A soufflé can be a fairly tricky dish to master. At Wickedfood cooking school, we make a delicious one in a French cooking class. The one below is also relatively easy to make, and comes from our cookbook of the week - Cook and Enjoy. Once you have mastered this one, try some of the variations below.

¼t pepper

1½ cups hot milk

1 – 1½ cups mature cheese, grated

3 or 4 extra-large eggs, separated

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C .
2. Slowly melt the butter or margarine in a saucepan.
3. Gradually add the cake flour, salt and pepper and stir until smooth.
4. Slowly add the hot milk, stirring continuously until the mixture thickens.
5. Add the cheese.
6. Remove from the heat and gradually add the beaten egg yolks.
7. Whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry: when the beater is lifted the peaks must  still fold back.
8. Carefully fold in a third of the egg whites into the mixture. Fold in the remaining egg whites.
9. Grease only the bottom (not the sides) of an ovenproof soufflé dish or several small, individual dishes. Pour the mixture into the dish or dishes to the rim. Place in a pan with hot water and bake for 30 – 45 minutes. If not using a pan filled with water, reduce the oven temperature to 160 °C; the baking time remains the same. Serve the soufflé immediately.

TIP
For variation use cheese such as mature Cheddar, Camembert, Parmesan, Gruyère, soft goat’s or blue cheese. You can also use chopped herbs of your choice or prepared mustard to taste. Chopped fried bacon, cooked ham or any other kind of cold meat can be added to the soufflé.

VARIATIONS
Sweet corn and cheese soufflé
1. Follow the recipe for Cheese soufflé, adding 250 ml (1 c) freshly cooked, tinned or frozen sweet corn kernels before folding in the whisked egg whites.
2. Use 1 cup grated cheese instead of 1½ c and 1 t salt instead of ½ t.

Cheese and pea soufflé
1. Substitute cooked or frozen peas for the sweet corn kernels.

Click on one of the links below for other recipes from Cook and Enjoy.

Salmon mould

Curried fish (Pickled fish)

Wickedfood Cooking School

Sunninghill – (011) 234-3252 sunninghill@wickedfood.co.za

Runs cooking classes throughout the year at its purpose-built cooking studios. Classes are run in the mornings and evenings 7 days a week (subject to a minimum of 12 people). The venue is also popular for corporate events and private functions – team building cooking classes, birthdays, kitchen teas, and dinner parties with a difference.

Our classes are hands-on, where every person gets to participate in the preparation of the dishes. They are also a lot of fun where you not only learn new skills, but get to meet people with similar interests. For corporate groups and teambuilding cooking classes these events are a novel way of creating staff interaction or entertaining clients.

The UK may have their Mrs Beeton, and the USA Julia Child, but we have Mrs SJA De Villiers, author of Cook and Enjoy. This enlightening cookbook,  first published in Afrikaans in 1951, is still the bible to most South African cooks, both English and Afrikaans. It has sold over one million copies and gone through numerous updates. The latest edition of Cook & Enjoy , in English as well as one in Afrikaans (Kook & Geniet), has been completely revised by the original author’s  daughter. The new edition, published in 2009, combines a readable, modern feel with the classic look of the original.

It contains everything you need to know about cooking – from measuring ingredients and operating ovens to the preparation of vegetables and meat, and how to freeze foods, along with more than 700 recipes, specially tested – from breakfasts to mixed drinks, and recipes for large function catering. A large number of the dishes are beloved South African favourites. There’s also a great section about preserving foods.

The one cookery title that no South African home can do without. At Wickedfood Cooking School we use this book as a consent sauce of reference, especially for our South African cooking classes, as well as at Wickedfood Earth for ideas on preserving the bounty of fresh fruit and vegetables.

See our recipe of the week – Cheese soufflé, or click on one of the links below for a few recipes from the book.

Salmon mould

Curried fish (Pickled fish)

Wickedfood Cooking School

Sunninghill – (011) 234-3252 sunninghill@wickedfood.co.za

Runs cooking classes throughout the year at its purpose-built cooking studios. Classes are run in the mornings and evenings 7 days a week (subject to a minimum of 12 people). The venue is also popular for corporate events and private functions – team building cooking classes, birthdays, kitchen teas, and dinner parties with a difference.

Our classes are hands-on, where every person gets to participate in the preparation of the dishes. They are also a lot of fun where you not only learn new skills, but get to meet people with similar interests. For corporate groups and teambuilding cooking classes these events are a novel way of creating staff interaction or entertaining clients.

Wickedfood Cooking School, SUNNINGHILL

Information & bookings (011) 234-3252 sunninghill@wickedfood.co.za

Hi all,

We had a great response to our survey, thank you to all of you who filled it in, and congratulations to Hannelie Swanepoel who won the fantastic prize, a Cooking class for two for a Month. We have taken note of your comments and will be implementing many of your suggestions answer from next newsletter.  The most important one being that the majority of you wanted a newsletter every alternate week.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter – just search for Wickedfood and you will find us. We update the blog on a daily basis and publish it through Facebook and Twitter.

Wickedfood Cooking School news

Our March individual cooking class programmes are up on the internet – click the relevant month for the programme March and April.

Wickedfood Cooking School runs classes with a minimum of 8 participants and a maximum of 12 as this gives everyone hands-on experience  and keeps the class small enough for maximum learning.

• Sunday 14 March at 4pm – Easy to prepare Indian dishes (R350pp). An Indian cooking class, exploring authentic easy Indian dishes including potato patties; tandoori chicken; pumpkin cream curry; pulao and sago pudding.
• Monday 15 March at 6pm – Classic Italian dishes (R380pp). Italian cooking class, preparing 6 hearty dishes including chicken liver crostinis; zucchini frittata; pasta with a clam sauce; Osso Buca; polenta and pannacotta.
• Monday 22 March at 6pm – Thai master class (R350pp). In this Thai cooking class dishes include Fried springrolls, Chaing Mai noodle curry chicken, Green pawpaw salad, and Crispy red water chestnuts.
• Sunday 28 March at 4pm – Making flavoured pasta, shapes and sauces (R380pp). Adding flavour to pasta, dishes including pepper fettuccini with an Alfredo sauce, chilli tagliatelle with a seafood cream, beef filled spinach ravioli and fried sweet pasta with grappa.

Please contact the school should you wish to make a booking:

Looking for info on food?

If you have any  food-related question, or a dish that you just can’t get right or even a certain recipe that you are looking for, but just can’t seem to find, then contact us and we will do our best to answer it as soon as possible. Click Here for more information. Hope to hear from you soon.

Cookbook of the week

The UK may have their Mrs Beeton, and the USA Julia Child, but we have Mrs SJA De Villiers, author of Cook and Enjoy. This enlightening cookbook is the bible to many South African cooks. . … Click Here for more.

Click Here to see Wickedfood Cooking School’s top 10 food-related books for 2009.

Did you know:

In the Middle Ages, the word plum was used to describe dried fruits in general. For this reason, Christmas pudding is still also known as plum pudding. When Little Jack Horner pulled a plum from his mouth in the 16th century nursery rhyme, he probably pulled out a raisin, according to Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food.

Food quote of the week:

“Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.” – Orson Scott Card, American author

Recipe of the week:

Cheese soufflé

A soufflé can be a fairly tricky dish to master. At Wickedfood cooking school, we make a delicious one in our French cooking class. Our recipe of the week is also relatively easy to make, and comes from our cookbook of the week - Cook and Enjoy. … Click Here for the recipe

The Wickedfood Team

Wickedfood Cooking School runs cooking classes throughout the year at its purpose-built cooking studio. Classes are run in the mornings and evenings 7 days a week (subject to a minimum of 12 people). The venue is also popular for corporate events and private functions – team building cooking classes, birthdays, kitchen teas, and dinner parties with a difference.

Our classes are hands-on, where every person gets to participate in the preparation of the dishes. They are also a lot of fun where you not only learn new skills, but get to meet people with similar interests. For corporate groups and team building cooking classes these events are a novel way of creating staff interaction or entertaining clients.

High on the hog, meaning – “Affluent and luxurious.”

Origin

The source of this phrase is often said to be the fact that the best cuts of meat on a pig come from the back and upper leg and that the wealthy ate cuts from ‘high on the hog’, while the paupers ate belly pork and trotters. The imagery of lords and ladies feasting on fine meats, done to a turn, at Olde Englyshe banquets is easy to bring to mind and this seems to be the right context for the phrase to have been coined in. However, as far as the source of this expression goes, our imagination needs to leap forward a few centuries.
None of the variants of the phrase ‘living (or eating) high on (or off) the hog’ is to be found in any of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare or the like. In fact, they aren’t found in print in any form until the 20th century, and then in the USA rather than England.
‘High’ has been in used in the UK with the meaning ‘impressive; superlative; exalted’ since the 17th century and in the USA since the early 19th century. For example, this from Samuel Pepys Diary or, as he liked to call it, Samuel Pepys’ Memoirs – Comprising his Diary, in the entry for 29th July 1667:
“Where it seems people do drink high.”
The word alluded to people’s status and is the source of the terms ‘high-life’ (18th century), ‘high-table’ (15th century) and even ‘high-heaven’ (9th century).
The idea that ‘living high on the hog’ initially meant ‘living the high life’ and eating pork, rather than literally ‘eating meat from high on the pig’, seems plausible but is dealt a blow by the following citation. This is the earliest printed form of the phrase that I have come across – from the New York Times, March 1920:

Southern laborers who are “eating too high up on the hog” (pork chops and ham) and American housewives who “eat too far back on the beef” (porterhouse and round steak) are to blame for the continued high cost of living, the American Institute of Meat Packers announced today.

‘High off the hog’ has a similar pedigree, i.e. mid 20th century USA. For example, the San Francisco paper the Call-Bulletin, May 1946:

I have to do my shopping in the black market because we can’t eat as high off the hog as Roosevelt and Ickes and Joe Davis and all those millionaire friends of the common man.

Why, when people had eaten pork for millennia, did the phrase not originate before the 20th century, is a difficult question to answer. Nevertheless, ‘high on the hog’ appears to have been derived, in the USA, as a reference to the cuts of meat on pigs. The question of why the clunky idiom ‘eating too far back on the beef’ didn’t quite catch on with the public is a little easier to resolve.

Once in a while a recipe book comes along that is truly inspirational.  That can definitely be said about Nigel Slater’s  Tender: v. 1: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch. Many consider Nigel as one of the top cookbook writers in the world, and with good reason.

This book is once again a masterpiece. With over 400 recipe ideas and many wonderful stories from the cook’s garden, this book  is the definitive guide to cooking with vegetables. Each chapter looks at a different vegetable (29 vegetables in total), giving a background to the vegetable,  how to grow it, how to treat it in the kitchen, quick cooking tips, and then an assortment of mouthwatering recipes. If you are at all interested in food and growing it yourself, then this book is indispensable and should definitely be on your bookshelf.

Other books by Nigel Slater, reviewed on this blog site – Appetite

Wickedfood Cooking School

Sunninghill – (011) 234-3252 sunninghill@wickedfood.co.za

Runs cooking classes throughout the year at its purpose-built cooking studios. Classes are run in the mornings and evenings 7 days a week (subject to a minimum of 12 people). The venue is also popular for corporate events and private functions – team building cooking classes, birthdays, kitchen teas, and dinner parties with a difference.

Our classes are hands-on, where every person gets to participate in the preparation of the dishes. They are also a lot of fun where you not only learn new skills, but get to meet people with similar interests. For corporate groups and teambuilding cooking classes these events are a novel way of creating staff interaction or entertaining clients.