Friends, lend me your meals

I have just been told about the BBC's 50 things to eat before you die (look, I don't have satellite, okay?) and am horrified that haggis seems to make it on to the list. I know this blog is supposedly mostly about things musical but I can tell you as a foodie: you really don't have to try it before you die. Really.

But then I thought, it was your last meal and you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, what would you order? Let me know!

Me, I would find it incredibly difficult to (a) come to terms with the fact that this is my last meal and (b) narrow down my choices. However, this would be a good final feast:

A starter of black mushrooms covered with a bacon and napoletana sauce and topped with provelone cheese and oreganum, all grilled - as I once had at a lovely restaurant called Carvers, set on a lake. Well, a lakeside, obviously - this was not a restaurant on a ship.
Coniglio al forno (baked rabbit) with sage butter and rosemary potatoes (reader, hop on a plane to Joburg and you too can have this at Assaggi in Illovo) and some lovely Tuscan red wine. Oh, and a side of deep-fried salted courgette strips in batter. God, but they're good.
(But a proper chicken Thai green curry with fragrant rice and without coriander leaves - yuck - would also do very, very well.)
Oh, what to have for dessert. One's final dessert must be something truly spectacular, surely. Got it. A standard creme brulee - not as easy to find as you'd think, mind. That's it.
And you have to have a final digestif, no? Try a double frangelico on crushed ice.

Over to you.

Seriously remiss!

How could I possibly fail to mention, under my four (and then some) favourite dishes, the following treats?

Roasted garlic and parmesan grissini from Wild Olive - folks, no mere starter but a superb meal in itself. By cost-per-mass, you'd think they were made from spun platinum or something, but they are unparalleled. We're talking good enough for your last mouthful on Death Row.

Pesto bread with sea salt from Doppio Zero - crusty on the outside, with a sea salt crust on top, fluffy and moist on the inside with layers of pesto spread into the dough. Not a low-calorie meal by any stretch of the imagination, but so very, very good.

Melomakarana, preferably from Fournos - any speakers of Greek forgive my possibly errant spelling - little juicy biscuits made from honey, cloves and nut flour, then baked, soaked in syrup and topped with flaked, toasted almonds. Koeksusters se moer!

Apologies to Caro, but honey, no way was I going to leave out your famous wheel of baked Camembert, topped with a macadamia nut brittle.

Oh, and I also forgot to add one more movie that I can watch again and again: Sin City. It's just bee-ootiful.

Ah, a reminder of the Good Old Days

There was one completely outrageous and utterly brilliant sequence in Days Of Our Lives (and if you don't appreciate the inimitable genius that DOOL displays every few years, why are you on this blog?) that is paid tribute to by the lovely Fuggers.

For those smart individuals who tuned in with me, read this.

Because I was tagged...

... and didn't have anything better to do, inbetween pages on this working Good Friday.

Four (more) movies I can watch over and over
Bring It On (yes, I can hear you laughing)
Moulin Rouge
Quite possibly The Producers, though I haven't actually tried this multiple times yet
Metrosexuality (but only when I'm feeling strong, as the overload of primary colours tends to make me feel queasy quite soon)

Four places I've lived
Gosh. I really haven't moved around a lot, have I?
Oop North in Newhey, which has two streets and lots of hills and forest and snow and bunnies and has two dodgy claims to fame: 1. It had a factory that made press-studs during the war and 2. The Queen (and I'm not referring to myself here) opened a motorway near there. Oooh, and obviously there's 3. Me, Newhey's (likely) most famous export. If you call writing for a newspaper famous, but we Lancastrians don't ask for much you know.
Joburg
Elsewhere in Joburg
And somewhere else just down the road in Joburg

Four (more) TV shows I love
I'm a bad candidate for this because I really can do without TV. No, really, I can, apart from the first item on the list here, and even then I miss great chunks of it because I forget to watch. And do. Can I do without DVDs is a related question, and there I'd probably say: no.
Days Of Our Lives
Bull (yes, laugh, but someone makes about a million bucks in just about every episode, so it appeals. Besides, great credit sequence; Mark Snow is a genius composer.)
Six Feet Under (early episodes - later it gets weird, but then it becomes slightly more normal)
Oh, and of course, when I was in my early 20s I thought Friends was great because I thought it would be superfabulous to live in a glam city and have all your best mates just across the hall with plenty of food and booze and comic get-togethers. Can't watch it now though.

Four (more) places I have been on holiday
Rome! Gorgeous in every way. If you can speak Italian.
London. Ahem. Great museums, best bookshops, expensive booze, unfathomably crap food. Oh, but nice pastries. Certainly nothing I haven't had better at home.
Cape Town. More Cape Town and yet more Cape Town for working holidays.
Franschoek. So pretty! Winelands and mountains. Lovely little-town feel, and of course it is home to Reuben's, voted SA's best restaurant in 2005. Not that they would serve me anything, nonono, because their kitchen was only opening in the next hour. So I couldn't verify the quality of Reuben's fare.

Four (more) of my favourite dishes and other things
Ye gods, I have to pick just four? This is An Highly Unfair Task.
Adriaan's white chocolate & orange ice cream, served on a hot nut-brownie base.
Wild Olive's marzipan nut brownies. Or their nut brownies when they are used as a thick base for their baked lemon cheesecake. (The best in the city. Really. You'd be surprised how few people manage a respectable cheesecake.)
Bang-bang duck, preferably from Orient, not Soi.
Artichoke and orange salad with champagne vinaigrette (sadly, a dish no longer served at Bourbon Street).
Come on, I couldn't stick to just four items. I'm a textbook Taurus and will not have my foodie nature limited. Let me add just a *few* more. Ergo:
Vanillatinis from Addiction - Frangelico and vanilla vodka on crushed ice. Yum! ...
This is closely rivalled by the excellent good Cosmopolitans to be had at The Champagne Bar ...
Which are second only to the ylang-ylang and lavender vodka martini at Orient.
Springbok shank with a cranberry and sherry jus from Thyme Out.
Salad of endive, avocado, feta, orange and toasted sesame chicken strips fried in soy sauce with a lime vinaigrette from Addiction.
Port-soaked dried figs stuffed with camembert and baked in a honey sauce at Soulsa.
Chicken liver pate from Sides at 10 Bompas. It sounds ordinary but you've never tasted anything quite so rich and sophisticated.
The bar snacks at the Park Hyatt in Rosebank - only for the stuffed and marinated green olives. How do they do it? Man, they're tasty - and I normally only eat kalamata olives.
Chicken and sage bocconcini wrapped in parma ham, fried in butter and dressed in olive oil and balsamic from my very own kitchen (recipe by Gennaro).

Four sites I visit daily
Well, I suppose they mean websites.
PSGOnline - for stock prices
Equinox - for unit trust prices
Moneyweb - to see how wrong my more sensational competitors got it
That's it really. What a financial geek I am.

Four (more) places I would rather be right now
At home - it's a holiday for Christ's sake. (For those who overlook the importance of punctuation, I mean this literally. It's Good Friday.)
In my boyfriend's bed, hopefully with him, and tanked full of shiraz. Only we don't know if he's my boyfriend or not, since he has issues. Well, I know what I want, and have said so, but what can you do with Aquarian men?
In Venice. Anywhere in Venice would do.
In this little spot in Delta Park where there is a thicket of huge old cottonwood trees, which always reminds me of a certain section in The Hobbit.
But if there was one place to pick, I'd like to be in my fabulous new house with the renovations already done and the arbour already planted and with fab guests wafting through, admiring my taste and being secretly jealous that I've managed to do all this and have a lovely boyfriend too. (See? Power of positive thought will make it happen. All your good vibes are welcome, reader.)

I ain't tagging no bloggers, coz I ain't got no one else to tag. Most of the people whose lives I like to be up to date with are still old-fashioned enough to phone me and tell me things, rather than blogging about it.