Essential food-blog housekeeping, plus top six recipes ever on this blog

Thyme-roasted garlic chicken, with a red-wine and cranberry gravy... no, I kid. That's the way I usually start off a post on this blog, as I introduce my latest recipe (as any food blogger knows, the first paragraph of any post is hugely important: it needs to sum up the recipe and its ingredients in just a few words and, more important, entice the reader to scroll down for more).

But I have no recipe for you today, just a notice that I am going to be doing some housekeeping on this blog. I've tinkered with the CSS settings on the template for this blog so many times over the years - and I'm no expert - that the site has become a bit clunky, rather outdated and, most annoying of all,  slow to load, with all its widgets, badges and gizmos**.

Over the next few days, I'll be cleaning up the look of Scrumptious South Africa  to bring you a new, streamlined site. Please bear with me while I bash my forehead on the keyboard and gnaw off my own knuckles.

I've considered, many times, moving this blog to another, sexier platform (I long to be on Wordpress) or schlepping it, lock, stock and photograph, on a Wordpress platform, to my own registered domain (www.scrumptious.co.za).  But the truth is that I don't have time to faff around with this, and I can't afford to pay someone to do it for me.  On a technical note: exporting the text of this blog to Wordpress isn't a big deal, but the photographs are a nightmare, because they're stored all over the place.  Over the years, I've tried several different hosts for my photographs, in a quest to find a service that doesn't crunch and blur them. I have some of the originals on my internal hard drive, but many of them disappeared into the land of lost photographs when my external hard drive crashed last year.

So, for now, I'm going to stick with blogger.com, and devote two days to some arduous housekeeping, during which this site will resemble a bomb crater.

Are you wondering why there's a picture of potato wedges at the top of this post?

Over the last few days, I've been reviewing the traffic on this website since its inception (a very interesting exercise, and something I urge you to do if you're a food blogger), and here are the six recipes and/or posts that have attracted the most attention.  I find these results intriguing, not least because two out of the six top recipes (ginger beer and braaied fillet) don't feature photographs of the finished product.  It's common wisdom among food bloggers that a photograph is essential if your post is to have any authority or popularity (and I wholeheartedly agree), but these results seem to say otherwise. Is it possible that detailed, clear instructions for well-loved, oft-searched-for recipes are perhaps just as important as a mouth-watering photograph?  I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, and I'd also like to know which recipes on your food blog are perennial favourites.

Here are the top six, in no particular order:

• Spicy, Super-Crunchy Garlic Potato Wedges with Roast Pepper Dip
• Henna-Patterned Spiced Cream Cheese
• Old-fashioned, home-made South African ginger beer
• How to cook (or braai) a fillet of beef to perfection
• Roast Pork Neck with Leeks, Carrots and Apples
• Oven-Cooked Hearty Beef and Carrot Stew

** Gizmos: I've put several food-bloggie badges and 'partnerships' on this site, such as FoodBuzz, and none of them bring any significant traffic. Most of the traffic I get is from random Google searches and from Foodgawker.com, Facebook's Networked Blogs, Twitter, and referrals from fellow food bloggers. 

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I-Love-You Chicken Pie from South Africa

A silky creamy filling, with an intense chickeny flavour and delicate hints of mustard, nutmeg and wine, makes this luxurious pie the perfect dish for impressing friends, or for showing your family just how much you love them.

That's why I've called it I-Love-You Chicken Pie.  (And also, I was at a loss for good ideas for naming this recipe. Do you know that 'chicken pie' is among the most frequently searched-for recipe titles on the Internet?Google it yourself, and you'll be rewarded with three-and-a-half  million results).

The 'South Africa' in the title is there because this really is our moment, isn't it?  A frenzied excitement and an outpouring of national pride is the best way to describe the atmosphere in our country over the past few days, and I am loving every minute of it!

I've made dozens of chicken pies, of various sorts, over the years, but I've often found that they don't have the full-bodied chicken taste I expect from a good pie.  The reason? Simmering whole chickens in water doesn't produce - in a short time at least- a stock of sufficient intensity and flavour.  So, after some experimenting, I've come up with this method: the chickens are roasted, at a moderate temperature, in a shallow bath of water and wine, with the usual flavourings.  Once the cooked chicken has been stripped off, the bones and skin are returned to the bath, and cooked briskly on the stove-top to concentrate the flavour and produce a small amount of really chickeny stock. This is a long recipe, which takes time, but I reckon the effort is worth it.

It may seem like an extravagance to use two whole chickens for a single pie, but you can boil up the bones for a second time, with fresh vegetables, to make a few litres of good stock for a soup or stew.

I use bought puff pastry for this pie because I honestly can't be fagged to make my own, but it would be superb with a really good home-made pastry.  The ready-made sort we get here in South Africa (Heinz's Today Ready-Rolled Puff Pastry) is not great - it tends to crack as you unroll it, and it doesn't have much puff in it. But it's convenient.

This pie, like all stews, tastes better the day after it's made. Use a large pie dish, or make individual pies, as you please. The ham is entirely optional: if you use it, use a good-quality smoked ham, and ask your deli to cut off a chunk, so you can cube  it it yourself.  Other good additions to this pie are little nuggets of fried pork- sausage meat (squeeze the filling from pork sausages, roll into balls and brown in oil), frozen peas, and hard-boiled eggs.

I-Love-You Chicken Pie from South Africa 

For the chicken and stock:
2 whole free-range chickens
2 carrots, thickly sliced
a stick of celery, sliced
6 parsley stalks (reserve the leaves)
10 peppercorns
2 bay leaves
3 whole cloves
a large, unskinned onion, quartered
a large sprig of thyme
a lemon
2 cloves garlic, peeled
4 cups (1 litre) water
1½ cups (375 ml) white wine
1 tsp (5 ml) salt

For the sauce and pie:
4 Tbsp (90 ml/90g) butter
100 ml flour
1½ cups (375 ml) milk
¼ tsp (1.25 ml) freshly grated nutmeg
2 tsp (10 ml) Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp (15 ml) brandy
5 Tbsp (75 ml) cream
4 Tbsp (60 ml) chopped fresh parsley
a generous squeeze of fresh lemon juice
salt and milled black pepper
250 g cooked, smoked ham, cubed
a sheet of prepared puff pastry
an egg, lightly beaten

Preheat the oven to 160°C.  Place the chickens in a large, deep metal roasting pan. Add the carrots, celery, parsley, peppercorns, bay leaves, cloves, onion, thyme and salt. Squeeze the lemon over the chickens, then push the squeezed-out halves, together with the garlic cloves, into their cavities. Pour the water and wine into the pan. Place in the oven and roast, uncovered, for an hour and twenty minutes, or until the chickens are cooked through.

Remove the chickens from the pan, first tipping them neck-side down to drain any juices back into the pan. Discard the lemon halves. Allow the chickens to cool for 20 minutes. Remove the flesh from the bones, and tear it into strips the size of your little finger. Put all the skin and bones back in the roasting tin. Place the tin over a moderate flame and simmer for 20-30 minutes. Strain the liquid into a jug and place in the fridge to cool. Remove any fat from the top of the stock and measure out two cups (500 ml). (You can skip this step, but the stock will be fatty.  If you're in a hurry, skim the fat off the hot stock with a spoon. Alternatively, you can use one of these brilliant fat-separating jugs). Set aside.

In the meantime, make a white sauce. Melt the butter in a saucepan over a high heat. When the butter stops foaming, tip in the flour and stir vigorously to make a paste. Allow to bubble for a minute or two, but do not allow to brown. Now tip in all the milk and, using a balloon whisk, stir wildly to disperse any lumps. Continue stirring constantly until the mixture becomes smooth and very thick. Now beat in the reserved two cups of stock. When the sauce comes to the boil, turn down the heat and allow to bubble gently for three minutes. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the nutmeg, mustard, brandy, cream, parsley and a spritz of lemon juice. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover the surface of the sauce with clingfilm and allow to cool to lukewarm.

Mix the sauce with the chicken strips and cubed ham, and place the mixture in a pie dish about the same size as your sheet of pastry. Very lightly roll out the pastry on a floured surface (don't stretch it or enlarge it by more than about a centimetre on all sides). Place the pastry on top of the filling, and cut away any excess. Seal the edges by pressing lightly with your fingers. Decorate the pie by crimping the edges and using any trimmings to make leafy decorations. Cut a 1-cm slit in the middle of the pastry. Brush the pie all over with the beaten egg. At this point, you can place the pie in the fridge to bake later, or the next day.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Bake the pie, in the middle of the oven, for 30 minutes, or until the pastry is crisp and golden,and the filling is bubbling (reduce the cooking time if you are making individual pies).

Serves 8. Print Friendly

Caramel-Dipped Naartjies on Kebab Sticks

Arguably the most famous of South African stadium foods, naartjies (tangerines) have long been associated in this country with watching rugby matches. A bulging bag of naartjies (pronounced 'nar-chees') is what fans take along with them to watch their provincial side - or the famous Springboks - in action. To thwart no-alcohol rules, naartjies are sometimes spiked in advance, using a hypodermic syringe, with brandy, vodka, witblits or mampoer (potent moonshine, often made with peaches).

Naartjies have no association, as far as I know, with soccer matches, but my series of scrumptious soccer snacks would not be complete without a mention of this most delicious winter fruit.

Caramel is always tricky, and it doesn't like moisture, so there are three important points to bear in mind when making these. First, the fruit segments must be dried out overnight, which will allow excess surface moisture to evaporate, and make the skin slightly papery.

Second, the segments must be dipped to only five-sixths of their length, so that the caramel comes nowhere close to the hole where the kebab stick has been pushed in.

Finally, please note that the caramel remains hard for a maximum of 35 minutes (and I tested these at sea level, with relatively high humidity), after which it begins to soften.

This caramel does not set glass-hard, but cools to a nice crack with a tiny bit of chew. This recipe is adapted from a recipe for toffee apples from Inspired by Sugar by Lesley Faull (1965), which is one of the most treasured items in my collection of vintage cookbooks.

Caramel-Dipped Naartjies on Kebab Sticks

6 large naartjies [tangerines, clementines]
1 cup (250 ml) light brown sugar
2 Tbsp (30 ml) golden syrup
1 Tbsp (15 ml) lemon juice
1 Tbsp (15 ml) water

Peel the naartjies and divide them into segments very carefully, making sure not to puncture their skins.  Spread the segments on a large plate and place, uncovered, in the fridge overnight. Push a slim wooden kebab stick into the end of each segment.

Gently heat the caramel ingredients in heavy saucepan, stirring now and then until the sugar has dissolved.  Bring to the boil and cook briskly, without stirring, until the caramel reaches 155°C . If you don't have a sugar thermometer, place a droplet of the caramel into iced water: it should snap cleanly in half.  Remove the caramel from the heat.

 Dip five-sixths of each segment into the caramel, avoiding the hole where the stick has punctured the flesh.  Lean the sticks up against a plate or upturned box, and allow to dry. If the caramel becomes too thick during the dipping process, gently warm it over a low flame.

Serve within half an hour.

Makes about 40.

Try some of the other recipes from this series:

Mini Pita Breads with Spicy Meatballs and Hoummous
Mini Bunny Chow with Butter Chicken 
Cape-Malay-Style Curried Lamb Kebabs with Apricots
Potato, Cheese and Chilli Phyllo Triangles
Steak Kebabs with a Monkey-Gland Dipping Sauce Print Friendly

South African Food Blogger Explosion, and the thorny Freebie Question

When I started this blog three years ago, food blogs were reasonably plentiful.  Reasonably, I say, because, on a global scale, food blogging was a lesser-known, rather niched activity. Less than a handful of South African - or indeed African -  food blogs existed at the time.

Much has changed. Food blogging is the flavour du jour, if not du decade. The Internet is bulging with hundreds of thousands of food blogs, ranging from professional, beautiful and instructive sites, through charming, chatty food diaries, to some of the most dreadful and dire food nightmares you can imagine.

In the last eighteen months or so, the rise of South African food blogs - pioneered six years ago by my mate, London-dwelling South African Jeanne Horak-Druiff of Cooksister -  has been meteoric.  There are, to my knowledge, well over 120 South African food and wine bloggers posting recipes and restaurant reviews on the Net, on Facebook and on Twitter.  And, as they have attracted more fans, these blogs have become very popular, and somewhat influential.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that there has been a minor storming of the food-blog world from South African food bloggers.  Not a tempest, but maybe a little whirlwind.

This is so heartening, especially given the fact that South Africa is about to be catapulted into the limelight during the 2010 Fifa World Cup. It's also encouraging because South African food deserves to be highlighted: it's about time that the spotlight falls on our beautiful  fresh produce, our superlative wines, our creative cooks, our excellent restaurants and our extraordinarily rich culinary heritage  That razor-tongued restaurant reviewer and gourmand A.A.Gill, in several columns on the subject of South Africa, has often indignantly wondered why South African cuisine - and in particular, Cape Malay cuisine -  has not become famous, and the next big trend.

Well, A.A., one tries.  Certainly, I've tried hard enough on this blog to promote South African foods, and after three years of hard slog, my blog is attracting traffic and interest I didn't dare to dream of three years ago.

Which brings me to my next point.  As any successful food blogger knows, more popular and visited your blog becomes, the more often you're begged for mentions.

So here's the freebie question.  The marketeers, publicity agents and pee-ars of South Africa - and further afield -  have just twigged on to the fact that local food bloggers attract an audience. In the last month alone I've had 42 press releases from various publicists, begging me to take note of their product.  These releases range from a heads-up about a new product, to lavish invitations to free lunches, to 'urgent' queries for my physical address so I can take delivery of the latest liqueur, cookie or boxed cereal.  Or apron, oven gloves, bottle of wine, and so on. All manner of exciting products are dangled before my eyes.

I refuse these - with reluctance - because I want my blog to be independent, and because I see myself first as an impartial journalist and second as a cook and food writer.  I'm not saying that accepting free products, or going to launches and openings,  is any way dodgy: on the contrary, I'm always keen to read consumer opinions of products, and reviews of new restaurants. However, what I would like to say is that I think it's incumbent on a food blogger to declare, upfront, that whatever product, service or meal you're reviewing was offered to you for free.

And I add this piece of advice:  if you're a successful food blogger, you are only so because of your talent and originality.  Don't under-sell yourself.  If a manufacturer, or his publicist, wants you to do a write-up on their product, don't do it for free.  Charge them. Sure, it's nice that they sent you a free sample, but the fact is that they didn't do this out of a sense of love and altruism, and genuine admiration for your blog.  They sent you that sample because they wanted free advertising.

In short: decide what you want your blog to be.  And stick to that formula.

And finally, having said all that, I declare that I won't, henceforth, be featuring any Verlaque products on this blog because they've appointed me, in my capacity as a professional journalist, as a consultant for their brand. Print Friendly