Recipes inspired by heritage food

YUMMY: AN UNFORGETTABLE TASTING SESSION

Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week it’s about the sparkling, the laughter and forgetting. Marie-Lais Emond

Scarlet and plump on the kitchen counter is a perfect red pepper. I gasp because it seems to have slipped out of my recipe to appear here, like a magic trick.

Joburg businesswoman Khanyisa Malabi is all daisy brightness and calm beauty but gives a funny smile, saying she re-read her recipe and hadn’t mentioned it was for garnishing.

My chicken pot is on her stove and I show off a plate of green, nutty balls. I’ve made the last two thirds of Khanyisa’s “Vuswa and organic miroho rolled in roasted nuts and side dish of braised chilli infused organic chicken”.

It’s in her latest book, Legacy of Living and Sparkles of Taste. I’ve been excited by the first fine dining book I’ve seen in South Africa inspired by heritage foods.

Khanyisa’s son Muako has compiled for us a playlist of Nina Simone and we’re drinking pineapple and orange juice out of sparkling flutes, sniffing the foody air.

Khanyisa produces her own chicken dish from the same recipe. It looks nothing like mine. At least I have the beautifully green miroho balls, produced with every last miroho leaf in my little garden, nuttily rolled.

Khanyisa and Heather compare notes about Soshanguve, the family homeplace, but I worry about chicken differences.

Admittedly, I’ve used a heritage chicken and they’re often tough so I’d first eased it up in a low oven and removed the bones, before marinating in rich buttermilk, as in the recipe, then continuing as written.

Then another surprise. This time it is exquisite dumplings studded with pumpkin seeds, baked in enamel mugs. They’re part of another recipe I’d loved, “braised goat neck with plum tomatoes served with pumpkin dumpling”, these superior dombolo filled with pumpkin flesh.

And then there’s “boiled ground nut humus” from her book. These are charmingly presented, laid out on the stoep.

Khanyisa sets to merry work with roasted plum tomatoes and beautiful purple chillies, garnishing both our chicken examples before we settle down to the yummiest tasting session.

by Khanyisa Malabi.