Recipes

There are times, usually when the night is dark, the wind howling and the rain beating on the windows, when all you want out of life is a bowl of hot, steaming soup.

The English cook stews. The French design casseroles. Give this lamb and haricot bean combination your best shot. Your guests will love you for it.

Some Israeli friends recently dropped by just long enough to cook me a breakfast of shakshuka. This rewarding dish consists of eggs baked on a bed of spiced tomatoes. Add lamb kidneys and you have a delicious, quick-to-prepare Sunday brunch.

Completing a rapid review of my past pasta recipes for this page has revealed that nearly all of the recipes entailed sauces for store-bought pasta. While these products, both local and imported, are very good, something deep inside told me that maybe, just maybe, making the stuff at home was the shining path to pasta truth.

Stews are perfect for a chilly winter's evening. Here's a recipe for a delicious hearty beef stew.

This classic one-pot family meal owes much of its ongoing popularity to an amiable relationship with mushrooms. These fabulous fungi contribute to the feast with their delicious flavour as well as their appearance.

Cajun cooking is a mixture of smokin’ and grillin’. Like Cajun music, it’s both familiar and unfamiliar. While this recipe works well with alligator or any local giant water-living reptile species, some frozen hake fillet is really all you need to hunt for.

Chicken pieces are ideal in the hurried kitchens of working people. Here’s a quickish dinner for three or four people complete with potatoes and a revved-up sauce. All in one roasting pan…

It’s easy to forget that chilli is so much more than a local curry, with or without rice. Here’s a New World homage to the chilli, that glorious, scarlet, life-enhancing veldfire in the mouth.

It’s a pity that ‘Lemon Cream’ is a brand name, as this is a better description than ‘lemon curd’ for this magnificent sweet-and-sour dessert. With sparse ingredients and minimal preparation time, it is the perfect complement to ice cream or yogurt.

You’ve grilled the perfect steak. How could you make it even better? Nothing, if you are a purist. Quite a lot, if you’re ready to venture into the unknown. To do this, you’ll need butter. Anchovies. Maybe even a can of smoked oysters...

For the mid-20th century connoisseur, the ideal of fine dining consisted of a prawn cocktail, followed by Tournedos Chasseur, finished off by an Irish coffee. Here’s that very same culinary delight, but without the Irish coffee. Or the prawn cocktail.

For years, vegetables were simply annoying competitors for real estate on my plate. I needed the room – all of it – for meat. Then I learned how to cook the green things. No boiling to a flavourless pulp: just a moment at high heat in a wok.

This superb homage to the pig is a luxurious meal, easy to cook and quick too, assuming that you have some quality chicken stock in the freezer. If not, I’ve shown you how to make your own.

Baking, as I’ve mentioned before, is a dark zone of potential failure and damaged emotions. But sometimes, there is light at the end of the oven. Here is a totally unexpected cake, invented by sheep farmer and slow food specialist, Richard Haig of Enaleni Farm. As the ads used to promise, it’s truly flop-proof.

Nowhere does it say that you have to have spaghetti with bolognaise sauce. And to prove it, here’s a combination of great flavours, textures and aromas all designed to transform pasta into the meal of your dreams…

While there are some folk, this backwoods cook amongst them, who regard plain vanilla ice cream as an eternal miracle of fine dining, other more sophisticated diners have requested a few enhancements. Here they are...

Here’s a way to rev up frozen hake. Playing anything but second fiddle to the fish is a crunchy assortment of slightly unusual green vegetables.

Pork, red meat’s poor relation, makes a roast of multidimensional complexity if treated right. Thanks to crisp crackling with a moist interior, this roast adds its own special blessing to Sunday lunch.

This magnificent invention can also be called curry without rice. A splendid combination of traditional Cape and KZN cooking, it provides both cook and diners with a powerful set of calming emotions.