Q: My son had a blue cheese sauce on his steak at a restaurant.  He wants me to find a recipe for this as he would like me to make it for him.  Can you help please?

A: Blue cheese sauce is not only very easy to make, it is also extremely versatile.  We make a version of it in our Pasta cooking class at Wickedfood Cooking School. Apart  from serving on steak, it is also delicious with pork chops, over baked potato, as a filling for crepes, or a classic gnocchi sauce.  Toss it with some quick fried chicken fillets strips as a sauce for pasta.

1/4 cup butter
6 spring onions, finely chopped
1T sweet sherry or port
1t Worcestershire sauce
150g blue cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup double cream
Pepper to taste

Q: I would appreciate advice on how to prepare a whole fish in the oven

A: One of the best ways to cook a whole fish cooked on the bone along with hearty accompaniments. This recipe, inspired from Saveur, is a Portuguese-style preparation where the fish is stuffed with herbs and cooked in foil with sausage, potatoes, clams, olives, and fennel. Take the fish to the table still enclosed in its shiny wrapper, then slash it open to serve. Any white fleshed fish will work for this dish including hake, cob, cape salmon and reds. For more on cooking whole fish, join the Wickedfood Cooking School seafood cooking class, where you will learn the secrets of cooking seafood with confidence on kettlebraais and gas barbecues.

1 large bulb fennel
Salt, to taste
500g baby potatoes, halved lengthwise
4T extra-virgin olive oil
±300g chorizo , cut into 1cm-thick slices
±1,5kg whole cleaned fish
1 lemon, sliced into 1cm-thick half moons
Ground black pepper, to taste
10 sprigs thyme
10 sprigs parsley
±250g mixed olives, pitted
±12 small clams
1⁄2 cup white wine
Zest of 1 orange

1. Trim and discard stalks from fennel; reserve 10 wispy fronds. Halve fennel bulb lengthwise; slice into 1cm-thick wedges.
2. Bring 2L salted water to a boil in a large pot. Blanch fennel for 4 minutes; drain and set aside.
3. Add potatoes to boiling water; reduce heat to medium; simmer until tender, ±15 minutes. Drain potatoes; set aside.
4. Heat 2T oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add sausage; cook until browned, ±5 minutes. Set aside.
5. Heat oven to 220˚C.
6. Cut 4 angled slits on each side of fish, to the bone. Put a lemon slice into each slit. Line a baking sheet with a sheet of heavy-duty foil. Transfer fish to foil. Rub with oil; season with salt and pepper. Stuff the cavity with remaining lemon, thyme sprigs, and parsley. Arrange fennel, potatoes, sausages, olives, and clams around fish; sprinkle with remaining thyme. Drizzle with wine. Put another piece of foil over the top. Crimp edges together to form a packet.
7. Roast for 35–40 minutes. Cut into foil; carefully pull back edges. Sprinkle with zest, remaining oil, and fennel fronds.

SERVES 6

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.

Pumpkins take centre stage in October, lighting up driveways and leering at us through windows in the run up to Halloween in the Northern Hemisphere. But they’re not just pretty faces, they are a great autumn vegetable with a good shelf life.

Blend the flesh into smooth, thick pumpkin soups, finished with a swirl of cream – a small pumpkin can provide a satisfying meal for one. For a pot-luck broth that hits the spot, roughly chop and boil equal quantities of pumpkin, potatoes and sweet potatoes in stock, along with one onion, a tomato, an ear of sweetcorn and a bunch of fresh coriander. When the vegetables are tender, chop them more finely to create a delicious, chunky pumpkin soup.

Pumpkin creme brulee

Stir meltingly sweet cubes of fried pumpkin into risottos or curries, offsetting the flavours with fragrant herbs such as sage or thyme, or warming spices such as ginger. Alternatively, serve pumpkin stuffed into pasta, pasties or gnocchi, or use it to beef up warm salads.

Sweet dishes need not be limited to pumpkin pie. Stir puréed pumpkin into a cheesecake filling for a less sickly take on this decadent dessert. Or try making pumpkin halva – the nutty flavour of the pumpkin flesh blends well with the other nuts and seeds. Roasted pumpkin seeds are great on their own as snacks and can be incorporated into flapjacks and biscuits, or used to garnish tarts and cakes.

Click here for some delicious pumpkin recipes.

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.

Q: I would just like to know which is the healthiest oil to use to  cook with.  What  is the best oil to cook with, that does not taste bad?

A: Canola oil (or rapeseed oil) contains both omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Canola oil’s proponents claim that it is one of the most heart-healthy oils and has been reported to reduce cholesterol levels, lower serum tryglyceride levels, and keep platelets from sticking together. However, only very long chain omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to improve cholesterol levels, and these are absent from rapeseed oil, so these claims should be viewed with suspicion unless or until further evidence of their activity becomes apparent.

Cold-pressed rapeseed oil contains about 95 % of unsaturated fatty acids of which about 30 % are essential fatty acids, linoleic and alfa-linolenic acid. Cold-pressed rapeseed oil contains about 60 % monounsaturated fatty acids which were shown to decrease the risk of breast cancer by 45 % in a Swedish research. This study was made in the Karolinska Institute and over 60 000 women participated. Cold-pressed rapeseed oil also contains plenty of vitamin E (30 mg/ 100g). A table spoon of rapeseed oil will give you about half of the recommended daily intake of vitamin E.

Rapeseed oil is a good choice for cooking with as it does not degrade when heated to high temperatures.

Grape seed oil is a vegetable oil pressed from the seeds of various varieties of  grapes, an abundant by-product of winemaking. Grape seed oil is used for salad dressings, marinades, deep frying, flavored oils, baking, massage oil, sunburn repair lotion, hair products, body hygiene creams, lip balm and hand creams. Most grape seed oil is produced in Italy,

Grape seed oil has a relatively high smoke point, approximately 216 °C, so it can be safely used to cook at high temperature. In addition to its high smoking point, grape seed oil has other positive attributes in relation to cooking. It has a clean, light taste that has been described as ‘nutty’.

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.