Salsa verde, or as the French call it sauce verte, sounds very fancy. It is. But in a good way – fancy on the tongue, easy on the prep. Because salsa verde or sauce vert simply means a green sauce. Recipes differ wildly, but they all have one thing in common – loads of fresh herbs. To give backbone to [...]
Green bean bredie – of course one has to call it a bredie, for nothing this soul satisfying could possibly be called a mere stew. What makes this a true South African bredie? The addition of marvellous old-fashioned boerekos spices along with liberal lashings of lard. This is gran’s green bean bredie recipe, but I’ve given it a modern twist. [...]
Pomegranates. They’re probably as trendy as a fruit can be. Open a food mag or check out food packaging and chances are these ruby jewels will feature – on pretty much anything, from chocolate cupcakes to raw boerewors. (I get the former, the latter is a bit weird.) My memory of pomegranates is a nostalgic one that goes way back. [...]
See a woman amble aimlessly around a fashion store for hours on end and nobody bats an eyelid. Try doing the same thing in a supermarket, and security guards get downright twitchy. None of this picking up stuff, checking it out and putting it back. That’s OK for a dress, but apparently not for a bottle of pickles. But here’s [...]
Cookbooks are a little like shoes, you can never have too many. But unlike shoes, books do not have to be new. In fact some of my very favourite ones in my collection are at least 40 years old. I often go rummaging in second-hand bookstores and almost always discover a new gem – like my latest find, Robert Carrier’s [...]
People aren’t all the same and that’s probably a good thing. I can’t begin to image how epically boring a place the world would be if they were. Unfortunately this different-strokes-for-different-folks thing is a bit of pain when it comes to writing recipes. Take my friend Betty (not her real name, as she would NOT be amused). She pecks at [...]