Meals Moods Moments Memories

And one more for the road… not that last melancholic drink before being kicked out of an already empty bar so beautifully sung of by Billie Holiday, but a reference rather to the practice of packing food for the road: “padkos”. It was such standard practice when we were kids and going on holiday, that my mother would, the evening before, be found in the kitchen, mixing up minced meat and grated onion and breadcrumbs and herbs and an egg yolk to bind it all, for tiny meatballs, which would be rolled between her palms, soon sticky with the mixture, and placed in neat rows in a baking tray ready for the oven. Frikkadels or meat balls were standard road food, cooled off and packed into tupperware, ready to be doled out in the car when us kids and my dad started getting hungry. Not only meatballs, but cooled off, cooked boerewors sometimes, and cooked chicken pieces, enough for two adults and four children (including two always seemingly ravenous boys) would always be found in the food basket somehow squeezed in at my  mom’s feet in the front passenger seat. And tomato sandwiches, and a flask of coffee and tea each, and some of the biscuits which were baked in the week before a trip: oats crunchies, melting moments, coconut macaroons, ginger biscuits….

We used to always, at least as I remember it, get up early, before sunrise, and drive into the day, usually to a holiday on the South coast, and once, very adventurously, to Port St Johns for an Easter break, when I was around 8 or so. I remember that very clearly: my grandparents had left a week before to Port St John’s, but we didn’t have any plans to go away. My dad had just come back from work, we were having afternoon coffee, and the next moment my mom started packing: my dad had said; ”Let’s go and surprise Mom and Dad(his parents) in Port St John’s”. My mom, whom I think had quite an adventurous nature, immediately got us all packed and started making sandwiches, a flask of coffee and one with tea for her, andwhat seemed like the next moment to my child’s mind, we were on our way, this time driving into the night. By daybreak the next day we were in Falstaff, waiting for a bakery or café to open, and then my dad found a spot at the side of the road to park the car, hauled out a little gas stove and frying pan, and cooked up a breakfast of boerewors and fried onion on freshly baked white bread rolls.

We found the campsite where my grandparents had their caravan parked quite easily, but they were not “home”, so we drove down to the coast. I will never forget what happened next: as my dad drove around a rather sharp curve in a gravel road, my grandparents in their Opel coupe or was it an El Camino? came round the same bend from the opposite side, and all we saw was my grandmother’s mouth and eyes open wide in what was total surprise and almost shock when she recognised my dad’s car: a happy hello followed, cars to the side of the road, excited laughter and my dad being playfully berated by his mother (he was not quite 30 then) for doing something so daring!!

I have as an adult continued the food for the road tradition, even though I could perfectly easily have long since stopped doing that: with the roadside filling stations and the eateries attendant to them, it makes it easy for most people and families to simply stop for petrol and breakfast or lunch. And to be honest, I mostly fly to my grown-up holiday destinations these days, though my most recent break in the Midlands was an opportunity to pack food for the road, as referred to in the previous blog entry.

So I was delighted to be asked by my boyfriend to help him make food for his flight to Toronto where he spends a month or so with family every year. He has been, for years now, making himself “lugkos”(air food), for no other reason than finding the (economy class) airline food too awful. I didn’t know that it is allowed, but apparently one can carry food on board. So Friday morning found us in his kitchen, with a selection of freshest Turkish and Italian bread, and a loaf of Rye, cold cooked chicken, leftover whole fillet of beef, and assorted lettuce and rocket, whole grain mustard, creamed horseradish in a little jar, gherkins, tomatoes and mayonnaise, from which we constructed a veritable feast of sandwiches….

I smiled to think that every sandwich he un-wrapped, may have evoked a memory of me in his kitchen…

Yesterday I came back from a long weekend away in the Midlands with my lover: I smiled again now writing that, since friends have commented that I seem to always be cooking for “sons and lovers”!! Of course I can call him my boyfriend, but at nearly fifty and him 6 year older that I, we are hardly a girl and a boy, though sometimes I feel like a young girl when I’m with him..

It was a weekend of food. We did a WW food shop and went past my usual baker for fresh ciabbata and Turkish bread, because I knew from previous visits to the Midlands when a then husband that there will be no fresh salads or other delicious luxuries available from the very rural shops(those general stores where one can buy almost everything including paraffin lamp wicks and slabs of mottled blue soap, and a small selection of dairy products and standard loaves of white bread). Besides, we had planned to spend most of the time at the cottage overlooking a 2 hectare trout dam, on a stud farm just outside of Rosetta.

And that is what we did: we cooked, ate, read, slept, watched the little dam in different light as the days wore on, did a bit of the Midlands Meander, visiting craft and gift shops, some with a slightly sad,  down at heel feel, and then on Sunday, went to Howick to do the gorge walk: a fairly strenuous(for me unaccustomed to exercise) walk down  to the bottom of the falls, and back up: my calves are still a bit stiff from heaving myself up in some places, a quite steep stone path.

Each night we lit a huge fire in the large fireplace in the lounge area of a very simple but somewhat quaint cottage, which stands alone, very privately, at the edge of a dam stocked with brown and rainbow trout, in a little valley surrounded with hills. A strong halogen spotlight perched on top of the cottage lit up the view at night, and we saw a mountain rhebuck lope across the lawn between the cottage and the dam on the first night….

And since this is a food related blog, let me tell you what we ate:

On the way there, in the car, roast beef on ciabbata sandwiches packed with a flask of coffee in a very old basket that belonged to a beloved grandmother, perched on the back seat.. Then on the first night, lamb sosaties from my favourite butcher with couscous and roast vegetables with a chilli and coriander and feta crumbled through… on Saturday night another braai, on the weber, under a clear, cold, almost full moonlit sky: this time a substantial chunk of aged rump steak, with a panzanella which I made earlier in the day with the requisite stale Italian bread which I deliberately cultured the week before, and on Sunday night, pan fried rainbow trout, with a beurre blanc(but made with balsamic so it was rather a buerre brown: equally delicious), crushed potatoes and a simple green salad…

In between and for lunches we nibbled on cheese and pate on crackers, and dolmades and hoummous , and leftovers…

And even though every meal had associated with it a particular sense memory for me, which I will write about, now there is a fresh overlay to each meal: my first weekend away with a man that I love cooking for…. Every moment rich and filled with pleasure and some poignancy, since soon he will fly off to Canada for almost a month for a yearly sabbatical with his family….

I was forgiven, via facebook , for not making my own basil pesto to go with the spaghetti last night!! On her wall, my longest standing female friend posted an appreciative comment on the meal she shared with me and my sons last night: basil pesto and a panzanella salad with the ubiquitous pasta-on-Wednesday meal.

I didn’t make my own pesto last night: thank goodness for Woolworths’ almost-as-good-as- homemade basil pesto, of which I bought two tubs on my way home, and two bottles of a goodish blanc de noir.

In my fridge I had been nursing leftover ciabbata from the weekend, waiting for an opportunity to make a panzanella: the recipe of which does not do justice to the unexpected wonderfulness of stale sticky Italian bread soaked in red wine vinegar and olive oil, chunks of tomato and cucumber, fresh basil shredded over it and the sweetness of a red onion diced finely to add a pungent undertone to the salad and no doubt a decided odour to breath the next day…I piled all the ingredients onto a huge plate, and later watched with satisfaction as the very last bit of bread was relished, the plate swept clean of every last morsel.

Last night I simply emptied the tubs of pesto into a pot with steaming spaghetti, but couldn’t help thinking then about my first taste of basil pesto, and being shown how to make it by my second husband. He was, in turn, taught by an Italian friend and restaurateur. We drove all over Johannesburg to find fresh basil and then yet another excursion to find pine nuts.. it is relatively recent(in the last 15yrs or so) that in SA these ingredients are easily obtainable: neither my grandmothers, or my mother, grew basil in their gardens, and I hardly ever had any pasta other than macaroni cheese, or spaghetti bolognaise as a child.

I’ve grown basil in all my gardens since my first taste of basil pesto. There’s nothing quite like the pungent distinctive greenness of basil leaves being plucked from the stems, garlic being crushed, parmesan grated gruntingly by me (a properly stored chunk of parmigiano reggiano can get hard to grate without having a knuckle scraped)..and then, when the food processor starts whirring and the thick gloopy emulsified pesto dollops out of the beaker eventually: there’s nothing that says summer to me more than that fragrance… except maybe the smell of a lawn being mown or the taste of sweet white flesh of red skinned peaches…

It’s only later that I started making basil pesto in a pestle and mortar: even more satisfying, if noisy and time consuming: a pinch of Maldon sea salt at the bottom of the mortar, then a clove or two of garlic, then slightly toasted pine nuts, and then the basil leaves only a couple at the time, while all the time pounding and pushing the ingredients against the sides of the mortar…adding olive oil and parmesan as you go… until you have a bowl heaving with a deep green paste: when you do it in the food processor, the texture is finer and it is a uniform lighter green: handmade it is dark green with an uneven texture with the ingredients still evident….a half kernel of pine nut, a slick of unblended garlic….

I don’t ever use the food processor anymore to make basil pesto, and sometimes like last night I don’t even make it myself. But it remains one of the most satisfying culinary experiences for me: the making, smelling, tasting, and sharing thereof.

For my son, who has in the past proclaimed that his epitaph should read: “He didn’t eat fish paste”, it was probably too much to expect that he would like anything with anchovies in it. So my plan to cook pasta with my version of a puttanesca sauce for my sons last night had to be scuppered at the last minute, which is luckily quite do-able when one does a pasta sauce which requires little cooking. Well, the one son who does eat anchovies did not last night come over for dinner: he had other plans, sounded as if he has started seeing a mysterious new girl, whom I will eventually meet at our Wednesday dinners if she is, as they say, a keeper..

The other son, he of “no- anchovies- please- ma”, or capers it turns out, came over with his girlfriend last night. I had planned to make a tomato based sauce with olives, anchovies and capers for penne, and ended up making a tomato based sauce with courgettes and olives and chilli and garlic, which was equally delicious, since the courgette wheels were fried off first with garlic and olive oil, the caramelisation adding a sweet dimension to the sauce.

I could not resist though the idea that anchovies would have added yet another depth of taste, as they do, but my son could not be convinced to try it so I, just before serving, heated some salty pungent little preserved fish fillets with their filigree of tiny bones until melted with some olive oil and served it alongside, in little condiment bowls, the chopped fresh red chillies and garlic in olive oil that my chilli loving son, insisted in preparing, standing alongside me in my galley style kitchen, while his girlfriend bravely nibbled on a tiny chunk of fresh baby bulb garlic which I recently saw in Woolworths and have been using extensively in a couple of dishes lately…

Earlier on, when they arrived, we had with a first glass of wine, chunks of the freshest basil pesto bread from my favourite baker, theirs with butter slathered on and mine drizzled with Morgenster olive oil with its particular peppery bite at the back of my throat, standing at the counter talking and getting the pasta water on the go and the improvised sauce simmering gently.

The ambience was perfect for a pleasant evening: candles lit, music playing, me in my element, cooking and singing along with some crooney songs from the fifties, when I realised that the pair were having a bit of a er, rumble: and then they left to go and fetch something from their cottage, and I was sure that they were not coming back. As the non-interfering mother and potential mother-in-law which I hope to be, I did not say anything, but fervently hoped that they would be able to talk though whatever was clearly causing tension…. So by the time they thankfully did return, seeming fine, the sauce had reduced enough, I had spoken to my lover whose reassuring voice helped soothe my motherly concern for my child, and ten minutes later the pasta was drained and dressed and steaming in white bowls, and the green salad with rocket and a selection of baby greens with a good dressing on the table, alongside melted anchovies (almost like anchoaide) and the colourful bowl of shiny red chillies and white garlic.

I ended up being the only one to drizzle the anchovy oil over my meal, savouring the salty bite and the unmistaken tang thereof as it married wonderfully with the other ingredients in my mouth..

And this morning, finding it in my fridge, standing up at the kitchen counter, I scooped up the leftover anchovy oil with leftover basil bread tore off  the loaf in rather greedy abandon, and had a completely new variation of the far more sedate and  traditional anchovy toast….delicious.

But strictly I think, for those of us who keep a bottle of those in the fridge door to at a whim, fish(pun intended) out a tiny fillet with one’s fingers(which can be tricky) to have just on it’s own to satisfy a curious craving for what has to be an acquired, very adult taste sensation.

I made a favourite dish last night for my lover: chicken in white wine stew with gremolata, served with mashed potatoes, and a green salad with my take on vinaigrette….

The chicken has always been a favourite recipe of mine, and happily has become such for him too since I have started cooking for him. I cook of course, for myself too when I cook for others, we all do. I once kept a diary of every meal I cooked or had out. I found that journal the other day, and had in my hand a history of that year in food; no recipes, just a short description of what I cooked/ate, and on the opposite page, in the same line who I had it with or whether it was a special occasion.. a year measured out in meals.

Reading through it last night waiting for my lover to arrive, it was easy to spot my favourite meals, well at least for that year, but also those lifelong standards which are probably worth recording in recipe form. I did once start a recipe book, in a notebook handmade by my second husband: I found that too during these past two weeks since I decided to start blogging about my food memories.

My maternal grandmother had one of those sturdy, A4, lined, black hard cover notebooks which she had covered with what always looked to me like a piece of plastic tablecloth, but which was probably from a roll of vinyl for that purpose… the contents though were mostly cookies and cakes and tarts recipes, all copied out in blue ballpoint. I’m sure one of my aunts still has it.

I have my mom’s recipe book: similar to her mother’s: the same black hardcover notebook, with a blue fabric spine… and now even thinking about it this morning I want to cry… every time I open it I do cry, still, even 9 years after her death: the recipes written in her very feminine, loopy but neat handwriting mostly also in blue ballpoint, with loyal reference to the source, whether from a friend or a magazine, or a radio show: Sometimes she would have written them down in shorthand first, and then transcribe.

Her recipe book bulges with clippings too, and pieces of paper from old fashioned writing pads (remember Basildon Bond?) with handwritten recipes from other women: some of whom I knew as neighbours… from her mother, from her sisters, from her mother-in law, my other grandmother: so when I hold that book in my lap, I am in an instant connected to all those women and the love so richly shared and expressed through cooking and baking and more than that, recording it so that it can be passed from generation to generation.

So maybe thinking about favourite food is the clarion call to continue the tradition, to write down, by hand, favourite recipes again: the Wednesday meals that my sons have here every week, the dinners for friends, and the food I cook for my lover.. for pure pleasure but also for posterity…