cardamom.  Don't leave out the cinnamon though!

Oktoberfest, honey and savoury preserves

Contrary to what the enigmatic of this post may suggest, we haven't devised some new and super-esoteric blog event.  The "Does my burning sugar-high honey look good at Oktoberfest with savoury preserves, waiter" extravaganza?  Anybody?  Anybody??

Naaah, it's just me being lazy and fitting three smaller snippets into one post without devising a snappy title.

MUNICH OKTOBERFEST

Firstly, in case you hadn't noticed, September is marching on and that can mean only one thing...  Oktoberfest is approaching!  Many people all over the world will be celebrating this traditional German event - I know that the Port Elizabeth German club always puts on a big show that I religiously attended as a student.  But this year we will once again be attending the Big Daddy of all the fests:  Munich Oktoberfest.  If there are any of you out there who plan to attend this enormous festival between 22 September and 7 October this year, have a look at my Oktoberfest essential survival tips, developed after a number of years spent in the tents.  And for those of a more voyeuristic bent, here are my 2004 and 2006 diaries of the Fest so that you cen read what we got up to.  Prost!

HONEY TASTING

Secondly, a long time ago (June?) I proposed to have a honey tasting at my house in the late summer and then promptly forgot abotu it until the date I had set was practicalyl upon us.  Eeek!  One slight reschedule later and we are now having a honey tasting at my place in East London in Saturday 22 September, from about 1pm.  We already have about 6 bloggers attending and between us we have honey from Austria, Spain, Morocco, Italy, England, Belgium and more.  It should be an interesting afternoon.  If you would like to join us, hurry as space is limited.  Drop me an e-mail and I can send you further details. 

WAITER, THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY... SAVOURY PRESERVE

And thirdly, the lovely Johanna (my co-conspirator together with Andrew in the creation of Waiter, there's something in my... ) will be hosting WTSIM this month.  In the spirit of waning "summer" and approaching autumn, she has decreed the theme to be savoury preserves.  So abandon all ideas of fruity jams - think savoury!  Johanna defines preserves as anything preserved in liquid - whether it be brine, vinegar, oil or whatever.  Go and have a look at her announcement post for details and make sure you get your entry in by 28 September.

That should be enough to keep us all out of mischief for a while...