If you love cooking, or even just enjoy food for food's sake, you should visit Henrie's Hotch Potch, the Highlife regular recipe column for a truly amazing website: www.iafrica.com.

A food guru if ever there was, Henrie Geyser does not supply just any old kind of recipe, randomly pinched from the yellowing pages of Your Average Cookbook. Rather, the wondrous menus that grace the pages of Henrie's Hotch Potch each week have come to exist through endless experimenting and tasting, night after night of gleeful peeling, chopping, stirring, stuffing, straining, baking, grilling, frying and braaiing - wooden spoon in one hand, glass of wine in the other.

We are fortunate enough to have been given permission to reproduce a few of Henrie's recipes, just so that we can get a taste! To visit Henrie at the iAfrica web site where he updates his column every Friday with a full menu of Starter, Main Course and Dessert - click here

"Traditionally, clams are used for this dish, but I prefer using mussels, mainly because fresh clams are not easy to find".

Ingredients

30 black mussels, scrubbed and left in a bucket of seawater for an hour or so. This will allow them to expel any sand they might contain.
1 large onion, sliced thinly
1 tin of peeled tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1 small tin of tomato paste
1 teaspoon sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
3 cloves of garlic, peeled, crushed and coarsely chopped
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
salt and black pepper
5 tots of gin
2 tablespoons of olive oil

• In a large sauce pan, heat the oil and fry the onions until soft, then add the garlic and parsley. Fry for about two minutes, stirring constantly.

• Add 1/2 cup warm water and let the mixture simmer for a minute, then add the chopped tomato, the tomato paste, the mussels, salt, pepper, sugar and the gin.

• Let it simmer until the mussels start opening, then add the lemon juice.

• Remove the lid to allow the strong in-fumes to escape.

Serve on its own, or with plain white rice and or crunchy fresh bread or rolls.

Serves 4

Henrie

To visit Henrie at the iAfrica web site where he updates his column every Friday with a full menu of Starter, Main Course and Dessert - click here