Category: Food

These are fresh dates, a first for me, since I have only eaten dried ones all my life.  A coworker brought them from Beijing.   We sometimes say in Afrikaans ‘daar sal dadels van kom‘ ( ‘dates will come of it’), meaning nothing will come of it.   One theory has it that dadels actually refers to a good-for-nothing Dutch governor-general from Batavia in the East named Daedels.  

Yes, yes, if you are American you know exactly what this is!   Around since 1930, and named after a horse by the Mars family.   In South Africa I grew up with Nestlé’s similar offering, called a Bar One.

We’re going to a different cafeteria for lunch here at work.  A welcome break it is, from sitting in meetings or staring at an SAP screen.     So you get your tray and run a series of counters with oh, 20 some items, served up in little bowls, and make your selections.   My choices for the day, clockwise : herbal tea, chicken nuggets, tofu with garlic and green peppers*, shredded potato and red pepper, green beans and pork.    Very nice!  *the tofu was great, but the green peppers were just too hot for me.

I spotted this South African wine at the bar in the hotel where we had a beer Thu night.  The Two Oceans are the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean and that’s the Cape Point peninsula on the label.    It’s definitely not a top-rated wine (it has a screw top), but as someone said ‘ a good value makes a wine taste better’.  Or do expensive wines taste better -because they ‘have’ to?

I am finally putting two ‘acquisitions’ from my stop in Frankfurt in place in the kitchen : a Thomas Rosenthal mug, and flatware from Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF).   The WMF company has been around since 1853, and this particular set is a classic.  The no-nonsense, clean design in 18/10 stainless steel is called Stockholm, and has been made for 50 years.  I actually had a set already, but when the salesperson said WMF is stopping manufacturing this design and it is therefore on sale, I jumped at it and got one more set.

I took Marlien to Cape Town International airport, and had to pack up as well : Monday it is my turn to start my journey back to Seattle.   The picture is the view from a little connector road on the way back.    Even though it is winter, there is still plenty of greenery around.   It really is like driving around in a postcard.     And yes, that’s tiramisu – from Saturday night’s dinner out at a restaurant called Decameron in Stellenbosch.  

My mom and dad and I went to the Tokara wine estate outside Stellenbosch today for lunch.    The stainless steel tree artwork at the main entrance was interesting.    I had grilled cob and the estate’s Chardonnay (very fruity and on the sweet side; I liked it a lot).    And the pastel on paper art is called ‘Fynbos bush’ (the indigenous forest in the Cape and also on Table Mountain), and is by Nicole Leigh (2007).

So now that I’m here in South Africa, I can look for the real boerewors  (farmer’s sausage) I mentioned in my 4th of July post, and here it is.   This one says 100% meat, spices, grape vinegar – and nothing else!    The text at the bottom of the label says ‘VIR NOG WORS SKAKEL 080-NOG WORS  (For more sausage call 080-‘MORE SAUSAGE’).  : )    The wors comes from tiny Prince Alfred Hamlet (A on the map).  Google Maps has one 360º picture of the place.   No windmill in the picture, but the blue gum trees and high Cirrus clouds are classic elements of a South African farm.

The pictures are from late Saturday afternoon, actually.  My mom and dad and I drove out to the Hillcrest berry farm – 5 miles or so outside of Stellenbosch (marked A on the Google map).   When ordering scones with jam and cream, one gets to select two jams out of a dozen or so.  My selections were Cape gooseberry jam and blackberry jam.  It is as delicious as it looks !  Yum!

This picture appeared on the front page of the advance edition of the Sunday Seattle Times.  ‘Grillin’ and chillin’, said the headline, offering several tips for a perfect barbecue.   A sample : use tongs and not a fork to turn those brats (bratwursts);   go easy on the seasoning : more is not necessarily better;  leave some room on the grill to manoeuvre when flare-ups happen.   I read it  with interest since I was always the designated barbecuer among the four boys for our family in South Africa.     There we call grilled meat braaivleis, and the sausage is boerewors (‘farmers’ sausage’, coarse-ground beef that could also have pork or mutton, with pepper and spices such as nutmeg and coriander).   It typically comes in a big spiral (picture).    A very popular side dish for boerewors is pap (a dry porridge made from coarse maize flour), served with a tomato-based relish.    So while the Brits have their bangers and mash, South Africa has wors en pap.

I’ve run out of my made-in-South-Africa cereal ProNutro’.   So this Marks & Spencer cup with just-add-water oatmeal porridge* from Hong Kong will have to do in the meantime for a hotel room breakfast.   (Sultana is a raisin made from sultana grapes).     *I think the reason the word ‘porridge’ is not widely used in the USA, is because there all the porridges there are made of oatmeal !    In Asia, porridges are made of rice and are called congees. 

There is no Memorial Day in China.    (I borrowed the flag and yellow ribbon from Google’s home page).     So we’re at work and the tea I drink these days is black tea from Marks & Spencer in Hong Kong.    I like it – but to get the ‘pale bright color’ touted on the packaging, one has to yank the bag out of the cup after barely a minute or two of steeping.     And I am no tea expert so I had to look up Dimbula tea (one of the original areas where tea was planted, and probably the most famous Ceylon tea) and ‘medium-grown’ (refers to the elevation of where the tea is grown, not the height of the tea plant !).     

These chopsticks are from the Dynasty restaurant in the Sheraton Dameisha Hotel where we had dinner Thursday night : lacquered with metal ends.   (See the dragon in the picture?).    I have seen really expensive sticks carved from jade.      But it turns out for me that the lowly bamboo ones we use at lunch in the cafeteria every day are the very best :  light and with tips that can hold on the morsel of food that is picked up from the plate or the bowl.

Monday’s mission was to find some doughnuts and bagels in Hong Kong for the SAP go-live here in Daya Bay.    So here are the highlights of the events that led to the delightful sight of pink-sprinkly and chocolate-with-nuts frosted doughnuts.     The doughnut shop in Lan Kwai Fong we found on the internet went out of business some time ago.    So, off to the nearest Starbucks.   It had all of 8 doughnuts (we needed forty-8!).   Well – we’ll take all 8, we said.   Something is better than nothing.    And would they know where to get more?  Or when is the next delivery?  There is a factory in the city but they only deliver again at 3 pm.   It would have been best to order one day ahead.   But the barista was very helpful, offering to call other Starbuckses and tracking down more for us.   Well – we didn’t have time to go to 6 other Starbuckses in the city!   So we remembered a Marks & Spencer store down on Queens Rd., and off we went.   The store’s food dept was in the basement.   As we made our way through the underwear department which was also down there, we went .. hmm, what are the chances of any doughnuts down here?   But sure enough, they had a bakery and there they were,  in the display case (pictures).    And they had plenty more in the deep freezer.   Turns out they keep them there and defrost them a dozen at a time – otherwise the frosting goes gooey in the humid Hong Kong atmosphere.    Alright! we said.  4 dozen frozen ones, please !   Mission accomplished.    (Soon after that we learned of the news of the big mission from the US Marines that had been accomplished as well).

What’s for dinner in the hotel room if one is too tired to go out?   Why – instant noodles, of course!     Add boiling water, let it steep for 3 minutes and it’s ready!   Tonkotsu flavor is pork bone broth flavor (or an imitation of that? doesn’t matter, it’s tasty and good).   My research shows that instant noodles were invented in 1958 by Momofuku Ando, the Taiwanese-Japanese founder and chairman of Nissin Foods (same as my noodle  cup’s brand), now run by his son Koki Ando.   

A final note :  instant noodles was named the greatest Japanese invention of the 20th century in a Japanese poll.    (Source : Wikipedia.   It did not say which other inventions the instant noodle competed with).

A colleague of mine working here on the project brought out some biltong from South Africa.   Biltong is South African ‘beef jerky’ but comes in many many more incarnations than just beef.    So in South Africa one would find bilong made from beef, kudu, eland, wildebeest, even ostrich.      Blue wildebeest is a very common antelope found in Africa and has a ‘least concerned’ status on the endangered species list (see panel from Wikipedia), which made me feel better – it being Earth Day and all on Friday  !    There are about 1 million of the ‘beasts’ roaming the plains of the Serengeti.

I bought the ‘bee-hive’ honey bottle in a fancy grocery store in Hong Kong some time ago.   Check out the French-engineered ‘valve’  on the bottom that allows honey to be squeezed through with no dripping.   Quite a feat, huh?     My cereal bowl* for use in the hotel room is melamine and from the local grocery store.   It is the perfect shape for me to mix my sloppy Pronutro cereal in.  (It’s like instant oatmeal).    If the bowl is too shallow, the milk and stuff sloshes out to easily – very annoying !

*go ahead and ignore the little pooh-bear, I didn’t buy the bowl for that : )

We went out to dinner in Shenzhen last night, not too far north of where I stayed this weekend.   The area had plenty of restaurants, many decorated with festive red lanterns.   The first picture is of a traffic jam made by an inept driver maneuvering in the middle of the street OR trying to park right there on the corner!   We were at the Victory Restaurant (the sign is from the restaurant right next to it).    Their signature dish is “The General Crosses the Bridge’ : a whole pork rib served upside down to look like a bridge.   We each had a little piece and it was delicious.    The horse is from the restaurant lobby.

‘An Erdinger beer, please’ is what I said tonight in the Dameisha Sheraton hotel.   Three of us had a beer and dinner there.   Below is what landed on the table in front of me.    The server painstakingly poured the beer into a glass and it formed a thick white foamy head.    The beer is a golden cloudy color (the fine unfermented yeast one finds in heffeweizens) and has citrus-sy notes in the taste.   I liked it.    Cheers !

No, it’s not a recipe, it’s the name of a restaurant in the Queen Anne neighborhood that 5 of us went to last night.  The outside is very low-key, as is the inside : it looks like a wood-slatted den.   The dishes on the menu are all served family-style with small plates for everyone.  It could be cold starters, pastas or meats or fish.    We had roasted beets(*), sea bass(*), sturgeon, potato gnocchi (*), speck (thin-sliced cured ham, really a prosciutto I thought) and a pasta with a spicy meat sauce.   The food was delicious, but with 5 people sharing one plate we had to share carefully to make sure everyone got a bite!     (*)  I liked these best

I stopped on the way back to snap the Space Needle from Denny Way (it’s nice to be a tourist in one’s home city), and the Starbucks pictures are from earlier in the day.  That’s a brand new logo on the cup (supposedly making the coffee goddess more accessible overseas without the Starbucks text around her, and implying like Nike’s swoosh that the brand is so recognizable that it does not need text).   I also stocked up on my favorite instant coffee (Columbia Medium Roast), which also has new packaging.