Duck............She's Like A Chicken But She Swims

Officially back on form, thank Heaven, I had a really good cooking morning today - made the yoghurt and cardomom mousse with pomegranate seeds, finished off my sea salt and rosemary fococcia which came out well, onion bhajis with tomato and pepper relish, palmiers (pig's ears) using my flaky pastry, handmade chocolate cups filled with banana, raisins and walnuts all soaked in rum and a loaf of white bread, not too shabby at all for 4 hours work I thought.

The choccie cups were a fiddle and a half, melt chocolate, paint the inside of a petit four cup using the back of a teaspoon, wait for them to dry, then find somewhere cold (not hard) and make sure your hands are very cold (again, not hard) to peel them off, my word, was actually quite therapeutic in the end although I'm not sure it's a job for boys, the guys in my kitchen were cursing profusely and luckily I'd drawn the banana/raisin/walnut/rum filling, there was another one with grapes and Kirsch which entailed peeling and de-pipping the grapes and I'm sorry but I honestly think life is too short to peel grapes, and that's coming from a disgustingly uptight Virgo!

Half the kitchen started making puff pastry today, the King of Pastries, equal parts butter to flour so in other words it's utterly delish but you can feel your bum growing in width before you even finish chewing - it involves making the basic dough out of flour and water, chilling it for a while and then taking it back out, rolling it out, putting AN ENTIRE BLOCK OF BUTTER into the middle of it, folding it over, rolling it again, and then repeating those last two steps about a 100 times - so a few hours later you end up with the most amazing pastry, made up of layers and layers of fine pastry interspered with butter - truly Heaven on a plate. Now this on top of a chicken and mushroom pie and your man will be beside himself, I bet you I could even ask to watch Grey's Anatomy in the middle of a (relatively) crucial rugby match and succeed...................not SA vs the All Blacks mind you, I know my place.............

So onto lunch, all those amazing stews from yesterday, lots of veg, perfect winter day food. And from there to Demo with Darina where we kicked off with duck - there's an urban legend at home that I'm sure most South Africans have heard before where a waitress was allegedly asked by a customer what the duck was like and the reply was, "she's like a chicken but she swims", still my favourite restaurant anecdote of all time. Thankfully, in terms of jointing in into lots of bits, ducks and chickens are exactly alike except that Duck comes with a built in fully-body wet suit of fat and a lot of it which you've to trim off for ages (and then ukky chef part, render down in a low oven to liquid fat, hugely valuable in restaurants, absolutely the best thing to do your roast pots in). We moved on to the first stage of duck confit which is basically a classically French dish where duck (or chicken or goose or any other of your fair feathered friends) is preserved in fat, sounds dodgy I know and we'll only be trying it in a few days but it is apparently incredibly good, again this is one where the taste buds benefit and everything else suffers in a big way but let's not talk about that for now.

From ducks on the top of the water, we dove down a little and did a few fish dishes - seared spice crusted salmon with red lentil risotto, fantastic, and pan grilled John Dory (nice easy-to-fillet flat fish) with watercress butter and a few side dishes, braised leeks with yellow peppers and marjoram, roast garlic mash and a spiced pumpkin salad.

There were a few soups too, a couple of pumpkin ones and my personal favourite, seafood chowder which was a flashback of note to my days of living in Boston where seafood chowder is virtually a rite of passage and I'd forgotten how good it was, especially in cold weather which let's face it, Boston does with style  - the one today had salmon, monkfish, haddock, mussels and prawns, it really is yum, a whole meal in a bowl. To go with the soups, there was another new bread, ciabatta which I adore and even better, it's best made in a Kenwood mixer, far too sticky to make by hand, I love breads that suffer from this affliction.

With the puff pastry we did a few classic French pastries, one called Gateau Pithivier and another called Jalousie, the gateau was particularly special, basically a puff pastry base and top filled with an almond mixture, then baked in the oven and dredged in icing sugar at the very end to give a caramelised top, the calorie counter would officially go on strike with this one, not enough decimal points and all my small  (thankfully) tasting portion did was make me want to bake a whole one of my own, incredible.

Saving the best for last though, the utter highlight of the afternoon for me was ravioli, so homemade pasta rolled to almost see-through stage and then filled with a gorgeous herby pumpkin mixture and sealed, cooked in boiling water for just a few minutes and finished in sage butter - it's almost identical to a starter at my favourite restaurant at home, 9th Avenue Bistro, and every single time we go there we have this so now that I know how to make it myself perhaps we'll actually be able to try out something else on their menu................hallelujah!

As soon as demo finished, there was a very quick wine tasting with Martin Moore, winemaker at Durbanville Hills in good old SA, YAY I was so excited, had a quick chat before the tasting started and he was just lovely. We tasted their Pinotage, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc which just today won a gold medal at a huge Wine Competition in Canada where it was tasted blind against 960 other wines and won, very proudly South African moment!

Martin chatted to us all for about an hour, all about the estate, how they makes their wines and how having developed a really strong local reputation they're now working on building up their brand internationally - he told a story about how in Europe wine markers leave their wines outside to chill to the right temperature and when he was asked by a French cellar master whether he did the same in the Cape, Martin replied no, and the Frenchman questioned whether this was because of South Africa's much warmer climate and Martin said no, not at all, but if you leave anything outside it won't be there when you go back to fetch it later - eesh, I miss home!