Kingklip with lemon butter sauce from South Africa

Kingklip is a very popular eating fish in South Africa.  It is a species of Cusk Eel and is known by different names around the world.  In Japan it's called Kingu and in New Zealand Ling.  In South America it is known as Congrio.  Kingklip aren't specifically caught, they are a product of by-fishing.  In other words you are trying to catch one kind of fish and accidentally catch a Kingklip when it appears in the trawl net with the more common Hake.  Therefore they are not the cheapest fish and not always available in fisheries.  Kingklip are low in fat and have a delicate flavour.  For this recipe if you can't get your hands on Kingklip you can use any other firm white flesh fish.  Like Hake, Cod or Monkfish for instance.

Kingklip or other white fish fillets
lemon pepper for sprinkling
1 teaspoon butter for each fillet
olive oil for sprinkling
Sauce
1/2 cup water/fish stock
1/2 cup sherry
1/2 cup cream
1 onion finely chopped
3 garlic cloves finely chopped
1 bayleaf
250g butter
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon lemon pepper
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Prepare a baking tray for your fish by lining it in tin foil.  Sprinkle the tin foil with olive oil and lay your fish fillets on the foil.  Sprinkle lemon pepper on the fish fillets and place the teaspoon of butter on top of the fillet.  Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes until it is just done and turns from translucent to opaque in the thicker parts.  Let it rest for a few minutes before serving.
While the fish is in the oven you can prepare the sauce.  Put the water, sherry, cream, onion, garlic and bay leaves in a pot and bring to the boil.  Let it boil while you make the next part of the sauce.  In another pot or pan, melt one tablespoon of the butter.  Add the flour and stir until it is incorporated with the butter.  Slowly add the contents of the other pot to your flour/butter mixture, stirring all the while.  Add in the rest of the butter a tablespoon at a time, never stopping the stirring.  Turn the heat down and let it simmer while you stir.  Stir in the salt, lemon pepper and lemon juice.  Take the sauce off the heat and add the chopped parsley just before you are ready to serve.  Spoon the sauce over the fish fillets and serve with steamed vegetables and rice or boiled potatoes.
Cindy Vine is a South African currently living and working in Kyiv in Ukraine. She is the author of Hush Baby, Defective, C U@ 8, Not Telling and The Case of Billy B. All her books are available on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. http://cindyvine.com

Smoked Snoek Tart from South Africa

Snoek is synonymous with Cape Town.  It is a silvery, oily game fish with sharp teeth and long needle-like bones.  A bonus is that it doesn't have to be scaled before cooking.  Snoek are caught in the waters around the Cape and traditionally smoked and sold at the side of the road.  Nowadays during snoek season you can buy smoked snoek in most supermarkets in Cape Town.  However, not everyone is lucky enough to be able to pop into a supermarket in Cape Town, so the snoek can be substituted with any other smoked fish.

1 packet frozen puff pastry
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup smoked snoek that has been deboned and flaked
1 small onion finely chopped
1 clove garlic finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
zest of a small lemon
3 eggs
1 cup cream
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Melt the butter in a frying pan and saute the onion and garlic until soft.  Add to the flaked smoked fish together with the pepper, zest, eggs, cream and cheddar cheese.  Mix well and check the seasoning adding in more pepper or salt if needed.  Cut out pastry circles and place them in a greased muffin pan.  Spoon your smoked fish and egg mixture onto the pastry cases.  Sprinkle the Parmesan on the top.  Pop them into the oven and bake for about 25 minutes until the tops of the tarts have browned and the filling has set.  Serve with a salad.
Cindy Vine is a South African currently living and working in Kyiv in Ukraine. She is the author of Hush Baby, Defective, C U@ 8, Not Telling and The Case of Billy B. All her books are available on Amazon in both print and Kindle format. http://cindyvine.com

Peri-peri Chicken Livers from South Africa

Peri-peri chicken livers is another South African classic.  It's on the menu at many restaurants as a starter and has just the right amount of sauce and spice.  Serve it with toast or Portuguese bread rolls.

1 cup chicken livers
1 onion finely chopped
4 cloves garlic finely chopped
1 can  peeled tomatoes
1 capsicum finely chopped
salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons paprika
2 teaspoons chili powder
1/2 cup sherry or brandy
2 tablespoons olive oil
Put the olive oil in a pan and cook the onion and garlic until the onion starts to get translucent.  Add in the chicken livers.  You can chop them up into bite-sized pieces.  Brown them and then add in the paprika, chili powder, salt and pepper.  Mix it all together then add in the can of peeled tomatoes, chopped capsicum and the sherry.  Let it all simmer for about 15 minutes.
Cindy Vine is a South African currently living and working in Kyiv Ukraine.  She is the author of The Colorful Art of Pain, Hush Baby and Defective.  All her books are available on Amazon in both print and Kindle format.  http://cindyvine.com

Boerewors Rolls from South Africa

If you live in South Africa you nip down to your local supermarket and buy a pack of boerewors and a packet of hot dog rolls and you are A for away.  However, if you live in a place far from South African influences, then you might have to make your own hot dog rolls and boerewors.  Boerewors loosely translated means farmers' sausage.  There are many varieties of boerwors, many closely-guarded secret recipes.  If you have a mincer attachment to your mixer, chances are you'll have the sausage-making attachments as well.  Electric mincer/ sausage-makers are reasonably cheap to buy, you can get them for under $30!  When you make your own sausages you know exactly what is going into it.  Some commercially produced sausages have very little meat in them.  The big thing you have to do is source hog casings.  This is not as difficult as it sounds.  Wherever sausage is made there are hog casings available for you to buy.

Hot Dog Rolls
1 cup milk
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup butter
4 1/2 cups flour
1 packet instant yeast
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
Warm the butter, milk and water.  Add it to the mixing bowl containing the flour, salt, sugar and yeast.  Mix, add the egg and knead it until the dough pulls together and becomes smooth and elastic.  Divide the dough into 12 pieces.  Shape them into long rectangles and leave them covered in a warm place and allow them to rise for about half an hour.  Bake in an oven pre-heated to 200 degrees Celsius for 10 to 12 minutes until golden brown.

Boerewors
3 kg meat cuts into chunks ready for mincing (Can be a mixture of beef, lamb and pork)
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
4 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons coarsely ground coriander seeds
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 cup vinegar
Hog casings
Mince the meat, mix together with all the ingredients and use the sausage-making attachment on your mincer to stuff the hog casings.  Traditionally boerewors is made as one long length.  While this is a basic boerewors recipe, you can experiment and add in some herbs, or even cut down some of the vinegar and add in red wine.

Assembling the boerewors rolls
Grill, BBQ or fry the boerewors.  Cut into piece after it has cooked, roughly the same length as your rolls.  Cut open a roll lengthwise and put in a piece of cooked boerewors.  Add in fried onions, mustard, tomato sauce, sweet chili sauce or chutney, whatever you wish as an extra condiment.
Cindy Vine is a South African currently working in Kyiv Ukraine.  She's the author of Hush Baby, Defective, Not Telling, C U @ 8 and The Case of Billy B.  All her books are available on Amazon in both print and Kindle format.  http://cindyvine.com

Samosa from South Africa

Most of you will look at this and think 'Samosa from South Africa?'  She has to be kidding.  Well I kid you not.  While samosas might have originated in India, other countries have taken the original recipe and adapted them to make it their own.  Samosas are very popular all over East Africa, for instance, and while more similar to the South African samosas than the Indian samosas, they lack that bite.  Samosas are a very popular South African snack and their taste does differ in the different provinces.  The ones in Kwazulu for example have a lot more chilies in them.  The ones I make are Cape Malay samosas from my home town of Cape Town.  Wherever I've lived in the world, I have always made my own samosas.  Especially when they are not readily available.  They have proved to be a popular bar snack at pub quizzes.  The only slightly challenging part of this recipe is the folding of the samosa skin or wrap, but once you do a couple you'll become a master.
The filling can be lamb, chicken, fish or beef mince if you want a meat one.  Potato and peas is the vegetarian variety.  For this recipe I used chicken mince.

Samosa filling

1kg chicken/beef/lamb mince

2 onions finely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

5 teaspoons curry powder

2 teaspoons chili powder

2 teaspoons turmeric

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger

1 garlic clove finely chopped

1 chili finely chopped

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh coriander leaves

Brown the onions, add in garlic, ginger and chili.  When soft add in the mince and stir to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of your pan.  Add in all the seasonings and let it simmer until cooked through.  You don't want it to be a wet mixture, rather err on the dry side.

Samosa wrap/pastry/paaper/skin

(Whatever you want to call it is okay.  We don't judge.)

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
cornflour for sprinkling
oil for schmeering 
1/4 cup of flour and water paste for glue

Put dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. (Not the cornflour.)  Make a well in the centre and add in the water a little at a time, kneading it together, until you have a soft dough that does not stick to your fingers.  Let the dough rest for about 15 minutes while you get the rolling area ready.  Divide the dough into 12 golf-ball sized pieces.  Set them aside and cover with a damp cloth so they don't dry out.  Then take them one at a time and roll it out into a disc the size of your hand.  Schmeer oil onto the top of the disc and sprinkle a little cornflour to prevent sticking.  Place the next disc on top.  Do this until you have a tower of six discs, all with oil schmeered on their top and a sprinkle of cornflour.  You do not need to schmeer oil or sprinkle cornflour on the top disc.  Now repeat and do the same to the remaining 6 balls so that you'll have two towers of 6 discs each.  The next step is to roll and flatten the tower so that it is about the size of a dinner plate.  Try and make it more like a rectangle.  You should now have two flat large rectangles.  Place your samosa skin rectangles on a greased baking sheet and pop it into the oven at about 120 degrees Celsius for 3 minutes.  Take it out of the oven and using a sharp knife, cut the rectangles into long strips about 6cm wide.  The strips should pull apart.  Fold each strip to make a pocket and put about 2 teaspoons of filling inside the pocket.  Close the pocket, sealing the filling inside, by folding the strip into a triangle.  Keep folding until you come to the end of the strip.  The last bit use your flour and water paste to glue the end bit down so it doesn't unravel when deep-frying.
Fry in hot oil or for the health-conscious, bake in an oven until the wrapping is crisp.

Cindy Vine is a South African currently living and working in Kyiv Ukraine.  She is the author of Hush Baby, Defective, Not Telling and C U @ 8.  All her books are available on Amazon in both Kindle and print format.

Bobotie from South Africa

This has always been one of my family's favourite South African meals.  Bobotie is Cape Malay cuisine which has its roots in Cape Town, and as Cape Town is my home...

Bobotie can probably be made with any kind of minced meat, although some prefer beef and others prefer mutton.  I once had the pleasure of eating ostrich bobotie and it was orgasmic.

The Recipe

All the ingredients listed below are easy to come by and found in most kitchens. The thing with bobotie, is that you can use the basic idea and add in some of your own curry and spice combinations to create your own unique flavour. The basic bobotie recipe is this:

2 onions, peeled and sliced

1kg good quality lean ground beef

1 thickish slice of white bread

1 cup milk

2 tablespoons curry powder the strength of which is too your taste, mild or hot, no worries

1/2 teaspoon chili powder for some zing

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons salt

freshly grated pepper (about a half teaspoon)

3/4 teaspoon turmeric

1 1/2 tablespoons vinegar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 cup seedless raisins

3 tablespoons strong chutney or apricot jam or a combination of both(fruit chutney is another famous Cape Malay thingie)

2 bay leaves (or fresh lemon leaves if available just for decoration to tart it up a bit)

2 medium eggs

Preheat oven to 350°F or 180C.

Chop up the onions and add to your ground beef/mince which should be in a mixing bowl.

Soak bread in half the milk and mash with a fork. Set the rest of the milk aside for later, and add mushy milk bread to the meat mixture.

Add curry powder, sugar, salt, pepper, turmeric, vinegar, raisins, chutney (apricot or peach jam) to the meat mixture. Spoon the mixture into a greased baking dish, and place bay leaves on top. (Tip: I usually add in some garlic and ginger as well but it is not necessary)

Bake for 25 - 30 minutes in preheated 350°F oven.

Beat egg with remaining milk and pour over your half-baked bobotie and bake for another 25-30 minutes

Serve with steamed yellow rice and extra chutney. To make the rice yellow, add a little turmeric when it is steaming. You can also add some raisins into the rice as well.  Wash down with copious amounts or South African red wine.
Cindy Vine is a South African author and teacher currently living in Ukraine.  She is the author of Hush Baby, The Colorful Art of Pain, Defective and The Case of Billy B.  All her books are available on Amazon in both kindle and print format.