Recipes

My first guinea fowl of the year was klapped by an Isuzu on a dirt road near Karkloof. The next two were expertly hunted by a good friend and perished with all their adrenalin safely in their adrenals. Boy, oh boy, were they tender.

There’s not much one can do when cauliflower au gratin makes its umpteenth comeback to the dinner table, except to look hopefully in the general direction of the kitchen. Perhaps there’s something else to come? Alternatively, give this recipe the attention it deserves.

Imagine a little French island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Then imagine a curry that has flavours different from any curry you’ve enjoyed before… Cari de poulet à la Reunion.

A large Christmas lunch takes time to prepare. Here, we use standard industrial time and motion methods to speed up production while maintaining quality.

This is without doubt the simplest dessert recipe I know, with the exception of vanilla ice cream. The only skill demanded of you is to make the trifle look elegant and tempting in the glass dish. A second optional skill involves actually making the custard.

You don’t have to live on the beach to enjoy this delicious meal, since the fishy parts come straight out of the supermarket freezer. And to make it even easier, the main ingredient in the crust is breakfast cereal.

To make cauliflower mash with chicken livers and chorizo sausage for four, you will need: For the mashed cauliflower: 1 head of...

Eat more plants, we’re told. An excellent idea, especially with the wide choice of delicious greens available these days. But we love our meat too, don’t we? So here’s a Thai-influenced salad – served warm, unlike most salads, and augmented by succulent rump steak.

This is the stage name for grilled chicken in red chilli sauce. The red chilli sauce is a variation on a riff on an improvisation on a South East Asian folk recipe with a couple of notes added from the classic Durban spice repertoire.

We all know the traditional image of prawns: palid specimens covered in red goo, heaped in a sundae glass dish or even a wineglass. Oh, I nearly forgot the ‘bed of lettuce’. Instead of this gustatory let-down, here are two great dipping sauces designed to enhance rather than obscure the oceanic pleasures of roasted prawns.

Twice-cooked dishes are usually Chinese in origin, with the raw ingredients getting two treatments instead of one. While a little heavy on the cook, the effects on the diners make up for the extra work. Give it shot with this recipe.

This is a huge blast of flavour created with little effort, and a regular hit in my household. Be sure not to skimp on the whisking action to ensure the perfect white sauce.

Spaghetti with a sauce is a family staple throughout this nation of ours. Instead of working a can opener, here’s a more hands-on pasta meal for four that is easy to cook and pleasantly novel in flavour.

Is it a condiment? Or merely a vegetable? The fact of the matter is that caramelising onions is a great kitchen skill to learn: this delicious ingredient adds layers of flavour to all meat-based meals.

This could just as easily be grilled pork or even the next unexpected culinary event at the family braai. Whatever the cooking method, the outcome will thrill your diners and leave you with an immodest sense of personal achievement.

There’s a mysterious colonel down our street who sells this by the bucketful. Given the complexity of the Deep South of the US, there are many variations of this much-loved regional dish. Here’s a beginner’s version to try out.

We all know the experience. Braaied chicken, hot and black on the outside, cold and pink on the inside. Here’s a way to avoid such horrors.

This is based on an ancient principle: if one is good, two is better. Hence the double salsa. While best with a freshly grilled steak, this combination also works superbly with cold beef or smoked ham.

Good soup is high quality nutrition in a rush. Since most of the goodies are in solution they get to work exceptionally fast. That’s why all international cuisines feature soups, from Italian Minestrone to Vietnamese Pho Bo.

Like all recent converts, I am a fanatic to the cause. And the cause, my brothers, is the dry rub. This is a rough ’n tough application of seasoning to raw meat. Until recently, my only previous experience of a dry rub was cajun-style blackened fish. And, as we say down in the Durban mangrove swamps, fish ain’t meat.