Jack Daniels Steak with Mushroom Sauce was born that day and to my surprise its still a firm favorite with my imediate family.

For The Recipe You Need:
Beef Fillet (any amount you want to make)
Jack Daniels Bourbon Whiskey (any bourbon would do)
Salt and Pepper (freshly cracked)
Butter (to cook with)

Instructions for steak:
Grab a ziplock bag and add the fillets to the bag with about 2 shots of Jack Daniels per fillet and season with Salt and Pepper. Allow this to rest in the fridge for about 2 hours. Yes I know this doesnt really allow oxidation to make the meat softer, but you essentially just want the flavour and smell to infuse into the meat.

Using a medium frying pan, melt some butter (I like it as it add’s flavour) and heat the pan to a medium-hot temperature.
Fry the fillets for a few seconds on each side and add a glug of Jack Daniels straight into the pan.

Grab a match, light it and then proceed to light the Jack Daniels within the pan.Shake the pan (not too rough now) to make sure all the alcohol burns and continue to pan fry the fillet to the rare’ness you desire.
Remove Fillet and allow to rest for a few minutes whilst you make the sauce.

For the sauce You Need:
1x Punnet of button mushrooms (any will do), sliced
1x 250ml Fresh Cream
2x smallish blocks of butter (to thicken sauce)
Half a glass of your favorite white wine (personally I enjoy Blanc de noir)
Your favorite herbs (I use Basil)
Salt and Pepper (frashly cracked)

Instructions for sauce:
Using the same pan as for the steak, add the mushrooms and fry until cooked and soft.Add the wine and allow to simmer for a minute then proceed to add cream and basil and allow to simmer for a few seconds (the colour of the cream will slightly change).
To thicken sauce, just add the butter and allow to melt whilst continually stirring.

The Finished Product:
Add steak to a hot plate and pour over sauce. Serve with veggies of your choice. I normally just go for freshly made potato mash (chunky) as I love eating the extra sauce with the mash.

Note: no need to use the wine in the sauce but except for that Teetotalers can eat this dish as all the alcohol is burnt away when you light it.

As with so many things in life, the climax of the story involves cock and wine…

Carefully and meticulously, I had cultivated a personage as the quintessential yuppie. Successful, driven, ambitious. Climbing the corporate ladder as if I could scale that vertical wall even without the ladder.

Then two things happened at once that I needed to reconcile:
I became the father of the most beautiful baby girl the world has ever seen, and I was offered a job that would earn me more money than I had ever dreamed possible.

As I pondered these two events, I felt a growing unease…
One night, over a bottle of exquisite red, I played out the scenario. Me, gone for weeks, making lots and lots of money, increasingly unable to take time off, increasingly unable to walk away from that lifestyle and spending less and less of the ultimate resource – time – with my lovely new family…

A decision was made that would change my life forever.

I resigned and started balancing my time between investing myself in my wife and daughter, and working part-time for an NGO that really changes lives.
All of a sudden, life slowed down. Where previously I had eaten for sustenance, I started to savour flavours, textures. Cooking became a passion.

But the big moment came when I opened a magazine with an excerpt from Les Halle Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain. I needed just two words to be absolutely, irrevocably changed:
“Day One”.

I had never even considered a recipe that started with the words “Day One” before! Yet all of a sudden, it made so much sense that I didn’t know whether I could ever cook in any other way. The recipe was for coq au vin, and it was exquisite.

I invite everyone to take a moment, re-evaluate your priorities and if at all possible, only ever cook recipes that start with the words “Day One” …

If you’re not sure where to start, try the recipe that initiated me into slow food…
Courtesy of Monsieur Bourdain.

Coq au vin

Ingredients

1 bottle (1 liter) plus 1 cup (225 ml) of red wine
1 onion, cut into a 1-inch (2.5-cm) dice
1 carrot, cut into ¼-inch (6-mm) slices
1 celery rib, cut into ½-inch (1-cm) slices
4 whole cloves
1 tbsp (14 g) whole black peppercorns
1 bouquet garni
1 whole chicken, about 3.5 lb (1.35 kg) “trimmed”–meaning guts, wing tips, and neckbone removed
salt and freshly ground pepper
2 tbsp (28 ml) olive oil
6 tbsp (75 g) butter, softened
1 tbsp (14 g) flour
¼ lb (112 g) slab or country bacon, cut into small oblongs (lardons) about ¼ by 1 inch (6 mm by 2.5 cm)
½ Ib/225 g small, white button mushrooms, stems removed
12 pearl onions, peeled pinch of sugar

Directions

DAY ONE

The day before you even begin to cook, combine the bottle of red wine, the diced onion (that’s the big onion, not the pearl onions), sliced carrot, celery, cloves, peppercorns, and bouquet garni in a large, deep bowl. Add the chicken and submerge it in the liquid so that all of it is covered. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

DAY TWO

Remove the chicken from the marinade and pat it dry. Put it aside. Strain the marinade through the fine strainer, reserving the liquids and solids separately. Season the chicken with salt and pepper inside and out. In the large Dutch oven, heat the oil and 2 tablespoons/28 g of the butter until almost smoking, and then sear the chicken, turning with the tongs to evenly brown the skin. Once browned, remove it from the pot and set it aside again. Add the reserved onions, celery, and carrot to the pot and cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and golden brown. That should take you about 10 minutes.

Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and mix well with the wooden spoon so that the vegetables are coated. Now stir in the reserved strained marinade. Put the chicken back in the pot, along with the bouquet garni. Cook this for about 1 hour and 15 minutes over low heat.

Have a drink. You’re almost there …

While your chicken stews slowly in the pot, cook the bacon lardons in the small sauté pan over medium heat until golden brown. Remove the bacon from the pan and drain it on paper towels, making sure to keep about 1 tablespoon/14 g of fat in the pan. Sauté the mushroom tops in the bacon fat until golden brown. Set them aside.

Now, in the small saucepan, combine the pearl onions, the pinch of sugar, a pinch of salt, and 2 tablespoons/28 g of the butter. Add just enough water to just cover the onions, then cover the pan with the parchment paper trimmed to the same size as your pan. (I suppose you can use foil if you must.) Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook until the water has evaporated. Keep a close eye on it. Remove the paper cover and continue to cook until the onions are golden brown. Set the onions aside and add the remaining cup/225 ml of red wine to the hot pan, scraping up all the fond on the bottom of the pot. Season with salt and pepper and reduce over medium-high heat until thick enough to coat the back of the spoon.

Your work is pretty much done here. One more thing and then it’s wine and kudos …

When the chicken is cooked through—meaning tender, the juice from the thigh running clear when pricked—carefully remove from the liquid, cut into quarters, and arrange on the deep serving platter. Strain the cooking liquid (again) into the reduced red wine. Now just add the bacon, mushrooms, and pearl onions, adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper, and swirl in the remaining 2 tablespoons/28 g of butter. Now pour that sauce over the chicken and dazzle your friends with your brilliance. Serve with buttered noodles and a Bourgogne Rouge.

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I was very fortunate to have travelled a lot when I was young, thanks to my conference-hopping parents and their penchant for unusual (if somewhat ivory-towered) travel destinations. From a young age my love of eating must have overshadowed all other experiences because the most memorable parts of these trips are the local cuisines. A few months ago, I was reminiscing about the year we spent in the beautiful US state of North Carolina. As memories of the sparkling Crystal Coast and snow on the Smokey Mountains filled my mind, I knew only one thing could quell the longing in my heart – a big ‘ole banana puddin’.

For days banana pudding was on my mind. As a guy not accustomed to baking, I walked the streets of Cape Town hoping to catch of glimpse (or a whiff even) of its golden meringue topping, its succulent filling of sliced bananas kissed by creamy custard. But alas, no one I asked had even heard of it. I sighed, lamenting the total absence of Southern cooking in the Southern-most city in Africa. After enduring my complaints for some time, my ever-patient and inspirational girlfriend provided the solution, “just make one yourself!” And so I did….

On the surface, banana pudding seems so easy to make. Slice a couple of bananas, make some custard, beat some egg whites for the meringue, and then throw it all together and bake the sucker to golden perfection. These were my thoughts as I began my cooking journey, scouring the aisles of Woolies in search of the simplest of ingredients. I had come upon http://www.lanascooking.com, a charming Southern cooking blog packed full of delicious down home recipes, including an authentic and easy to follow Banana Pudding recipe. “A simple recipe” I thought, “this should be a cinch”. Confident and excited, I paid for my groceries with a smile and headed home to bake a prize-winning dessert. Or so I thought.

Back in the kitchen, I set out all the equipment and ingredients before I started, just like the TV chefs do. I had perfectly sliced my bananas, lined my buttered baking dish with tennis biscuits, and was ready to prepare the creamy custard filling. So far so good. A careful reading of the recipe revealed that some heavy-duty equipment was called for. After I Googled “double boiler” and realised I had never even seen one before, I decided to improvise. Moments later, I had an absent-of-use glass Pyrex dish masterfully balancing atop a pot of boiling water – sheer genius. If you had asked me how I felt at that moment, I’d have told you I could feel victory in my bones. My jubilation was short-lived though, because it was exactly at that moment that things started to go horribly wrong.

I had combined the milk and sugar to make the custard filling and was about to add the egg yolks when I realised that I had no eggs. Off with the stove, and off I went to Woolies again to get some. I returned home, got the liquid boiling again and was about to add the yolks when I came to a shocking realization – eggs, even Woolies eggs, don’t come pre-separated! After a few failed attempts, I worked out how to separate eggs and obtained three perfect yellow yolks, which I added to the milk. I stirred conscientiously, trusting that the custard would soon thicken into a wonderful creamy filling. It didn’t.

At this stage, the kitchen was a mess, with egg shells, banana peels and biscuit crumbs strewn across the black granite landscape of the counter tops. At the centre of this chaos was me, frantically trying to beat egg whites while I prayed that the custard would thicken. Unfortunately I had lost track of time, and was startled by the ringing of the buzzer, the CCTV image confirming my worst fears – my girlfriend was home from work. Upon entering the apartment her reaction was mixed, a combination of shock and horror. She took a few moments to gather herself, then announced that makeshift double boiler wasn’t providing enough heat to thicken the custard, and that the egg whites were far too soft. By this time the latter had half returned to their liquid state, while the water in the “double boiler” was fast running out. I acted quickly, adding some boiling water to the pot, and beating the egg whites on the fastest setting, but alas, the custard simply refused to thicken. At this point I realised something else – I hadn’t bought the ingredients for the dinner I had promised to cook! Leaving the custard in more capable hands than mine, I sped off to Woolies again, and was about to pay for my groceries when I received an SMS: “Ran screaming from the kitchen, it’s a mess. Taking a shower. X” Just great.

I returned home, out of breath, and put my parcels down. When I neared the stove, I went cold. Lying before me was a ghastly sight: my double boiler had collapsed. Whether it was the weight of the custard in the glass dish above, or my haste in adding the hot water, the dish had slipped into the pot of water, flooding my custard and washing half of it into the cauldron below. My heart sank as I surveyed the scene before me. I was ready to give up, to cast off my dream of Banana Pudding forever. But then I remembered the Alamo. (OK, so I didn’t but it sounds Southern.) Mustering all my strength, I hatched a cunning plan.

As the old saying goes “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”. Except in this case it was more like “Cometh the hour, returneth the man to Woolies”. Back in the queue for the third time, I was getting decidedly odd looks from the cashier who, as luck would have it, had served me twice already that day. I had in my hands two containers of fresh custard that I had spied on the dessert shelf. Armed with these creamy beauties I knew victory was mine.

Back home for the last time, I looked upon my biscuit-lined dish and smiled. Adding the banana slices and layering them in rich creamy custard, I whipped up fresh egg whites (which I now separated with greater ease) and topped off the pudding with a thick layer of tasty meringue. A few minutes in the oven, and a golden, scrumptious Banana Pudding emerged, the pride of any Southern kitchen.

Ultimately, everything worked out great. I got the kitchen sparkling clean, we had a great meal and delicious dessert that evening, and all the calories I burned on my trips to Woolies meant that I had an extra helping, guilt-free! My longing for Banana Pudding satisfied, I have my sights on more ambitious dishes, and these days I even make my own custard!

Real Deal Banana Pudding
(http://www.lanascooking.com/2009/05/22/the-real-deal-banana-pudding/)

3/4 cup sugar, divided
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
Dash salt
3 eggs, separated
2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
45 NILLA Wafers, divided
5 ripe bananas, sliced (about 3 1/2 cups), divided
Additional NILLA Wafers and banana slices, for garnish

1. Mix 1/2 cup sugar, flour and salt in top of double boiler.
Blend in 3 egg yolks and milk. Cook, uncovered, over boiling water,
stirring constantly for 10 to 12 minutes or until thickened. Remove
from heat; stir in vanilla.

2. Reserve 10 wafers for garnish. Spread small amount of custard
on bottom of 1 1/2-quart casserole; cover with a layer of wafers
and a layer of sliced bananas. Pour about 1/3 of custard over
bananas. Continue to layer wafers, bananas and custard to make
a total of 3 layers of each, ending with custard.

3. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form; gradually add remaining
1/4 cup sugar and beat until stiff but not dry. Spoon on top of
pudding, spreading evenly to cover entire surface and sealing well
to edges.

4. Bake at 350°F in top half of oven for 15 to 20 minutes or
until browned. Cool slightly or refrigerate. Garnish with
additional wafers and banana slices just before serving.

Makes 8 servings.

Enjoy!
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