SA Food Fundis II: Michael and Michele Karamanof

Say I had a choice: indulge in an exquisite meal at the finest restaurant in the city, or enjoy a home-cooked Sunday lunch, under a whispering tree, at the home of Parkview couple Mike and Michele Karamanof. No contest: I would head over to my friends' house with a bottle of wine and no regrets.

Maybe I'm getting old and crabby, but I'm fed up with restaurant food in Johannesburg. I can't afford to eat out often, and when I do, I almost always end up feeling ripped off. I do enjoy a slap-up meal at a good family steakhouse or pizza joint, if it's good value for money, but I really resent forking out R800 to R1000 - which is about what it costs to take five people to dinner at an upmarket restaurant these days, excluding wine - for a meal with absurdly stingy portions, pretentious stacked towers of food, dabs of this, drizzles of that, and shriekingly disgusting 'foamed' sauces that look and taste like spit.

All I want is a full plate - or several plates, for that matter - of honest, gutsy, delicious home-cooked food. I want it hot, I want it fresh, and I want it made in a home kitchen by a friend.

Chemical engineer Mike Karamanof and his wife Michele Botha (a graphic designer) have, for many years, and in their spare time, run a small home industry supplying several Johannesburg restaurants with top-quality home-made products, notably superior home-made pesto and tiramisu.

The Karamanofs are small fish in the Johannesburg-Foodie nibbling order: they're not caterers, chefs, restaurateurs or food professionals, but they are still among the best cooks I know. They have an instinctive love of food, they care about fine ingredients, and they understand simple combinations of brilliant flavours.

Welcome to the second of my new series about local South African food fundis!

Michael Karamanof is an ebullient, warm-hearted Greek with a passion for food that borders on obsession. His knowledge of food and ingredients is encyclopaedic: there are few butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers and wine merchants in Johannesburg with whom he isn't on first-name terms. He loves food, he adores wine, and Michael's idea of heaven is whipping on his apron and spending countless deliriously happy hours cooking for friends and family.

Actually, Mike is a complete know-it-all about food, and the only reason he gets away with this insufferable attitude is because he does actually know an enormous amount about food, and especially Mediterranean food. Mike speaks fluent English, Greek, German and French, and can hold a conversation in Italian and several other languages.

Michele Botha, the thoughtful, organisational, highly creative wing of this partnership, and a talented cook herself, is frequently maddened by Mike (the Karamanofs cannot prepare a meal for friends without having a good argument before everyone arrives).

But, back to the food: although they can cook anything, it's simple Greek food that Mike and Michele really adore. And this passion has accelerated since they bought, a year or two ago, a beautiful, tumbledown old house on the Greek island Kythera. The Karamanofs and their son, Leo, try to get back to the old house twice a year. Most of their time there appears to be spent arguing with builders and architects and each other, while they figure out how to to renovate the place, but they also do manage to spend a lot of time finding, eating, and thinking about food. One of the gorgeous desserts featured here - thickened yoghurt with sweet stewed grapes - is a speciality of Kythera.

For weeks, I've plagued M&M, as they are known among friends, for recipes for my SA Food Fundis section of this blog, and as they haven't produced the goods, on the grounds that they 'don't really have proper recipes' (and they genuinely don't, preferring to cook from their hearts) I'm giving you what they made me for lunch a Sunday ago. This represents a tiny portion of the wonderful food I've eaten at their home over the years.

Our meal started off with beetroot greens - the top leafy portion of beetroots, with their crimson stalks - simply cooked and dressed with olive oil, vinegar and salt, and a loaf of yeasty home-baked bread. Thin-crusted, crispy pizzas, freckled underneath with the black spots you get only from a proper wood-fired pizza outdoor oven (manned by Michael in his apron) and topped with gorgeous mozzarella, anchovy, tomatoes, herbs, mushrooms and the best salami, came next. Then, when we thought it was all over, two earthenware dishes of youvetsi - a dish consisting of rice-shaped pasta (orzo) combined with the tender rippings of lamb cooked for many hours with tomato, and topped with feta. And then, to crown it all, the yoghurt and stewed grapes.

All this around a wooden table, under a tree, in glowing autumn sunshine, and the scent of lemons drifting from a nearby tree in Michele's organic vegetable patch.

Does food get any better than this?

Want to go for dinner at Chez Auberge de La Mon Repose in Poshville, Sandton, for a Tower of Scottish Salmon with Rooibos Jus and Biltong Spit?

I thought not.

Here are the recipes:



- Stewed Sweet Grapes with Thick Yoghurt and Mascarpone, Kythera-style
- Beetroot Greens with Olive Oil
- Mike's Youvetsi


This post is the second in my series about South African Food Fundis. To see the first post, about Gilly Walters of Wedgewood Nougat, click here.

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SA Food Fundis: Gilly Walters of Wedgewood Nougat

I've never forgotten a single heavenly dish cooked by Gilly Walters, cook, caterer, innovator and the creative brain behind Wedgewood Home Confectionary, a thriving family business based in the Natal Midlands, and now branching out in the UK and elsewhere.

I've been in raptures about Gilly's wonderful home cooking since I was four years old. And although she has long forgotten making those dishes, I certainly have not, and the memory of every slice of home-made, wild-yeast bread, every tender flake of roast chicken, every feather-light piece of cake, is indelibly imprinted on my tastebuds.

Welcome to the first of my new series about local South African food heroes!

I'm kicking off this series with Gilly Walters (my aunt) because she is quite simply the best home cook I know. Her instinctive flair in the kitchen, her fine palate, and her love of fresh, seasonal, locally produced ingredients are all vital ingredients in the magic Gilly-Walters formula. Even more important is that Gilly understands that food is there to feed not only your body, but your soul too.

Her food is simple, honest, fresh and heart-warming. And did I mention damn delicious? Whenever I, and my family, stop over at Gilly's house, en route to the Kwa-Zulu-Natal coast, we take along cricket bats and stun-grenades so we can beat off all the other people stampeding to her table. There's always a crowd gathered in Gilly's kitchen at meal times - her sons, her daughters-in-law, five million grandchildren, and assorted nogschleppers* - and it's a very happy bunfight.

Wedgewood Nougat

Gilly is very well known in the Natal Midlands, where she's spent many years cooking, catering and teaching. Her herb and veggie garden - which would make Martha Stewart weep with envy - is a green fountain. Her artisan-bread-making classes are legendary, as are the meals she's served up at classical music concerts hosted by her and her husband, my uncle Taffy Walters, at their home in Hilton, Natal.

It was at one of these concerts that Gilly served her first batch of home-made honey nougat, to the delight of her guests: a light-textured, not-too-sweet prototype that eventually became the popular brand Wedgewood Nougat. The range has since expanded to include a variety of nougat products containing macadamias, almonds, pecan nuts, black cherries and cranberries. Gilly's 'Angel Biscuits' - thistledown shortbread containing nougat chippings - have also proved to be big sellers.

Thanks to the energy and flair of Taffy Walters and the Walters brothers - my cousins Jon, Steve and Paul - Wedgewood confectionary is now sold all over South Africa, and overseas (under the brand name Walters Handmade Honey Nougat)

The famous Angel biscuits!

Their new factory in the Natal Midlands is a model for small family businesses: sustainable, socially responsible, and friendly to the environment. My cousins have developed their own Bio-Fuel plant that converts used fast-food oil into a high quality diesel; Wedgewood's vehicles, biscuit oven and forklift truck are all run on old chip-fryer oil.

Gilly has shared three of her recipes with me (I begged her to give me these particular recipes, which sent me into a faint when I tasted them).

Note: I've added these recipes to the blog in individual posts: click on the links to see them.

- Citrus Poppy-Seed Cake
- Easy Nougat Ice Cream
- Egg 'Bavarois'

And here are two of her secret flavour strategies:

Gilly's Gorgeous All-Purpose Pepper Sauce

'I picked up this tip from a cook who had trained at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland,' says Gilly. 'It's just delicious with fish and chicken.'

'You can also use it to make a fabulous salsa - finely chop the peppers, instead of puréeing them.'

4 ripe red peppers (capsicums)
a little olive oil
a little mild roasted garlic paste (see recipe below)
sweet chilli jam
salt and pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C. Remove the stalks from the peppers, cut them in half, and strip out any white pith and seeds (or leave them whole).

Put the peppers in the oven, directly on the oven racks, and bake for 35 minutes or so, or until they are soft and the skin is lightly blistered, but not charred.

Remove from the oven, cover with cling film and set aside to cool for 30 minutes. Peel off the skin, dice, and place in a blender with a a little olive oil, a few teaspoons of garlic paste [see below] and a few teaspoons of sweet chilli jam or sauce. Season with salt and pepper, and blitz to a paste. Store in the fridge.

Gilly's Mild Roasted Pepper Sauce

'I always keep a jar of this delicious mild garlic mixture in my fridge,' says Gilly. 'I make a new batch about once a week. This paste should be added, in small quantities - just a teaspoonful at a time - to stews, soups, and so on, just before they are served.'

'Save energy by putting the garlic into the oven at the same time as you're cooking or baking a roast or cake.'

Do use fresh, snappy, plump white garlic for this recipe, not old, withered, yellow or sprouting cloves, which will taste stale and oxidised when cooked.

4 whole heads of fresh garlic
olive oil
salt

Remove the papery outer skin of the garlic bulbs and break apart into cloves. Put the cloves onto a large piece of tin foil, shiny side in, and wrap into a parcel. Bake at 180° C for 30 - 40 minutes, or until the garlic cloves are soft. Remove the parcel from the oven and allow to cool for 20 minutes. Using a pair of sharp scissors, snip the pointy end off each clove and squeeze the softened clove into a bowl - they should pop out easily.

Add a generous glug of olive oil and some salt, and whizz to a fine paste using a stick blender, or the small grinder on a food processor. Tip the paste into a lidded jar, or a small plastic container with a lid, and pour a film of olive oil over the top to prevent the paste from coming into contact with air and oxidising.

Store in the fridge.

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* Nogschlepper: it's difficult to define this piece of hybrid South African slang. It sort of means, a hanger-on, or someone who tails behind. It's a very nuanced word. 'Nog' means 'also' in Afrikaans, while 'schlep' is a Yiddish word meaning to move laboriously or slowly. In a South African context, 'schlep' means having to drag yourself off somewhere, largely against your will: 'It was such a schlep to go to to the supermarket'.

So, put together, the two words signify a person who drags themselves along too. Or 'with', as South Africans say. Print Friendly