The book starts with several sections dealing with the basics of healthy eating, with tips on what you should and shouldn’t be eating and why. Then there are five sections of recipes, including a section for kid friendly recipes and also a section for healthy desserts! The last section of the book is called Best Basics and is a collection of sauces, pestos and dressings but modified slightly to be healthier.

Each recipe in the book has a beautiful full page picture of the dish, making every recipe look super appealing. Each recipe also has a bunch of tips relating to preparation, alternative ingredients, etc, which is very handy and informative. At the bottom of each recipe is the nutritional analysis which reveals the amount of fat, protein, carbs, calories, etc in the meal. I am a little surprised the analysis is in grams instead of a percentage. I assume the grams are related to the quantities of the ingredients specified in the recipe, which means if you modify the recipe, it’s more difficult to calculate the effect on the nutritional values. Also, it’s difficult to compare the nutritional components of different recipes because the recipes work with different quantities.

The recipes are very simple and quick, so that people can start eating healthy without a massive investment in time and ingredients.I elected to make the One Pot Chicken & Mushroom Risoni (pasta rice). The recipe was easy to follow and didn’t require any fancy ingredients.  I bought some chicken breasts, mushrooms and Roma tomatoes, as well as the pasta rice. The rest of the ingredients I had in my not very impressive ingredients cupboard. Some of the spices I did not have were marked as optional so I did not include them. I think the total shopping bill was about R100.

The meal did not take long to prepare and it looked similar to the picture, but it wasn’t amazingly tasty and I think that’s a result of trying to keep the recipes healthy. When I say it wasn’t amazingly tasty, I mean it tasted good but cutting back on salt, oil, butter and things like that will have to affect the taste. Sometimes we forget that restaurant food is so tasty because there is a huge amount of butter/oil/salt and healthy food can’t generally compete. Although, the dessert we had at the launch of the book was the Orange Chocolate Mousse and that didn’t taste like a health version at all.

These days the food we eat at restaurants is usually extremely calorie heavy so it’s a good idea to be more careful about what we eat at home and Simply Good Food is a great resource to assist with that goal.

The guide is green this year and that apparently points to the inclusion of information on sustainability in this edition. Organic wines and wines that are certified as sustainable are indicated as such in the guide.

The guide has masses of useful information, mostly focused on wines and estates but also on the South African wine industry in general. For instance, did you know that per capita wine consumption in SA has dropped from nearly 10 litres in 1999 to less than 7 in 2009? Or that beer, brandy and whisky have all increases market share since 2000 while wine has decreased (pg 38).

The main focus of the Platter’s launch is the announcement of the 5 star wines. This is a high accolade and heavily coveted in the industry. All 18 judges put forward several recommendations for 5 stars, which are all blind tasted by the panel and those with enough votes go through to become the 5 star wines. This year, out of the 150 nominations, 58 made it. They are listed below.

You can purchase the 2011 Platter’s guide at Kalahari.net.

Methode Cap Classique
- Topiary Blanc de Blanc Brut 2008
- Villiera Monro Brut 2005

Chenin Blanc
- Botanica 2009
- StellenRust ‘45’ Barrel Fermented 2009

Sauvignon Blanc
- Graham Beck Pheasants’ Run 2010
- Klein Constantia Perdeblokke 2009
- Klein Zalze Family Reserve 2009
- The Berrio 2009
- Zevenwacht 360° 2009

Chardonnay
- Groot Constantia Gouverneurs 2009
- Julien Schaal 2009
- Mulderbosch 2008
- Rustenberg Five Soldiers 2008

Grenache Blanc
- The Foundry 2009

White Blends
- Cape Point Isleidh 2009
- Hermanuspietersfontein Die Bartho 2009
- Lammershoek Roulette Blanc 2009
- Nederburg Ingenuity White 2009
- Nederburg Sauvignon Blanc-Chardonnay Private Bin D253 2009
- Rall White 2009
- Sadie Family Palladius 2009
- Steenberg Magna Carta 2009
- Steenberg CWG Auction Reserve The Magus 2009
- Strandveld Adamastor 2009
- Tokara Director’s Reserve White 2009

Grenache
- Neil Ellis Vineyard Selection 2008

Pinot Noir
- Meerlust 2008
- Newton Johnson Domaine 2009

Pinotage
- Beyerskloof Diesel 2008

Shiraz
- Boschendal Cecil John Reserve 2008
- Eagles’ Nest 2008
- Haskell Pillars 2008
- Rijk’s Private Cellar 2005
- Saxenburg Select Limited Release 2006

Merlot
- Shannon Mount Bullet 2008

Cabernet Sauvignon
- Boekenhoutskloof 2008
- Delaire Graaf Reserve 2008
- Kanonkop 2007
- Klein Constantia 2008
- Kleine Zalze Family Reserve 2007
- Le Riche CWG Auction Reserve 2007

Red Blends
- Ernie Els Signature 2007
- Graham Beck Ad Honorem 2007
- Hartenberg The Mackenzie Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot 2007
- Nederburg Ingenuity Red 2007
- Reyneke Reserve Red 2008 (first biodynamic 5 star wine)
- Spier Frans K. Smit 2006
- Vergelegen Red 2005

Dessert Wine, Unfortified
- Fairview La Beryl Blanc 2009
- Klein Constantia Vin de Constance 2006
- Nederburg Winemaster’s Reserve Noble Late Harvest 2009
- Nederburg Private Bin Edelkeur 2009

Port
- Boplaas Family Cape Vintage Reserve 2008
- De Krans Cape Vintage Reserve 2008
- De Krans Cape Tawny NV
- JP Bredell Cape Vintage Reserve 2007

Other awards are:

Five Stars & Red Wine of the Year
- De Trafford Shiraz 2008

Five Stars & White Wine of the Year
- Fleur du Cap Bergkelder Selection Noble Late Harvest 2009

Winery of the year (with an amazing five 5 star wines)
- Nederburg

So I was pretty keen when the guys at Yuppiechef asked me if I wanted to check out the new Jamie Oliver book, Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. The book arrived at my office in the usual Yuppiechef packaging which drew the attention of my coworkers. Next I selected a recipe and invited some friends around for dinner.

I have to say that you can’t fault the recipes in terms of taste. I selected the stuffed Cypriot chicken with pan fried asparagus & vine tomatoes and cabbage salad. Dessert was ice cream float. I was a bit worried about the cabbage salad, which is just raw cabbage, olive oil, lemon juice and fresh herbs, but everyone loved it and wanted the recipe. The whole meal was really tasty and the guests were all impressed.

Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals is also a great looking book, with really appealing photos of the food and Jamie himself in action. With fifty meals to choose from, the book will remain a favourite on your cookbook shelf for a long time.

This is not your usual cookbook. Each recipe is for a whole meal, mains with sides and a dessert. The recipe is structured so that you work on all the dishes at once, going between them so that you finish all the prep and cooking within 30 minutes. This is how you would have to cook to have all the elements of a meal to have them ready at the same time.

It definitely took me more than 30 minutes to prepare the meal, but I think on a second attempt it would be easier. It’s a good idea and will be perfect for some people. It does have some negatives though. It means that you can’t pick and choose elements from various meals and combine them. I found it difficult to select a recipe because I liked certain things from each meal but struggled to find one where I liked every element of it.

Because the recipe is so detailed, there is no space to explain why things are being done. In his other books he explains a lot more and it means you learn a lot more. The book also expects you to have certain equipment and if you don’t have the equipment you will find the recipe quite difficult, but it doesn’t list the equipment required at the start of the recipe, so like me you might find half way through that you don’t have what you need.

30 Minute Meals is good for creating diverse and interesting meals quickly, but certainly not cheaply. If you haven’t done much cooking before, you’re going to have to spend some money stocking up on spices and other basics. My chicken recipe for 4 people cost about R300 (excluding basics like spices, oil, etc), which is cheaper than eating out but certainly not inexpensive.

In summary, 30 Minute Meals is not your usual cookbook. It takes a new approach which will definitely appeal to some people, while others will struggle to synchronise it with their individual cooking style.

You can order Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals from Yuppiechef here.

We seem eager to buy and buy into all sorts of products, remedies and theories. Magazines and newspapers are forever telling us about some new ‘development’ and we assume the science behind it is 100% because they wouldn’t lie. They may not be lying, but they are often stretching the truth or even twisting it.

Do you recognise any of these topics?

• Homeopathy
• Patrick Holford
• Antioxidants
• Matthias Rath
• Measles, mumps & rubella (MMR) vaccination

These along with many others are dealt with in this book. To take one as an example, we are told over and over that we must take in antioxidants to fight the free radicals that cause cancer. Many products proudly boast that they contain antioxidants too. Ben Goldacre shows that the scientific studies have found no benefits from taking in antioxidants and that in fact they could be bad for us.

The point of the whole book is to demonstrate how science is twisted and misquoted by companies and the media so they can sell us something. Some of it has alternate benefits, for instance homeopathy can have a strong placebo effect. While others can be downright dangerous for instance the scare regarding MMR vaccinations which has subsequently raised the occurrence of these diseases due to people not being vaccinated.

Bad Science is really a very interesting book and it’s time we started to be more savvy so that we can actually invest in and develop good, sound, scientific solutions to problems instead of wasting our money and time on quacks and quack therapies.

Do yourself a favour, get a copy of this book and read it. You will not regret it.

Bad Science is available from Kalahari.net

I do honestly believe that corporations are one of the fundamental reasons that the world is in the trouble it is in. So when I’m browsing Kalahari.net and I see a book titled When Corporations Rule The World, I have to buy it and read it.

I know that there are many books on this topic and I’m not sure what made me choose this one. The foreword is written by Danny Glover and Desmond Tutu calls it a ‘must read book’, but I don’t think that is why I chose it. The author, David Korten is highly qualified in the fields of economics and business management, which is good but I didn’t know that when I bought it. Whatever it is that made me choose this book, I’m glad it did because it’s a very interesting and eye opening read.

A lot of books these days are about climate change, but this is not the focus of When Corporations Rule The World. The book does mention the environmental impact of corporations, but mainly with reference to the effect it has on the people who are exposed to those impacts.

The book spends some time looking at the damage caused by corporations and how they take no responsibilty for the damage they cause. The author also spends some time looking at how corporations are fixated on growth, with little regard for the long term implications of their growth strategies. He illustrates the disparity between the rich and the poor, an inevitable result of the capitalist system.

A very interesting part of the book looks as the history of the corporation, from its very humble beginnings to the economic behemoth it has becomes. The authors shows how the corporation was never intended to have influence over government and policy and that laws were never put in place to prevent this eventuality which is now our reality.

David Korten talks about corporate colonialism and shows how corporations have taken advantage of developing countries without compunction. They have become a tool for first world countries to feed their economic growth at the cost of others. We thought colonialism was a thing of the past but it is alive and well in a much more insidious form.

When Corporations Rule The World shows how these giant corporations have circumvented the controls which were meant to be inherent in the economic model in which they operate. Competition no longer exists, costs are externalised and production is subsidised by government, all elements which skew the model on which our economic system is based.

Reading these chapters can be quite depressing. Fortunately he spends the last few chapters of the book looking at alternatives and shining a light on organisations and movements which are already making a difference.

We know that the present system cannot continue unchanged. To change it for the better we need to understand what is wrong with it and this book is a good tool in acquiring that knowledge. I highly recommend it, but as with most non fiction on heavy topics, it is quite a dry read. Almost tending toward textbook reading.

Click here to obtain this book at Kalahari.net

This book was given to me second hand as a birthday present by a friend. What makes that such a great way to acquire a book? Let me explain: 1) My friend knew I would enjoy it, so it was a thoughtful gift. 2) It was second hand, which means reusing, which beats recycling and certainly beats buying another copy unnecessarily. 3) He didn’t have to spend money to give me a gift. Gifting is a massive contributer to over consumption which is a major contributer to the problems the world faces. Why buy people things they don’t need? You can read more about my thoughts on gifting here.

Back to the topic at hand. Heat is an excellent book, a book which looks at practical solutions to the problem of Climate Change, or Climate Disaster as George Monbiot prefers to call it. Climate Change sounds like it’s no big deal, when it is in fact a disaster.

Climate Change, its certainty and its potential impact are not the topic of Heat, so the author discusses them only briefly before moving onto the main topic which is looking at the feasibility of meeting the required carbon emission targets to prevent more than a 2° increase in average temperature (a very dangerous tipping point). He looks at several aspects of life and industry, and evaluates the options for reducing their carbon footprint. The topics he covers are: Houses, electricity, transport, flying, shopping and cement production.

He weighs up the alternatives for each topic and concludes that we can reduce the carbon footprint of each if we make some big changes. All that is, except one: Flying. The aviation industry is responsible for a large proportion of emissions and there is no way of reducing the emissions other than to fly less. This is quite disturbing because my circle of friends see flying as a necessity. For pleasure and for work, they fly around the country and around the world regularly and without compunction. Some even feel they have done their duty when they ‘offset’ their flight by paying for some tress to be planted.

This is one of the main points of the book, we cannot ‘offset’ our emissions, we have to reduce them. I won’t go into the details but planting some trees to offset emissions is a complete waste of time for a number of reasons. There is no way to offset emissions, they must not be emitted and that is the only way we will save ourselves. Flying around the country or the world, must become a rarity.

The last chapter of the book is particularly interesting, as George Monbiot tries to analyse why it is that we seem unable to take the measures required to prevent or reduce Climate Change. He presents several reasons which sound plausible. It think the main reason is that we are just no prepared to make the sacrifices required for something that we will only see the impact of in 20 or 30 years. If anybody takes the time to familiarise themselves with the potential magnitude of the disaster approaching us, they would realise we cannot do nothing.

Each of us needs to take responsibility for our carbon footprint and we need to urge the government to put policies and measures in place to do the same thing for the country. The time for action is now for soon it will be too late. Read this book, see that it is possible and be motivated to do what is required.

Click here to purchase Heat from Kalahari.net

Malcolm Gladwell has a captivating writing style. He shares descriptions and facts which seem irrelevant to the story, but which add depth and colour to a book which is essentially a look at historical facts and statistics. Weaving statistics and the results of scientific studies into stories of real people, he brings what could be dry text book material to life. But more than that he takes these scientific studies and linking them together, he constructs a convincing case for his proposition.

The proposition of ‘Outliers: The story of success’ is that while successful people are talented in their field and they have taken opportunities offered to them, they are not successful just because of that. The book very convinvingly shows that success is a product of many things including when one is born, where one is born and even where one’s ancestors come from. He looks at Bill Gates, professional ice hockey players, airline pilots and Chines farmers, amongst others. He shows how in each of these very different fields, there are many factors which affect the success of an individual. The point is not to say that successful people have no responsibility in creating their success, but rather that if circumstances were different, there would be a lot more successful people in the world.

As with Blink, reading Outliers will change the way you look at people whether they are successful or not. It will help you to realise that people act and think in certain ways for a multitude of reasons, which could be as obtuse as where their ancestors are from. A highly recommended read.

Buy Outliers on Kalahari.net

The consequences of increases in medium and long term interest rates may be particularly serious, given the high level of indebtednes of individual households, many of whom took out large mortgages in response to the unusually low interest rates. What matters is not the average level of indebtedness but the number of households that will face difficulties in meeting their debt obligations. the increasing fraction of mortgages having interest rates that are variable makes this particularly worrisome.

Now, as we see this financial crisis around us brought on exactly as described in that paragraph, take into consideration that this book was written in 2006. It’s obvious that Joseph Stiglitz knows what he is talking about. It shouldn’t come as a surprise considering he has won a Nobel prize for economics, was chief economist at the World Bank and was Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers.

I found this book to be extremely interesting, as interesting as his first book Globalization and its discontents. Joseph Stiglitz is not anti globalisation,  but he is anti the way it has been implemented and managed. With his vast experience and knowledge, he knows that globalisation can benefit all countries if it is managed correctly.

In his first book he describes the problems with globalisation, and in this book he makes suggestions for how we could possibly deal with many of those problems. Covering topics such as 3rd world debt, multinational corporations, intellectual propery and many more, he briefly shows the problems caused by the current way of doing things and then suggests an alternative way.

Making Globalization Work covers many topics which could themselves fill several books. It won’t make you an expert on globalisation (although it will give you some insight into the various issues), but it will prove to you that globalisation doesn’t have to happen the way it is happening right now. You will understand that there doesn’t have to be winners and losers, everyone can win.

The author makes the point quite strongly that unless we change the way globalisation is being managed we will have some dire consequences to face in the near future. Global issues, such as climate change, affect us all and the current system is ill equipped to deal with issues of this magnitude. The time for change is now,  before it is too late.

Click here to buy the book from Kalahari.net

If you find this type of book interesting, you might enjoy this book too: Alternatives to Economic Globalisation

I recently acquired a copy of Rossouw’s Restaurants 2009. It has changed a lot from the 2008 version. Apart from the new look which is smaller and hardcover, it includes restaurants in Gauteng, although much less than Western Cape restaurants. There are in fact 4 sections: Cape Town, Winelands, Garden Route and Gauteng.

All the meals are unannounced and paid for in full, removing much of the potential bias. This is something which I feel is very important when it comes to reviewing restaurants and is a policy I use myself. In his introductory comments, JP Rossouw draws attention to the fact that restaurants often vary in quality over time as there are many factors which can impact the quality. Just because a restaurant is reviewed as good or bad, doesn’t meant it will stay like that forever, so just as I do, he welcomes feedback from other diners in order to monitor the general standard of the various establishments. If you wish to read JP’s notes on his various dining experiences, check out his blog at www.rossouwsrestaurants.com and feel free to post your comments. I comment there regularly and I know that JP follows Relax with Dax and has commented here several times too.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on the book, was to page through and see if I agree with his ratings of the top restaurants and the bottom restaurants. Apart from a few discrepancies, we were in agreement. I enjoy the short reviews and summary information. I don’t have time to read long rambling reviews, I just want a general feel and specific advice on each place along with the price range and contact details. This is all provided in an easy to read format.

The guide does not contain reviews of every restaurant, but there are certainly a lot which are included. Over time the guide will expand to include more, especially in Gauteng as this is the first one to include Gauteng. I gave some thought to how someone might use the guide, obviously reading it from cover to cover is an option, marking off restaurants which have tickled your fancy. But I think a good way to use the guide is to use it when choosing a restaurant. It has lists at the back, indexed by star, food type and location, allowing you to choose a suitable restaurant on whichever criteria suits you. Also, if you have chosen a restaurant, double checking with Rossouw’s Guide could help avoid unnecessary disappointment.

Rossouw’s Restaurant Guide cost R150 and is available at most book stores or on the website.

I consider myself and activist for 3 reasons:
1) I inform myself about various issues.
2) I share that information by blogging and speaking to people.
3) I try and make choices that are ethically sound whenever I can.

These may not be world changing things, but if we all do something, it will make a difference.

In The Everyday Activist, Michael Norton gives many examples of what has been achieved by ‘normal’, ‘everyday’ people. These are very inspiring stories and the best aspect of the book. It is quite astounding what can be achieved when someone puts their mind to something.

The rest of the book looks at the process of becoming an activist, from finding the cause to raising money and getting exposure, etc. It’s a very practical guide. I found a lot of it to be common sense, but I suppose that comes from having some experience in business. For someone younger, or less experienced, it would be very useful information.

There are also a lot of links to websites in the book, some are websites of other activists which could inspire or motivate you and others are links to useful website which can assist you with your project. I found the book to be inspirational and even uplifting, reading about all those people making a difference in the world.

I guess the stories of these people are available online if you know where to look. The practical guide to starting and managing a project was not of great interest to me. It’s a quick read, so I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but I don’t know if I would pay much for it.

Check it out on Kalahari.net here.