The Pizza that had too much to live up to

IMG_20190707_182043 So if you’ve been following my recent blog posts you would know that I now have someone in my life. So my boyfriend (yes I love saying that) had for weeks been telling me about this Nachos pizza at San Fernando’s since he knows that I love avocado!

He has been telling me how amazing this pizza is, and I really couldn’t wait to taste it. Finally the day came when we decided to go out for dinner to have this nachos pizza that he has been bragging about.

I must say the service at San Fernando’s at Sunridge Village is amazing, very friendly and very quick as well.

I had the most amazing bar-one hot chocolate and that I would recommend to absolutely everyone. IMG_20190707_180946

The pizza came (quite quickly may I add) and it looked amazing, except when you bear in mind that my boyfriend thought I would enjoy this pizza because I love avo and you notice that here is only a small dollop of guacamole on every slice. I ignored this though and dived into what mostly looked like an amazing pizza.

My boyfriend’s brother joined us for the pizza and to my happiness didn’t eat avo so most of his gaucamole came to me…yay!

The first bite of the pizza was delicious, but on the next bite something tasted a little floury or doughy maybe. At first I couldn’t place it but later realized some spots of the pizza’s base didn’t completely cook through.

I’m not a large fan of tomato flavoured things so I think I’m slightly biased on this next point, but as the nacho base on top of the pizza base they use tomato flavoured corn chips. The taste is also a bit dry which might have added to the floury taste and also the tomato taste kind of overpowered the rest of the pizza.

We opted for the plain pizza as I am asthmatic and need to be very careful of things that are too spicy, but the pizza came across a bit bland. I would have enjoyed it if the pizza was slightly tangy. I mean yes, when I eat spicy things I get to a point where I would just as well sell my birth right for a glass of water but with this pizza I thought I would sell my birth right for a little bit of spice.

They only have the plain option and the spicy option on the menu- I would definitely recommend that they add a mild version of the nachos pizza on the menu and if they do I would give it a try for sure!

I think at some point during consuming the pizza my facial expression must have changed since my boyfriend felt it necessary to express that he forgot that I critique food.

I would just like to say that I might not have enjoyed the dish but I did enjoy the place! They have some amazing specials and are worth checking out!

Love Jo, xo

Jo’s Takeaways:

There is no such thing as too much avo
Plain doesn’t have to mean tasteless
Don’t oversell a dish

Mid-month Budget Busters

Firstly I need to apologise for my lengthy absence from the blogosphere. I’m certain if you are a fellow South African you would be well aware that the flu going around is particularly bad. This particularly bad flu decided to chew me up and spit me out into my bed with meds that knocked me out for most of the last while and my editor got married making it more difficult to get my posts back, love you Em. I am back now however and should be bugging you with posts at least once a week!

So all of us know that (okay maybe not all of us, just those of us who are financially challenged) know that a few weeks into the month the grocery cupboard starts to look a bit bleak.

This month ours look particularly bleak as we opted to not buy groceries but rather purchase ready cooked meals from a local chef. Really well priced and delicious! These meals however are only from Monday – Friday and only dinner. I don’t know if we forgot that weekends existed or that you’re supposed to have more than one meal a day but our cupboards only had the remnants of last month’s grocery shopping to show, which really wasn’t much.

Luckily I am always up for a challenge and absolutely love the opportunity to be creative, even in my cooking! I think some of the greatest combinations of food must have come out from people having hard times and trying anything to feed their families.

Similar to how I discovered that cheap two minute noodles tastes amazing with some melted butter mixed in! A meal I’ll have again even if my cupboards aren’t so bleak!

Also a very nice, affordable and non-fattening snack to have is popcorn! You don’t even need gas or oil if you have the right apparatus (which my sister conveniently forgot she had when we realised she had no oil and I really wanted popcorn, only to find the microwave popcorn maker the next morning…needless to say I still haven’t had my popcorn).

We are very privileged to have a large 4 burner gas stove with an oven which works amazing to cook some scrumptious things – it has one problem though. It runs out of gas! This isn’t a problem when you plan and budget for it, however when we forget that we’re supposed to eat on weekends we also forget to plan for the gas running out – after all, we’re getting ready cooked meals!

So my life without gas has been pretty interesting, and so has my bleak cupboards as the combination of the two really brought out my creative side.

I present to you condensed milk chicken! Yes, you read that correctly! There was a special on whole chicken last month at one of my favourite supermarkets so I decided to buy one. Saturday I decided that would be a decent Sunday lunch- throw it in the crock pot over night and ta-da- super soft delicious chicken. I had a problem though, I usually do this with cream and I didn’t have the cash flow to purchase cream at the time. I racked my brain as to what there was in my pretty bleak cupboards until I remembered the condensed milk I had purchased (actually for the melk kos recipe I still want to try) and decided this is perfect! Just to give it that creamy texture. I put the chicken, some baby potatoes, some frozen veg, a soup powder- minestrone I think- and braai relish into my crock pot. I rubbed some condensed milk onto the chicken, added water till it was just above the chicken closed the pot and put the setting on auto throughout the night. I forgot that the chicken had giblets so when I opened the pot the next morning (since I cooked the chicken from frozen) found the giblets floating in their packet on the top of the pot – I of course found this very amusing. The end result was absolutely delicious! It wasn’t sweet, but did have a sweeter taste than chicken would normally have. Not overbearing though and it had a soft smooth taste like that which I would usually accomplish through using cream. Definitely a recipe I would try again and add mushrooms!

My last few notes on life without gas is my absolute love for the random apparatuses that I have to cook with. From my electric frying pan with which I made egg and sausage for breakfast, to the microwave in which I made mash (although I should have left the potatoes in a bit longer as they were still a little bit hard here and there even after they were mashed), my crockpot in which I made the delicious condensed milk chicken and lastly my microwave omelette maker which works wonders!

Thankfully payday is around the corner and the bleak cupboard will soon be replenished, till then I’ll let my creative side run wild!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s Take Aways

Be prepared to be creative
Have apparatuses to help
Don’t be discouraged when things look bleak, something good can still come from it

3 Ways to make baked beans bearable

If you are anything like me who does not enjoy dry foods, you would probably share my distaste for baked beans. Yes, they have sauce around them but bite down into one and they’re still dry!

Living in the day and age that we are in today, baked beans is something that pretty much everyone has in the cupboard. They’re cheap and filling, even if they don’t taste great!

So I set out on a mission to find ways to make baked beans taste better, to make them bearable for those last week of the month meals.

I chose 3 ways to tell you about:

Baked Bean Salad

This is quite easy and honestly really tastes good. A friend of mine introduced me to this recipe while we were still house mates and I have made it many times since then.

So what to do is to empty the can of baked beans- sauce and all- into a bowl. Add half a chopped onion and some sugar. Lastly, add some mayonnaise and stir. I don’t have exact measurements for this recipe, it’s a bit of a “to taste” recipe. It has never tasted bad, but whenever it seems to hit the sweet spot of perfection I can never remember what the ratio of ingredients were. Works well with meals like sausage and egg or steak and chips.

Curried Baked Beans on Toast

This is a dish that a friend’s mom made for us when we were still in high school. I really wasn’t fond of baked beans but as a courtesy to my friend’s mom I decided to eat the baked beans. I was pleasantly surprised! I tried to remake it. I threw the entire can of baked beans in a sauce pan, added half a diced onion, added tomato sauce and chutney as well as some curry powder. Heat up and stir well. My bread was frozen and I’m not fond of toast from frozen (although my mom is). Luckily we had those sandwich squares from Blue Ribbon in the freezer too, and I quite enjoy them toasted from frozen. I added the baked bean mix on to the toasted and buttered squares and enjoyed for lunch!

Joxo Chilli

So I had some leftover baked bean mix and had this idea in my head to make American Chilli. When I googled the recipes for American Chilli I realised that I do not have most of the ingredients in my house and besides the fact that I prefer to cook with what I have in house, it was still a few days until payday! I decided to make my own dish. My dish is inspired by the idea of American chilli and probably similar to some that already exist. I threw green beans, carrots and split peas in a pot together to cook. In future I would put the split peas in their own pot or not make them at all. Although I did enjoy their taste though, they were sadly still hard when I dished despite being cooked for a really long time. I added some garlic to my baked bean mix. I fried some beef patties (hamburger meat) in a pan, once cooked I added some barbeque sauce over the patties. I cut up the patties and added them to the baked bean mix while I waited for the veg to become soft. Once the veg was soft, I added it into the baked bean mix. I made the sticky barbeque instant sauce from Imana (I used more water than suggested on the instructions to give the chilli a nice runny consistency) and added to the baked bean mix. I stirred well and ta da! Joxo Chilli! I made some mash to put the chilli on, and man am I glad that I did! In one of my previous posts I have mentioned that my mom had cancer, I swear the chemo did something to her taste buds. My nose was running from the burn of the chilli and she sits there not worried about a thing. I asked her if she didn’t taste it? She responded that she tastes it but it isn’t nose run bad – really hope the chemo affected her taste buds otherwise there might be something wrong with mine! Point being that the mash under the chilli really helped with the burn.

I hope this inspires you to take something you don’t like and turn it into something you would enjoy!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s Take Aways

Never complain about having food
There’s always a way to “upcycle” an ingredient you don’t enjoy
Try new things

Sushi Search – Part One of Many

IMG_20190515_215636 I have decided to take the challenge upon myself to check out all the (affordable) sushi places in P.E. and surrounding areas and review them on my blog; so that you my dear friends and followers can avoid a bad sushi experience. (This definitely has nothing at all to do with the fact that I love sushi myself). The first place I decided to try out was TORO Sushi, Teppanyaki & Seafood.

A friend of mine and I decided we were in the mood to go out- sushi sounded like a great idea and I had been dying to try out the buffet at TORO. Their sushi buffet is really well priced at R169.00 for all you can eat sushi (there are some restrictions but we’ll get to those in a bit), and you also get 4 salmon roses and 4 small pieces of sashimi.

They were running a contest at the time (and I think they still are) where if you do the buffet and stack your different coloured plates, you need to take a selfie with your stacked plates and tag TORO on Instagram or Facebook to win a voucher. However when we got there we were told that when doing the buffet you are only allowed to take white plates off the conveyer belt at the sushi bar, so this was quite confusing. We didn’t enquire further though because at the end of the day we didn’t really care that much about the contest but more about the fact that we could finally enjoy this experience together.

So we were 4 friends who decided to go to TORO and 3 of us did the buffet. You can’t share with someone not doing the buffet though (let’s just say we learned this through experience) just so you know for when you go try them out! You have two options, you can either take sushi off the conveyer belt (white plates only though) or you can order off the menu on your table (you can do both if you want as well).

I opted for ordering off the menu as we were sitting far away from the sushi bar and I would find it awkward to constantly walk through the rest of the patrons. I had avocado & cream cheese California rolls as well as salmon & cream cheese California rolls which were absolutely divine and decadent! I did however realise that both the choices of ordering off the menu and ordering sushi with cream cheese in were big mistakes – how so, you may ask?

When you order off the menu, your sushi takes a while to get to the table hence giving the sushi you already ate time to digest. This causes you to fill up a lot quicker than you would want to at an ALL YOU CAN EAT sushi buffet, and the cream cheese being so rich also had a hand in me eating a lot less than I would have anticipated!

I was slightly disappointed by the amount of mayonnaise on my salmon roses, but luckily we had a very hard working waiter and he went to get extra mayo for my salmon roses. Thank you, Jacques!

All in all, it was an amazing experience! The food was great even though I ate less than I would have hoped, and the company was amazing.

You know that table at the restaurant that makes everyone else uncomfortable with the amount of fun they’re having? Yeah, we were that table! There was a man sitting at a table adjacent to ours and he enjoyed eavesdropping on our silly conversations so much that he bought a round of shooters for our table.

Sometimes when you look forward to an experience for a long time it doesn’t live up to your expectations, but my time at TORO really did. The food was good but the company was better, and I’m pretty sure we made our waiter blush a few times as well.

Definitely go give TORO Sushi, Teppanyaki & Seafood a try!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s Take Aways

Take good company with
Sit at the sushi bar to consume more food
Have extra mayo for the table
Be nice to your waiter – give a decent tip

For photos of the evening check out my instagram @imjoxo

My Fav Winter Creature Comforts

As I was having my first cup of Milo (a treat which I reserve for only the cold part of the year) of the season, I got to thinking about how we each have little things that we enjoy about every time of the year. Whether it be Christmas trees and ice cream, or camp fires and mosquito repellent, there is usually something special we associate with every season or at least our favourite season of the year. I thought I would share some of mine.

Obviously the delicious warm chocolatey-ness of a cup of Milo. Some people make it with milk, I however, being slightly sensitive to dairy products, make it like you would a cup of instant coffee. First you add three heaped spoons of the Milo powder and then, if you’re terribly unhealthy as I am, you add some sugar, stir in some milk and add boiling water. A comfort drink of note and if you’re feeling lavish, maybe add a dollop of whipped cream on top, or just some mini marshmallows!
My kind of famous Butternut Soup!! I have made this at many a soup night I have hosted and people are always raving about how tasty it is. I wish I could remember where I found the recipe because I can’t take full credit- someone else came up with it and I’m just very good at making it. So you have 2 -3 butternuts, chop ‘em up into cubes, chuck ‘em in a pot (I use my “stoom pot”), add water so that it only just covers all the butternut. Chop up an onion and a red bell pepper and add to the mix. Cook on the stove until everything is soft. I use a masher to get a better consistency of the ingredients. Then lastly you add 250 ml of cream- it is very important that this has to be full cream as it is the only fat that goes into the recipe. Spice to your taste- I love to add some cayenne pepper for that very slight kick!
Muscadel – I was first introduced to this delicious treat at my 21^st birthday as someone gave me a bottle as a gift. I fell in love, it is basically an extremely sweet sherry. To me it’s almost like you can taste the warmth while you drink it- best consumed in small portions to avoid it becoming too sweet or you becoming too sweet if you know what I mean…Lovely to consume while camping on a nice chilly weekend or just chilling around the fire place on a lovely night in. Some people might prefer something like an Old Brown Sherry if they’re not that into sweet drinks though, has the same effect.
Melk Kos – I tend to describe this as liquid pancakes (South African pancakes- American pancakes are the equivalent of our flapjacks). I haven’t had this in a very long time and I saw a recipe using condensed milk for it the other day. It always makes me nostalgic when I enjoy some Melk Kos- it takes me back to a simpler time. Melk Kos directly translates into “milk food”. So the main ingredient…you guessed it = MILK!!! I won’t say more on this as I will be making the recipe that has the condensed milk in as part of my Authentically South African series, so keep an eye out for that if you would like the recipe.

I hope my list of favourite winter treats has made you remember some of yours and perhaps inspired you to enjoy an old favourite.

Much Love, Jo XO

Jo’s 3 Take Aways

Consider the less fortunate this winter season
Make warm memories
Be inspiring!