Category: Food

Little Saturday is a Scandinavian concept that adds Wednesday to the list of ‘drinking days’.  We use the term sometimes in South Africa as well.   Six of us went to Jamjuree, a Thai restaurant on 15th Ave.    Singha beer is served everywhere in Thailand, and we always ask for it here in Jamjuree.   I love the golden lion on the label – Singha is indeed a mystical lion, found in ancient Hindu and Thai stories.     The food was delicious : red curry and fried rice with pineapple, wide rice noodles and coconut soup with chicken and mushroom.   I had to look how Bangkok is doing with the flood water that is still everywhere, and it looks as if it hasn’t really started to recede.    Click on the map or paste the link into a browser for a version of it that can be zoomed in and out.

http://203.150.230.27/FloodMap/index.html?search=&locate=&xmin=11105110.04837066&ymin=1518928.8106264025&xmax=11303081.95162934&ymax=1639852.1893735975

Mandarins are indigenous to south east Asia, and sometimes these are given as freebies in the cafeteria where we have lunch.     A closely related fruit of this kind is found in South Africa, where they are called naartjies in Afrikaans, originally from the Tamil word nartei meaning citrus.

This plump little ‘loose-rinded fruit from a spiny orange tree’ as Merriam-Webster describes it (see below), was easy to peel and delicious!

From Merriam-Webster dictionary

man·da·rin

noun ˈman-d(ə-)rən

definition of mandarin

1   a : a public official in the Chinese Empire of any of nine superior grades b (1) : a pedantic official (2) : bureaucrat c : a person of position and influence often in intellectual or literary circles; especially : an elder and often traditionalist or reactionary member of such a circle

2   capitalized a : a form of spoken Chinese used by the court and the official classes of the Empire b : the group of closely related Chinese dialects that are spoken in about four fifths of the country and have a standard variety centering about Beijing

3   [Swedish mandarin (apelsin) mandarin (orange), ultimately from Portuguese mandarim mandarin; perhaps from the color of a mandarin’s robes] a : a small spiny orange tree (Citrus reticulata) of southeastern Asia with yellow to reddish-orange loose-rinded fruits; also : a tree (as the satsuma) developed in cultivation from the mandarin by artificial selection or hybridization b : the fruit of a mandarin

— man·da·rin·ic adjective

— man·da·rin·ism noun

Here’s the scene at the ‘restaurant across from the Sheraton’ where we had dinner tonight.   There is also ‘the restaurant under the tree’ and the ‘spicy restaurant’ here in Dameisha : our way to simplify the Chinese names.    The little group with white shirts by the window is a band that provided live music.    My favorite dish of the evening was the eggplant and beef, shown in the picture.    And the last picture is just of a hotel with animated neon stripes, close by.

Come end of day Friday we had completed a 7 day workweek that started the previous Saturday.  Oof.   So Friday night I just put my feet up (on the hotel bed) with some 7 Up I got across the street.   The xǐ 喜 on the can means like| love| enjoy| joyful thing.  I guess that’s the same as ‘up’, as in getting one’s spirits up.   7 Up was created by a Charles Grigg, who launched his St. Louis-based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920.  The original Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda was launched just two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929!   The very cool artwork is from the 7 Up website.  The submarine is my favorite!  

FTA stands for Free Trade Agreement, of course.  Finally went into law on the US side (still to be ratified by Korea).  And what is ‘free’? Well, there are no import tariffs on a number of designated categories of goods.  So President Obama says he’d soon like to see South Koreans driving Chevys, Fords and Buicks.  Well, I’m sure the Koreans would like to see Americans drive more Hyundais, and they will possibly eat more American beef in return (screen shot from NHK TV Wed night).

Speaking of beef, yukhoe refers to a variety of raw dishes in Korean cuisine, usually made from raw ground beef seasoned with various spices or sauce.   But in April and May this year, four people died and some 35 hospitalized after eating yukke (what it’s called in Japan) in the Tokyo area.     Yukke is now served there under new standards (recent newspaper article from Tokyo newspaper).   But they can still count me out.  Cook or grill my beef, please!

I have munched on the last of my fancy dark chocolate Kit Kats I picked up in Japan (aww).    Japan has green tea Kit Kat also, but I steered clear of that.   Or maybe I will get some the next time I stop over in Narita airport.     My love for Kit Kat goes back a long way; it has been around for 76 years now and I recall the plain red and white packaging shown in the 1969 picture below.   Back then it was milk chocolate, and that was it.   But it was very good !

One of our US colleagues brought us some Pilão coffee from the States.   I have to confess that at first I thought it was Italian! .. but NO, it’s from Brazil. Brazil is by far the world’s largest coffee producer, responsible for around 30% of the world’s supply.    Coffeereview.com says ‘Cafe Pilao represents the down-home style of Brazilian coffee.  Most North American coffee drinkers will be put off by its almost composty fermented fruit notes, but others may enjoy this ambiguous flavor character’.   So I will have to try it for myself and report back.   The review site didn’t mention that the coffee is Rainforest Alliance-certified – I hope it is !

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.