Turkey and all the trimmings in the middle of what could turn out to be a hot summer (Christmas) day. Hmmm. Not really conducive to that vast, hot meal with three veg followed by a luxurious Christmas pudding with brandy sauce, is it?

The promise is made, and the promise is kept: at the Foodbarn, you can wear shorts and sandals or even walk in with bare, sandy feet, and nobody is going to frown, ask you to sit outside and bring you the burgers and chips menu. There isn’t one of those. Rather, you’ll still enjoy some of the finest fare at the Cape and a soupcon of France, sandy feet and all.

Cape of spice. Cape of fruit. At the Cape, we have an abundance of both, so when faced with neatly trimmed organic pork chops and an empty frying pan, it’s time to raid the spice rack. But don’t get carried away. Pork, despite coming from such a huge beast, has a delicate flavour, and does not benefit from spices being chucked at it with wild abandon.

If you’re from Johannesburg or Durban, you have to wonder about the inescapable truth that the restaurant awards are governed from the Mother City, and speculate about the possibility that, were the carrier magazine published in Gauteng and its judges mostly based there, the outcome might not be very different.

Pity the poor ostrich. Not the prettiest of old birds to begin with, let’s be honest. The only beautiful thing about you is your feathers, and they pluck them off you to sell to rich Frenchwomen, drag queens, Rio carnival dancers and Lady Gaga. To a human kid, you’re a horse with feathers. You think ‘those kids are biltong’ but mommy and daddy are watching, so you make it look less obvious that you’re trying to throw them off.

I recently rediscovered my flavour shaker. It had been given to me for Christmas several years ago, and then we moved house, and you know how it is – a box gets unpacked, you think ‘where shall I put this’, you shove it in a cupboard, and after three years of complaining that somebody stole the Jamie Oliver flavour shaker you lift up a forgotten implement and there it is.

Offering a surprise menu — you have no idea what you’re getting — is the restaurant industry’s equivalent of bungee-jumping. It’s out-there stuff, and pretty exhilarating if you’re prepared to harness up and fling yourself over the culinary edge.

When you’re curing salmon for a man who makes witblits for fun, you know you have to chuck in something fairly potent. I’m not sure that curing the fish actually IN witblits, a liquor of a proof so high that it may or not be on either this or that side of the law to do so (I may or may not be hedging my bets here), is entirely a good idea (or not, as may or may not be the case). In any event, what we do know, unequivocally, is that it is not illegal to include tequila in a salmon cure, and I’ll drink to that. I think.

What is not okay is arriving in Amsterdam for the first time in your life at the age of 32 and going down to breakfast in your hotel and asking for bacon and eggs. I got some very odd looks. But it was a very long time ago. And the croissants and rolls are good for stuffing in a pocket for a snack later on while you’re gazing at Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

This year’s Christmas Eve dinner menu has a vaguely Cape touch: Amarula cream chicken liver pate, miniature roast turkey with a very Christmassy stuffing, and, instead of the obvious (and yummy) Christmas pudding, Cape brandy tart served with brandy butter and maraschino cherries to give it a festive touch.

The chef came out before a particular course and explained, somewhat nervously, that the kingklip was to be served raw tonight. Riiiiiiight, we muttered, dubious, looking left and right as if wondering where the candid camera was.

It was one of those moments when you wake up and realise where you really are. On a soccer field, yes. But no crowd, no glaring stadium lights. Just a modest small-town soccer field on the edge of town, and it’s Sunday morning coming down on a boy’s wild imagination.

How to cook your potatoes for Christmas dinner? Here are some ways… The German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a diet consisting predominantly of them “leads to the use of liquor”, which would be enough for some of us to stockpile them, just in case.

A slice of a terrine, served as a starter with crusty bread and a dollop of a sweetly spicy relish, is as French as a downturned nose with a garnish of raised eyebrow. And it’s great as a Christmas starter…

The editors of Posh Galore generally do quite well, and I commend them for their efforts, and we foodie lemmings usually climb on the bandwagon and try using whatever it is in new and unexpected ways in dishes that previously would have managed quite well without the pounded seed of something found growing under a dewy knoll in Zheleznodorozhny and unearthed by a castrated yak. But there’s something they’ve all missed which has potential flavour of the year written all over it. The common, humdrum and very Afrikaans potjie, the three-legged cast-iron pot, is one of the most versatile cooking vessels there is.

Making a good first impression is often the most important moment in a relationship, or even the difference between a relationship and none at all. I remember one of my first dates as a 16-year-old. She was a farm girl from the Northern Cape and I was a fidgety youth who’d been paired with her for her family’s visit to the Douglas agricultural show. Why? I have no idea why. You’re 16, you’re visiting your sister in some cement making town even the people living there have never heard of, and next thing you’re in the back of a car with a plump farm girl who thinks you’re a big city catch, on your way to a whole lot of humiliation.

STEP into Christmas – here is the first of three consecutive menus to help those who celebrate Christmas decide what to feed their family and friends this season. On the menu: Smoked Snoek Mousse, Roast Duck with Cranberry and Red Wine Sauce, and Pink Champagne Jellies with Frosted Red Grapes.

The tang of liquor is as much a part of the Christmas spirit as fruit, nuts and those silly costumes Santa Claus wears. Flame brandy or whisky over a pudding, add a glass to yourself along the way a la Keith Floyd, and the headier side of the yuletide is ignited.

Nuts, fruit and liqueur all scream “Christmas” and this week’s triple-course dinner pushes all those buttons. Start with a pleasingly nutty soup of wild mushrooms and ground walnuts with a dash of sherry, go on to a stuffed loin of pork with crunchy crackling, and end with a deliciously old-fashioned black cherry and maraschino trifle dressed up for the season.

My household has been awash in the Christmas spirit for a month now, a task which has been staunchly borne as we have sat through three Christmas dinners on as many consecutive Saturday nights. Finally, with the real, thing almost upon us, we gave ourselves a break from all that – so that I could make a last-minute Christmas cake.

A Frenchwoman had set up a stall selling these Moroccan cooking vessels and sundry other pots, all ceramic and beautiful. I bought a blue ceramic tajine and the lady, with whom I had been chatting about Moroccan food and how the conical lid of a tajine works, smiled and gave me two additional pots, medium and small, to fit inside the tajine base like Russian dolls.

Best advice to the apostrophically challenged (after being cautioned that it would be best not to attempt any writing outside of a Twitter account) is to suggest that they should never use an apostrophe at all rather than do what most of them do, which is to fling an apostrophe in a sentence wherever they see an “s” at the end of a word. “Prawn’s with olive’s and tomatoe’s”.

My best meal in a year of good eating happened unexpectedly. And in great company too. The foodie set were all out for a lunch of note in the warm green garden of Kleine Zalze wine estate, where a vast team sweated in the Terroir kitchen while we langoured with bubbly and canapes.

The tide was coming in, Di and Annie moved further up the beach, and we continued gamely with our quest, even though we were now thigh-deep in water and the sun was fast disappearing. Finally, figuring we had enough or at least as many as the rising tide was going to allow us before the sea claimed two more souls to add to the roll call of those who have been sacrificed to the salty brine of Arniston, we gave in.

History repeats itself. La Colombe had a brilliant chef who grew an international reputation for the Constantia restaurant and earned it a slew of awards. Then he left and started his own, more modest, eatery. La Colombe found a brilliant replacement, who clawed back its international reputation and earned it a slew of awards. But now he too has left and opened his own, more modest, restaurant.

Preserved lemons are just brilliant, and ridiculously versatile. You can use them pulped to enhance a savoury sauce, chop them into a vegetable dish or stirfry, add them to a stuffing for whole-roasted poultry or a roulade, pummel them into a paste with olives and garlic to spread on bruschetta or a pizza, or pop some into a salad dressing.

Akhni is the kind of spice blend that should be celebrating the Cape on at least half of the local restaurant menus, yet I don’t recall ever having seen it outside of a recipe book or a friend’s dinner table. Why is that? The dish screams “Cape cuisine” yet ask all the major chefs cooking for our thronging tourists if they serve akhni on their menus, or even know what it is, and I reckon you’d be met with a sea of blank expressions.

Time has moved on again, and here we are back at the dear old Nellie for another meal in another new restaurant. The Planet bears the same name as the successful Planet Bar adjacent to it. It is in the same space as the Cape Colony, Simon Brady’s mural having been moved into the adjacent function room where delegates and secretaries will think it to be some relic of the hotel’s earlier days. One day, when the old dear has become the Protea Mount Nelson City Resort Hotel & Wellness Centre, they will paint a scene of vines and cherubs over it and put it in the pool room.

But writing builds up an appetite for food and wine. You’re immersed from dawn to sunset in words and in the mad things that occupy your mind. Then you put the figurative pen down, look around you, and remember where you are, what day it is … and it hits you like a smack in the face: you need a drink like a condemned man needs a reprieve.

The silliest thing about a braai is the moment when the man with the beer boep and the silly grin cracks open a can of beer and pours it over the flames, while the guests suck in a breath and let out the deep sigh of those who know their dinner is going to be late. And possibly wet.

IF our national flower is the protea, our national vegetable is you-know-who and our national sport is soccer … I mean rugby (hey, you guys can fight it out, I prefer boules), our national meat has to be lamb. Whether it’s cooked on the braai, on the spit or in a potjie, roasted in the oven, turned into sosaties, into a Durban curry or a Cape Malay breyani, it’s the one meat that unites our dark carnivorous hearts. Lamb was on the menu at two launches I attended recently. One was a new theatre restaurant, the other a regular summer spitbraai on a wine farm.

In the mid-20th century decades, when we were young and life stretched to a far horizon, sole was the fish ordered by women on dining room menus. Not solely (sorry). But mostly. We kids were encouraged to try it too. But I don’t remember any dads ordering sole. Especially Sole Bonne Femme. Which is not surprising really. “I’ll have the Sole Bonne Femme” doesn’t have quite the same masculine ring as “Old Man steak please, rare, just slap its bum and send it out”.

This was the Springbok flank of shanks. Meaty and moist and superbly browned and reeking of exotic flavours, and yes, Butch, it was a ginormous one too. A very manly shank, worthy of fitting the space between a Springbok rugby boot and a bruised knee.

The racks had been given a French trim. (Calm yourself, Daisy, it has nothing to do with a Brazilian. It means the bones have been trimmed and excess fat removed.)

Last week I spotted something I had seen once or twice before but never tasted – dragonfruit. They’re bright pink, almost cerise, in hue and have little nobbles on their skins that make them look like little gay dragons. But nothing prepares you for what they look like inside. Beneath that hard pink shell is a second even pinker layer of softer flesh, but within that is a large oval centre of pure white fruit speckled with tiny black seeds. It is too beautiful for speech.

It’s culinary showtime, kitchen kabarett. It’s the chef as artist, the chopping board as palette. Elemental cuisine is about assembling a plate of small things that complement one another but in which each item is an element in its own right. A sliver of something, a jellied something else, perhaps. A curl of a third thing, a swirl of a sauce, a slice of an ingredient that just looks damn pretty with all the rest of the stuff.

Boeber is as ‘Cape Town’ as Cape brandy tart, the Cape Doctor, over-priced fancy-schmancy restaurants and claims that ‘it has never rained like this/blown like this/been so hot at this time of the year before’.

AROMATICS are the heated flavourings that give a dish its essence, its heart. Aromatics impart the distictive peaks of taste and fragrance that make you remember a dish, set it apart from other dishes, and make you want to make it again.

It takes The Greenhouse at the Cellars-Hohenort Hotel in lush Constantia to cap three years of rediscovering the restaurants of my old home town. Strange how much things change in just a few years. Restaurants come and go, and you find that many have gone. Of those that remain, few are the same. And even at hotelier supreme Lix McGrath’s fine property, I find that much is changed.

PEOPLE often want to know what my favourite restaurant is, expecting it to be some prissy fine dining palace, all starched and minimalist and where only the freshest of fresh ingredients are served by waiters who like to cadge a bit of a grope while they’re bestowing the damask napkin on your lap.

REUBEN Riffel has travelled a long way from his
wrong-side-of-the-tracks Franschhoek beginnings to his position at the
helm of a very highbrow restaurant at one of the Mother City’s most
luxurious hotels.

Chocolate fondant probably started its culinary life as a mistake. What it is, really, is a little chocolate cake that hasn’t cooked all the way through. So this is cooking turned in on itself – that which is strictly to be avoided when making a proper chocolate cake becomes exactly what you try to do, with a high risk of messing it up, when you choose to make a chocolate fondant.

Having bought a piece of pork belly, I decided to throw caution to the winds and approach it from an entirely new persective: foil. The theory was that the foil would become a mini oven within an oven, and any liquids would remain at the bottom of the foil parcel, with the fat near the top, untouched by liquids that could keep the pork soggy.

Chicken pie is as Cape as bobotie, waterblommetjiebredie and the Cape Doctor. Made in the old Cape Dutch tradition, it contains sago, diced ham, hardboiled egg, mace, allspice and other flavourings typical of the cuisine. Altogether an odd recipe, if you think about it, but seriously good and a perfect hearty winter meal.

A good hamburger is cowboys and rodeo, backslapping, thigh-whipping sustenance for good ole boys to wash down with neat Jack with another Jack for a chaser. A great hamburger screams Fourth of July, it sings the Starspangled Banner. Munch the perfect burger and the best Hollywood movies you’ve ever seen flash before your eyes, the shadow of Uncle Sam caresses your soul, and you know that all is well with the world. The grand old US of A survives and thrives and you can taste its very nectar.

WOKE up Sunday morning, yawned, looked out the window. Glorious day. Not a cloud in the sky, head didn’t hurt. Didn’t need an organically-brewed Fair Trade beer for breakfast, never mind one more for dessert. Perfect, just perfect. A perfect day for killing some sacred cows.

Is it its name that makes us think of kingklip as the king of South African fish? Is it like being called Elvis? Is it like being born Michael Jackson with feet that start shufflling to Billie Jean even as the baby’s head appears? You’re alive. You’re a kingklip. And you rule.

Koppies in all directions. Lowslung mountains with milky purple coats. Verges of tufted fynbos, knobbly Karoo herbs and an occasional scrunched Coke can. Ry-gos interrupt you with an enforced break for a stretch and a waft of the cigarette smoke from the rally dudes in the logo-spangled 4×4 in front. Giant trucks grind past, blowing you back into your car as the blanket-wrapped marshal lady steps out of her booth and moves the Stop sign, waving you to go.

To console our spirits after visiting the atrociously neglected Garden of Remembrance that is meant to be a tribute to the Cradock Four earlier this winter, we needed wine and sustenance.

Frangelico is pure, heavenly nectar even when sipped in its virginal essence. It should be fed to anyone whose idea of attaining an afterlife is to follow a random American preacher’s advice, give away all his possessions, foist the cat onto some unsuspecting third cousin, and check into a hotel to wait for the end. One sip and they’d be raptured to a place they’d never been to before. Not heaven though, just a really cool spot in their own heads where mellow people go for an hour or two when they’ve had a few drinks.

IT WAS a potjie day in Arniston. A potjie day is one where the sun is a little slow to reveal itself, there’s just a tad too much windchill for a braai, but it’s too warm to hang around indoors. It’s a shoulder season thing. Half-warm, half-cool, the Weather Gods dithering about in fence-sitting mode. You put on a jacket, put your back to the breeze coming off the turquoise sea, and think, $#@% it, I’m gonna make me a potjie, crack a bottle of wine and enjoy the view.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that a fish restaurant must be expensive – no more ‘free from the sea’. Far from it. This in a city surrounded, arguably, by two oceans. Glass-half-empty people will say the Indian and Atlantic meet at Cape Agulhas. But I’d sooner align myself with those who fancy savouring what’s still in the glass.

I saw some rhubarb in a supermarket recently and its alluring red stems played their trick on me. I popped some in the basket as memories of our vegetable garden sandwiched between the mouth of the great Orange River and the lower reaches of the Namib desert jumbled in my head.

My parents had both, as Yorkshire folk, somehow been influenced in the kitchen by their cousins across the channel, and those methods rooted in the humblest kitchens of the French rural peasant were practised in our kitchen in farflung Namibia. I love the deeply reduced, luscious sauces, the deglazing of the pan to capture every last of the essences that have been developing during cooking.

IN the superficial rush to cook with only the finest and most sought-after ingredients, the most dedicated followers of food fashion can be frightfully forgetful. Eagerly pursuing all the latest foodie trends, these latterday descendants of the Carnabytian Army march on from one fad to the next, guided by gurus clothed in white who spew wisdom and profanity in the same breath.

Raise the subject of peri-peri recipes and you are likely to have a fiery debate on your hands. Everyone who feels passionate about peri-peri will have a firm opinion of how it is or should be made, down to the type of chillies used and how long it should be left to steep so that the flavours will be enriched.

Having earlier than that worked with Mike Bassett in the restaurant at the Radisson at the V&A Waterfront, it has taken Pillay a long time to come into his own, but it seems he has found the right sort of niche to show off the enormous amount he has learnt, not only about cooking for a fine dining restaurant, but the nuts-and-bolts aspects of running what is essentially a business.

Yet for all that, chef-owner Bertus Basson manages to turn out plates of food worthy of the finest Michelin-star rated restaurants of Europe in an otherwise modest eatery barely 40 minutes drive from central Cape Town, and at prices that make you wonder just how much profit the competition makes. Got to respect that.

Mention the name of the Cape Town Hilton City Centre Hotel (formerly, briefly, the Coral International) and everyone wants to know: do they serve alcohol? They ask this because in its earlier incarnation, the place was strictly halaal including allowing no alcohol on the premises. But I can vouch, unequivocally, that in its new guise, the hotel most certainly does serve alcoholic beverages.