Family Baking Rocks!!

Today was baking day...

My two-year-old daughter, Lilly-Ann and Chantal, my beautiful wife, baked some amazingly yum cookies, with a recipe we pilfered off Joy the Baker's blog. They are called Flourless Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies, and are so easy to make with your kids, Lilly spooned on all the jam/jelly and loved licking the spoon after every cookie (oh well, at least I know I won't pick up any deadly virus!).

I, on the other hand, baked a classic. An Old Fashioned Apple Pie. I used sweet French pastry for the crust and made my filling with tart New Zealand backyard apples, which Chantal's mum and dad had bought off a street vendor. I like using brown sugar when baking with apples. In my humble opinion, brown sugar
enhances the character of  the fruit. This is my own delicious apple pie recipe and is best served warm with Vanilla Ice-Cream or a dollop of Double Thick Cream.

Pastry

280g Flour
160g Butter
110g Castor Sugar
2 Eggs
1/2 Tsp. Vanilla Essence
Pinch of Salt

Cube the butter when cold and cream it with the sugar when the butter is at room temp (you might need to soften it slightly in the microwave if you live in a cold place like New Zealand). Sift in the flour and the salt and mix well while rubbing the mixture through your fingers. You'll notice the mixture starts to look and feel like very light crumbs, then add the two eggs and vanilla essence, mix together well and knead slightly. Roll your Pastry into a ball and cover with clingfilm. Rest in the fridge for 30min. to an hour.

Filling

700g Peeled and Cored Apple Chunks
3/4 Cup Brown Sugar
1 Cup Water
1 1/2 Tsp. Ground Cinnamon
1 Tbsp.Lemon Juice
1 Tsp.Vanilla Essence(or seeds from 1 Vanilla Pod)
3 Tbsp Cornflour

Place all the ingredients excepting  the cornflour into a large saucepan with a lid, and bring to a slow simmer, stirring to ensure the sugar gets dissolved, cook for 3-4min. till apples start becoming tender. Mix the cornflour with a little water and stir through the apple mix and cook this further for 1min. Let the mix cool.

Assembly

Preheat your oven to 150 deg. Celsius. Grease and flour a 24cm pie dish/tin. On a floured surface roll out 3/4 of the pastry. Reserve the remaining 1/4 to roll out and cut into strips for the lattice to go on top of your pie.

I use a large piece of baking paper that I place over the pastry while using a rolling pin, this somehow keeps the pastry together without it cracking too much.

Line the dish with the rolled out pastry and blind bake for 15-20 min. Remove from oven and let the shell cool.

Fill the shell with the apple mix and assemble the lattice straight onto the pie, neatly trim the edges and brush with milk. Bake @ 170 deg. for another 20-25min.

Now you should have a mighty fine apple pie to enjoy with some friends.

Happy Cooking

Pappa's Sauce

I come from a very colourful family.

Let me put it this way, my mother's maiden name is "Uys", rooted in some very deep South African Anglo Boer War History (A tale for a rainy day).

My father's surname is "Lenferna De la Motte". His family came to South Africa in the 1950s, from a little island nation somewhere in the warm Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa, called Mauritius. My grandfather settled in the Natal Province (now known as kwaZulu Natal) and started work as a laboratory assistant for the Hulett's Sugar Company (still today South Africa's biggest sugar producers). He worked for this company for 45 years and retired from his position as the sugarmill's safety executive officer.

My grandfather was affectionately called "Pappa"by all of his 8 children (I'm not sure if kwaZulu Natal had television broadcasting back then) and was an infamously good cook.

"Pappa" would be known to get up early on a Saturday morning and head off to the nearest rocky beach. He would return hours later, laden with fresh fish, oysters and sometimes even crayfish and no doubt, would have an absolute feast laid out by dinner time. Much to the relief of my (by this stage of the week) overworked grandmother. 

One of his specialties, which I clearly remember him cooking on a visit as a child, was a seafood chow mien. It was lovingly prepared with real Chinese egg noodles, shelled prawns, fresh line fish and bits of succulent crayfish tail. I also need to mention, that only the freshest selection of veggies from his vegetable patch, were used in his chow mien, Capiesh!!! But the most memorable part of this dish was his sauce, "Pappa's Sauce". An intoxicatingly moorish blend of light soy sauce, chicken stock, lemon juice, freshly chopped coriander leaves with garlic, ginger and chilli, crushed in a mortar and pestle, a teaspoon of brown sugar and a generous amount of chopped spring onions. 

This sauce was prepared and served in a large sauce-boat that would be eagerly passed around the large outdoor garden table and then hogged, by every member of the family. When it got to your turn, you would take the spoon it would be served with and ladle out some of the crunchy spring onions and then slowly tip out some of the dark, zingy goodness over your fragrant, steaming pile of "Chow Mien Au fruits De Mere." 

BON APPETITE!!!

Lamb Shanks Slowly

We had some family over a few nights ago for dinner and as fate had it, I was cooking. It was a combined effort by myself and my young, beautiful, attractive wife/assistant :) in the dessert department. 

The menu was: Slow Braised New Zealand Lamb Shanks, with Oyster Mushroom Risotto and Caramelized Parsnip. The dessert was an incredible Lemon and Lime Tart Recipe pillaged from one of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks served with White Chocolate and Berry Ice-Cream. 

This was all enjoyed with a rather good bottle of inexpensive cabernet/merlot blend. The whole meal was truly a great one, not only because of the grand menu, but because the night was made even more special, by sharing it with equally as grand people. As we had not seen them for quite some time, there was no better way to do a bit of catching up. 

So my truly wonderful and easy Lamb Shank recipe follows:

7 Medium sized shanks, were braised in a slow cooker after sealing them in a hot skillet that morning and adding 2 tins of Whole-peeled/Chopped tomatoes, 1 Glass Red Wine, 3 Bay Leaves, 2 Cups Diced and Combined Carrot, Celery and Onion, 4 Cups Vegetable Stock and a generous seasoning of Course Sea Salt and Ground Black Pepper. This cooked on a high setting for 6 hours( Note: if you are using larger shanks add on 1-2 hours cooking time)

My risotto was made using dried Oyster Mushrooms that I had cultivated in a warm dark and dangerous corner of my shed, and air dried on my kitchen window sill in warmer weather.

I like to use dried mushrooms in a risotto as you would rehydrate them by pouring hot water over them, and at the same time producing a pungent and flavorful mushroom stock to add to the risotto during the cooking process. (1/2 Cup Roughly Chopped Mushrooms + 3 Cups Boiling Water. Do this first before you start your risotto, so that your mushrooms steep, and the stock flavour develops)

My risotto recipe goes a little something like this:

In a medium sized heavy based pot, add 3 Tbsp. Butter, 1 Medium Sized Onion, finely chopped. Sauté on a hot/ but not full heat, until the onions have started to go translucent(see through) for roughly 1 min. Then add the Arborio Rice and stir around for 20-30 sec, don't let the rice catch on the bottom of the pot. If the rice does catch, turn the heat down slightly. 

Add the stock and the Mushrooms. Do this in stages by adding only a third of the mushrooms and stock at a time, stirring the bottom of the pot. This gives the rice time to soak up the stock evenly and produces a silky smooth, al dente risotto. To finish, add 200ml Cream while still stirring the risotto slowly to a moist, slightly thick consistency. Season with salt and pepper. 

Test your risotto by fishing out a single grain and biting on it, it should be firm but not chewy. A 1/2 handful of grated Parmesan cheese is optional at this point.

The Caramelized Parsnips where peeled and cut into crudité sized sticks(+/- 1cm thick) and sautéed with butter on a low to medium heat giving the parsnips time to cook and brown slowly without coloring too quickly(+/- 3-4min.) I then turned up the heat, and added a teaspoon of brown sugar and a pinch of salt and sautéed vigorously, till the sugar had helped caramelize and even out the colour.(1min.)

All the flavors of the ingredients in my recipes above, fused and complemented each other so well. It was truly a plate that I was proud of sharing with others and thought I might share it with you also.

Have fun cooking from your soul...

 

Crazy About Soulfood!!!

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to my brand spanking new blog. Never done this before, but thought that it's about time I started sharing my passion for my favourite meals, recipes, cutural food experiences, inspirational cooks and totally wierd and exotic ingredients that I happen to, or have happened to stumble across/into.

My name is Jean-Pierre Lenferna De la Motte(totally flashy and extremely wealthy sounding hey! Don't be fooled:)

I am a qualified chef that started my career out all bright eyed and bushytailed in the dazzling lights of Cape Town City, South Africa. I woke up one exhausted/overworked/overpartied hung over morning, thinking to myself "OH S*%T I've made the biggest mistake of my life, I'm using my passion of cooking as a tool for making money!!!!" I know some of you are thinking "what's he on about, I'd love to use my passion to be able to make a living!" 

But the simple truth is using your passion to recreate other's ideas of incredible food, and trying to please an extremely overdiscerning palate,( the latter can just be described as a miserable complaining hillbilly goat!) WEARS YOU OUT!!! 

Don't get me wrong, over the years on my cooking journey I have experienced some really good times and worked with some truly good and real people, on this journey I have begun to "find myself", or shall I say my "inner chef", and picked up and developed some truly great dishes and recipes, some that have never even been written down, but are as natural to me as breathing. 

I have decided to describe this as my "Soulfood Recipes", dishes that are created and sometimes recreated while cooking for close friends and family, in my/friends/families home kitchens, backyard barbeques, or sometimes even on an adventure somewhere eg. Once on a trip overseas in Venice, Italy, with my wife's darling family, we got tired of getting ripped off by totally unitalian immigrants trying to flog off their "Italian Cuisine"( at an astronomical price! I'd like to add), to us totally naive tourists(along with about 15million others) So with little coaxing I got the family to agree that I should make us dinner one night, and set off to one of the hard to find supermarkets on the impossible mazelike streets of Venice, with a modest backpackers budget.

That night after assembling what I would describe as an absolutely "Georgeous Symphony of Classic Italian Flavours", on the antique venitian dresser of our hotel room, we all sat around, each with a bowl of fresh crisp mesclun lettuce, real bocconcini, crushed plum tomatoes, salty olives and fragrant genoese basil pesto. We all enjoyed the best meal we had in Venice! 

Oh yes, then we watched to my dismay as Italy beat France in the Fifa World Cup, on our boxlike hotel t.v. The streets went absolutely wild, some crazy italians even jumped into the canals for a victory swim. The elation might not have lasted long for them, as I think they probably would've contracted some seriously nasty waterborne virus in the days that followed.

What an incredible experience, that was a memorable night made even more so, by a bowl of "Soulfood".