The Corkless Mind

Tag: Love Cape Town

  • Festive fare.

    Festive fare.

    Welcome to December! How quick did this year go by!? Every week to celebrate the festive season and to of course give you ideas for your next dinner party, I will be doing at least one festive themed recipe per week. This week I wanted to create a light snack for summer, something for anyone and everyone to enjoy and a refreshing drink that all can enjoy too. 

    I found a recipe from the renowned Chef Liam Tomlin from the revered Chefs Warehouse in Cape Town that he recreated for Woolworths Taste Magazine. The recipe is incredibly simple to recreate at home with very little effort involved, doesn’t that sound good? And of course I added a little(a lot) of sparkle because tis’ the season! 

    I’ve been a weekly regular at a certain awesome bacon themed restaurant in my area, and they serve the most delicious, refreshing locally made artisanal iced tea. Mesmerized by its unique flavour and texture, I have been racking my brain to recreate it at home. This is a recipe that I have developed.

    Ingredients: 

    4x Rooibos tea bags

    500ml boiling water 

    200g strawberries 

    100g blackberries/any other berry of your choice

    A drop or two of rose water

    250g castor sugar 

    Juice of one lemon
    Method: 

    Over a medium to low heat, bring the berries, sugar, lemon juice and rose water to a simmer until the berries are macerated and the juices of the berries have covered the berries and sugar dissolved, take off the heat and leave to cool. 
    Brew the rooibos tea in the boiling water and let the tea draw for 10 minutes, leave to cool and place in the fridge. Once both the tea and the berries have been cooled, pour the compote mixture into a tea pot or carafe with the rooibos tea, serve with a slice of lemon and a few sprigs of mint. 
    This is the ideal drink for long scorching summer days or switch it up and add alcohol to make a crisp cooler. 
    Happy festive season! 

    Dominique x

  • Roasted red grape and rosemary focaccia. 

    Roasted red grape and rosemary focaccia. 

    I’ve been struggling to come up with blog posts lately, mainly suffering from ‘writers block’, which to me is weird as I am immensely passionate about fare and find I can talk about food for hours on end if you pick my brain I will happily engage in conversation about my basic knowledge of food. However there’s just one little problem, you see I’m an introvert, and a rather shy one. But like an onion I have so many layers, if you peel me back… 

    I tend to compose posts and recreate recipes only when inspiration has struck. My kind of Inspiration, could be that instantaneous revelation of how ‘ugly’ distorted veg is hardly ever used these days, or asking myself questions, like “why can’t candy floss be savoury?” Yes, these are indeed the strange yet wondrous questions I ask myself. 

    (Cue the Oprah voice) I Love Bread! and thank god I am not gluten intolerant. I cannot imagine my life, I cannot imagine life in general without the sustenance which is bread. So as an ode to my great love of bread, I recreated a recipe adapted from BBC GoodFood , a no knead focaccia with an interesting twist. 

    The photos were taken yesterday early noon as soon as the bread came out of the oven. I started making the dough Monday evening already to ensure successful proving. The red grapes were really sweet, strangely enough not only did they look like cherries but they had the same sort of sweet taste too. These grapes are great for snacking without all the guilt of crisps or sweets. I’m a notorious snacker and I’m trying to make a real effort to snack healthier these days, more for health reasons than anything else. 
    A tad off topic, this time of year Cape Town gets very busy, the craziness lasts till mid-end of January, I do love that fact that people continue to visit our unique country and city. There are many times I feel incredibly privileged to live around such beauty and authenticity. The crazy traffic on the roads and in the shopping centres is something you learn to tolerate and avoid if you’re lucky, but there’s no place I’d rather be this time of year, than right here in my home city. 
    Dominique x