I love cooking

A discussion took place this week about how many reads some blogs enjoy and it was mentioned that it is a sign of the times how incredibly popular budget meal posts are. Indeed they are but the subject ’budget meals’ (and God) have always been extremely popular, ask any book store or publisher. The exact kind of discussions we have now about the cost of food my parents and their friends had when I was a small girl and that was a few lifetimes ago …!  

So obviously the cost of living will remain a human issue and the same discussion also turned to Italian cuisine which in its very soul, is not expensive. And for that matter, most ethnic cuisines are affordable as a lot of those cuisines were borne from the poor mamas having to feed many little mouths a few times a day. Usually the expensive items are animal products and pre-made goods so if you look at a plate of Chinese stir fry, you will see mostly starch, fresh vegetables and very little animal products in there and ditto for Spanish paellas, Italian risottos, Indian biryanis, African pap and morogo, samp and beans and so on. Somewhere along the line, I think, we let go of our roots (have we too many roots?) and adopted the American way of life with focus on fat, sugar and protein. And if we cook and eat starch (complex carbohydrates) it is mostly refined and mostly fried or embellished with animal products like eggs, cheese and cream. In many of our homes, meat is an entire course on its own … and yesterday at the butcher I fell over when I had to pay R109 per kilo for my weekend braai choppies!

My point? Erm … frankly, I don’t have one. LOL, that will be a welcome change for some people who resent my points of view but I think I want to say that if you consider the cost of food in our Western society and you want to cut down on your food costs, it makes sense to look at other cuisines and especially their peasant, farm-style kind of dishes. A perfect example is fresh pasta. With double standards and lots of excuses in my favour, I bought some at Woollies yesterday and it plonked in my trolley at R20 for 250 g. If I made my own it would have cost about R6, I estimate. But now we have a time issue so we buy our stuff but my case will remain strong for simple, seasonal, regional … like the poor people eat of other countries with great cuisines like Greece, India, Spain, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and of course, everybody’s mama’s cuisine, Italian.

So in honour of cutting food costs, here is my cheapest recipe for pasta, using fresh pasta. And in honour of all busy moms, this is also the quickest if you choose to buy the ordinary dry pasta from a shop. You probably have your own favourite Alfredo recipe, but this plain one holds such great memories for me as my kids loved it so I am posting this one also in their honour. When they were very small I omitted the radical herbs, used plain old cheap cheddar and wait for it ….. I added a smidgen of Bovril to the butter. They loved it more than any other meal at the time and in fact my son called it Mama Alfredo not too long after he could speak full sentences. When they were a bit older and started looking less suspiciously at garlic and herbs I introduced them to old Alfredo as I knew him ….

And yes I know this is the third post in a row about pasta, but so what? Perhaps if we ate pasta more often, we would be healthier and richer like the famous Italian actress Sophia Lauren who apparently claimed “I owe everything to spaghetti!”

Alfredo A’ la Mama!

Visit I love Cooking for this recipe and for a Fresh Pasta recipe.

Fresh Pasta

10h05: … and while hanging for Telkom to handle an issue, I used the 57.5 minutes waiting time well and surfed my favourite blogs and then astonishingly enough I see that Jan Tripipei shared her Fettucini Alfredo recently with us and RSG listeners so Jan, this is not copying you honey! Obviously I need HRT patches … (LOL) … and if I simply remembered to check your post (you were on my mind when I wrote this one as we had that discussion, mos!) I would have done another topic for this post!! But you know that synchronicity is a thing of beauty, it really is.  And it spells good things … XXX!!

Something very disappointing happened during the last shoot that once again made the crew and me aware that the urge and tendency still exist within certain people to reward low stats.

It is a basic fact in cooking that if you mix the right amount of roux (butter and flour paste) into hot liquid, it will thicken the liquid. And so life has a few basic facts that have become rules or yard-sticks if you will and one of them is that if you reward or praise or promote low stats (or behaviour or work) you will continue to get low stats (or behaviour or work). It’s guaranteed. And just as sure and simple is the opposite: if you reward or acknowledge high stats, you will mostly get high stats. Just as simple to understand.

In this day and age – in spite of us becoming very informed thanks to psycho-spiritual guides like Gary Zukav and Thomas Moore and M Scott Peck and even old Dr Phil – it remains a gobsmacking event to see some people in society, organisations and businesses still ignoring that basic human fact … and often getting away with it … for a while at least!

Luckily there are not many people like that in major-important areas of our lives as our spiritual and psychological gurus taught us so that the tendency to praise (and often protect!) low stats is part of a process borne from lack of sufficient self-worth from being a victim to getting into shame-and-blame-and-snub-the-achiever to praise of the unworthy … back full circle to being a victim-with-buddies in the same situation. So the majority of us just don’t do that but it IS a scary thought to think that somebody that still operates emotionally like that, may be your child’s mentor … 

Thank God for Oscars! And cum laude! And other rewards and awards all the way to the Nobel prize – the very acknowledgment of excellence in many sectors. Imagine the world without the basic truth and greatness to recognise value and quality in others? Imagine the world if organisations and businesses operated on the principal let’s give the loser the Oscar, the manager’s jobs, the scientists’ jobs …!? Makes you think, hey?

Anyway, the issue was sorted and the greatness in this situation was that the ‘victims’ seeking rewards for their low stats ended up seeing the healthy and truthful point and coming clean with it all. They stopped their blaming the real achievers and we could reward them appropriately. Afterwards the person in charge of the team understood the principle of rather telling a low-achiever in a constructive manner the truth. She understood that her way of dealing with the situation was borne from her desire to be accepted and liked and her fear that if she does not side with the losers, she will not be liked. It turned out later they were hiding the fact that their team also violated the same rule that they blamed the other team for! I felt nothing but compassion because many of us who have healthy self worth actually know the pain of low self worth … We’ve just simply learnt our own value through accepting the honesty and realness of our achievements or non achievements for better or worse. That has become our truth and in truth we grow out of our emotional prisons. 

On the high stats note – today I am breaking with a celebration-of-sorts regarding the next television series which will be a cookery series … and important people are coming for dinner. Being busy as a bee, I will buy the starter and the dessert and prepare a quickie I published in 1991 already but it stood the test of time: Creamy Smoked Salmon & Horseradish Pasta. When my daughter got married in 1996 Mathew Gordon of the Haute Cabriere Cellar Restaurant in Franschhoek cooked my recipes and we served small portions of this as a starter … minus the canned salmon and milk off course. Those ingredients are for lesser festive events! Here goes, dears, enjoy!

Creamy Smoked Salmon & Horseradish Pasta

Visit I love Cooking for the recipe.

The ambiance was almost non-existing, the food great, the drinks cold and the service carefully attentive. I’ve often eaten at the Vintage India before and it’s usually a hit-and-miss potluck kinda affair when it comes to service. If you are very service-oriented and get easily annoyed or have an ulcer or prone to migraines, then it’s perhaps better to dine elsewhere but if you want to try out this eatery, it’s advisable to take the waiter’s cell number so that you may call him to your table when you need him … J

However, on-and-off service aside, the food remains consistently good (provided you order the popular dishes off the menu) and yesterday’s lunch with Jan reaffirmed why this restaurant in the Garden’s Centre remains my favourite curry house in Cape Town. It’s not only because of the (select) great, authentic Indian food, but because of the quiet and their immense space and the separate smoking area and their tolerance for any odd diner … above all, the privacy as there is seldom anybody there! I don’t know if a trust fund keeps them going or if they cater for the thousands of guests who attend Indian weddings to be able to pay the rent in that immense space because it’s always quiet. Clearly not everybody’s cuppa Chai tea and in fact, if you are not forewarned, the dining rooms could feel almost eerie. I prefer to look at it as calm and peaceful. Jan felt the same but she did take one look at it and with lightning-fast wit she chirped how cool it was that I booked-out the entire place for us..! And indeed, the 200-seater eatery was ours for the entire afternoon …

So? Go figure … instant BFF and every bit as I imagined, loving her blog as I do. In a word: authentic.

But today it’s back to basics and much work. So without any further ado, here is what dinner will look like in honour of all great cooks who are authentic and honest and humble: Classic Tomato Sauce with Spaghetti. I can safely say that this must have been one of the top five dinner dishes when my kids were growing up. Using this basic sauce, you can add chilli and bacon for Arrabiata sauce, or mince for Bolognese sauce or even some cream for a creamy sauce. This sauce can also be served with sausage, polenta or any bread, egg, meat, chicken or fish dish. In fact, I can probably safely say this sauce is the most popular in the world and that tomatoes are the fruit that is most eaten throughout the world every year.

Classic Tomato Sauce with Spaghetti

Click here for the recipe.