Jacana

Whether you enjoy oysters with cap classique, crayfish with chenin blanc, springbok with merlot or oven-baked pudding with muscadel, InFusion is the cookbook for you.

A successful “infusion” of fresh South African produce, liquor and lifestyle in today’s cutting edge industry fill the pages of this book. For those who have already been delighted by his original and creative flair with flavours, textures and culinary twists, prepare to be inspired.

InFusion, Shane Sauvage’s second book, imparts knowledge about food and wine today, including a feast of incredible recipes combined with individual wine recommendations and step-by-step photography. World-class cuisine made easy even for the novice. Expand your culinary horizons today!

“A chef who makes, marriages and fusions work where other fail” – Brian Tuner, BBC Celebrity Chef

“If you we are to discover that ever elusive South African cuisine, it will have to emerge from some process of fusion for we have so many of them. And if it does, Shane Sauvage will be right up there with the founding fathers”
– Andrew Unsworth, Sunday Times Lifestyle

Book details

• InFusion by Shane Sauvage
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770097087
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Photo courtesy Restaurants.co.za

A dedicated group of folk who care deeply about the environment gathered last night in Noordhoek’s Wordsworth Books to celebrate the launch of Grow to Live: A simple guide to growing your own good, clean food by Pat Featherstone.

The author, who is the founder of Soil for Life, a Cape Town-based NGO which teaches people to grow their own food, works with the premise – healthy soil, healthy plants, and healthy people.

Environmental activist Anthea Torr, who edits Biophile magazine, introduced Featherstone’s book, saying, “Grow to Live is a tremendously timeous publication for people moving towards living in a sustainable way. We just have to look at the weather to know that it’s time to become reverent towards our life on this planet. With the world facing three major interlinked crises simultaneously – financial, food and environmental – it is evident that those who acquire the knowledge and skills for cultivating the soil and are confidently utilising any space they have available, no matter how small, will be the protagonists of the future.”

Torr introduced the author: “Born, bred and educated in Zimbabwe, Pat Featherstone moved to Cape Town, in 1973 to take up a teaching post at a local High School. It was not the teaching that brought her here, but the father of her about-to-be children. Three girls down the line and many life experiences under the belt, Pat was propelled into the life she had been born to live. Having returned to her home country to set up a new life in the early 90’s things didn’t turn out quite as expected.

“Tough as it was about to be, she drove from her refuge in Zimbabwe, with dogs, children and scant possessions and enjoyed the freedom of just being. No home, no belongings worth mentioning, no work, no money, and no future on the horizon. Only the multitude of gifts bestowed upon her on entering this world, and her three sisters and a mother who believed that there was a life to be lived.

“With the children out of the nest and armed with a BSc Honours degree, a certificate in higher education and twenty years of teaching experience in biology, biochemistry, parasitology, animal diversity and evolution at secondary and tertiary institutions, Pat committed herself to using all of her God-given gifts, to pursuing her passion for the environment, and to helping people to help themselves to a better quality of life.

“She believes that ‘in the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.’

“Best we love our planet now,” she concluded.

A Gallery of Gardeners

Book details

• Grow to Live: A simple guide to growing your own good, clean food by Pat Featherstone
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770096509
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Jacana Media and Wordsworth Books invite you to the launch of Grow to Live: A Simple Guide to Growing Your Own Good, Clean Food.

“A vitally important book, perfectly timed for the extraordinary times ahead. There should not be a household without one.” Anthea Torr – editor of Biophile magazine

The benefits of food gardens are many: they deepen our connection with nature, quieten our minds and create a new understanding of life. The food that is grown gives physical sustenance. The experience of growing it feeds the soul. Can we grow ourselves out of the environmental problems that overwhelm the planet today? There is hope that we can if we know how to get going and use the goods and services provided by Mother Nature that enable us to work in harmony with the environment. This beautiful and, above all, practical book will teach you all you need to know about growing your own food and is a celebration of the wonders of the natural world.

We look forward to welcoming you at the launch:

Event Details

• Date: Wednesday, 11 November 2009
• Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
• Venue: Wordsworth Books
  Shop G41, Longbeach Mall
  Buller Louw Drive, Noordhoek | Map
• RSVP: Wordsworth Books, longbeach@wordsworth.co.za, 021 785 5311

Book Details

• Grow to Live: A simple guide to growing your own good, clean food by Pat Featherstone
  Book Homepage
  EAN: 9781770096509
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

The Irish-trained chef Jason Comins teams up with acclaimed lifestyle photographer Russel Wasserfall to produce a sumptuous yet straightforward men’s guide to cooking delicious food.

With Bloke, Comins departs from the premise that simplicity is the key to putting a good meal on the table, and the full-colour illustrations and no-fuss layout ensure that any man will be equipped with the basic skills needed to become a handy cook.

About the author and photographer

Jason Comins trained as a chef under the famous UK chef Darina Allen during his time at Ballymaloe in Ireland. He now spends much of his time running chef training programs, as well as spending about 5 months a year in Norway where he manages a salmon fishing lodge.

Russel Wasserfall is a well-known international food and lifestyle photographer. Over the past few years he has also branched out to writing, store design and marketing. He was responsible for coming up with the concept for Bloke.

Book details

• Bloke: a cookbook by Jason Comins, photographed by Russel Wasserfall
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770097711
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy FarmCookingSchool.co.za

Sprigs Entertain is the long awaited follow up to Sprigs Fresh Kitchen Inspiration from the incomparable chef twins, Clare and Fiona Ras – the owners, managers, cooks, bakers, chefs, hosts and chief taste-testers at Sprigs in Durban.

The Sprigs shop and restaurant is a family affair that has been built in equal parts of passion for food and the immense pleasure derived from feeding friends, family and the people who return time and again to their tables. Sprigs Entertain came into being as a direct result of the massively popular cooking courses hosted in their demo kitchen, which are all about getting people relaxed and creative about feeding people in their own homes.

The book combines a host of their favourite dishes, along with new recipes that utilise more contemporary ingredients and explore the tastes afforded by a myriad different cuisines. With exotic ingredients now readily available at the local supermarket, they argue that there is simply no need to limit home offerings to pastas and roasts.

Sprigs Entertain will build confidence in the kitchen and gently push the culinary boundaries. With menu titles like: Gone fishing; Tunisian Morning; Long Italian Lunch; Thai Island Style; China Doll; and Colonial Portuguese there really is something enticing for everyone within these richly photographed pages.

While the sisters are keen to encourage home chefs, the intention is to always to guide, rather than prescribe, and a little bit of home based adventure, according to the Rases, is the beginning of culinary inspiration. With Sprigs Entertain, even something as simple as scrambled eggs, with a twist, can become the centre of a wonderful family gathering.

Sprigs Entertain has been beautifully photographed by Russel Wasserfall, who regularly shoots for Fair Lady and Marie Claire, amongst others, and was the man behind the lens for the ever-popular Harvest.

About the authors

Clare and Fiona Ras run the Sprigs restaurant and food shop in Kloof, Kwa-Zulu Natal and are the authors of Sprigs Fresh Kitchen Inspiration.

Russel Wasserfall is an accomplished commercial food photographer whose work appears locally and internationally in food magazines and on the packaging of high-end food brands.

Book details

• Sprigs Entertain by Clare Ras, Fiona Ras, photographed by Russel Wassferll
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770097193
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy sprigs.co.za

The benefits of food gardens are many. They deepen our connection with nature, quieten our minds and create a new understanding of life. The food that is grown gives physical sustenance. The experience of growing it feeds the soul.

Can we grow ourselves out of the environmental problems that overwhelm the planet today? There is hope that we can if we know how to get going and use the goods and services provided by Mother Nature that enable us to work in harmony with the environment.

Pat Featherstone’s Grow to Live is a beautiful and, above all, practical book will teach you all you need to know about growing your own food and is a celebration of the wonders of the natural world.

Book details

• Grow to Live: A simple guide to growing your own good, clean food by Pat Featherstone
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770096509
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Picture courtesy Soil for Life

Amid the regal splendour of the Comedie Francaise, the French national theatre founded in Paris in 1680 by the Sun King, Louis XIV, a young South African writer was last week awarded the special jury prize at the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards.
 
It is a long journey from the country home she shares with her husband and infant son, half an hour outside Pretoria. But already, Anna Trapido has carved a reputation as a writer and critic specialising in food from many parts of the world.

Daughter of the famous South African novelist Barbara Trapido, Anna’s book Hunger for Freedom: the Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela has captured a worldwide audience. Previously she worked on a pan-African cookbook with Burundian chef Fathi (Coco) Reinarhz.

Last year, she went to Beijing to collect another prized literary award. But the fuss is unlikely to turn her head.

“But it is nice to be a bit posh sometimes and put on a nice frock,” she says.

Food writing has become her domain, based on a simple premise.

“I have always been interested in why people cook the way they do” she tells me. “Food is everybody’s favourite form of material culture. We eat three times a day and don’t get bored with it. We all engage in artistic expression on a dinner plate whether it be high art form or artisan level.”

Where did the idea of the Mandela cookbook come from?

“It was the way my mind works. I have always wanted to know what was on the menu at important political events.”

• Read the complete article in the Sunday Independent

Book details

• Hunger for Freedom: The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela by Anna Trapido
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770095656
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Anna Trapido, author of Hunger for Freedom: The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela, writes about her book for the UK’s Guardian newspaper – and supplies four recipes (see below for links):

Hunger for Freedom traces Nelson Mandela’s journey in food reminiscences and recipes from the corn grinding stone of his Mvezo birthplace and simple dishes like umphokoqo through wedding cakes, prison hunger strikes and presidential banquets into a retirement deliciously infused with the Mozambican seafood dishes of his third wife Graça Machel.

In the course of the research for my book I tracked down the former South African President’s schoolboy contemporaries who put on a traditional Xhosa rural feast for me. I shared biscuits and memories of teenage dinner dates with his first girlfriend. I made his favourite spaghetti recipe with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as she told of a great love lost and thwarted. I wept through ex-prisoners’ descriptions of Robben Island prison rations and roared with laughter at his grandchildren’s tales of the great man’s fondness for Frosties breakfast cereal.

There were Christmas cakes with former jailers and crab curries with comrades past. I was very pregnant throughout much of the research process and to hear Nelson Mandela reminisce about chicken recipes (and offer to deliver the baby) was a huge privilege and an absolute joy.

Looking at Nelson Mandela’s personal and political history from the vantage point of the kitchen offered up hitherto unrecorded insights into a man and the society in which he came of age. In apartheid South Africa every dish was served against a backdrop of racial oppression. In the 1950s parties given by anti-apartheid activists saw drinks served in very short tots so as to ensure that if the police raided the event black people would not be found engaged in the illegal act of consuming alcohol.

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Please join us for these terrific events involving Jacana authors at the Cape Town Book Fair.

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