Misadventures of a kitchen klutz on the road to culinary redemption

​​You’ve probably noticed some poor soul in a public toilet moving their hands up and down under the tap trying to activate the sensor and not succeeding. I am that poor soul, either invisible to, or ignored by that little electronic eye. I never seem to be able to get the right height or distance to make the bloody tap squirt the water it’s supposed to squirt. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that electronics are my enemy. Or I’m just a klutz.

In fact, I know I’m a klutz, at least in the kitchen. I’ve been known to add a splash of dishwashing liquid to my whiskey instead of a splash of filtered water from the water filter right next to the soap dispenser. To the merriment of my wife, son and Hugo the dog. Hey dad, your whiskey is foaming! Funny. Sometimes it seems that my sole purpose in life is to serve as a source of entertainment for my wife and kid. And dog. 

Mind you, come to think about it, in my defence I would say that perhaps I’m absentminded, rather than a klutz. I mean, I can slice an onion with the best of them. At least I think I can. Whereas my absentmindedness goes back many years. When I was in Grade 1, one morning the bell rang for first break, so I packed my bag and walked home at ten in the morning, totally oblivious to the fact that all the other kids were running around the playground screaming their heads off and I was the only one walking home. Ding dong. 

My mom, chatting to our neighbour over the fence, was startled to see me waltzing in the front gate at twenty past ten on a school morning, but she fortunately figured out what was going on, knowing me, and instead of driving me back she spared me the ridicule, called in and said I wasn’t feeling well. Not true. I was feeling great. 

So being absentminded means I’m not the greatest at all the essential steps of prepping before cooking. “Mise en Place”, as the French hotshot chef types call prepping, is not my strong point. I’m more like the “la de da” type who thinks oh sh*t I’m missing the most crucial ingredient as I go digging through my cupboards at the last moment. Shopping is the same. I arrive home after work loaded with supermarket bags announcing roast chicken for dinner, and my wife Jill says this is all very lovely, but where’s the chicken? Chicken? Yep, the one you were going to roast. Oops.

For some reason I have this reputation of being a good cook. Probably because in my early days here in America most people I knew didn’t cook on a regular basis, or at all, for that matter. So I would cook something edible and everybody would go wild and rave about it and ask for the recipe, and I would sit there looking like a startled deer in the headlights.  Recipe? What bloody recipe. And then Jill would perpetuate this good cook myth by saying that I, like all great chefs, never revealed all the ingredients. Yeah right. Fact is, I’d forgotten half of what I chucked in there. The important thing is, everybody loved it and they weren’t about to rush home and scribble down the secrets of my recipe anyway, what the hell. I basked in the glory. Take it when you can, is what I say. In the end, what really mattered was the wine and conversation. 

At this point you’re probably asking yourselves why I’m writing a food column and why you poor suckers are reading it. All I can say is take it up with my editor. But then again, maybe not. Food editors don’t have it easy, so don’t torment the poor guy. They have to put up with a lot of stuff that the likes of you and me don’t have to. 

Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago he was invited to a 6.15am fancy dinner. Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. A 6.15am dress-up fancy dinner. I was like, f**k it dude, you’ve got to be kidding me.

I like breakfast, don’t get me wrong. I’m a big breakfast kind of guy. But dress up funny and go to a fancy do at six in the morning? No way. It’s not that I’m not a morning person. I am. I’m up early; by the time the sun comes up I’m way beyond my second cup of coffee. On my own. By myself. Alone. Thing is, I can’t stand other people around me at that hour. It makes me grumpier than my usual grumpy self. By a lot. Surrounded by sleepy types masticating and trying hard to be cheerful at sunrise? Forget about it. 

Way back in the early Eighties I was invited to a really swanky breakfast do at this wine estate somewhere east of Stellies in the mountains. I drove there in my sleep, and probably hung over, so my memory is a little vague. White tablecloths under the old oak trees kind of thing. Eighties shabby chic. You get the picture. Lots of champagne, or whatever it’s allowed to be called down there these days. By nine o’clock I was totally sh*tfaced and ran out of people on the estate to insult. The rest is a blur. Needless to say, I got struck off the fancy breakfast and white tablecloth list, which suited me just fine. 

Anyway, I feel for my editor who had to endure a crack-of-dawn costume-themed breakfast “dinner” featuring Korean beef stew, and then put on a good face while staring down something that looked like, at least in the photos he posted, giant eyeballs in a crust, gazing up forlornly at the poor breakfasters. I mean what the hell, this does not even qualify for brunch. This is hardcore cold turkey crack-of-dawn breakfast with complete strangers still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. And the invite said no coffee. With an exclamation mark! Six fifteen in the morning, fancy food and no coffee? I’d rather stick a fork in my eye. Bacon and eggs, anybody?

But seeing as I now find my sorry Afrikaans-boy-from-Pretoria ass (I could have been from Benoni, so there’s that) writing for the food page, I’ve decided to take a shot at being a restaurant critic. And not just any restaurant. The target I’ve picked happens to be in New York, I’ll have you know. No provincial stuff for me. I go for the big time. 

I’ve been in New York a lot lately for work and I always try to stay in a self-catering apartment so that I have a little kitchen to cook breakfast and dinner in. You already know what I think of eating breakfast out, but in New York you can multiply that by 10. It’s crazy out there, even early in the morning. Ditto dinner. Too hectic. Too loud. Too expensive. Too bloody everything that I hate about eating dinner out. I’m much happier browsing the local supermarket and cooking in my tiny kitchen away from home. At least there’s no Hugo The Bad Dog to terrorise me like back home.

Nice and cozy in my little New York kitchen away from home. Even Hugo’s devious doggy brain won’t be able to figure out how to cross four state lines to get to me. So I’m safe for the moment. 

That mutt is going to be the end of me, I swear. So I have a couch in my kitchen back home in Chicago. I think every kitchen should have an old rundown couch where friends and family lounge and converse while cooking happens. A familiar old couch, nothing fancy. A kitchen without an old rundown couch? No couch your dog sleeps on and your kid lounges on while glued to his iPhone? Not a kitchen. Anyway, so Hugo, lounging on said kitchen couch, somehow manages to figure out when I’m ready to cook dinner. No idea how he does that. I try to divert him by opening the back door, hoping he’ll sniff a rabbit in the alley, then humming casually while unobtrusively removing a pot from the cupboard, but he’s on to me in a flash, hopping off the kitchen couch and planting himself in front of the stove, giving me the beady eye. One day I’m going to trip over him, mark my words.

I’m digressing. Why am I talking about my dog? I was supposed to be critiquing a restaurant, like a real grown-up food writer. Okay, I don’t like going out to eat but I always browse the local restaurant scene and Kaia, a South African restaurant on Third Avenue on the Upper West Side, not far from where I was huddled in my tiny cozy kitchen away from home, caught my eye. Viskoekies, bobotie? What the hell. I’m in. Fact is, South African food is nearly impossible to find in America. Back in the Nineties there were a few places, even a short-lived one in Chicago. So short lived that I missed it. I think there might still be one or two in LA and Georgia. Most of the “South African” restaurants in the US when you google them are not South African at all but some kind of African hybrid, mostly West African. So, bobotie and viskoekies? On my way. 

Well, the dudes behind the bar were African, I think. More likely Jamaican. Or local guys acting out some kind of accent. Anyway, they sported dreadlocks and with those odd accents seemed vaguely exotic — to New Yorkers, anyway. I asked for a typical South African drink. Just for fun. They stared at me blankly. Okay.

I got a table, sat down and ordered the viskoekies, which were not bad, actually. Then I ordered the bobotie. Oh, the best thing on the menu, I was assured. The server was really friendly and all over me and way too familiar like they tend to be in SA, but her accent was really bizarre, way more bizarre than the dudes behind the bar. Not American, although that was what she was obviously aspiring to. Not South African either. Just a weird, mystifying twangy kind of thing. Where is Charlize when you need her? 

So I was pondering that for nearly 40 minutes until my “bobotie” finally arrived. The owner makes the best bobotie you will ever have, I was assured. It was a brown and gloopy pile of something with a very hard piece of something balanced on top. You could actually take your fork and whack it, tock tock. Okay. So I dug into the meat under it. Meat? Mostly raisins. It was this weirdly super sweet concoction with a bizarrely hard crust balanced on top. I couldn’t manage more than two bites. And the funny-accent waitress kept coming by and saying it’s great, isn’t it, the best you’ll ever taste. I just stared at her. And at the “bobotie” in front of me. 

I was in a Fellini movie. I didn’t want to be in a Fellini movie. I just wanted to have bobotie and dream of Cape Town. Oh well. She whipped my untouched “bobotie” away after a while and asked if I wanted dessert, oblivious to the fact that I was sitting there, grey in the face, staring a thousand metres into nowhere. I shook my head, told her that I missed my dog, paid and left. 

I miss my dog? Yes, it was that bad. After this, I think I’ll call it a day as a restaurant critic. Not sure I’m up to it. Leave it to the professionals.

This is probably a good time to change the subject. So, here we go. My last column was about helping my son Willem drive from Chicago to his college on the banks of the Hudson River in upstate New York back in January. A nineteen-hour drive. For eight hours of which we were caught in a whiteout blizzard. For summer break in June I went over to New York and drove with him back to Chicago, his car packed to the roof with dirty laundry, and stayed over in Cleveland. No snow blizzard this time. Instead, summery leafy trees, happy birds chirping, that kind of thing. Mosquitos buzzing. Ticks lurking. A normal drive. 

Cleveland is one of those northern Midwestern cities on the great lakes that used to be an early 20th century industrial powerhouse, then went into decline as industry moved away after Word War 2. Run down, but still charming. And actually making a comeback, like quite a few of these old cities. 

Anyway, I’ve been hearing a lot about Cleveland’s West Side Market. Not far from where we were staying downtown. We decided to pop in the next morning before hitting the road. And what a delight. Built in 1912, it’s a magnificent pile of Beaux-Arts industrial architecture with Neoclassical/Byzantine influences and a campanile (Italian style clock tower). I love that stuff. And the cavernous interior did not let us down. It was breathtaking. Crammed with butchers, bakeries, fishmongers — you name it. I could have spent a whole day there. 

So eventually we stocked up on some Irish meat pies for padkos and hit the road. The pies weren’t nearly as good as South African pies, but pies are close to impossible to find in the US so you take what you can get. Savoury pies are just not an American thing. Of course, Mexican empanadas are everywhere, but they don’t do it for me. Nothing like a good old SA chicken-and-mushroom pie.

As I mentioned in my last column, Americans pay hardly any attention to the Upper Midwest area around the Great Lakes, but I find it one of the most interesting and beautiful areas of America. And full of surprises. Like Cleveland’s West End Market. A few months ago Jill and I were driving back to Chicago from a job in Traverse City on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan. Not easy to get to. Once you leave the highway it’s at least two-and-a-half hours of windy country roads to Traverse City. But beautiful. Birch forests, apple and cherry orchards, kind of what I imagine Russia would look like. It’s like you could drive around a bend and stumble across Uncle Vanya’s dacha nestled amongst the cherry orchards. 

We stopped in this tiny little town of Cedar so I could switch audio books and noticed that we were parked right outside a little Polish market. A Polish shop in northern Michigan? What the hell, we had to check it out. It was Polish all right, including the ancient dude stooped over the counter. He studied me closely as I perused the various sausages at the meat counter. 

“From farm, everything from farm, from farm.” 

And he pointed out the door somewhere. This guy gave new meaning to the term “farm to table”. Then he noticed me studying a huge chunk of pork shoulder. He looked ecstatic. I thought he was going to levitate around the dark little shop. “From farm. Piękny! Piękny! Beautiful! Like wagyu beef. Wagyu pork. Best. From farm. Mangalica pig. You cook. Only here. Nowhere in America. You cook, you taste, you come back.”

This was farm to table. The real thing. Unpretentious, unselfconscious. He meant it. He was actually pointing at it out the door. And I’m sure this old dude would look at a pretentious “farm to table” menu from a foraging restaurant and have no clue what they were talking about. Farm to table? Even McDonalds can claim farm to table. Where the hell else do they get their meat and potatoes from? Mars? I am so done with the whole farm to table thing. As you may have noticed.

Well, need I mention that we ended up driving back to Chicago with a huge chunk of Mangalica hog on the back seat. It turns out that a whole bunch of Polish farmers fled the Stalin regime in the Fifties and ended up settling around Cedar, northern Michigan, back in the days when immigrants were still welcome. 

And I’ll tell you, that shoulder was spectacular, nothing like the pork available in the US. Almost like wild boar. Makes sense because they were first bred in Hungary from yes, wild boars, and are highly revered in Eastern Europe. And they are huge, with long grey fur, or hair, or whatever pigs have. One day I’m going to stop by there and tell the old dude that his porker was delicious. And watch him levitate. 

Anyway, bad bobotie, Irish meat pies, hairy hogs. What can I say. Ciao or cześć from Chicago. Or sommer a lekker ou totsiens. DM