Posts Tagged With: South African

South African Gatsby Sandwich

Posted on August 23, 2022 by pauldelancey

South African Entree

GATSBY SANDWICH

INGREDIENTS

2 cups frozen French fries
1 baguette, crusty roll, or hoagie
1 tablespoon olive oil or vegetable
5 baloney slices
3 tablespoons ketchup
½ teaspoon piri piri sauce or hot sauce
½ cup shredded iceberg lettuce

Serves 4. Takes 20 minutes.

PREPARATION

Cook fries according to instructions on package. Cut baguette open lengthwise, but not all the way through. Put opened baguette in oven 3 minutes before fries are to be done. Take fries and baguette out when fries are done.

While fries bake, add olive oil to large pan. Heat oil using medium heat. Oil is ready when a bit of baloney starts to dance in the oil. Carefully add baloney spices to pan; oil is hot. Make sure baloney slice don’t touch each other. Sauté baloney for 2 minutes or until bottom of baloney slices brown. Flip slices and sauté for another 2 minutes or until the new bottom side browns.

Arrange baloney slices on bottom half of baguette. Then sprinkle fries over baloney. Drizzle ketchup and piri sauce over fries. Sprinkle lettuce over ketchup and piri piri sauce. Close sandwich. Cut sandwich into 4 equal pieces.

TIDBITS

1) The Gatsby Sandwich looks a lot like a ping-pong paddle. This is not an accident. The sport of ping pong consumed the famed author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, all his life.

2) Indeed, the great writer littered his earlier works with ping pong imagery. His most renowned work in the niche ping pong, aimless rich folk genre surely must be Proud Priscilla Pernod and Paul’s Ping Paddle. Literary critics still debate his pregnant metaphors and why he ever wrote the novel.

3) Anyway, disaster struck in 1924 when Fitzrgerald was thrown out of the Paris Ping Pong tournament for using a corked paddle. Depressed permanently by this affair, F. Scott turned to writing once more and penned his magnum opus, The Great Gatsby, which has tortured high-school students ever since.

4) The son of one of these destroyed scholars moved to South Africa and invented the Gatsby Sandwich. Some see the sandwich as an homage either to The Great Gatsby or to ping pong. While others hold that the chef only had French fries, a baguette, and baloney on hand. Who can say?

 

Paul R. De Lancey

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Advertisement
Categories: cuisine, history, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Koeksisters

Posted on July 31, 2018 by pauldelancey

South African Dessert

KOEKSISTERS

INGREDIENTS – SYRUP

1⅔ cups water
1 cinnamon stick
1¼ teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon ginger
1 tablespoon lemon juice
4⅓ cups sugar

INGREDIENTS – DOUGH

2 tablespoons baking powder
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
3 tablespoons butter, softened
½ cup milk
6 cups vegetable oil

Makes 18 braided doughnuts. Takes 20 minutes plus 4 hours plus 1 hour 45 minutes.

PREPARATION – SYRUP

Add all syrup ingredients to pot. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir enough to keep sugar from burning on the bottom. Reduce heat to warm and simmer for 10 minutes or until syrupy. Stir enough to keep sugar from burning on the bottom. Remove cinnamon stick. Cool in refrigerator for 4 hours or overnight.

PREPARATION – DOUGH

Add baking powder, flour, and salt to mixing bowl. Mix with whisk or fork until well blended. Beat egg in cup. Add egg, butter, and milk to bowl. Mix with whisk until well blended. Let dough sit for 1 hour.

Roll out dough to ¼” thickness. Cut dough into strips that are 3″ long and 1½” wide. Cut each strips into 3 ribbons along its length almost all the way to the other end. Leave ribbons connected at one end. Braid the mostly-separated ribbons. Pinch the loose end of the ribbons together. These are your koeksisters.

Add oil to deep pan. The oil should be 1½” high. Turn heat to high. Add little bit of dough. Oil is hot enough when a bit of dough rises to the top. Carefully add koeksisters to pan. (Be careful of splattering oil.) Do not let koeksisters touch. You might have to cook in batches. Deep for 2 minutes or until bottom turns golden brown. Turn over koeksisters and deep fry for 2 more minutes or until new bottom is golden brown. Remove koeksisters and drain immediately on plates covered with paper towels.

While koeksisters drain, remove the pot of refrigerated syrup. Divide this syrup into 2 bowls. (This will prevent all of the syrup from heating up when dipped into by the hot koeksisters.) Immediately after draining the koeksisters, dip the koeksisters into a bowl of syrup. Dip the koeksisters again, this time in the 2nd bowl of syrup. The koeksisters should be slightly crispy on the outside.

TIDBITS

1) These braided doughnuts are crunchy on the outside, but deliciously soft on the inside.

2) However, if you leave koeksisters or any other dough out long enough, it will get hard, real hard.

3) Indeed, long doughnuts such as koeksisters or long Johns are favored by the US Army as these doughnuts’ cylindrical shape enable them to fit into all sorts of artillery pieces.

4) A fourteen-day-old koeksister will eliminate an enemy infantryman.*

5) A month-old long doughnut will knock down a brick building.*

6) A six-month old Long-John will tear a sizable hole into any tank found on the modern battlefield. You don’t want to contemplate what the rock hard doughnut fragments will do to the crew inside.*

7) A year-old koeksister will rip apart even the most hardened concrete bunker.*

8) * = As recorded in the US Army Top Secret* Film #107-223-4X. “Analysis of Doughnut Projectile Effectiveness in the Second Gulf War.”

9) Top Secret films really shouldn’t put on YouTubeTM.

10) A good way to soften a rock-hard doughnut is to place a damp paper towel over it and microwave for one minute.

11) America’s enemies know this. They are busy inventing SDDIs (Strategic Doughnut Defense Systems) to intercept and eliminate our lethal doughnuts.

12) SDDI consists of two different artillery pieces. The first piece fires open microwaves into the path of a flying doughnut. Once near the doughnut, the trajectories of the microwaves are controlled by controllers on the ground.

13) The second artillery piece fires gigantic rolls of damp paper towels. Air friction tears one paper towel after another from the paper roll. The sky becomes a blizzard of paper towels. By sheer force of numbers, every doughnut captured in the flying microwaves will be covered by damp paper towels. Once this happens, ground technicians will microwave the once hard doughnut to harmless softness.

14) There is even talk that the American Doughnut Corps has satellites that can take out incoming nuclear missiles. As of press time, there has been no official confirmation.

Chef Paul

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bunny Chow

Posted on September 30, 2016 by pauldelancey

South African Entree

BUNNY CHOW

INGREDIENTSbunnychow

1 medium onion
3 medium potatoes
4 cardamom pods
1 cinnamon stick
½ teaspoon fennel seeds
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tomatoes
2 pounds chicken breasts or lamb
3 fresh curry leaves
3 tablespoons Durban masala (See recipe)
⅓ cup chicken stock
2 1-lb whole white loaves
1 tablespoon fresh cilantro

Serves 4. Takes 1 hour.

SPECIAL UTENSIL

Dutch oven

PREPARATION

Dice onion. Peel potatoes. Cut potatoes into 1″ cubes. Add onion, potato, cardamom pods, cinnamon stick, fennel seeds, and vegetable oil to Dutch oven. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir constantly. Remove from heat.

Dice tomatoes. Cut chicken into 1″ cubes. Add Durban masala, Add tomato, chicken, curry leaves, and Durban masala to Dutch oven. Cook using medium heat for 5 minutes. Stir frequently. Add chicken stock. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes or until potato is tender and chicken is no longer pink inside. Remove Dutch oven from heat. Discard cinnamon stick.

Slice bread loaf in half along its length. Use sharp knife to cut off most of the soft white bread from each half. Leave ½”-to-1″ of bread crust along the edges and bottoms. (The scooped out bread can be made into bread crumbs.) Ladle potato/tomato/chicken mixture into each hollowed-out loaf half. Garnish with coriander. Repeat for second bread loaf.

TIDBITS

1) Bunnies are naturally fierce fighters. Armies everywhere had them. Napoleon wouldn’t have dreamed of conquering Europe without his corps of bunny irregulars.

2) But you say, “Aha, Napoleon didn’t conquer Europe. See, you’re wrong. Bunnies aren’t so fierce.” Ho, ho, they are. Napoleon won victory after victory up until 1808 with his beserker bunnies.

3) Then, Napoleon invaded Spain. Spain had guerrilla fighters. More importantly, it had battle hardened bunnies. Conquistador bunnies. Bunnies that pushed Moors out of the Iberian positions during the centuries of La Reconquista. Bunnies that had accompanied Cortes to Mexico, Pizarro to Peru, and Albondigas to Greenland. Bunnies that terrified conquered peoples into quiet submission for centuries.

4) The French army never had been on the receiving end of a bunny charge. Never had seen those twitching noses and the unreasoning terror that engendered. Never had to see a sea of bunny tails popping up and down as they stamped toward them . . .

5) where they nibbled your shoes and your shoelaces and so you tripped and your comrades laughed and laughed at you and felt so ashamed that you deserted the army and ran home where you sold sprigs of cilantro which tastes like soap to some people which was okay because all life tasted like soap to you and you spent the rest of your life thinking in run-on sentences.

6) And even if you managed to man up and stand your ground after all that, the bunnies would bite your ankles repeatedly which often hurt, particularly so when their teeth actually broke your skin.

7) Suppose you were a stalwart sort, a man among and you were still fighting bunnies crazed beyond belief by sangria, you’d still have to deal with the bunnies’ powerful rear legs, legs that could kick a potato twenty feet.

8) Imagine. You’ve seen their twitching noses, their bobbing cottontails, had your shoelaces nibbled in two, had your ankles bitten, and now they’re hurting your shins and they won’t stop. And then, and then, they keep your potatoes twenty feet away where they get smooshed in the heat of battle.

9) You have no food. So, you confiscate some local food, some paella perhaps, but your body hasn’t faced Spanish food bacteria. So, now you’re a French soldier in Spain fighting for an emperor who only cares about himself and you have the mother of all stomach aches. You throw thrown your musket and flee.

10) The rest of your comrades see that you, a man among men, are fleeing. They realize the fight is lost. They flee as well. Your army is routed. Bunny-fear demoralizes the other French armies. French forces reel back to France. Allied hordes attack Paris and storm the Montmarte. France capitulates. Your flight from the Spanish battlefield brought all this about.

11) The French Emperor Napoleon gets exiled to Elba. The long-time leader gives a farewell to his Old Guard, “Adieu mes amis, nous sommes battus vaillamment et aurions gagné mais pour ce lecteur de recette et sa peur des lapins.”*

* = “Good buy my friends, we fought valiantly and would have won but for this read reader of recipes and his fear of bunnies. (Sorry, apparently Napoleon’s French is only as good as mine. Weird.)

12) So you’ve changed history. Awesome responsibility, isn’t it?

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, history, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Durban Masala

Posted on September 25, 2016 by pauldelancey

South African Appetizer

DURBAN MASALA

durbanmasalaINGREDIENTS

½ teaspoon cardamom
1 teaspoon Cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1¼ teaspoons coriander
1¼ teaspoons cumin
¼ teaspoon fenugreek
¾ teaspoon ginger
¼ teaspoon mace
⅛ teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons turmeric

Makes ¼ cup. Takes 10 minutes.

PREPARATION

Add all ingredients to mixing. Mix with whisk until well blended.

TIDBITS

1) Durban is a city in South Africa. Durban rhymes with Durban. This is useful when constructing rhyming poems. In much the same way, gnome rhymes with Nome, a city in Alaska. Over 20,000 gnomes live in Nome, admired for their strong work ethic. They’ll guard your garden for amazing lengths of time and everyone knows much polar bears fear gnomes.

4) Gnomes first came to Massachusetts on the Mayflower, fleeing persecution from waffle eaters. Later, they worked their way south, guarding spice gardens along the way. The little guys eventually settled in Chancellorsville, Virginia–Why not?–to lead a safe, if not totally accepted existence.

5) Tragedy struck in 1863. General Stonewall Jackson was shot after the battle of Chancellorsville. Enraged townsfolk held a gnome fired the fatal shot and drove the wee ones out of town.

6) The gnomes drifted ever northwestward, until they reached Nome on the Bering Sea. They could drift no longer. They wore parkas to keep warm. The parkas covered their faces, just like the natives. You couldn’t tell the gnomes and the people apart. Sure, gnomes are much shorter than people, but you always keep your face to the ground during a blizzard. And 19th-century Nome always had blizzards. The townsfolk didn’t even notice the little folk until 1941, when World War II broke out. People. after kneeling, worked shoulder to shoulder with the gnomes to defeat the common foe. The gnomes gained acceptance into one career after another. Today, Nome’s the gnome genome sequencing capital of the world.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, humor, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

South African Bobotie

Posted on May 4, 2016 by pauldelancey

South African Entree

BOBOTIE

INGREDIENTSBobotie-

2 slices bread
⅔ cup milk (½ cup more later)
1 Granny Smith or other sour apple
1 large onion
3 tablespoons butter
2 pounds ground beef
2¼ tablespoons lemon juice
1½ tablespoons curry powder
½ teaspoon pepper
¾ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
¾ teaspoon turmeric
2 cups almonds, quartered or slivered
½ cup raisins
5 bay leaves
1 egg
½ cup milk

SPECIAL UTENSIL

8″ x 8″ casserole dish

Makes 8 plates. Takes 1 hour 20 minutes.

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add bread and ½ cup milk to small bowl. Let bread soak. Peel, core, and dice apple. Mince onion. Add butter, onion, and beef to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens and beef browns. (The universe is continually expending, things are getting farther apart from each other, hence the extra two blank lines after this paragraph.)

Add beef, onion, diced apple, soaked bread, lemon juice, curry powder, pepper, salt, turmeric, almonds, and raisins to casserole dish. Evenly insert bay leaves, tips standing up, throughout casserole dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

Remove casserole dish. Add egg and ½ cup milk to mixing bowl. Beat with whisk. Ladle egg/milk mix over casserole. Bake for another 15 minutes or until golden brown. Bobotie goes well with rice. However, it goes really, really well with chutney. Omit the chutney and you’ll risk a visit from the culinary police.

TIDBITS

1) There are no gourmet restaurants in space. There once was that orbiting fast-food restaurant called The Outer Limits. It relied heavily on drive-through traffic. It failed. You probably never heard of it.

2) New owners reopened the eatery. This time they added space ports, hoping to get dock-in business from space-shuttle pilots and passengers to and from the International Space Station.

3) It failed as well. Indeed, it never opened. Costs did in this project. The parts necessary to building an up-to-date space docks surprised the eager entrepreneurs. And my gosh, the transportation costs for the materials. Out of this world! Who knew that NASA charged so much to blast off with even the most modest kitchen appliances?

4) Oh, and here is a tip for would be extraterrestrial restarauteurs. When hiring a private company to carry your culinary supplies to your orbiting eatery, don’t hire the shuttle on a mileage basis. The cost will eat you alive. Overtime wages for the shuttle operator are pretty horrific as well.

5) Anyway, there’s a hamburger joint, up there that is fully equipped and ready for business. Make an offer to the bank holding the mortgage. you’ll find it quite easy to work with.

6) I fear I’ve dwelt too long on the costs of operating an off-Earth restaurant.. There are benefits as well. You really don’t need a refrigerator. Simply place your meat, ice cream, etc. outside. The food won’t go bad; the temperature is nearly absolute zero out there. Your restaurant being the only thing of any size in the neighborhood will generate enough gravitational field to carry the food all with it.

7) I do recommend putting all your food in a giant mesh. Picture this. You’re trying to bring inside a rack of ribs. Instead of hooking the ribs you poke them away. The ribs fall out of orbit and hurtle to Earth. Except the ribs don’t make it to Earth. They crash into a satellite on the way down.

8) Only it’s not just any satellite. It’s the one people use to transmit photos of babies, kittens, and puppies to each other. Deprived of their cute pictures, billions of distraught people get into their cars to get the one thing that can ease their pain, a really good burger. And if billions of people turn on their cars at once, the resulting exhaust will cover the world asphyxiating everyone.

9) Social media companies have a reserve satellite permanently on call on a launching pad for this very occasion. They can get a new satellite functioning in space in fifteen minutes.

10) People will probably realize this. Enough of them to avoid suffocating the world. Probably, but do you want to take that chance? So for the future of all of us, please place your out-of-shuttle food in a secure mesh net. Thank you.

11) In the meantime, those wishing to enjoy a fine meal far from the madding crowd, might want to consider heading north, way north. The culinary scene in Svalbard, Norway is vibrant despite being in the land of four-month-long nights and having only 2,642 people. Indeed, the town of Longyearbyen has thirteen fine restaurants. According to TripAdvisorTM, the highest rated restaurant is Huset. It’s also the northernmost gourmet restaurant.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, humor, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

South African Custard Pie (Melktert)

Posted on September 24, 2014 by pauldelancey

South African Dessert

CUSTARD PIE
(melktert)

INGREDIENTS – PASTRYMelkTert-

2 cups flour (1 teaspoon plus 3 tablespoons more later)
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt (¼ teaspoon more later)
½ cup chilled butter (1½ tablespoons more later)
¼ cup water
1 teaspoon flour

INGREDIENTS – FILLING

4 eggs
4 cups milk
1½ tablespoons butter
½ cup sugar (½ cup plus 1/4 cup plus ½ teaspoon more later)
1 cinnamon stick
¼ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cornflour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons flour
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon sugar

SPECIAL UTENSILS

2 9″ pie tins
rolling pin
electric mixer or beater
sonic obliterator

Makes 2 pies. Takes 2 hours 40 minutes. Well, it should take that long, unless of course, while in the midst of preparation someone drank some of the milk you needed for this recipe, so you rushed to the store to buy milk and just before you got to the checkout stand four people rushed their carts in front of you, and then you got home only to find you had to take your child to sword-swallowing lessons. In this case, preparation will take longer.

PREPARATION – CRUSTS

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Add 2 cups flour, baking powder, an¼ teaspoon salt to large mixing bowl. Mix with whisk. Grate ½ cup butter or cut into small pieces. Add grated butter. Use hands to blend grated butter with flour mix. Add water. Use hands to smoosh, a new culinary term, water into butter/flour mix. Form mix into dough ball using hands.(Add additional water as necessary to keep dough ball together.)

Dust rolling pin and surface with 1 teaspoon flour. Split dough ball into two. Roll out each dough ball into circles into a 10″ circle. Place a dough circle into each pie tin. Poke pie crusts a few times with a fork. (This releases excess air.) Bake crusts for 6-to-10 minutes or until they start to turn golden brown. Keep oven at 400 degrees while you prepare filling. (Depending on the number of mixing bowls you have, you might want to clean them as you get the chance.)

PREPARATION – FILLING

Separate eggs. Add egg whites to small bowl. Beat egg whites with electric mixer set on beat until they stiffen. Add egg yolks to another small bowl. Beat yolks with fork.

Add milk to pot. Bring milk to slow boil using medium-high heat. Stir constantly. Add 1½ tablespoons butter, ½ cup sugar, cinnamon stick, and ¼ teaspoon salt. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes. Stir as frequently as you can.

Add cornflour, cornstarch, 3 tablespoons flour, and ¼ cup sugar to new mixing bowl. Mix with whisk until well blended. Add about ¼ of the hot-milk mixture (about 1 cup to this bowl. Mix with whisk until well blended. Add egg yolks. Mix again with whisk. Add vanilla and entire corn flour/flour/sugar/hot-milk contents to simmering pot. Keep pot simmering using low heat for 10 minutes or until mixture thickens. Stir as frequently as you can. Remove from heat and let cool for 15 minutes.

Lower temperature of oven to 375 degrees.. Add egg whites and ¼ cup sugar to pot. Mix with whisk. Pour filling into pie crusts. Bake for 15-to-25 minutes or until filling sets. (A toothpick inserted into the middle should come out clean)

Remove pies from oven. Add ground cinnamon and ½ teaspoon sugar to small bowl. Mix with fork. Sprinkle pie with ground cinnamon/sugar mixture. Let cool for 15 minutes and then chill for 30 minutes in the refrigerator. (Note: some people favor serving this dessert warm. A fierce debate rages.)

Congratulations! You’ve done a lot to make this wonderful dessert for your guests. Relax with a nice, cold root beer or even something stronger. If your guests do not appreciate your heroic efforts, zap them with your sonic obliterator. You don’t need that negativity in your life. ☺

TIDBITS

1) Hippos can get sunburned!

2) No wonder hippos kill people crossing rivers. Sunburns make them cranky. I got a bad sunburn recently. Made me cranky, I can tell you. But I didn’t kill anyone. Yay for me.

4) Hippos need sunscreen. Who would apply the sunscreen to these creatures? Someone brave.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, humor, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this: