I love cooking

If it’s Valentine’s day it means there are about three hundred and twenty shopping days left to Christmas - just enough time for us to get through Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Secretary’s Day and Women’s Day and any other day that floats your personal little boat. It’s dizzying stuff, I tell you, all this shopping and specials and fish-paste and blah and hype …  (Oy, guess who’s extra-grumpy this morning) But suffice to say from a person who’s rejected the Xmas hype (read a post in December), the Valentine’s day hype also gets me going off on a tangent. Of course I know that this day is extremely personal to all of us in our own unique way, but truth is that Valentine’s day has caused as much dejection, heartache and tears and arguments and break-ups as extra marital affairs if not more!

One word: expectation. Not all of us have the emotional maturity to make fun or light of this day, ignore it or brush it off as a commercial hype. There are some people who crave and  expect some love validation this day and if they do not get it, well, reactions can range from vengeance against the oke that did not do the red roses thing to serious thoughts of suicide by a chubby spotty teen with braces.

Not that I balk at the day and its sentiment per se, no, it’s the hype.  No, it’s actually not the hype, correction: it’s great to get excited and share it with others. To be exact: it’s the excuse it gives people and companies to hype themselves sky high … And by now my authentic readers, you know how I feel about insincere, unauthentic, self-hypers – oy and it’s often my job to help make hype for brands … but luckily I have emotionally secure, mature, classy, clients who realize that hollow hype is harmful to their brands …

So, after all of that, here is my take on Valentine’s day; adults only, meaning adults older than 45 years who know a fun thing when they see it. So dears, let’s unite and for a change this year,  let’s forgo the gravitas of emotions and expectations and even not celebrating Valentine’s this year. Let’s have fun on the event this year! Eat oysters and bust the myth. Or confirm it. And then, please, please blog about your findings. That will be a real short in the arm for us and a break from all the sugar and syrup and pink and a few red roses costing more than a tank full of petrol.

The recipe below is safe-for-sex: piping hot sauce goes over the raw oyster so it lightly cooks the oysters … you never know – your partner may just spoil the entire idea by feeding it to the cat under the table … and we all know how those dinners usually end up … neither sexy nor sweetly!

Right, here goes!

Fresh Oysters with Creamy Lemon-Butter Sauce

• 200 ml lemon-butter sauce
• some crushed ice or course salt (see image)
• 24 live oysters, shucked (let’s get sexy and call them topless)
• 120 g smoked salmon
• herb sprigs of your choice

First, prepare the lemon-butter sauce from this recipe and keep warm. Scatter some crushed ice or course salt onto two serving plates a arrange the oysters on top (the ice or salt will keep them steady). Next, while still piping hot, pour a generous spoonful of the sauce on top of each oyster. Garnish with a sliiver (no more than a sliver) of smoked salmon and a herb sprig or even slices lemon and enjoy …

Serves 2

PS: do let me know … this is my week’s consumer research (that’s why there are 12 oysters each) LOL!

And take my advice, a full stomach is not sexy! It’s like another but external organ you have to schlepp around with you … So stick to the oysters as one single course (oy, the wordplay) and if you must, have my vanilla-poached pears stuffed with  chocolate crumbs for dessert. Double up on the vanilla, it’s also supposed to be sexy. And the recipe has al the right tones and connotations …

Vanilla-Poached Pears

 Click HERE for the recipe.

So, to sum up: aging has serious side benefits!  We can laugh at ourselves, we can make fun of sacred cows, we can go topless or not and we know that happiness is a habit so here is wishing you a happy happy Valentine’s Day, my darlings!

And on a completely differenc note… I have just noticed the S2 button on the menu bar. It says subscribe form. So I am inserting it here to see what happens. Would be DIVINE and WONDERFUL of we can start re-building our mailing lists……. Jaaay! 

Liewe Nins (My Easy Cooking) and Sam (Drizzle and Dip), thanks for the mentions this week. It means a lot more than you think … I really needed a little morale boost this week! Project mop ups, campaign post mortems, housekeeping a.k.a ‘piling’ becoming filing, deadlines being met, work boxes ticked, status updates, closure reports, email inbox losing weight, a very old, very delightfully weird mother arriving for the holidays and Windowlene re-friended. That was my week. Amidst it all, I did a beautiful post about fishy appetisers and starters and so wragtag, it got lost in translation! Sigh. So here it is again, with love. Click on the title and it will take you to the recipe. Enjoy!

Avo, Lime & Dill Crème with Smoked Salmon

Crab & Avo Cocktail

Smoked Salmon with Lemon Crème

.Enjoy the long weekend, the holidays are officially upon us! And if you’re in Cape Town, here is my contention albeit probably sooo off the mark: summer only really starts after the 16th of December. ‘Strue!

For a while I will go under the recipe rumble radar as in my real job and real life we are deliciously and knee- deep in production. But as promised, more advice and bits and bobs will follow when the television series is in the can and I have more time. 

Meanwhile I have to express how over-the-moon, extremely impressed and very grateful I am at how transparently, fairly, professionally and must-mention pleasantly Sam and Caro of food24 are springcleaning our land. There is a saying in management: avoiding problems does not mean you’re a good leader - how you deal with problems when they invariably arise, distinguishes you as a great leader.  Thank you.     

The rest of this post will be a sweet and small tribute to Amy Winehouse and specially her song, Back to Black. Many of us loved her music and may her tortured soul find peace in rest …

Around here, soon we’ll be running like chickens without heads following a bunch of teenagers in a series of high octane, relatively extreme (if not insane) outdoor challenges. And if you live in the Cape Town region and happen to see a bunch of people in the next three months looking bedraggled, slightly-to-very grimy, with shiny faces, funny hair and all dressed in black except one energetic, perky little person who walks jauntily and is immaculate dressed and groomed, it’s our hard-core television crew. Yes, we’re going back to black for a while …

We’re a big troupe this time – twenty six of us. Usually – when we produce food programmes or even programmes like the baby show where we shoot lots of footage in studio – we have our own chefs who take care of our crew meals. And usually it means what food appears on screen, appears on our crew menu so go figure the crew appreciation! But this time the sheer volume of work and logistics far, yes very far from kitchens (like in shark cages!), forced us to forgo that little privilege and settle for camp-style food. But we will still have a pukka chef at base camp Triactive Lodge in Elgin, Gabouw.

But in the meanwhile, we are hyperventilating from stress and yummy, finger-licking recipes and menus and images are the least my priorities right now …! However, in the world of free-lance television producers and directors, you have to line-up your projects in advance otherwise you literally won’t eat. So no rest for the busy … we are in the midst of a new food campaign also and soon there will be more videos and recipes on the website. And by October, we will have confirmation of a television series consisting of our best bloggers (the primary reason why I started blogging and developing a website was to expand it into regular food shows for television) to be shot early next year.

Also, in the meantime, we have to eat. So here is a quickie and perhaps not so healthy it being fried, but this is only the 2^nd recipe on this blog that has to be fried, so there is the balance: everything is fine as long it is in moderation, I hear my other saying! Enjoy!

Crispy Coconut Calamari Rings

Click here for recipe.

This is not a joke, in fact, it’s a war. Yes, one day into our healthy eating regime and the war of the diets, a food fight of note, had begun! The day started with Ya Ya Sister placing a bowl of chopped apple mixed with cinnamon and ground almonds on my desk – it was as dry as a bowl of the dog’s food, but passable. That was followed an hour later with a hard-boiled egg: ditto, dry as the dog’s bowl of yesterday’s food, but still passable.

Then I went shopping. By the time I had returned home with the bags of fresh produce (the whole idea of the new regime), there was a platter on the kitchen counter with baby tomatoes (whole), lettuce leaves (whole) and a sliced avocado. It did not say “lunch”. It said “Suffer baby, suffer!”

Fortunately I had bought a tray of Woollies’ cooked peri peri prawns (some people call them shrimps: I do too), the first mango of the season and I had some tortillas left from the weekend’s feasts. The lunch at last? Delicious shrimp tacos with a creamy sweet chilli drizzle. Score 1 for me… because the meal was balanced, contained very little bad fats (shrimps do have some cholesterol in them) yet offered good fats because of the avo and provided energy for the afternoon ahead. Ya Ya Sister of course avoided the tortilla (it is flour, she said) and not oddly, by mid afternoon had to go and take a nap. I kept on working right through the afternoon … and at around 5.30 I had a wholewheat pita stuffed with peppered mackerel and lettuce, a vegetable juice freshly extracted from tomatoes, cucumber, carrots and yellow pepper and ended off with my first yellow peach of the season.

By late afternoon, Ya Ya Sister decided to wait with the cooking of the fresh hake fillet, asparagus and broccoli spears that I bought for dinner until later. (Remember, the deal was that she prepared all the meals.) But we started watching a movie just after 6 pm and by the time it ended at 8.30 pm, I was more in the mood for bed than dinner at that hour, thanks to my hearty ‘snack’ at 5.30 pm. However, Sister obviously skipped my menu suggestion for dinner because this morning I found all the ingredients still in the fridge. But the evidence of her dinner was in the kitchen sink: an empty bowl with the obvious scrapings of the weekend’s leftover veggie-curry and brown rice!

So fat lot of good her healthy eating regime does… Perhaps one day she will get the message: if it does not taste good, it’s no good because you’ll dump the diet between lunch and dinner on day two or three.

And that is me for today. Here is the healthy, delicious tacos recipe.

Prawn, Mango & Avo Tacos with Creamy Sweet Chilli Drizzle