2020 might have had delgona coffee, banana bread and sourdough starters. But in 2021 this baked feta and tomato recipe by food blogger and artist Jenni Häyrine not only broke the internet, but supposedly caused a feta shortage in Finland! So naturally with nothing but socially distanced time on my hands I had to see for myself whether something so simple is really worth all the hoo-ha. And in short yes. Yes it is. It’s easy. It’s cheap. It’s meat free. And like a French toast omelette it is infinitely better than the sum of its parts.

Just a few notes:

• The original recipe calls for cocktail tomatoes. I couldn’t find at the only shop I could bother to go to that day, but they had some perfectly ripened, impossibly red beefsteak tomatoes so I just chopped those up.
• I used traditional Greek style feta. This resulted in a caramelised, crumbly texture that was just gorgeous and still made for a creaminess to every bite. Danish feta would give you a creamier consistency overall.
• The secret to success here (for my taste at least) is confiting the tomatoes till they’re gorgeously jammy. So don’t be scared to push your scarlet beauties to the edge of their endurance and don’t skimp on the olive oil!
• The original recipe calls for 500g pasta, which I found a bit much for the tomatoes. I reduced it by 40%. Like with all good pastas, adding some of the cooking liquid to the sauce will bring the whole thing together, so remember that before you strain the lot!
• You can add grated or chopped garlic to the recipe, but I love the subtle and sweet flavour that roasting whole cloves of garlic imparts.

Baked feta and tomato pasta

Hands-on time

5 mins

Cook time

40 mins

Total time

45 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Recipe type: Pasta, meat free

Serves: 3 to 4

Ingredients

• 200g feta
• 125ml olive oil
• ½ red chilli (optional and to taste)
• 500g tomatoes (cherry or beefsteak, cut into chunks)
• 4 whole garlic cloves, skin on
• freshly ground black pepper
• salt to taste
• bunch of freshly torn basil leaves
• 300g pasta (I used cavatappi, but penne or fusili would work just as well)

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180˚C.
2. Place feta, garlic cloves, chopped chilli and tomatoes in an ovenproof dish. Glug over the oil and season with black pepper.
3. Bake for 30 minutes or until the tomatoes are gorgeously jammy. If your feta does not yet have a caramel hue, blast it under the grill for a couple of minutes.
4. Get your pasta on the boil in some salted water and cook till al dente. (Reserve 125ml of the cooking liquid when straining.)
5. Squeeze the garlic out of its skin. and smoosh a bit till it’s a paste. Break the feta up with a fork.
6. Now combine the pasta, the whole baked tomato lot, the cooking liquid reserved from your pasta and torn fresh basil. Season to taste (wait till the end as the feta is almost salty enough) and enjoy!

A mere moon ago, when the world was an entirely different place, I tasted my first Biscoff biscuit on a long haul flight from the US. A flight which extended our personal lockdown to 7 weeks. Thank God I don’t mind not peopling (to put my social aversion mildly…). Biscoff biscuits are similar to Dutch speculoos biscuits, but not quite as in your face spicy and better in all the ways that Americans make food great again – more sugar and loads of butter. Or maybe that’s just Paula Dean…? Anyway, one of my very favourite small moments is that cup of tea and a biscuit at 4am (biological clock time) when everyone else on the plane is sleeping, and this one was a revelation! Because my very favourite small moment – probably in life – is my first cup of tea and rusk every morning. So I figured, hey! Speculoos style rusks should totally be a thing! The original rusk recipe is one that my Ouma Visser passed on to us and has been a staple in our house for decades. With a few tweaks and additions you are left with a tea time treat with less of the fat and sugar of Biscoff biscuits and all of the spice and warmth you require in these dark days. They are also super easy to make, requiring no rolling into balls, and are also egg free, so perfect for those poor souls with egg allergies! Which I hope all you egg challenge takers now have, cause siff. These rusks will fill your home with the most delicious, comforting aromas of butter, vanilla and spice as you gently let them dry in a low oven. So if your government won’t let you buy slippers and blankets to warm your tootsies, at least these rusks will warm your soul before you’ve even taken the first bite.

Biscoff Rusks

Hands-on time

20 mins

Cook time

300 mins

Total time

5 hours 20 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Serves: 100 pieces**

Ingredients

• 4 cups flour
• 4 cups Nutty Wheat*
• 2 cups caramel sugar
• 8 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 750ml buttermilk
• 375g butter
• 8 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180˚C.
2. Sift the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
3. In a separate jug or bowl, melt the butter and stir in the buttermilk.
4. Add your buttermilk mixture to your flour mixture and stir till combined.
5. Pour the mixture into a large, greased baking tray. There are no hard and fast rules here. The smaller your dish, the taller your rusks will be, which is really no bad thing.
6. Bake for one hour or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.
7. Allow to cool, turn out on a bread board and slice into your preferred size.
8. Dry in a 100˚C oven (preferably with a fan) until bone dry. About four hours.

Notes

* You can substitute the Nutty Wheat with four parts flour and one part wheat bran, or just use flour.
** Yield depends on the size of your rusks.

Buy a restaurant, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. Four years down the line and I’ve aged a decade, haven’t had two consecutive nights of good sleep in 1562 days and have been relegated to those tier D friends who only get invited to shindigs when half the town has come down with the flu, but you have to throw that roast you accidentally defrosted one inebriated night while looking for boerie to cure the munchies on the Weber before it goes off. I haven’t written a blog post in more than two years and when I sit very, very still, I can almost hear my brain atrophying. I can’t even tell you who the new president of Zim is.

But writing isn’t the only thing that has taken a back seat along with my personal life and cranial development. Apparently the surest way to guarantee you never really get to cook is to do it for a living. This not unsurprising realisation hit me again last night when I found myself fending off fish moths while trying to find a tablecloth that doesn’t smell like old cupboard in order to deck my table for a Mexican dinner party. It’s been a while since I’ve entertained. Which is why I should be forgiven for forgetting that my all time favourite corn bread recipe calls for a tin of creamed sweetcorn. Up until this point I’d been wildly impressed with how my authentically-prepared-with-masa-harina tacos and made-from-scratch dulce de leche for my churros had turned out, so I should have realised that something was due to go pear shaped. I did, however, have some buttermilk on hand, so out of necessity my new favourite corn bread recipe was born. And while I don’t think this accident will change the world in the way, say, the discovery of penicillin or the origin of the potato chip will, I found it so good that I tossed away my old recipe (meaning I deleted it from Pinterest), which is a big deal in my corner of the universe. My version uses very little butter and sugar compared to the usual corn bread recipes, so you might want to up those quantities if you still own a hand stitched scatter pillow that says “I heart Paula Deen”.

Accidentally the best corn bread recipe

Hands-on time

5 mins

Cook time

60 mins

Total time

1 hour 5 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Recipe type: Breads and bakes

Cuisine: Southern

Serves: 10

Ingredients

• 500ml buttermilk
• kernels from two sweetcorn ears, cooked
• 100ml butter, melted
• 4 large eggs
• 50ml white sugar
• ½ cup grated cheddar cheese
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1 cup yellow polenta (Saffies, feel free to use mieliemeel, although the texture will be finer)
• 20ml baking power
• 3ml salt

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 150˚C.
2. Spray a 20cm loaf tin with non stick spray (or use two tins for smaller loaves).
3. In a mixing bowl, pulse the corn and buttermilk together with a stick blender. You want the corn broken up, but not liquidized, kinda like creamed corn. (See what I did there?)
4. Whisk in the butter and eggs.
5. Stir in the sugar and cheese.
6. Sift the remaining ingredients in and then whisk the whole lot together.
7. Pour into loaf tins and bake for 45 minutes if doing two flatter loaves, or an hour if doing one loaf.
8. Serve simply with lashings of butter and some grated cheese. Also really yummy with chilli con carne!

With Oscar’s story seemingly having more holes than a good Emmentaler, and a president whose chickens live in better quarters than the average South African, we are about ready for an icon we can look up to. There aren’t many contenders. Frankly, a dim witted fish would do the job at this point. Take snoek for example. Proudly South African and comfortably located on SASSI’s green list so you can tuck in guilt free without worrying about the state of our oceans, snoek is wonderful smoked and mashed up with a bit of mayo as a pâté, or braaied over the coals basted with lemon and apricot jam. Now that I own a restaurant, my culinary adventurism has taken a turn towards the more sensible. Gone are the days of trying out distinctly un-Hestonesque teqhniques on my friends (who fortunately claim they come to visit me for me and not my disastrous gloopy caramelised white chocolate spheres or exploded truffle croquettes). Now it’s all about creating fool proof dishes that can be prepared in advance and finished off with minimum hassle and in as short a time as possible, and these little morsels fit the bill perfectly. I’m quite proud of the fact that I can give someone fairly good directions when asked how to get to the nearest supermarket without getting them horribly lost or sounding like a total chick, but it will really be a lot easier at this point to ask you to just google how to fold samoosas if you don’t know how to do so. Somewhere, someone with a video camera and a mild case of gastronomic exhibitionism has no doubt captured the whole process on film for your reference. Failing that, they’d work perfectly rolled into springrolls too. If you can’t get smoked snoek, smoked mackerel would work just as well.

Smoorsnoek samoosas

Hands-on time

50 mins

Cook time

20 mins

Total time

1 hour 10 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Recipe type: Snacks & starters

Cuisine: Cape Malay

Serves: makes about 40

Ingredients

• 500g smoked snoek, deboned (good luck with that) and flaked
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 200g tinned whole tomatoes (about half a tin with the juice), chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 3ml cumin
• 3ml coriander
• 10ml masala
• 10ml vegetable oil
• 500g phyllo pastry, each sheet cut into 10cm strips (or to whatever size samoosa you want)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1L cooking oil
• sweet chilli sauce to serve

Method

1. In a pan or skillet, heat the vegetable oil over medium heat. Add the onions and saute till lightly golden.
2. Add the garlic and spices and saute for a further 5 minutes.
3. Add the snoek and tomatoes, turn down the heat and cook for ten minutes or so, stirring occasionally until the liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated. Cool (not cool as in awesome, cool as in let it get colder.)
4. Brush the edges of a pastry strip with egg wash. Place a tablespoon of snoek mixture on the end and fold the samoosa into a neat little package.
5. Heat the cooking oil to 200˚C and deep fry the samoosas in batches till golden brown. Serve with sweet chilli sauce.

I don’t trust people who don’t particularly care about food. You know the type. They eat because they have to and wouldn’t particularly care whether you gave them Marmite on toast or seared tuna with truffled cauliflower puree for dinner. In fact, they’d prefer the toast, because the whole thing would be over faster. If they could, they’d pop a pill three times a day in lieu of eating a meal if such a thing were possible. I just don’t trust them. It’s not normal, I tell you! I’m quite sure they’re just waiting for a signal from the mother ship and then they’ll all start shedding their borrowed human skin and start converting nitrogen straight into whatever cells make up their weird-ass, food disdaining, alien bodies. Fortunately (and maybe because of this fact) I married a very appreciative eater. I love cooking for bush man. He makes these little noises as he eats when he’s enjoying the food. Little “hmmm”‘s and “sho”‘s and “that’s good, add it to the list”s (there is no list of dishes I must remember to try again, but I really should start one, because he’s often told me to add things to it and I’m buggered if I can remember a single thing on there now other than this chicken). Anyway, when I made this dish, there were no less than five “hmmm”‘s in the first two minutes of eating, so I knew it was a winner. The original recipe is one concocted by my mom – one of my food heroes and the reason that “Must appreciate food.” was at the top of the list of attributes I looked for in my man. I just added bacon because, well, it’s bacon, and it should be added to stuff.

Cream cheese & herb stuffed chicken with braised leeks & bacon

Hands-on time
20 mins

Cook time
70 mins

Total time
1 hour 30 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Recipe type: Main
Serves: 4

Ingredients

• 8 chicken thighs, skin on and bone in
• cream cheese, sour cream & full cream Greek yogurt totaling 250ml (you can use only one or all three combined in whatever quantities you like, depending on what you have in the fridge, but I would definitely recommend the cheese & sour cream)
• hand full of chopped, fresh herbs (thyme and chives work particularly well)
• 125 grams bacon, diced
• 300g leeks, thinly sliced
• 1 cup chicken stock
• a squeeze of lemon juice if you don’t use sour cream
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 2 tablespoons butter
• Seasoning

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Fry the bacon and leeks together over medium heat until softened. This should take about ten minutes. Sprinkle over the flour, stir through, transfer to a baking dish and pour over 250ml chicken stock.
3. Combine the cheese mixture, herbs and seasoning. Gently ease the skin on the chicken loose with your fingers, keeping the side bits attached to create a pocket. That would be gross if it was Hannibal Lecter creating a skin pocket, but here it’s just clever.
4. Using a spoon, gently stuff the cheese mixture under the skin, using it all up. It should be well stuffed.
5. Place the chicken on top of the leeks and bacon, dot with butter and cover in foil. Bake for 40 minutes, remove the foil, and bake for a further 25 minutes or until golden. Serve with mash.

Notes

This recipe is lovely made with turkey at Christmas time!

Lime drops on soba and lemon whip chicken. Balsamic caviar and foamed olive tartin. Wild mushroom powder that’s washed down with bling. Either Willy Wonka has ventured into savoury, or these could be a few of my new favourite things.

We spent an eye opening morning this week watching a molecular gastronomy demonstration hosted by Adrian Louw at Margot Swiss. What a treat! I’ve always thought of molecular gastronomy as being the domain of bald über chefs who cook out of labs in that wonderfully quirky world where food and  science meet. Not that being bald is the prerequisite, but you understand what I mean – fancy gadgets and dangerous gas bottles and equipment and processes with names that contain words like “centrifugal” and “hydrocoidal” and “thermoirreversable” and other terms that you would never associate with food. It’s a world where a humble hunk of blue cheese is not just relegated to a cracker or melted down with a bit of cream over pasta, but can be a foam, a powder, a gummy bear, a gel or anything else you could imagine. It has always seemed a little scary, a little too much to take on for the average home cook. But if there is one thing I learnt this week, it’s that ANYONE can take their cooking up a notch with just a few basic techniques and chemicals. Armed with one or two everyday kitchen gadgets, a handful of chemicals and a battalion of reappointed hair colouring tubes and nozzles (I kid you not), Adrian had us all oohing and aahing over his balsamic spaghetti, tzatziki “ravioli” and blingy, glittery honey pearls that you could pop into a glass of champagne. Other than the liquid nitrogen that could blow your arms off if not respected, there was nothing scary about creating extraordinary special touches out of store cupboard ingredients. Opalescent balsamic caviar lay shimmering on a salad in all of five minutes, and it took even less time to whip up the smoothest, creamiest ice cream I have ever tasted. I was honestly so inspired and so astounded at how easy some of the techniques seemed to be, that I rushed straight home and… did a quick roast chicken for dinner. Because, well, it was only a Wednesday and some things never change. But I’m bloody useless really, so don’t let me put you off! Molecular gastronomy is for everyone and I really want to encourage you to give it a bash! Despite my slow start, I definitely plan on incorporating more of it in my cooking!

For an absolute wealth of information on molecular gastronomy, including a free, downloadable pdf packed with recipes and how-to’s, visit Khymos.org.

My idea of a well balanced breakfast is to have a slice of lemon curd toast in one hand, and a spoon full of cremezola in the other. Granted, you will not find this as the de jour diet in any of the glossies, but if you landed here by searching for lemon curd, then you probably don’t follow those things anyway. I absolutely adore sweet, tangy & jubilantly yellow hued lemon curd. Not that luminous yellow stuff that could double as a traffic cone in a pinch that you buy ready-made off the shelf in the supermarket. Real, homemade, butter laden curd made with love by your mom and packaged in a great, big glass jar that you can scoop spoons full out of when you need a culinary cuddle. But if mom is far away, or you’ve actually learned how to be self-sufficient, it is fantastically simple to make your own sunshine in a jar.

A few years ago, I had a Blue Mountain lemon curd at our local cheese festival that I fell into instant besottedness with (only to hear that they were discontinuing the range!). The curd had a gorgeously nutty flavour. The type of gorgeously nutty flavour that can be achieved by doing one thing and one thing only: browning butter. You know what I’m talking about. And now you can’t imagine why anyone would ever make curd without browning the butter first, right? You can use your favourite lemon curd recipe and just brown the butter before using it as directed, or follow this easy one here. I used a recipe from that old standby that makes up a large portion of every warm blooded Afrikaner girl’s recipe repertoire, Kook & Geniet, and just tweaked it to reduce the risk of scrambling and make it a little more buttery. When in doubt, more buttery is always the way to go.

Browned butter lemon curd

Hands-on time

5 mins

Cook time

10 mins

Total time

15 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Recipe type: Condiment

Serves: Makes +/- 350ml

Ingredients

• 330g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 egg yolk
• 110g salted butter
• Juice of two large lemons (roughly 400g in weight, whole)

Method

1. In a heavy based pot, melt butter over a medium low heat. It will spatter at first and then start foaming, and not long after will turn brown fairly rapidly. Don’t be scared to get a good amount of colour on it, but stop before the salt and milk solids (which will sink to the bottom) burns. Pour the butter – salt and all – into a bowl and set aside.
2. Add the sugar and lemon juice to the pot and bring to the boil. Once the sugar has dissolved, add the butter.
3. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs and egg yolk in the bowl that the butter was in. Slowly pour the sugar syrup into the egg mixture, whisking continuously.
4. Return the mixture to the pot and return to the heat, stirring until the mixture thickens. Do not let it boil or you will land up with sweet, lemony, scrambled eggs.
5. Serve smeared on warm toast, swirled over ice cream, spooned onto meringue nests or poured into sweet tart cases.

Blogging is not for sissies. It takes a massive amount of time and dedication, neither of which I have in excess right now. It also requires the ability to switch your creativity on at will when you do actually find yourself with thirty minutes to spare. I really suck at that too. One solution, they say, is to write drunk and edit sober, and frankly I can’t afford to be inebriated that often. This means that I have a draft folder positively brimming with unfinished posts. A little reminder, whenever I log into WordPress, of my ability to cling, hoard, procrastinate and just hope for the best when I know nothing will change. Every now and then I will go back to it, and listlessly page through the articles, knowing that I will never get round to sharing them with you because they either no longer seem relevant, or I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say in the first place, or in one sad case, the restaurant in question had inexplicably shut down before I could tell everyone why they absolutely had to go there. And yet, I hang on to them, even though I know that it is over and that they will never be written.

I know I will never get round to showing you the Qipu clothing market in Shanghai, with its mind-boggling selection of clothing stores, where the items get more expensive and the sales ladies get less pushy as the escalator goes up.

See? Start low, finish high.

Or the street-food-vendor-packed alley behind said clothing market, where I finally came across sanxian doupi with its delicate tofu skin encasing shrimp flavoured rice, and jiān bǐng with the fried pastry center that the my local Qingpu lady never added and I had been obsessing about since first hearing it was missing from mine.

No really. If you’re in Shanghai, and you love shopping and eating, then this is a must-add for your trip list!

In order to tell you about the massive Tianshan Tea City that we visited, I learnt more about tea than any sane person should be expected to.

But now you’ll never know the difference between the tea on the left and the tea on the right. (There, there now. You’ll get over the disappointment soon enough.)

I have a slew of posts on Shanghainese street food waiting to be written. For example, bet you didn’t know that Shanghai has more than 10,000 mobile food stalls? Or that in a government survey it was found that of 650 vendors surveyed, 609 had no business license? Or that sometimes your lamb skewer might be rat? Possibly poisoned rat. But that wasn’t going to stop me from encouraging you to try fire roasted sweet potatoes.

Or warm, cumin-y, delicious shao kao (street barbeque). “Lamb” and all.

Or sweet and fresh bingtanghulu (candied fruits).

Alas, I know I will never get round to them. So I’m letting go, moving on, out with the old etc., all in an attempt to feel less bogged down by what I have not accomplished, in the hopes that I can expend more energy on what I still hope to achieve. I’m hoping for catharsis, although the reality will probably only be a bit more free space on my server, and a once again full draft folder a few months from now, because some things never change.

But before I hit the delete button, I have one unwritten post that I felt have to share with you!

There are few things in life that give me as much pleasure as enjoying food with like-minded friends. Happily, I have been blessed with some very special foodies in my life! We don’t have it easy though. Living in a town where Wimpy is considered haute cuisine by many can be quite frustrating for fine dining lovers. I have raged about this before, and nothing much has changed since then. And so, my foodie friends and I decided to start our own Come Dine With Me competition. Four couples, four months, four extraordinary nights. A staggering amount of work went into preparing for each night, and afforded us all the opportunity of trying dishes that we would ordinarily consider too fancy for week night fare, or even your average dinner party. This beef fillet went a long way towards clinching the title for the winning couple, Niel and Pippa, who graciously shared the recipe with me. The recipe is from The Cliff, Barbados: Recipes by Paul Owens, a restaurant that was in the top 50 restaurants in the world when they visited there. I have paged through the book and can highly recommend it to anyone who would like to take their cooking up a notch! It has been a long time since I had this dish, but I can still remember the flavours as if they were melting in my mouth yesterday. Definitely one to add to your repertoire for when you’re having people around that you’d like to impress!

Fillet of beef on a potato rösti with Dijon mustard tarragon sauce & crispy leeks

Author: Paul Owens

Recipe type: Main

Serves: 4

Ingredients

• 4 x 80z tenderloins
• 3 cups chicken stock
• 2 cups dry sherry
• 1 ½ cups thick cream
• ⅓ cup Dijon mustard
• 2 tbsp fresh tarragon
• salt and pepper
• 2 leeks
• 4 potatoes (peeled)
• 4 tbsp of mixed chopped herbs i.e. marjoram, parsley thyme
• butter
• seasoning

Method

1. Season the tenderloins and sauté in a hot pan with a little clarified butter until medium rare (about 3 minutes per side). Divide the meat between four plates and allow to rest for 10 – 15 minutes.
2. For the sauce, bring the sherry to a boil and add the chicken stock. Reduce the liquid for about 10 minutes, then add the cream, Dijon mustard, tarragon and salt and pepper to taste. (Although the original recipe says to season here, I would leave that till the very end. You’re still going to reduce the sauce later, so it might become over salty.)
3. Cut the leeks into fine strips and deep fry in hot oil until golden. Place on a paper towel and season with salt and pepper.
4. Grate the potatoes and add the herbs and a little salt and pepper. Using your hands, squeeze out the moisture and form thin potato cakes. Sauté in hot butter until golden brown, drain on a paper towel. They can be made in advance and reheated.
5. To assemble the dish, place the steaks in a warm oven. Meanwhile reduce the sauce in a pan over a high heat until a syrupy consistency. Place steak on warm potato rosti and cover with the sauce. Top with crispy leeks.

Families are funny things, aren’t they? While scratch-your-eyes-out loyal if anyone dares speak an ill word about one of our own, we are the first to voice an opinion about cousin Betty’s latest binge drinking session as soon as we can grab a second alone with a familial accomplice. My family is no different. So it was that I discovered what my family had been whispering amongst themselves over wine glasses in kitchens and murmuring to one another on tee boxes while taking practice swings: I had somehow achieved the dubious honour of being branded the couscous pusher in our family. There I was, happily dishing up fall-off-the-bone lamb shanks over steaming piles of fluffy couscous, when I noticed a distinctly uncomfortable silence fall over the table. The same sort of silence you feel in that moment just after the drug addict has made himself comfortable in the cushy armchair, but before someone clears their throat to tell him that the tea party he’s been invited to is actually an intervention. Uncle T steepled his fingers together (as he always does when he has something uncomfortable to say) and with a sideways glance at my equally unimpressed looking brother said, “What is this shit now again?”. Around the table there was a lot of looking in laps, and readjusting of wine glasses, but when no one backed him up he continued: “Uncle G says you’re always trying to get us to eat couscous”. Now, please note that – whilst true – the last time I had attempted this feat was Christmas 2007, when I had tried to slip some of the little granules past everyone by disguising them amongst cubes of roasted butternut and crumbly feta while they read out loud to each other those terribly lame jokes that come in the crackers. But it mattered not. I had become the couscous pusher. And with good reason I suppose. See, I believe the much maligned couscous has had a bad rap. When it was first introduced to our shores, it was inevitably prepared by uninformed housewives who dumped too much cube derived chicken stock over it in sufficient quantities to turn it into a crumbly heap of mushy sludge more closely resembling wallpaper glue than a fluffy accompaniment to a lamb tagine. This really is a grossly unfair representation of what couscous could be. Really, if you think about it, when it is prepared correctly, what’s not to love? Tiny granules of al dente semolina that slurp up all the flavours you throw at them, couscous is the caviar of pasta. Add to that, it requires no more than a spoon to eat, so it is perfect comfort food. I have therefore made a mini mission out of turning couscous into a dish everyone could love, instead of just an ineffectual projectile weapon in a B-grade movie. This dish might not complete my life’s work, but it is one of my favourites.

Crispy chicken and chickpea couscous with feta & lemon zest

Comfort in a bowl.

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Ingredients

• 4 chicken thighs, skin on
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 cup raw couscous
• good quality chicken stock
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tin chickpeas, drained
• 2 heaped tablespoons of basil pesto
• zest and juice of one lemon
• 1 or 2 rounds of plain Greek feta
• seasoning

Method

1. Season the chicken on both sides. Cook in a dry pan over medium heat, turning occasionally, until cooked through.
2. Remove the chicken from the pan and shred into bite sized pieces, discarding the bones.
3. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat in the pan and return the chicken to the pan. Sprinkle over one tablespoon of seasoned flour and stir through to incorporate all the fat and juices and yummy caramelised bits on the bottom. Fry until crisp.
4. In a separate bowl, combine 1 cup of raw couscous with chicken stock and prepare as per the instructions on the packet (different brands require different cooking methods and times.) Do not add more stock than the instructions say, or you’ll land up with the aforementioned wall paper paste.
5. Add the chicken to the couscous and stir through.
6. Heat the oil in the pan over medium heat and add the garlic, frying for a minute.
7. Add the chickpeas to the garlic and fry for two minutes. Turn the heat down to low.
8. Add the lemon zest, lemon juice and basil pesto to the chickpeas and warm through. Add to the couscous mixture and stir through.
9. Crumble the feta into the couscous and stir through. Adjust seasoning and serve.

Nutrition Information

Serving size: 2

Pierneef à la Motte in Franschhoek is one of my favourite restaurants. The menu is constantly changing to reflect the seasons, so you always get the freshest, seasonal ingredients packaged in beautifully plated, explosive flavour combinations. Unfortunately this also means that you best not get your heart set on any one dish, as it may not be there the next time you visit. There is an important life lesson in this. Never put off till tomorrow what you can eat today! The bittersweet Valrhona chocolate tart with peanut butter mousse that I wrote about when I reviewed them in September was one such dish. While the rich chocolate tart itself was obviously delicious, the highlight of the entire meal (okay, a joint tie with the quail and orecchiette pasta salad with smoked pork lardo and almond ginger sauce), was the peanut butter mousse that accompanied the tart. Piped onto the plate into little mounds of salty moreishness, they were the unintentional star of the dish. So I was very disappointed when, on a visit there last week, the chocolate tart was no longer on the menu. After a week of hoping for a miserable rainy day, so that I could stare sadly out the window while I longed for that mousse, I realised I was unsuccessfully dealing with this blow, and decided to try recreating the mousse myself. I added white chocolate, so it is not quite the same, but it makes a similarly rich, lovely, dense mousse. Serve in little shot glasses, as an accompaniment to a tart (I served mine with a salted caramel cheesecake, but chocolate and peanut butter are made for each other when the bread and jam aren’t looking) or as a filling between layers of biscuits.

Peanut butter and white chocolate mousse

Hands-on time

10 mins

Total time

10 mins

Author: www.twosuitcasesandatinpot.com

Recipe type: Dessert

Serves: 4 – 8

Ingredients

• 50g butter
• 150g white chocolate
• 2 eggs, separated
• 70g castor sugar
• 125ml cream
• 175g smooth peanut butter

Method

1. Melt the butter and chocolate together. Warm the peanut butter till it becomes a little more runny, and stir into the chocolate.
2. Add two egg yolks to the warm chocolate mixture and stir through.
3. Beat the egg whites till stiff peaks form. Slowly add the castor sugar to the egg whites while you continue whisking. Fold the mixture into the peanut butter mixture.
4. Beat the cream till stiff. Fold the cream into the peanut butter mixture and serve.