Low-Carb Wine-Braised Leeks with Cream, Thyme & Parmesan

A dish of silken baby leeks cloaked in a wickedly creamy Parmesan sauce. The leeks take about half an hour to braise in their bath of wine, garlic and thyme, but once they're tender, the sauce takes just a few minutes of brisk bubbling to reduce and thicken. This dish is low in carbohydrates, and suitable for diabetics and anyone on a low-carb #LCHF regime.

Low-Carb Wine-Braised Leeks with Cream, Thyme & Parmesan.
This beautiful plate by my uncle David Walters, Master Potter of Franschhoek.

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Wine recommendation by Michael Olivier.  He says: "Boland Cellar Granny Smith Nouvelle 2014. Nouvelle is a grape developed by Chris Orffer at the University of Stellenbosch by crossing Semillon and Ugni Blanc. First planted on the Geldenhuys family farm Klipvlei near Perdeberg, Nouvelle is grown in the Swartland, and it's a belter. 

 It looks like: Lime-green tinge of youth. Packed in a green-tinged bottle, with Granny Smith dancing on the label. 

 It smells like: Well - Granny Smith apples and fynbos herbs scrunched in your hand. 

 It taste like: Yes, you guessed, Granny Smiths again - and vibrantly so. A real thirst quencher: zesty, crisp and dry. A nice counterfoil to the leeks and cream.

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I'm mad about baby leeks, and feature them often on this blog (recipe links below).  One watchpoint: even the slimmest leeks can be stringy, so be sure to keep them bubbling in the wine until they're as tender as a kiss.

If you don't cook with wine, you can use a cup of chicken stock in its place.

Here are more of my baby leek recipes. The first one is low in carbs, and the second and third are too, provided you omit the breadcrumbs and croutons.

Low-Carb Wine-Braised Baby Leeks in Prosciutto

Braised Baby Leeks with Halloumi 'Popcorn' and Frizzled Prosciutto

Salad of Warm Baby Leeks with Blue Cheese and Chilli Croutons

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Low-Carb Wine-Braised Leeks with Cream, Thyme & Parmesan

750 g baby leeks
3 Tbsp (45 ml) olive oil
2 large cloves of garlic, peeled and cut in half lengthways
1 cup (250 ml) dry white wine
a few sprigs of fresh thyme
1 cup (250 ml) cream
½ cup (125 ml) finely grated Parmesan, plus a little extra for topping
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice
salt and pepper, to taste

Fry the leeks in the oil until they take on a little
colour here and there. 

Trim the bases of the leeks and cut off the upper dark-green parts (freeze these for using in your next chicken stock).

Heat the olive oil in a large shallow pan and fry the leeks over a medium-high heat for 4-5 minutes, or until they take on a little colour here and there (see picture, left).

Add the garlic and fry for another minute, without letting it brown.

Pour in the wine - it will bubble furiously -  and add the thyme sprigs.

Now turn the heat right down, cover with a tilted lid and simmer for 25-35 minutes, or until the leeks are very - and I mean very - tender.

When almost all the liquid has evaporated, add
the cream.

Take off the lid. The liquid in the pan should have reduced to just a few tablespoons. If it has not, continue cooking the leeks, uncovered, until there are just a few tablespoons of liquid left in the pan.

Turn up the heat again, pour in the cream, and bubble briskly for a few minutes, or until the cream has reduced and thickened to the consistency of thin custard.

Stir in the Parmesan, turn the heat right down, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for a further minute, or until the cheese has melted.

Season to taste with salt and pepper. Go easy on the salt - the Parmesan is salty enough in its own right.

Remove the pan from the heat. Now add a spritz of lemon juice - just enough to give the sauce a little acidic lift.

Remove the garlic pieces and the thyme sprigs.

Serve hot, with an extra grating of Parmesan.

Serves 4 as a side dish. 

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Easy Maas (Amasi) Drained Cheese with Capers, Radishes & Herbs

A creamy, delicate white cheese that's incredibly easy and inexpensive to make. I'm excited to share my recipe with you, and hope you'll try it, because it's so versatile and delicious. I've used a beloved Southern African staple ingredient - amasi, or maas, a soured/fermented milk - to create this drained cheese, and combined it here with some spiky contrasting flavours.

Radishes, capers, lemon zest, olive oil and salt contrast with the
delicate milky flavours of the maas cheese.  I've used rocket and parsley
 seedling leaves from my garden to strew over the cheese. 

If you're fed up with paying through the nose for cream and cottage cheeses, you'll love this method of making your own soft white cheese at home. A two-litre bottle of amasi retails for around R25, so the cheese shown in the picture above, made from a one-litre bottle of maas, will set you back about ten rand.

I can't understand why amasi doesn't feature more prominently in restaurant dishes or, for that matter, in workaday South African recipes. Full-fat maas is a superb local ingredient: it has a light, tangy taste, it's pleasingly creamy, and it has many well-documented health benefits. 

The shiny slick visible at the top of this beautiful plate is not
 olive oil, but a brush-mark of fired-on, glassy glaze, placed there for a
 specific reason by my uncle, master ceramicist David Walters. More about
 this towards the end of this blogpost!  

Amasi also has multiple uses in the kitchen. You can use it in place of natural yoghurt (my obsession this year!) in many dishes: it's a good tenderising agent in marinades for chicken and red meat, it's lovely in raitas, salad dressings and creamy dips, and it's useful for dolloping at the last minute into curries and similar spicy stews. I always add maas to fruit smoothies, and often whizz it up with frozen cubes of fruit to make instant ice cream.

It's also an excellent alternative to buttermilk and/or yoghurt in scones and quick breads: the best scones I've ever tasted are made with maas: you can find the recipe for Irene Ngcobo's legendary feather-light scones here, on my Scrumptious Facebook page.

If you're wary of maas because it sometimes has a slightly lumpy texture, don't worry! The long draining process produces a beautifully creamy, smooth-textured cheese, all on its own, without any need for stirring.

You can lightly knead this cheese (once it has finished draining) with salt, pepper, garlic, herbs and any other zippy flavours you fancy, but I think it's best just as it is, with all the bells and whistles served on the side of the plate. I love the contrast of the delicate milky-bland flavours and a few crunchy/sour accompaniments, mashed together under a fork with plenty of fruity olive oil and flaky sea salt.

Try it, also, with ribbons of honey and a scattering of toasted flaked almonds or pistachios, or with stewed grapes or baked figs.  Or roll the cheese into balls, coat them with pepper and marinate them in olive oil, rosemary, garlic and similar sunny Mediterranean flavours (see picture below).

Maas-cheese balls rolled in pepper and smoked
paprika, and marinated in olive oil, garlic and rosemary.
  Plate by David Walters. 

There's nothing mysterious about this recipe: it's a basic drained cheese, similar to a Middle-Eastern labneh. If you're not in Southern Africa, you can make this using Greek yoghurt (here's my recipe for a garlicky, herby yoghurt cheese).

Finally, a note about the beautiful black plates in the pictures above. My uncle David Walters, master potter of Franschhoek, works closely with some of South Africa's top chefs to produce bespoke dinnerware for their restaurants. He's designed these matte black plates with great care and attention, brushing a slick of shiny glaze right across its middle  Why? Because he doesn't want your fork to make a nasty scraping fingernails-on-blackboard noise as you clear the plate.

Which brings me to a little grumble. As I may have mentioned on this blog before, I can't bear good food served on rough slate roof tiles, a gimmick that has spread like a black fungus all over the restaurant world. (I was annoyed to see this fad eagerly reproduced by contestants on the latest series of South African Masterchef, along with the ubiquitous spoon-dragged 'swoosh' of sauce, or what I like to call a Plate Skidmark.) There are many studio potters in South Africa producing the most beautiful hand-made dinnerware, and I wish restaurateurs would support them, instead of buying their 'crockery' at builders' yards.

My feeling is this: if you're going to spend a lot of time and effort making exquisite, flavoursome food, please dish it up on a spotlessly clean, unchipped, smooth piece of porcelain, preferably a shining white or black plate with a lip  - or crafty concave surface - to prevent your jus from sliding off the edge.

Easy Amasi Drained Cheese with Capers, Radishes & Herbs

a litre of full-cream maas (I use Inkomazi brand)
baby herb leaves, to garnish
finely grated zest of half a lemon
Maldon flaky sea salt
freshly milled black pepper
1 cup (250 ml) small radishes, halved
4 Tbsp (60 ml) baby capers
4 Tbsp (60 ml) fruity extra-virgin olive oil
a squeeze of lemon juice, to taste

Line a large sieve with a closely woven cloth. I use a fine, clean cotton dinner napkin, but a brand-new J-Cloth (one of these) or a laundered dish cloth/tea towel will do just as well. Avoid waffle-textured cloths, however.

Place the cloth-lined sieve over a big bowl and pour in the maas.  Let it sit, undisturbed, for about 10 hours, or overnight.

The clear whey will drip into the bowl below, and it will also soak right to the edges of the cloth. Don't stir or scrape at the cheese: let it drain at its leisure.

Gather up the edges of the cloth, twist them tightly together and secure with an elastic band.

Hang the bundle over a bowl, or suspend it from a tap over the sink, for another 12-16 hours, or longer, if you'd like a firmer cheese. The longer you leave it, the dryer and denser it will become. If you don't have a tap like the one shown in the picture below, hang your cheese from a broomstick placed across the backs of two facing chairs, or a similar rig.

Hang the cheese up until you're
 satisfied with its texture.  

If you're going to hang it for longer than two days, or the weather is very hot, it's best to finish the draining process in the fridge. If your fridge has wire racks, clip the knot of the cloth to the rack with clothes pegs, and place a bowl underneath. If your fridge has glass shelves, you will have to hang the cheese in the coolest place in your house.

Tip the cheese out of its cloth onto a plate. Alternatively, you can press it firmly into a mould of some sort - a little bowl, or perhaps two small ramekins - a few hours before you serve it, and then unmould it onto a plate.

Scatter over the baby herb leaves and lemon zest, and season generously with salt and pepper. Arrange the radishes, capers and any other accompaniments around the cheese. Generously douse the cheese with olive oil, and finish off with a good spritz of lemon juice.

Serve with melba toast or crackers, or with celery and carrot sticks if you're on a low-carb eating plan.

Serves 4-6 as a snack.



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Dave's Roast Pork Belly, a favourite dish of the dashing dog detective Napoleon Bones

Napoleon Bones (published by
 Random House Struik).

Napoleon Bones is a noble police dog, a crime fighter, a gourmand, and the star of a recent novel by my mother, South African writer Jenny Hobbs.

One of Napoleon's favourite dishes is a succulent belly of roast pork topped with extra-crackly crackling of great crackliness.

I know for a fact that the recipe my mum had in mind when she wrote her book is the one perfected by my uncle, master potter David Walters. 

It's also one of the recipes featured in my cookbook.  Is this book a family affair? Damned right it is! But then food is all about familie, isn't it? (There's a note about this word at the bottom of the page.)

Here's a paragraph from the book mentioning roast pork belly:

We were patrolling in Woodstock on the dog watch, eight to midnight. Spike was off-duty. A sudden gorgeous waft of aromas had my tongue lolling. Roast potatoes and parsnips. Fennel. Halved heads of garlic browning in the juices dripping from a racked pork belly with the crackling just starting to crisp.

Doesn't that sound toothsome?

I've referred a number of times to Dave's beautiful hand-thrown dinnerware on this blog, because I often photograph my food on plates, platters and bowls he's lent or given me.  But I haven't spoken much about my mum, apart from mentioning that I learned to cook at her elbow.

Because her new novel has much to do with food and eating (or wolfing down, arf arf,  in the case of Napoleon Bones), I thought I'd tell you more about it, and about her.

Jenny Hobbs, novelist, and director of
the Franschhoek Literary Festival.

I read my mother's novels with joy and appreciation, but there's often a level of trepidation because I know that at a certain point something from my childhood will leap off the page and seize me by the heartstrings.

This might be a character I recognise, or a favourite expression, or a line from a poem, or a whiff of something strange and beautiful and half-forgotten.

 In the case of her latest novel, I enjoyed juddering belly-laughs reading the droll observations of the dog Napoleon Bones.

Napoleon, a keen-nosed connoisseur and relentless chaser of frisky bitches is, you see, something of a composite of all the dogs I've ever known. Jenny has dedicated the book to all the stinky mutts of my childhood, including my beloved Mugsy, a bulldog of distinction.

Also, the text is scattered with family jokes and sly verbal references that cannot be appreciated unless you were actually there (the Strategic Fart is one example).

And then there's the language. A little-known fact about my mum is that she wrote, as Blossom Broadbeam, a popular column for Darling magazine in the early Seventies.

Her column became famous as a rich source of 'Seffrican', and many of the slang words she observed and used for the first time in print have been preserved in several dictionaries of South African English. I'm proud to tell you that some of these words were harvested from the mouths of her four daughters. (Okay, they're expressions not used much these days, but there was a time around 1975 when it was extremely cool to say 'tit', 'China', 'boney' and so on.)

She's put her keen ear for South African slang to good use in the new book, and I found myself performing the famous coffee-nose-spurt reaction several times as I raced through its chapters.

Really crackly crackling, all brown and blistered. 

But back to the food.  My uncle Dave and his family live right next door to my mum in Franschhoek, so there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the houses, and much merrymaking and feasting when my extended family swarms into Franschhoek.

Whenever an extra-special feast is called for, Dave makes his Famous Pork Belly, usually preceded by his equally famous Smoked Franschhoek Trout with Hot Sesame Oil.

I can heartily recommend both recipes to you.

Dave's Pork Belly

1 large pork belly, bone in (about 2 kg, or enough for 8; see Cook’s Notes)

¾ cup (180 ml) olive oil

10 bay leaves, dried or fresh

8 cloves garlic, peeled

milled black pepper

1 Tbsp (15 ml) salt

Score the skin of the belly, not too deeply, into a narrow diamond pattern using a very sharp knife or the blade of a sturdy craft knife. If you’re not confident about this, ask your butcher to do it. A few hours before you cook the belly, put the olive oil, bay leaves and garlic into a food processor and whizz to a fairly coarse paste (don’t add any salt). Brush the mixture all over the scored skin, pressing it well into the cuts. Grind over plenty of black pepper. Cover with clingfilm and let it stand for 2–3 hours.

Heat the oven to 170 °C. Place the belly, skin side up, directly onto the middle rack of the oven, and put a roasting pan underneath it to collect the fat. Roast for 3 hours with the oven fan off, and without letting the temperature go above 170 °C (or the skin will crackle prematurely).

After 3 hours the belly will be soft, juicy and well cooked. Fifteen minutes before you want to eat, take the joint out of the oven and use kitchen paper to wipe any oily puddles and bay-leaf paste off the top of the skin. Sprinkle the skin liberally with flaky sea salt.

Turn the top grill of the oven to its highest setting and wait until it is glowing red. Adjust the rack on which you cooked the pork so the skin is about 15 cm below the grill. Within a minute or two the skin will begin to spit and sputter as it forms crackling: watch it like a hawk to make sure it is not burning.

If it shows any signs of catching, turn the grill down a little, or move the rack down a notch, but don’t remove the pork from the oven. When the crackling is a deep golden-brown and crunchy all over (this will take 8–10 minutes), take the belly out of the oven, put it on a carving board and take it to the table. Serve with apple sauce, a light potato salad and green salad.

Serves 8.

Recipe courtesy of Random House Struik

Cook’s Notes

Order, well in advance, a large slab of top-quality pork belly from your butcher; supermarket pork bellies are of indifferent quality and always too small. If you’re throwing caution to the winds, put some parboiled potatoes in the dish underneath the belly an hour or so before you serve it, where they will roast to golden and fatty perfection

Note:

'Familie' is an Afrikaans word that means, literally, 'family'. But it also has several other untranslatable layers of meaning, among them clan, tribe, loyalty, friendship, closeness, familiarity, and so on. Someone who is familie need not be a blood relative - this could be an old friend, or a neighbour, or someone who has been kind and generous to you over many years. A mensch, in other words.

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A Scrumptious Pop-Up Dinner with David Walters & Christopher Duigan

It's been an exhilarating and interesting twelve months for me since my first cookbook was published, but none of these thrills and spills can match my excitement about this event.  On Thursday 7 March, I'll be collaborating in a once-off pop-up event in Pietermaritzburg with two inspiring people: my uncle David Walters, pre-eminent master potter, and my friend Christopher Duigan, South Africa's most popular concert pianist.  We're calling this event 'The Table', and we're doing it for the sheer fun of it.  Here are my co-conspirators:

Concert pianist Christopher Duigan (left) and master potter David Walters.

The Table is an idea dreamed up a while ago by Dave and Christopher, and they generously roped me in as the third wheel on their merry tricycle.  The idea is that everyone who has been invited to the jollifications (I was going to call it a soirée, but risk being smacked by Dave and Chris for such pretentiousness) will bring something to the table: Dave will be showcasing his beautiful plates, platters and bespoke dinnerware; Christopher and the acclaimed saxophonist Maxine Matthews will be performing works by composer Richard Guinness; and the food served on the evening will come from my cookbook, Scrumptious.

The event will take place at Christopher's home in Pietermaritzburg, Casa Mexicano, which I am told is  a villa of some splendour.  And it had better be, because I am spending a night there, and I will not be satisfied with anything less than fluffy white gowns, scented bath salts and hopefully a few oiled young men on stand-by should I require anyone to drop frozen grapes into my mouth.

Our VIP guests (including wine-makers, farmers, artisans, artists and some of KZN's top restaurateurs) will also be bringing their special gifts, goods and talents to the table, and I look forward to sharing all these contributions with you on Thursday night as I live-tweet the event (hashtag: #TheTable; follow me on https://twitter.com/Jane_Anne62).

I'd hoped to offer readers of this blog a pair of tickets, but the event was so popular when Christopher announced it that it was sold out before I had a chance to put finger to keyboard.

I will be putting hand to whisk on Thursday afternoon, however, as I prepare the main course for the event: my fillet-steak and hot-potato-nugget salad with a Green Goddess dressing.  Here's a picture of this dish (I'll post the recipe next week, when I'm back):

My beef fillet salad with hot potato nuggets and a Green Goddess dressing.
Photograph by Michael Le Grange, courtesy of Random House Struik. 

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How I styled my cookbook

My cookbook arrived in South African bookshops on Friday (a friend on Twitter tweeted a snap of a pile of books) and I'm quivering with excitement. This afternoon, I'm going to go to my local Exclusive Books so I can lurk - whistling nonchalantly, with hands in pockets - next to the display. I'm hoping to see a shopper pick up my book and browse through it, because I want to see how he or she reacts to to the photographs.

My Nougat & Ice Cream Cake with Hot Raspberry Sauce.
Image by Michael Le Grange © Random House Struik 2012

A great deal of thought went into producing simple, beautiful, mouth-watering images for the book, and in this blogpost I'll tell you how we tried to achieve this. (And you'll find more behind-the-scenes snaps from the shoot here.)

 Michael Le Grange's photograph of my Lemony Green Beans
with Aïoli. Click on the image to see a full-size version.
Image © Random HouseStruik 2012. Bowl by David Walters.

I've written before about why I opted for a professional photographer to tackle the images for the book. I knew the instant I saw Michael Le Grange's portfolio that his photographs of my food would be beautiful, but the prospect of creating a cohesive theme, mood and 'look' for my cookbook gave me some sleepless nights.

 I don't have much professional experience as a food stylist, but I was determined to do the job myself because it was the only way, I figured, that I could have complete creative control over the way my food was displayed on the page. 

What was crucial to me was that the dishes looked like my home-cooked food: in other words, what I'd put on the table in front of you if you came over to my house for lunch or dinner, or what you'd see if you were hanging over my shoulder as I cooked.

Something else that was important to me was absolute simplicity: in each photograph, the food itself had to be the hero. A clean, simple, pared-down look was essential if the food was to 'pop' from the page, fresh and colourful and glistening.

I wanted the food to 'pop' from the page.

Current trends in food photography favour what I call a 'sophisticated rustic' look - weathered wooden boards, worn cloths and cutlery, old or vintage props and much visual emphasis on the ingredients used to prepare the dish.

While this type of 'under-styling' is beautiful and inspiring when carefully done, I knew it wasn't right for my book.

I wouldn't bring a cracked dish or peeling board to my table, or scatter peppercorns or rocket leaves on the tablecloth, and I have a horror of serving dishes encrusted with baked-on dribbles.  (This caused much hilarity during the shoot. "But it looks real, Jane-Anne," cried the book's designer Bev, every time I got my knickers in a knot about a fleck of brown on the edge of a casserole dish, or a wrinkle in a napkin. "Don't make it look too perfect, or people won't want to try the recipe!")

Choosing props - and deciding what to leave out.
Napkin by Emma Wyngaard

My preference was to use the plainest plates and white linen throughout the book, but in the end Bev and Michael convinced me that a few rustic 'prep' shots featuring actual (dented and blackened) baking trays would not be the end of the world.

We also used several wooden surfaces for the photographs, which I reluctantly agreed to on the condition that they looked clean and scrubbed, with no peeling paint or encrusted cracks.

For plates and serving dishes, I turned immediately to my uncle David Walters, who is among South Africa's preeminent master potters.  In his studio in Franschhoek, Dave produces wheel-thrown porcelain, specialising in smoke-fired ceramics and fine dinnerware. In recent years, he's specialised in producing bespoke dinner services for local restaurants, which he designs in consultation with chefs. Dave cheerfully allowed me to raid his studio and gallery, and also offered to custom-make any ceramic item I needed for the shoot.  His exquisite porcelain plates, bowls and platters, with their fine detailing and delicate glazes, added a special elegance to the photographs, and I'm so honoured to have collaborated with him on this project.

For cutlery, I looted the silver canteens of my relatives and some friends. Much of the silverware in the book comes from Norway, because my Norwegian granny made it her habit to give her grandchildren one or two knives, forks or spoons for every birthday as they grew up.  Other pieces come from my great-grandmother, and the silver goblet in the soup chapter is a trophy my grandfather won in a hurdles race in the 1920s. It's been fun seeing my mum and sisters paging through the book and saying, 'Oh, I remember that spoon!' and 'There's granny's silver jug!

The Norwegian silver pattern I chose as a small girl.

All the linen and damask in the book comes from my collection, and my mother's, and some of the cloths were embroidered by my granny. For the occasional coloured napkin, cloth or place mat, I turned to my friend Margie, who has inherited a selection of fine Provençal linen from her mother-in-law.

Finally, some styling notes about the food itself.  I'm not a fan at all of 'doctoring' food for photographs. If food is photographed fresh, and uses top-quality ingredients, there really is no need to glycerine it, or stuff it with tissues, or resort to similar such subterfuge. (And it must be said that tales you hear about food being polished, varnished and coated with engine oil are largely wild exaggerations. I'm not saying this doesn't happen - food photographed for packaging shots and adverts often demands intensive care -  but most stylists like food to look fresh and natural, and will use tricks of the food-styling trade only when strictly necessary.

  In one photograph, I deployed a hat pin to attach a stubborn herb leaf, and in another I used super-glue to reattach a flower-head that had fallen off. Other than that, the only other tweaks were a light spritzing of water to some of the salads, and painting on more pan juices when the gloss had evaporated from meat dishes. The ice creams, shot in mid December, were a challenge, but split-second timing and buckets of ice prevented any camera disasters.

My grandfather's hurdling cup, and his son's bowls, with my 

Roasted Ratatouille Soup.

All the fresh herb garnishes came from my herb pots (I sowed handfuls of seeds six weeks before the shoot started, and once a week after that).  Tiny herbs wilt quickly in the heat, and look limp taken from supermarket packets, so it was a real bonus being able to pick them straight from the pot.

All in all, styling my own cookbook was an enormous  challenge, but one I thoroughly enjoyed. And if I'm dissatisfied with any one picture (there are a few I'd tweak if had to do it all again) I have no one but myself to blame.

Preparing a table shot for the photograph opening the Salads chapter.

Scrumptious: Food for Family and Friends is published by Random House Struik and is available at Exclusive Books.

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Easy Duck Rillettes: a real quacker of a recipe

I like duck very much, but I don't buy or cook it often because it's shriekingly expensive, and also because (look, I know this is heresy, coming from a cook) I have a soft spot for ducks. But there's no denying that duck has a deep savouriness that just cannot be found in a supermarket chicken or turkey. And sometimes my craving for that wonderful unctuous duckiness overcomes any sentimental feelings I may have about little fluffy yellow ducklings.

Succulent Duck Rillettes with my sister's Beetroot & Cranberry Preserve.
Plate by David Walters, my uncle, who made us each a name-stamped
side plate as a Christmas present. 

One of the best ways to appreciate the special deliciousness of duck is try confit duck leg. I always order this when I see it on restaurant menus, even though I know that this sublime dish - slow-seethed in its own fat until it melts into heart-stopping tenderness - will most likely shorten my life by several years.

Just before Christmas, I was pleased to find a fine locally produced duck (from Joostenbergvlakte) at a Chinese supermarket in Ottery for a paltry R80 (my local Spar sells them for around R125), so I seized it and took it home to cook.

A duck, even a good-sized one, doesn't have enough meat on it to give more than three or four people a square meal, so I decided to try to take off the legs (and the breasts, for good measure) and confit them, something I've never tried before. I scoured my cookbooks for an easy home recipe, and finally, after much page-flipping and head-scratching, followed the instructions given by Rick Stein in his recipe for Duck Confit with Braised Red Cabbage (from Rick Stein's French Odyssey; BBC Books, 2006)

The duck legs and breasts, post-confit, turned out beautifully, but were so modestly sized (puny, to be exact) that I decided to strip the flesh from the bones and turn them into rillettes.

'Rillettes' is a French word describing any fatty meat (usually pork and duck) that is slow-cooked to a tender shreddiness and packed, with a few judicious flavourings such as mace, pepper and thyme, into small dishes.  This may sound very Frenchified, but the method of packing meat into dishes is a very old English tradition: read more about this in my post about Potted Pork Belly with Mace and Pepper.

Now, you may be shaking your head and thinking: 'Duck confit? Not for me.'  Well, I concede that confit duck rillettes sounds like the sort of dish that only the ponciest and cheffiest chef would make, but I an assure you that this dish is not poncy at all. It may appear to be expensive too, considering that you don't get much more than two ramekins-full of rillettes from a whole duck, but - if you follow my instructions - you will end up with two fantastic by-products: a  delicious rich duck stock that you can freeze for future use in sauces and stews, and  lots of duck fat, which you can use to make excellent roast potatoes.

Most recipes for confit duck ask you for additional duck or goose fat, but as these aren't readily available in Cape Town, I've tailored this recipe to use the fat that comes out of your duck.

These duck rillettes are best served slightly cold (and by that, I mean that you take them out of the fridge half an hour before you serve them) with hot, crisp triangles of toast. A sharp, fruity preserve perfectly offsets the fattiness of the duck: I served these on Christmas Eve with a bottle of my sister Sophie's Beetroot and Cranberry Preserve (a Nigella recipe that she's promised to email me).

Easy Duck Rillettes
1 large duck, with plenty of fat, thawed
1 cup coarse (Kosher) salt
one large onion, quartered, skin and all
1 stick celery
1 large carrot, peeled and roughly sliced
2 cloves garlic, peeled
a few large sprigs of fresh thyme
a few peppercorns
a little powdered mace, or finely grated nutmeg
milled black pepper

Preheat the oven to 160ºC. Wipe the duck with a damp cloth and remove the giblets, if there are any (set these aside in the fridge to use in your stock). Cut the legs and the breasts off the duck as follows: place the duck, breast-side up, on a chopping board. With a very sharp knife, held parallel to the breastbone, slice off the breasts, skin and all, on both sides. Use long, sweeping strokes, and don't worry if you need to hack a little - you'd going to shred them after cooking anyway.  Turn the duck over, pull out the legs, and cut them off at the point where the thigh meets the backbone.  Here are some good instructions, with pictures, for cutting up a duck.

Trim every bit of visible cream-coloured fat off the legs and breasts, leaving the skin (and the fat under it) on, and set the pieces of fat aside. Sprinkle a little of the coarse salt in the bottom of a shallow dish that's just big enough to hold the two breasts and two legs in one tightly packed layer. Place the breasts and legs on the salt layer, skin-side up, and cover with the remaining salt, pressing it lightly into the skin. Put a saucer and a small weight on top and place in the fridge for six hours (but no longer, says Rick Stein, or the duck will be too salty).

In the meantime, roast the duck carcass to render its fat.  Arrange the onion, celery, carrot, one of the cloves of garlic and the sprigs of thyme in a bed on the bottom of a roasting pan. Place the duck carcass on top, and to the pan add the pieces of duck fat you trimmed from the legs and breast. Cover the pan tightly with tin foil and bake at 160ºC for an hour and ten minutes. Now remove the tin foil and roast, uncovered, for another twenty minutes. Remove from the oven. Tilt the pan and, using a deep spoon or soup ladle, scoop the clear fat into a bowl: you should have between one and one-and-a-half cups of fat. Reserve a few tablespoons of the pan juices. (Don't throw out the duck carcass and vegetables: cover them with water, add all the usual stock ingredients, plus the reserved giblets, and simmer for an hour and a half. Strain, then refrigerate or freeze.)

Wipe the salt off the duck legs and breasts and rinse them quickly under cold running water to remove all the salt. Pat them dry and put them back into the dish. Pour the warm duck fat over them, pressing down so that they are completely submerged. Tuck another sprig of thyme, the remaining clove of garlic and the peppercorns inbetween the pieces.

Cover the dish with foil and bake at 160ºC for an hour and a half. Remove from the oven and chill for 24 hours. Remove the duck legs and breasts from their fat. If the fat has started to solidify in the fridge, heat the dish gently in the microwave (or over a low flame) until it is just liquid.  Remove the duck pieces, and strain the fat in to a clean bowl. Keep the fat in a jar, in the fridge, for making roast potatoes.

Tear the skin off the duck pieces and discard. Pull the meat off the bones and place it in a heap on a chopping board. Using a sharp knife, chop it into small pieces (or shred it, if you like). Season with milled black pepper, a little mace or nutmeg and, if you like, some fresh thyme leaves.  How highly, and with what, you flavour your rillettes is up to you: I think a whisper of mace and a bit of pepper is enough. You shouldn't need to add any salt.  Pack the duck into two ramekin dishes, and moisten with a few teaspoons of the pan juices you set aside earlier. Now spoon a little warm duck fat over each dish, so that the duck is just submerged. Press a sprig of thyme onto the top of the dish (I added some pretty fresh-sage flowers), cover with clingfilm and refrigerate.

Makes 2 ramekins; serves 4-6 as a snack.  Print Friendly

My uncle's Smoked Franschhoek Trout with Hot Sesame Oil

I enjoyed many scrumptious feasts over the festive season, but none so splendid as this dish of smoked trout with hot sesame oil. It's not often you taste something so delicious that you feel giddy after the first bite, but here's a dish that made my mouth (and my knees) water. If you like sushi, you'll luurrve this.

My uncle David Walters insisted, on Christmas Eve, that I nip into his kitchen and watch him making what has become his signature dish, and I'm glad I did, because this is a real smasher of a recipe. I begged him to let me share it with you, and he kindly obliged.

Actually, it's such a simple idea that it can hardly be called a recipe. David, who is a master potter, and whose beautiful dinnerware I often feature on this blog, says he got the idea of pouring very hot sesame oil over smoked trout from his friend, chef Reuben Riffel, whose award-winning restaurant is a stone's throw from Dave's house and gallery in Franschhoek. The picture on the left shows Reuben with some of David's bespoke dinnerware.

(Note: Reuben's original recipe for Sesame and Olive Oil Seared Salmon appears in his book Reuben Cooks; Quivertree Press, 2008.)

David borrowed Reuben's idea and added his own clever embellishments, which you'll find listed below.

For this dish, David uses superb locally smoked trout - sometimes called 'salmon trout', and with the texture of excellent smoked salmon - but you could easily use any similar good quality smoked salmon.

This recipe contains a large amount of red and black 'caviar', or lumpfish roe. Please don't be put off by either the ingredient or the quantity you see in the picture. Two members of my family who've never tried roe - and who swore they never would -  ate it with relish, and enjoyed the lovely popping of the little fish eggs so much that they're already demanding more. (You can, of course, leave it out if you face a family mutiny. But please trust me on this!)

I can't give you exact quantities, as I haven't made the dish myself, but here's how David did it.

Cut some good smoked salmon or trout (David used about 500 grams) into strips. David offers some specific instructions: 'You must use lightly smoked Three Streams trout from Franschhoek. Choose thick-cut pieces, without any white fatty streaks. Cut the trout at an angle, so you get long, wide ribbons. Arrange them on a platter made by David Walters. This is not optional!'

If you don't have a plate by David Walters, use a large, flat dish.

Now make your miso mix. Mix a little miso paste or concentrate (available at Oriental shops and at good delicatessans) in about 80 ml water. Consult the package for dilution instructions, or simply mix it to taste. If you can't find miso paste, leave it out.

Fill a metal soup ladle to about three quarters with sesame oil. Place the ladle directly over a gas flame, and heat until the oil is very, very hot, but not yet smoking furiously. (In other words, the oil will be shimmering and swirling, and just about to send up a wisp of smoke.)

If you don't have a gas hob, heat the oil in a small saucepan.

Trickle the hot oil all over the salmon; it will sizzle as it hits the surface of the fish, ever so slightly searing its surface.

Now, artistically please, add the following toppings to the salmon:

• Miso diluted with a little water (see above)
• A few tablespoons of Kikkoman soy sauce
• Some very finely grated fresh ginger (about 4 tsp/20 ml, I would guess)
• A little finely grated fresh garlic (two or three small cloves)
• A little showering of black sesame seeds (use toasted white ones if you can't find black)
• A handful of caperberries, or good capers
• Large dollops of red lumpfish roe
• Large dollops of black lumpfish roe
• A good squeeze of fresh lime or lemon juice
• Salt and freshly milled black pepper, to taste (but go easy on the salt, as there's plenty of it in the miso and the soy sauce)

If you have some home-made mayonnaise (and I hope you do!), put little dabs of it all the way round the edge of the platter. David's home-made mayonnaise is flavoured with paprika.

Serve immediately, or allow to stand for up to an hour, at room temperature. This is lovely with a little side dish of pickled ginger and wasabi paste.  

Serves 6 as a generous starter; 8 as part of a buffet

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Tweeting Christmas recipes: the fun, the festivities, and the failure

My cousin Sarah's mulberry and raspberry Christmas trifle, which
 I whipped outside to photograph while the custard was being made.

I became a Twitter fan (oh, okay, a hopeless addict) this year, and this is the first Christmas in the four years I've been writing this blog that I have had the opportunity to engage, in real time, with people who've decided to give my recipes a whirl. 

(And what fun I had over Christmas! I joined my extended family in Franschhoek to prepare an extravaganza of a feast, to which we each contributed a course or dish; the trifle-in-the-making pictured left was one of two desserts made by my talented cousin Sarah Walters.)

I can't tell you what a kick it gave me to log in to Twitter over the past week to find many questions, comments and photographs posted by readers of this blog.

Not to say that I wasn't gnawing my knuckles at the thought of people putting faith in my recipes. I'm keenly aware that no matter how carefully I formulate and test a recipe, there is always a chance of failure: I might have made a mistake in writing down quantities, or left out a vital step, or neglected to explain the method clearly. (I experienced a spectacular failure myself when my huge Christmas gammon fell to soggy shreds in the pot last Thursday, but more about that later in this post).

It is hugely rewarding for me, as a recipe developer, to see my dishes being cooked by real people in real kitchens, and on such an important festive occasion. My Christmas Gammon Glazed with Brandy and Coke was the recipe most people made, with others trying my festive turkey stuffing, my Layered Christmas Ice-Cream Cake with White Chocolate and Berries, and several older recipes for salads, including the perennially popular Marinated Mushrooms.

Here are some of the pictures that were tweeted by readers who'd made the Coke-glazed gammon: don't they look scrumptious?

Some of the gammon photographs tweeted by readers of this blog!

And here's a picture sent to me by Steve Mabbutt (one of this blog's most loyal and informed readers, and a cook of note), of his mise en place for the gammon:

Our own festive feast (traditionally served on Christmas Eve) was just wonderful. It's so special to come together as a family to cook, laugh and talk, to eat, drink and be merry, isn't it?

Even though we are (mostly) heathens of note, I've always found Christmas Eve to be the most magical and merry night of the year. Twinkling lights, frosty champagne glasses, glowing candles, presents rustling under the tree, kids whirling in giddy circles, spicy aromas drifting from the kitchen...

My family, starting the feast.

And then, as the evening blossoms into its fullness, singing of carols, snapping of crackers, stirring of gravy, carving of turkey, munching of chocolate, filling of Christmas stockings, putting-out of milk and biscuits for Father Christmas, and all the other treasured family rituals that make those marvellous and important memories.

And then there is (of course) the food. This year, my family pulled out the stops to produce a humdinger of a feast. My sister Sophie produced a seriously delicious dip of smoky aubergines, garlic and toasted pine nuts.

My other sister Karen roped in the kids to make what is always the star attraction of the feast: little pork sausages wrapped in bacon, with fresh rosemary. My sainted mother glided back and forth, with her usual poise and enthusiasm, dishing out champagne, encouragement and hugs to her adoring children and grandchildren.

The winning dish - in fact, one of the best things I've tasted this year - was a beautiful starter of smoked trout made by my uncle David.  In this truly gorgeous recipe (recipe here) piping-hot sesame oil is trickled over a bed of Franschhoek smoked trout, then topped with miso, soy sauce, black sesame seeds, fresh ginger, garlic, caperberries, dabs of home-made mayonnaise and great dollops of pink and black fish roe.  This was served on exquisite plates hand-made by David, each one embossed with our names.

 My sister Karen's pork chipolatas, ready for the oven

The starter was followed by a traditional turkey course, as demanded by the British-born men of my family (three brothers-in-law: a Scot, a Welshman and an Englishman). We made two turkeys for 20 people (each turkey with its own stuffing), plus potatoes roasted in duck fat, peas, gravy, bacon-wrapped chipolatas and a green salad. For dessert, my pudding-queen-of-a-cousin Sarah and her man Jim produced a mulberry and raspberry trifle and an incredibly delicious Nigel Slater cheesecake.

And finally: my Christmas-feast disaster. I bought an enormous (4.3 kg) bone-in gammon from a local supermarket chain that collapsed into sodden shreds when I cooked it.  I won't name the supermarket until they've responded to my complaint, but I will say that I'm annoyed and frustrated at having wasted both money and time on a clearly inferior piece of meat.

The joint looked beautiful, all right, when I bought it (it's the same joint, from the same supermarket, shown in Steve's mise en place picture, above) but within half an hour of my placing it in a flavoured, spiced stock, it began to swell alarmingly.  Some three-and-a-half hours of simmering later (well short of the cooking time recommended on the packaging) it began to disintegrate into tasteless grey shreds. I couldn't save it, because it fell to pieces as I fished it out of the stock.

All was not lost, though, because a foraging party found another gammon from another supermarket (this time, in Franschhoek) which held together as it boiled, and tasted delicious.

I've cooked many gammons in my life, always using the same cooking times, and this is the first time I've ever seen a piece of meat collapse in such a spectacular fashion. I fretted briefly over whether I'd done something wrong, or miscalculated the cooking time, but when the aforementioned Steve told me he'd had exactly the same disaster with his gammon, I realised that the fault lay with the ingredient, and not the cook  (Whew!)

I will get back to you with details when I receive a reply to the email of complaint I've sent the supplier.

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Chilli Snoek Pâté: a taste of Hout Bay

Please admire the little double-walled amuse-bouche dish,
 from a bespoke set of dinnerware made for a famous Franschhoek
 restaurant by my uncle, master potter David Walters.

Few tastes capture Cape Town as delightfully as smoked snoek pâté.  When you visit Cape Town you will find this noble fish - an honoured staple for centuries - virtually everywhere you go along the coast.

You'll see fishing boats avalanching their silvery cargos of fresh snoek onto the quayside at little working harbours, you'll see it it vlekked (gutted and splayed) on drying frames, you'll see it sold in oaked-smoked fillets, you'll see smoorsnoek, and you'll see it sizzling over braai fires.   You're most likely, though, if you're a casual visitor to the city, to encounter it in the form of a salty, smoky pâté.

Today I spent a happy hour in the kitchen with my darling friend Claire (here from Jo'burg for the weekend), concocting our visisticated version of this dish. Claire was driven in a taxi from the airport to her brother's fabulous flat in Kalk Bay, and was inspired by a discussion she had with the driver and his wife. Just outside Muizenberg, they passed racks of golden snoek drying in the sun, and the conversation turned to recipes for preparing the fish.  The driver and his wife told Claire stories of  being put to work as children by their grandmothers: their task was to pound fresh red chillies and deboned salted snoek together in a mortar; the resulting paste was spread on bread.

After a walk on the beach this morning, and a sinful bockwurst roll at Muriel's Munchies, we  picked up a package of  oak-smoked snoek at Hout Bay harbour, gathered chillies, coriander and lemons on the way home and set to work producing snoek pâté, only better - with pounded chillies.

 Please do not be put off by the fact that this recipe contains a whole red chilli.  When you first taste it, you may be alarmed and think your mouth has caught fire.  But, given four hours in the fridge, this pâté mellows  and the chilli fades, leaving just a tingle.

You can pound these ingredients together with a mortar and pestle in the old-fashioned way, or use a food processor fitted with a metal blade. The important thing here is not to over-process the pâté: it should not be whizzed to a silken paste, but retain some texture.

Chilli Snoek Pâté: a Taste of Hout Bay

250 g oak-smoked snoek [or any similar smoked white fish]
1 red chilli, halved and deseeded
a big pinch of coarse salt
half a clove of fresh peeled garlic
½  tsp (5 ml) finely grated lemon zest
2 Tbsp (30 ml) soft butter
3 Tbsp (45 ml) crème fraîche
milled black pepper
1 Tbsp (15 ml) finely chopped fresh coriander [cilantro]

Flake the fish into a small bowl and remove all bones. Put the chilli into a small mortar with the salt and garlic; pound to paste. If you don't have a mortar, finely chop the chilli and garlic and mash into a paste with the salt using the back of a spoon or a knife. Set aside.

Scrape the chilli and garlic paste into the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Add the flaked fish and all remaining ingredients. Pulse lightly to combine without pulverising the fish. Tip the mixture into a little bowl and refrigerate for three to four hours.

Serve with sliced wholewheat seed loaf or crackers.

Serves 6 as an appetiser or dip.


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