Janice Tripepi

Happy Year of the Dragon to one and all!  I have always been an avid fan of these majestic mythical creatures and have been threatening to paint a Dragon triptych for about fifteen years.  I did spend about a month painstakingly painting the most beautifully shaped ceramic bowl with two rather magnificent five toed dragons …. Scale by scale! And believe me they have loads! 

The weather over Christmas was absolutely perfect with blue skies and billowing dragon shaped clouds.  La casa Tripepi was blessed with so many houseguests that life generally became an outdoor pool-side food fest.  Carol, Casey and I spent many a blissful morning floating around like three ice blocks in a G&T. 

On the odd occasion hubbies and boyfriends were off playing golf; we found ourselves having girly lunches and as is always the case, we chose to eat food that reflected this.  This baked Camembert, stuffed with some salty delicious bacon from happy free range piggies raised in the Midlands, and honey-sweet watermelon preserve from fellow blogger Kobus, better known as Sardines on Toast who hails from Paternoster in the Western Cape, was a real hit. 

Camembert stuffed with bacon and Watermelon Konfyt!

Carol arrived with a cornucopia of veggies from her farm so the lettuce and the crunchy juicy celery in the salad where Carol’s contribution to the meal.  One can hardly even call this a recipe as there really isn’t much cooking involved in this meal.

Baked Stuffed Camembert

A few of my favourite things!

Ingredients

1 x 250g Camembert in a balsa wood box

5 rashers of bacon

Watermelon & Ginger Konfyt

You can use any preserved fruit such as figs / ginger/ apricots.

black pepper

Preheat your oven to 180d

Method

Using a large knife cut the cheese in half transversally.

Carefully cut the Camenbert in half.

Check out that creamy cheesy heaven.

Grill the bacon and arrange it on one half of the cheese.

Lay the griddled on the bottom half.

Top with a generous amount of the preserved watermelon & ginger konfyt or your choic of  preserved fruit

Pile it up ..... don't be shy!

Top with the other half of the Camembert

Ready to pop into the oven..

Place back into the box and bake for 15 – 20 minutes at 180d

Assemble some girlfriends around the table, open your best bottle of ice cold vino, serve with some crusty health bread and a fresh salad …. Perfect!

Always find time to celebrate your friendships …

Cheers!

I saw this on a greeting card the other day ….

‘Life is just too short not to have an umbrella in your drink!’

Gotta love it!

As always

Buon Appetito

Xxx

Jan

Un buon piatto di pasta!

Ravioli Napoletana for a Meat free Monday. The basic unit of Italian Pasta sauce currency has to be the Napoletana Sauce. The combination of three store cupboard ingredients cooked together forms the basis for countless Italian favourites. The foundation garment of most authentic Italian pizzas, pasta sauces and Pasta al Forno dishes, is the humble Napoletana Sauce.

 Introduced into Italy by the Spanish, in the very late 1600’s, a pasta sauce not surprisingly named “alla Spagnuola” meaning, “in a Spanish style” featuring tomatoes first appeared in the Italian cookbook L’Apicio moderno, by Roman chef Francesco Leonardi.

The Italian tomato is much celebrated for its vibrant colour, exquisite flavour, abundant juices and soft texture amongst chefs worldwide. If you have a veggie garden and find yourself with an abundance of ripe tomatoes, a nice big pot of Napoletana sauce is a great way to use up the surplus. This may be frozen in bags and used as needed in countless dishes.

We had this for dinner on Saturday evening. The sauce is cooked in 20 minutes and delivers the perfect amount of tomato flavour all freshened up with some zing from a few sprigs of fresh basil. Tricky was in the mood for something creamy so here is how one achieves this. I find that sometimes cooks make the mistake of adding cream to a pot of sauce; this is not going to give you the best results. Cook you’re your pasta; in this case we had ravioli; drain them, put them back into the pot and add the fresh cream to the naked cooked pasta. The ravioli will suck in some of the cream giving you exactly the right finish in the mouth but still combining with the Napoletana sauce to give you a red sea of creamyness.

 Napoletana Pasta Sauce

Look at the colour of these beauties!

Ingredients

Guess who made this sauce? My Pasta Padrone!

Olive Oil

6 cloves of garlic finely chopped

1 red onion chopped

2 chicken or vegetable stock cubes

1 glass of dry white wine (or vegetable stock)

2 tins of Peeled Tomatoes – crushed by hand

1 handful of fresh basil leaves

½ tsp of dried chili flakes (optional)

½ tsp of cracked black pepper

½ cup fresh cream

Method

Cover the base of a frying pan with olive oil. Add the garlic and fry for 30 seconds then add the onion, stock cubes, chili flakes (optional) and pepper and fry for 4 minutes or until the onion has browned.

Brown the onions and garlic well before adding the wine.

Add the dry white wine and cook off all of the alcohol.

Add the wine and stir well to release the caramelisation off the bottom of the pan.

Add the crushed tomatoes and basil; bring to the boil, reduce and simmer for 20 minutes.

Basil from my garden .... what an aroma!

Cooking the Ravioli

 Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil Add the ravioli; I used two punnets of fresh Ravioli, and cook for 4 minutes

It's really important to use a large pot when boiling pasta.

Drain and return to the pot – add ½ cup of fresh cream and stir gently

Add the fresh cream to the cooked pasta ... not to the sauce!

Add 1/3 of the Napoletana Sauce to the pot and mix gently with the ravioli.

Gently stir in the Napoletana sauce to avoid breaking up your ravioli.

 Serve individual portions and top with some more sauce if you like and a good sprinkling of grated parmesan cheese.

Trickyricky likes his pasta with no extra sauce.

Max had the leftover Ravioli Napoletana for breakfast this morning!

As always Buon appetito

Jan

Xxx

I can’t resist this cheeky title.  This is a sh*t hot recipe from one of my favourite Chinese chefs, Kylie Kwong.  I have watched her on television a thousand times and identify with her very closely in many ways.  She has grown up, an Asian in Australia, where she suffered feelings of being ‘different’ and is as aware of the look of her kitchen, restaurant and surrounds as she is of the need to balance those incredibly wonderful Chinese flavours.

My whole family love Chinese food and we often have a meal at Durban’s number one (in my book) Chinese restaurant, China Plate in Glenashley.  I have cooked dozens of amazing dishes from Kylie’s beautiful cook book, My China.   This book is not cluttered with Chow Meins or Foo Yongs, it’s jam packed with authentic recipes, the food that the Chinese people like to eat at home. 

Once you start cooking from this book you soon realise what makes up the Chinese ‘Holy Trinity” of ingredients in most recipes.  The three or four ingredients that start off every dish – in Italian cooking it’s the olive oil, garlic and onion which is tempered by dry white or red wine.  In Chinese cooking it’s the peanut oil, garlic, ginger and chilli all tempered into submission and perfectly balanced by Shao Hsing rice wine.  I find that I now have the confidence to buy a vegetable and make it the star of a great vegetarian Chinese dish served with egg or rice noodles!

Don’t be put off by the 10 small dried red chillies in this recipe as they are used only to flavour the peanut oil.  The method used in this recipe of marinating the chicken thighs in corn flour and rice wine is masterful and it results in the most devine gooey texture that had my boys grinning from ear to ear. 

                                               Smokey Hot Chicken Stir-Fried with Dried Red Chillies and Green Garlic Chives

                                                                                                      Serves 4 – 6 as part of a shared meal.

Smokey Hot Chicken Stir-Fried with Chillies & Green Garlic Chives

I served the chicken with some fried noodles and comfortable fed 4 people.

Have your ingredients chopped and ready when stir frying. 6oog chicken thigh fillets cut into 42Tbs Corn Flour2Tbs Shao Hsing wine2Tbs Peanut Oil10 small dried red chillies2Tbs Peanut Oil extra5cm piece ginger cut into thin strips1Tbs brown sugar2Tbs light Soy Sauce1Tbs brown rice vinegar1small handful green garlic chives cut into 5cm lengths MethodCombine the chicken with the corn flour and Shao Hsing wine in a bowl. Cover, place in a refrigerator and leave to marinate for 1 hour.Combine the corn flour, chicken and rice wine.Marinate chicken for 1 hour.

Place oil and chillies in a cold wok and then turn the heat to low.  Cook for about 1 ½ minutes or until chillies begin to darken slightly. 

Infusing the peanut oil with the dried chillies

 Using a slotted spoon, immediately remove chillies and drain on kitchen paper.

Leaving chilli-infused oil in wok, turn heat up to high and stir fry half the chicken thighs for 3 minutes.  Remove with a slotted spoon.  Add extra oil to wok with remaining chicken and stir fry for 3 minutes.  Return all the chicken to wok, along with ginger and reserved chillies, and stir fry for 1 minute.

I added in a cup of snow peas and a cup of diced cucumber at this point and stir fried for 3 minutes.

I added some snow peas and cucumber to my dish which I stir fried for 3 minutes at this stage.

Add sugar and stir fry for 30 seconds. Add remaining ingredients and stir fry for 30 seconds.

Serve in small Chinese bowls with Steamed Rice or Fried Noodles.

Serve with a nice bowl of steamed Basmati rice or Noodles.

As always

Buon appetito

Jan

xx 

Perfect lunchtime food with a side salad.

After leaving school I qualified as an International Travel Consultant, which accounts for many of my foreign travels and cooking adventures.  Back in those days all of the foreign airlines still landed their majestic birds on our shores.  Bottom line, us Travel Agents were entertained and looked after very well in the hopes of us promoting their airlines. 

The recipe is accredited to Charlotte de Grand Pre and despite extensive research, I can only assume that she must have been an accomplished chef and perhaps working for UTA at the time, then again she may just have been one of Paris’ great Madam’s of the time!  Who knows, but I do remember being more than impressed when the manager of UTA,  walloped all the ingredients onto a wooden board and, using a pastry scraper, scraped it all together into the most fabulous pastry I had ever tasted.

So here it is, I still have the original recipe penned by Arthur Sandler, the then manager of UTA, Durban in my tatty old recipe file.  I love my tatty old recipes, and am very attached to them.  Quiche is to the French is as Pasta is to the Italians; it’s a vehicle to carry any number of flavour combinations.  One is limited only by ones imagination.

I made this for the boys, sometime before Christmas for lunch and changed the original ham and cheese filling to a Pork Sausage, Sage and Caramelised Onion filling and served it with a salad.  This is the beauty of a quiche, the fillings are totally endless:

Pork Sausage, Sage & Onion Quiche

Pork Sausage, Caramelised Onion & Sage Quiche

The Pastry

80g butter

1 egg

1Tbs Ice Water

1Tbs Olive

5ml salt

Place the ingredients in your food processor and pulse three or four times.

Turn out onto a floured board and squash together into a ball using your hands.

Cover with cling film and allow to rest in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Roll the dough out and line your baking tin.

Once cooled, roll out and line a lightly greased loose bottom flan ring – or tart tin and prick the bottom with a fork.

The Pork Sausage, Sage & Caramelised Onion Filling

1 packet of Pork Sausages – removed from their casing

100g butter

3 onions finely sliced

2 cloves of garlic finely chopped

100g pecorino cheese

4 eggs

250ml fresh cream

5ml salt

5ml freshly ground black pepper

2.5ml of grated nutmeg

2 sprigs of fresh sage

In a frying pan fry the sliced onions and garlic in the butter on a medium heat to slowly caramelise them with the fresh sage. 

Caramelise you onions to make them nice and sweet.

Remove and set aside, then add the pork sausage to the pan and fry until browned.

Fry the pork sausage.

Arrange the sausage meat and onion in the bottom of the quiche; combine all of the other ingredients and pour over sausage meat and onions.

Top with a generous grating of parmesan cheese and bake in a preheated oven at 200d for 30 minutes.

This quiche is really tasty served hot with a nice side salad and a glass of dry white wine.

More Filling Suggestions

Roasted Butternut and Feta – roast the butternut in olive oil with an onion, loads of rosemary, cinnamon, brown sugar, coarse salt & garlic

Roasted Pear & Blue Cheese – roast the Pear with olive oil,

Bacon & Blue Cheese

Bacon, Olive & roasted red pepper

Spinach & Blue Cheese

Zucchini & Prawns

As always Buon Appetito

Xxx

jan

The Guitar Man

This is a week or so’s worth of my Christmas and New Year revelry ..

Monday 19^th 8.30pm

Indescribably happy!  Both boys and their beauties here!  Can’t chat, blog or really talk much on account of the really silly grin that has divided my face into two parts!  We are partying – laughing drinking – singing along to TrickyRicky playing oldies on his guitar – playing games and laughing …… and laughing!  We are spending our day swimming, remembering, braaing, laughing uncontrollably and celebrating life and being together.

Max & TrickyRicky serenading the crowd!

Been cooking up a storm – can’t take pics with a kitchen full of boys, eating my ingredients and hiding my spoons ……!!! Love them to bits … I will try and blog again soon but if I don’t get around to it because I have no spoons or ingredients or because we are going away to the Wild Coast Sun soon,

I wish you all the very best of Christmases

May your dinner tables be encircled with your favourite faces

May it be blessed with food that oozes love and care

May your dining room be filled with laughter

and may each and every day of next year be filled with

the never-ending joy that is family

xxx

Which reminds me…

Tuesday 6.30am

Lunch at Wakame!

Today would be a great opportunity to share the story of how I started blogging.  My real job is doing the books for our Engineering & Project Management Company in Durban; anyone that does bookkeeping knows that there are those days in the month when one is not exactly rushed off ones feet.

I was surfing the net checking out the latest fashion (that would be handbags in my world) and food when I came upon Food24’s invitation to submit a review of your favourite sushi restaurant.  At that time I had my eye on Rick Stein’s cookbook, Mediterranean Escapes, so the possibility of a prize of a Kalahari.net gift voucher was more than I could resist. 

A visit to see my son Daniele in Cape Town is never complete without lunch or dinner at Wakame in Mouille Point.  The setting is outstanding and nearly as spectacular as their food.   Durban is wanting in the authentic sushi department so the frequency of my visits means that I can pretty much recite their entire sushi menu verbatim.  Apart from the sushi – I just love their Crispy Fried Calamari with Hoisin & Lime so much that I have developed my own rendition of their dish.  I served the mouth watering , chilli, sweet and hoisin fried calamari on a bed of noodles and chilli ginger bok choy, fresh fava beans, spring onions and peas …

Alas, I have had severe camera woes!  I had to take these pics with my little wee point and shoot so the quality is not quite up to scratch!  Good news is, I have a brand new lens for my “Big Boy” aka Nikon.  

Crispy Fried Calamari with a Hoisin & Lime Sauce

Crumbed Calamari in Chilli Lime Hoisin Sauce.

Ingredients

Calamari – small Patagonian calamari is best I used about 450g – just use as much as you need to feed your family and guests

2 eggs

2 cups bread crumbs

1 cup flour

 Method

Easy peasy – pat the calamari dry with a tea towel.

Dust first in flour – then coat in beaten egg yolk and lastly into the bread crumbs.

Refrigerate for 20 minutes before frying in plenty of hot oil.

Always refrigerate anything that you crumb for a minimum of 20 minutes to ensure that the crumbs don't drop off when frying!

The oil must sizzle when you put a piece of calamari into it.

Don’t overcrowd the pan – it’s best to fry the calamari in batches – each batch will take no more than 3 minutes …

When the crumbs are nice and crisp remove from the oil and set aside on some absorbent paper to drain off any excess oil.

Drain Fried Calamari on paper towel to remove excess oil

Here is the link to my blog post specifically on the ABC of crumbing …

Crumbed Organic Pork Chops ........ buono!

The Veggies

Chopped onion, sugar snap peas, spring onions, ginger and fresh beans

Stir fry your veggies and noodles – I stir fried bok choy, fresh beans, peas and spring onions in peanut oil, 4 cloves of chopped garlic, 3 chopped chillies and 2,5cm knob of finely chopped ginger, then added a splash of xiao xhing rice wine (or sherry), 3Tbs of soy sauce and 2Tbs brown sugar, cover your wok with a large lid and let the veggies steam for about 4 minutes. 

And, of course the cook should always have a nice glass of vino for her efforts!

Soak your noodle of choice until tender then stir fry them in a little peanut oil with garlic, chilli and ginger.  Add a splash again of the Xiao Xing Wine (or Sherry) .

Set aside

Chilli Lime Hoisin Sauce

Ingredients

1/3 cup of lime juice

2/3 cup of sweet chilli sauce

2 heaped tsp of Hoisin Sauce

Method 

Whisk together in a  bowl.

Mix your three sauces together.

 Add about 4Tbs of the Hoisin, Lime and Chilli sauce to the wok and bring to the boil – now add back all of your Calamari and fry in this sauce for 30 seconds – NO MORE

A quick 30 seconds in the wok with the Chilli Lime & Hoisin Sauce is enough!

If you fry the calamari for too long they will go as tough as a bowl of rubber!  30 Seconds in the pan is enough time to cover them with the tangy sauce.

Chilli Lime & Hoisin Sauce .... I have a bottle of this in my fridge to use as a Chinese Style Marinade for my fish and chicken.

On a large platter place your noodles, top with the stir fried greens

Add the calamari on the top – drizzle a few table spoons of the Chilli & Lime Hoisin Sauce over the calamari.

Crumbed Calamari in Chilli Lime Hoisin Sauce.

Ps: I won the Kalahari gift voucher and shortly after starting blogging.

Thursday 22nd

Well I have finally finished typing this blog post. I hope to get it up today!  I hope

Thank You for reading my blog, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me

and thank you for sharing your recipes with me. I have enjoyed this year immensely

and will be back, as fresh as a sashimi salad in the new year ….

Monday 2 January 2012

Well as you can see I still haven’t had any free time to blog.  We spent the last week at the Wild Coast Sun with the whole Tripepi, Domiro and Pizzutti families and had a ridiculous amount of fun.   I got absolutely blotto on New Year’s Eve, well we all did but I was saved by an enormous helping of Pasta al Forno, which is the staple for large family gatherings.  It’s impossible to make pasta for 60 people successfully without a fully equipped restaurant or hotel kitchen.  It’s an easy alternative to lasagne and can be made and frozen weeks in advance if needs be.  Click here for my Pasta al Forno recipe.

Pasta al Forno means Baked Pasta.

 I wish you all the very very best for 2012 – may this year roll out like a red carpet at your feet.

As always

Buon appetito

Jan

I have been so looking forward to sharing this recipe with you.  For the last month or so I have been craving something but have not actually known exactly what it was that I was craving.  You must all have had those days when one minute you are craving pickled onions and the next chocolate cake!!  And no, I am not in the family way. 

 
It has been raining cats and dogs for the last month, with roads, roofs and communities being washed away and Durban is in danger of turning into one big mangrove swamp.  The temperature during the day varies significantly and some evenings have been unnaturally cold so last week I decided to make a lamb curry.
I chose another one of Camellia Panjabi’s amazing recipes out of her book 50 Great Curries of India.  What really caught my eye when deciding which curry to cook were the final two ingredients which are literally just stirred into the dish with some fresh lime juice just before serving.  Saffron and Rosewater!
I cooked the dish as prescribed, tasting the whole way through as I do and the moment I added the saffron soaked in rosewater I was transported to a Moghul palace feast.  These two aromatics added a delicate perfumed elegance to the final flavour of the dish such as I have never tasted before.  This is what I absolutely adore about Indian food.  Theirs is a cuisine that has been growing and developing for generations.  I find Indian food as colourful as a sari and as romantic as the iconic and most beautiful Taj Mahal.

Lamb Shank Korma
Nali Korma

Ingredients

A few strands of Saffron
1Tbs Rosewater or Keora (screwpine flower) I used 2Tbs rose water
½ cup oil
400g onions thinly sliced
40g cashew nuts or almonds
4 chopped green chillies
2 cinnamon or bay leaves
1Tbs chopped fresh ginger
1Tbs chopped garlic
1kg lamb shanks
2tsp coriander powder
1tsp garam masala powder
3Tbs full fat yoghurt
¾ tsp mace powder
2tsp red chilli powder
1/3 tsp cardamom powder or 3 green cardamom pods pounded with a little water
The juice of 1 lime

Method

Soak the saffron strands in the rose water for a minimum of 15 minutes

Heat half the oil in a cooking pot and fry the onions until medium brown. 

Add the almond/ cashew nuts and continue to fry until the onions are deep brown

With a spatula extract the oil from the onions by pressing against the side of the pot. 

Transfer the onions and nuts to a bowl and leave to cool.  Place in a blender and puree.

In the remaining oil sauté the green chillies, cinnamon or bay leaf, ginger, garlic, lamb coriander powder and half the garam masala and 11/2 tsp of salt for 10 minutes, stirring continuously.  Then on a low fire add the red chili powder and the yoghurt, stir continuously for 3 minutes and leave to simmer until the yoghurt is absorbed.

Add the fried onion puree and mix well.  Put the remaining garam masala, the mace and cardamom powders and sauté for a couple of minutes.  Add 4 cups water and cook until the meat is tender. 

I cooked my shanks on a nice slow low heat for about 2hours – lamb must be only

be eaten when it’s falling off the bone.

 Before transferring to a serving dish, stir in the lime juice and the saffron in the flower water.

This lamb shank curry is awesome before you add the rose water and saffron – but the moment you add them … ooh ooh ooooohhhh …

Serve with some fluffy basmati rice and sliced Lime Pickles

If you live in Durban I have such a scoop for you …

Next Tuesday 13th December
Craft Trattoria in Durban North will be offering
Their first Master class with Bertus Basson ……
Not to be missed!
Read the details below.

I am going to try and categorise all of my previous posts as I have had some people contacting me saying that they can no longer find certain recipes as they are not in the search engine!  Has anyone got any advice on doing this easily or do I have to go back to each and every post…. Just asking!

Durban has been abuzz with loads of hemp & hessian types.  Monday morning we watched some Greenpeace dudes putting up posters.  I think that they were afraid of being arrested as they put them up so quickly and then ran off! 

         
Here are a few pics of the veggie garden that the Dept. of Parks & Gardens planted in the middle of town – I cannot BELIEVE that the cabbages and spinach haven’t been stolen.  I do hope that some of these community inner city garden ideas catch on as we have many nice vacant roof tops that could be providing veggies to worthy community projects.  I will do some digging and report back.

Just as a final note:

Please support local South African Industry this Christmas
How about a voucher for a haircut, some beautiful beadwork, hand crafts,

a car service, a potted salad ie. lettuce and tomato plants in a pot or a florists voucher this Christmas.

Be Proudly South African

As always

Buon Appetito
Xxx
jan

I have very nostalgic and fond memories of my Aunty Jean’s farm kitchen in Grantham, England.  Aunty Jean was a bit potty but I loved her with my entire right ventricle.  All she ever wanted from life was a daughter but all she ever gave birth to was sons.  I profited enormously from this cruel twist of fate and spent many happy hours being pampered and thoroughly spoilt by her. 

Being a pig farmer, she was a resourceful woman.  Tough as nails, yet with a heart fashioned from a really large Swarovski crystal she would walk me down to the milking shed and give me the job of churning the milk to make butter.  She had to walk me to the shed so she could chase away the geese that sensed my fear and delighted in chasing me up the nearest tree.  Geese are nasty little buggers when they get going and I will never forget that demonic hissing, gaggle with their wings up and their beaks snapping furiously behind me as they left their signature of purple welts on my bum as I fled wailing and hoiked myself up the nearest tree trunk.

I was the youngest sibling of my family and of my cousins, with a large enough age gap to warrant me being ‘left behind’ with Aunty Jean at which we would go for long walks together.  She taught me to look out for food and to pick berries, medicinal leaves and herbs from the hedge rows along the way; and I can remember my very primal ‘gatherer’ pride when we got home with a heavy basket filled with our bounty.  From mushrooms to herbs to pretty pink and purple stalks of rhubarb we would get home and wash everything in her really deep farm sink. 

Once the rhubarb was clean we would sit together on the kitchen step with a bowl of sugar into which we dipped our long stalks of fresh rhubarb while the rest would be bubbling away in a pot on her wood fired stove.  My mouth is watering as I am remembering that mind blowing taste, I am trying to think of words to describe the sweet and sourness that gave a little six year old girly goose bumps and made that little sour spot behind her ears do the happy dance.

After dinner we would each be given a bowl of stewed rhubarb and homemade farm custard and I will never forget my child like wonder at the combination of sweet and tangy rhubarb with creamy farm custard. Oh my heavens what a treasured moment that still lingers in the memory banks of my palette like it was yesterday.

Can you for one second imagine my heavenly, childhood memory fuelled excitement when I was nosing around Woolworth’s Christmas goodies and my eyes fell upon a little old fashioned milk bottle filled with? Drum roll if you please, Limited Edition Woolworths 80^th Anniversary Rhubarb & Custard SWEETS! 

My hand came out quicker than a ‘bum biting goose’ and snagged me a bottle.  I was beside myself with nostalgia and hot-footed it back home to create an Aunty Jean rhubarb and custard moment.  I love ‘old fashioned’ and was completely enamoured with this purchase.  I could hardly wait.

Once I had steeled my shaky hands I opened the lid, closed my six year old eyes and popped a sugar coated red and yellow, rhubarb and custard boiled sweet into my gob.    Unable to open my eyes I sucked away waiting for the sweet and sourness of it all to carry me off into the land of euphoria …  and …. NOTHING!  Convinced that my taste buds had spectacularly malfunctioned I popped another one in and ….. NADA … BOKEROLI!  I tried another one and …..

What I did get was a blob of red and yellow boiled sugar, with not even a hint of flavour – ANY FLAVOUR – not even red flavour or yellow flavour or custard flavour or vanilla flavour or anything.  My memory was crushed and my six year old shoulders sank.  Over the next week I tested said blobs of sugar out on my sister Sue, my son Max, my girlfriend Carol and even Bubbles looked forlorn at the flavourless blob ….. They unanimously agreed that these blobs in absolutely NO WAY measured up to the label on the bottle.

This is so definitely a VROT …. and get’s the Vrot Banana Badge!

R24, 95 for 180g of tasteless “Rhubarb and Custard” boiled sugar blobs!

This is JUST NOT ON Woolworths!  You cannot sell the promise of a childhood memory in a pretty little milk bottle and simply not deliver anything!  Traditional hard-boiled sweets se Voet!  Shame on you Woolworths, this is bad form! 

There was simply nothing left to do but seek out some fresh rhubarb, drag it into this century, give it a makeover with some new herbs and spices and create a new memory.  And this is what I came up with …..

Bougatsa with Spiced Poached Rhubarb

Bougatsa are Greek Pastries filled with semolina custard and served with a mixture of cinnamon and icing sugar dusted over the top.  I added the spiced poached rhubarb and dusted them with plain icing sugar.

This does remain somewhat faithful to the rhubarb and custard combination, it’s just been given a Durban spices meets Greece fusion make-over.

This recipe will yield 6 portions.

Bougatsa

Ingredients

12 sheets of Phyllo pastry

The zest of one nice large lemon

1 cup of semolina

1Tbs of vanilla extract

4 free range egg yolks

4 cups of milk

200g of butter – melted

Icing sugar for dusting

Method

Beat your egg yolks, sugar and 1Tbs of vanilla extract until the mixture is light and fluffy and set aside ready to use.

Slowly heat the milk and lemon zest until its piping hot but not boiling.

Turn the heat down a little now and slowly pour in the semolina and using a whisk keep stirring until it starts to thicken.

Add the beaten egg yolk mixture and keep stirring.

You are really making a semolina egg custard.

Keep stirring on a medium heat until the semolina has cooked.

Be careful not to burn it.

Set your custard aside to cool.

For the Poached Rhubarb

Ingredients

1 glass of Port or 1 glass of cranberry juice

500g of rhubarb – peeled, washed and cut into 4cm chunks

1 knob of fresh ginger sliced

6 cloves

1 piece of cinnamon bark

3 cardamom pods – crushed to release the little tiny seeds inside

1 tsp of all spice

2/3 of a cup of sugar

1 sprig or rosemary

This really couldn’t be easier.

Method

Wash, peel and chop your rhubarb into 3cm lengths.

Place all of the above ingredients into a pot and poach gently for 30 minutes.

Remove the ginger slices and cinnamon bark and set aside to cool.

To assemble the Bouratsis:

Pre-heat your oven to 200d

Take a sheet of Phyllo pastry and cut it in half.

Brush the first sheet of Phyllo all over with melted clarified butter

Place the second sheet on top of the first and also brush this one with butter

Take a handful of the semolina custard, roll it into a ball and flatten it .

Place in the centre of the Phyllo

Place 2Tbs of the Poached Spiced blushing pink rhubarb on top of the custard

Fold over both sides brushing each flap

Then close it up by bringing the bottom and top up and again, brush each flap with melted butter.

Turn them over so that the fold is underneath, brush the tops with butter and

place them on a greased baking tray and bake for 20 -25 minutes at 200d.

Keep an eye on them though – everyone’s oven behaves differently.

Serve warm with a dusting of icing sugar and if you want a nice dollop of double cream.

 They really were delicious I don’t mind saying but I will admit that the little six year old in me snuck into the kitchen before going to bed and I just had to have a little bowl of the left over rhubarb with some normal ultra-mel custard!

The more we change the more we stay the same hey!

At the end of the day this product falls short of all it’s promises.

It’s expensive at R24,95 for 180g of boiled sugar - and although I will definately repurpose the glass bottle – the contents

of the bottle – those red and yellow blobs just don’t deliver on any level.

I bestow upon this dismal product the Sad Vrot Banana award.

Next week on, Is it Hot or is it Vrot?

 I am putting two brands of fruit mince up against each other and looking into the cost of one of China’s largest

 exports at this time of the year …. Christmas Crackers.

As always

Buon Appetito

Xxx

jan