Food & Family

Milk Tart Profiterole Challenge for World Baking Day

2013-05-19T18:06:00.000+02:00

I hadn’t even heard of World Baking Day until Colleen shared her stunning milk tart cake in stages on Facebook the other day. The idea is to choose one of a 100 recipes, submitted by foodies all over the world, and bake something just a little way outside your comfort zone on the 19th May.

Never having made choux pastry before, and having already seen Candice’s scrumptious looking blog post with the recipe, I picked her South African take on profiteroles, with a milk tart custard filling. The recipe was ranked number 79 in the difficulty stakes, but I was up for it! I mentioned the challenge to a few friends and they responded with an “Oh yeah, we made profiteroles at school”, which made it sound like it must be a doddle. But as I’d never made them at school or anywhere else, I thought it could still count as a challenge. And I was right!

The first batch of dough in my shiny new Le Creuset pan

This morning I launched confidently into the pastry making and achieved a respectable looking dough, which I proudly piped through a home-made piping bag (a corner cut off a freezer bag) into nice even swirls on the baking tray.

First attempt at piping went well

Into the oven they went, but when I peeped into the oven after 20 minutes my confidence faltered. They hadn’t risen at all, but were already golden brown. Stress! I tweeted frantically and consulted my Anne Willan Readers Digest cooking bible, to find two things I’d done wrong. The water had boiled before the butter was melted. And the dough hadn’t really been glossy before I piped it. I put the blame squarely on my scales, which are of the approximate ball park persuasion and had obviously delivered too much flour.

Sorry, soggy unrisen profiteroles

Wiser by two mistakes so far, I discarded the first sorry, soggy batch and plunged back into the fray. This time I checked the dough for glossiness and added more egg, the scales still being over-generous with the flour.

Now we have the right gloss on the second batch

And this time when I peeped in to the oven at the 20 minute mark I was rewarded with nicely rounded puffs of pastry, maybe a little too golden but definitely puffy. Yay!! After 10 more minutes they were done enough to poke holes in their bottoms to release the steam and put them back in to dry.

Not perfect but definitely edible

Relieved that things were looking up, I turned my mind to the milk tart filling. Milk on to heat, eggs beaten with sugar, flour and cornflour added. The milk took advantage of my back being turned for a minute (Tweeting distraction)to froth over, but I caught it just in time and foiled its evil intent. It was poured over the egg mix, whisked to a smooth custard and then put back in the pan to thicken, stirring all the time. Now I stirred constantly, I really did, but the sauce still managed to turn into lumps on me, so I took it off the heat, whisked madly and eventually put it through the sieve to get rid of the worst lumps. Rather than risking it back on the heat again, I reckoned it was thick enough and hoped it would set more as it cooled. Spices and vanilla were added and I left it to cool.

Meanwhile the rest of the meal was to be a braai, conveniently leaving most of the work to my husband, but I still had to spice the chicken wings and boil potatoes. Flurry of spices, potatoes thrown into pot, stove lit. Done.

Now there was just the chocolate ganache to do. Candice had made a white chocolate sauce, but I’m a dark chocolate fiend and reckoned that I could just substitute that. I brought the cream to the boil, poured it over the broken chocolate pieces and stirred madly to be rewarded with lovely glossy sauce. Perfect first time... or so I thought.

The milk tart custard meanwhile had cooled but was still slightly too runny, so I tried chilling it in the freezer for five minutes and then turned my mind to assembling the profiteroles. Pastry cases, check. Cream filling, check, chocolate ganache at room temperature... errr ... panic, the smooth glossy sauce had gone lumpy and grainy as it cooled.

By now I was past expecting perfection and was going for edible. I tried heating it again over a pot of hot water, but that just added to the disaster as it began to separate. Never mind, it still tasted good and chocolaty. So I got out another freezer bag to pipe the filling into the cases, half-filled them and plonked them firmly onto the plate so the filling wouldn’t dribble out again, squidged a dollop of melted dark chocolate over the top and congratulated myself on a morning well spent. If we learn from our mistakes, it was definitely a steep learning curve.

The verdict of the family: they really liked them and had two each, but reckoned I could have used a cheaper and sweeter dark chocolate or even milk chocolate. Lindt 70% is too good for chocolate sauce it seems!

Disclaimer: All troubles and travails were entirely of my own creation and nothing whatsoever to do with Candice’s recipe which is just as it should be. I’m going to try it again from scratch another day, now I’ve got over the first few choux pastry hurdles.

Thanks to all on Twitter who came through with helpful suggestions and encouragement!

Milk tart profiteroles served up to family with cream

Lessons I learned

I need more accurate scales. The relative quantities of flour, eggs and liquid are even more crucial than in most baking techniques. I think my second batch could be improved on further by getting it more exact.
Making lumpy custard is easier than you think. A lower heat would have been better and more controlled.
I need to research making chocolate sauce with dark chocolate for next time. I would have loved to see these with a luscious glossy coating of chocolate.
It’s OK to chuck it all out and start again.
I should wear an apron more often - sticky custard piped all over T-shirt!

The braai was perfect, the autumn day even better for a lovely family lunch on the stoep

Autumn in the Western Cape

2013-05-13T13:57:00.000+02:00

A sunbird in the Cape honeysuckle against blue autumn skies

Still sunny days, chilly mornings with wisps of mist rising, the first rains, but many more sunny days, an idyllic lull between the fierce heat of summer and cold winds of winter.

Autumn is about the only time of year when the wind dies here in the Western Cape. We enjoy a procession of still days, with only the mildest breezes: a breather between the Cape’s notorious blow-you-off-your-feet summer south-easters and gusting north-westers bringing winter rain.

The first sign of autumn approaching is the flowering of wilde dagga and tecoma, (the Cape honeysuckle): slashes of orange with nectar loving sun birds flitting between them chattering, the iridescent green backs and scarlet mufflers another flash of colour returning to the dry land.

Wilde dagga or leonotis leonurus

New shoots of spring flowering bulbs emerge, the new green is a sign of spring in the Europe, but here it's a reward brought by the first autumn rains, as the watsonias make the most of a whole winter of rain to grow tall before flowering in late spring.

Proteas and sugarbush flowers open. More food for all the sweet nectar loving birds and bees.

There is the scent of honey from what I now know, after our visit to Grootbos, to be metalasia muricata, an unimposing but beautifully scented fynbos plant that grows wild among the restios here.

Then jewel-like yellow oxalis flowers peep out of the sand, furling their petals again at night or on dull days and opening wide to embrace the sun as soon as its rays warm them every morning.

The white oxalis, first of the winter flowers

In the vegetable garden there is swiss chard, growing profusely enough to make spinach torta again and again, then rows of new seedlings of cabbage and salads; but the carrots have been ravished by moles... and by moles I mean mole rats, nothing like the cute velvety surface moles, but large, fat, furry beasts, the size of a rabbit, with long teeth to gnaw through the roots of our mulberry trees and take out rows of carrots, their tunnels making man traps for the unwary.

The hole left after my foot descended into a mole tunnel!

The first guavas are ripening, fragrant and perfumed, soon there’ll be enough for guava fool again. (For guava pics look at this winter post from June 2010.)

Olives ripen on the tree, for the first time in several years, waiting for me to get my act together and brine them for posterity.

Glorious sunrises are a daily spectacle at this time of year, and we’re up to see them now the days are so much shorter. On school days we get up in darkness at 6am, watch the skies lighten at the breakfast table, and rush out to photograph orange, red and pink flooded skies just after 7am, until the sun bursts over the mountain horizon flooding the house with light and warming cold feet and hands.

It’s the perfect time for long lunches on the stoep with posies of nasturtiums, as we did yesterday for my sister-in-law’s birthday. Good friends, good food, sunshine, fresh air and flowers, looking over an incomparable view of mountains.

I might miss European autumns with golden beech leaves falling in drifts, but we still get those same autumn colours in another form here, different but just as beautiful. How does autumn look where you are?

After the Event - the Robertsons Spicemaster Challenge

2013-05-11T16:43:00.002+02:00

My station just before I plate up

I'm back home after rather stressful but very enjoyable morning stepping way out of my comfort zone into competitive cooking! My last post was all part of the competition, a challenge to South African food bloggers from Robertsons Spices, to see who could cook up a storm from a mystery box of ingredients and then blog up a storm about it immediately afterwards. We were to be judged by Chef Reuben Riffel and the winner would get to blog for Robertsons for four months as well as winning some pretty fantastic prizes.

Nerves, nerves, nerves attacked me beforehand. What if I couldn't think of a thing to cook, what if , what if, what if. I revised all my Indian dishes, checked up on the spices for chicken korma, aloo gobi and so on, but in the end the Indian spices, cardamom, turmeric, coriander, mustard seeds weren't on the shelves, so I took refuge in my Italian comfort zone instead. I would normally never serve pasta with a main meat course, but the alternative starches were polenta, cake flour or risotto rice, so I crushed my food snobbery underfoot and went with a simple fresh tomato sauce on linguini that would serve as a foil for the mustard notes of the chicken.

My pic of my plated dish, snapped in the heat of the moment

Then I revved it up a little with a sauce of anchovies and capers mixed with oil and mustard to dip the broccoli in. That was winging it a bit as I haven't made anyting like that for years and I wasn't quite sure if I had it right, but I hope it worked.

The kitchen at SA Chefs Academy 5 minutes before times up

To put you out of your misery (my gorgeous blog friends who are holding your breaths), I didn't win... but I did bring home a lovely little Le Creuset sauce pot and a beautiful beech wood (and very solid) Robertsons spice rack, soon to be used on SA Masterchef,as well as having a wonderful morning meeting and chatting with fellow food bloggers that I'd never met before, and some lovely media people.

Great prizes from Robertsons Spices and Le Creuset

The winner was Barry of Cape Cook, who showcased the spices with plenty of oomph and made a chicken and chorizo stew on polenta. I think my spicing was a tad too subtle... on reflection trying to get that authentic Italian flavour, where the spices are a background note to the other ingredients without overwhelming them may not have been the best strategy for a spice challenge!

Anyway thanks very much to Robertsons for inviting me to take part, to photographer Michael for being so helpful when I was writing my post on a strange laptop and trying to get pictures loaded (no stress!), to Jane-Anne for being so supportive, and to all the other food bloggers there for being such good company. Check out their competition posts too to see what we all went through.

Barry of Cape Cook,
Fritz of Real Men Can Cook,
Thuli of Mzansi Cuisine,
Kristy of Food Monger,
Matt of Curate this Space,
Saaleha of Meals on Speed

Totally gratuitous pic of cute kitten, dogs and spices

Would I do it again...? Yes I think I'm crazy enough to despite the nerves and stress. More than compensated for by the chance to be part of a friendly and fun food event, and of course the Le Creuset pot and Robertsons spice rack!

Live and Spiced Out from the Robertsons Spicemaster Challenge

2013-05-11T11:20:00.001+02:00

Spicy, aromatic and fierce with fiery heat... and that is just the atmosphere in the kitchen at the Robertsons Spicemaster event, where I'm one of seven South African food bloggers competing in a Masterchef style mystery box challenge.

The mystery ingredients reveal themselves as we are briefed - I spot a whole chicken - how on earth to cook that in 45 minutes flat? We have ten minutes to orientate ourselves, check out the ingredients. Spotting anchovies I'm immediately on an Italian themed taste mission, but I want to keep it simple, something I'm used to cooking at home but spiced up for the event. After all I'm competing against some serious foodies here!

The time starts and I grab the chicken and divest it of its breasts. I'm going to grill them with a mustard, oil and vinegar sauce, so they are tender and juicy. There's a pack of linguini which I'll use as starch, even if it's not traditionally Italian to have pasta accompanying the main meat course. Some fresh tomatoes for the sauce with a dash of dried thyme, some garlic and just a touch of dried chilli.

Meanwhile those anchovies are demanding to be used. I ask my chef assistant if there are capers and there are, so I decide on an anchovy, caper and oil dipping sauce for some steamed broccoli. None of this is rocket science or even very ambitious but I hope the flavours will all come together and shine with just that touch of herb and spice that Italian cuisine requires, nothing too showy but tantalising and tasty.

I finish early and am plating up (me who never plates anything at home!) five mintes before crunch time. The plates disappear into the board room for judging. We wipe our brows and are all genuinely amazed at what each other has come up with. Seven very different dishes from exactly the same range of ingredients.

Grilled chicken with mustard, oil and vinegar sauce.

2 chicken breasts
2 tablespoons dijon mustard
2 tablespoons olive oil (the good stuff)
2 tablespoons vinegar
a pinch of Robertsons dried chilli flakes
salt
pepper
a pinch of Robertsons dried thyme

Edited to add:
We only had 25 minutes to write and post our food experience, which was all part of the competition. I ran out of time, so I'm adding the recipe method after the event just in case you want to try this one.

Batter the chicken breasts with a rolling pin or other heavy implement, until they are an even thickness and slightly tenderised.
Mix up the mustard, oil and vinegar with the herbs and chilli. Season this with salt and pepper.
Put the chicken into an oven proof dish and pour over the sauce. Cook under a hot grill for 10-15 minutes, then turn the breasts over, baste with the sauce and cook the other side for another 10 minutes until cooked through. Scoop the mustardy sauce over the chicken as you serve.

Note: I usually use a grainy mustard, but there was only smooth Dijon available, which worked well for flavour but was less visually appealing.

Photos courtesy of Michael the very helpful photographer at the event. Thanks!

Spinach Torta For Sunday Lunch

2013-04-29T13:33:00.001+02:00

A Sunday roast tends to be meat-centric by its very definition. The crispy roast potatoes, the steamed veggies, the baked butternut are all there to cluster around in a supporting role to the main meat event on the plate.

So what do you add to the array if you have a vegetarian joining you for Sunday lunch? They might of course be perfectly happy with fresh steamed vegetables, roasted butternut chunks and roast potatoes, but it still feels to me like there isn’t a centrepiece to hold the meal together if you leave out the meat.

So yesterday morning first thing I went looking for a recipe that would live up to a central role and go well with all the traditional roast accompaniments. I wanted something that would go in the oven with everything else and that could be prepared in advance, so that there would be no extra last minute tasks to compete with making gravy and dishing up the roast potatoes at the very last minute. I also had to already have all the ingredients to hand, either in the larder or the veggie garden.

I found a perfect recipe in one of my Marcella Hazan recipe books. I’d been looking for a recipe for sformato, an Italian baked vegetable dish that I remember from my earliest days working in Tuscany. Instead I found this ‘turta di spinaci e riso’. It was providential because we currently have an over-abundance of swiss chard/spinach in the garden, and this recipe uses a lot of spinach! The flavours manage to be both delicate and robust enough to take on a starring role. The spinach is intensified by cooking without water, parmesan and butter add a rich depth and nutmeg contributes a subtle hint of spice. Our vegetarian guest loved it and so did all the meat-eaters, including three out of five kids present.

I would usually tweak, adapt or add to a recipe before sharing it here, but this one is so good just as it is, that I hope Marcella won’t mind me sharing the ingredients unchanged. It’s from my copy of Marcella's Kitchen, which is out of print now, but still very well worth looking for if you can find a second hand copy. I think Marcella's Italian Kitchen is the US version of the book, which is more easily available.

Spinach and rice torta - photo snapped in middle of Sunday lunch!

“Turta’ di Spinaci e Riso Recipe

Ingredients
900g / 2lb fresh spinach or swiss chard
200g / 7oz long grain rice
60g / 2 oz butter
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 onion
50g / 1 ¾ oz freshly grated parmesan
1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg
4 eggs
Salt and pepper
30g / 1 oz lightly toasted breadcrumbs

Wash the spinach well in several changes of water, until there is no more sand or grit left at the bottom of the sink.

Put the spinach in a large pan (this is a lot of spinach, so I used my stockpot to fit it all in) with only the water still clinging to the leaves. Add a pinch or two of salt and cook covered over a medium heat until the spinach is tender. Turn the spinach once or twice so that it cooks evenly and keep an eye on the heat so that it doesn’t boil dry and stick. At the end of cooking all the spinach should be tender and there’ll only be a little liquid in the bottom of the pan. Allow to cool, then squeeze out the excess liquid and chop roughly..

In a small pan bring water to the boil, add the rice and cook until just tender/al dente. Drain and cool.

Chop the onion fairly finely.

In a large sauté pan, heat the oil and half the butter. Cook the onion for 4 minutes or so until light golden. (Don’t let it catch.) Add the chopped spinach and rice to the pan and toss everything together over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes until all coated and flavoured with the onion, oil and butter. (Note – don’t stint on the oil and butter, even if it seems excessive – this is part of the flavour combination that makes it work). Tip it out into a bowl and allow to cool before proceeding.

You can make the recipe up to this point a few hours in advance, which I would recommend if you are making it as part of a Sunday roast... I ended up using every single pan in the kitchen yesterday!

Preheat the oven to 220C / 450F.

When the mixture is cool, stir in half the grated parmesan and the nutmeg. Mix in eggs one at a time. Season generously to taste with freshly ground black pepper and sea salt.

Prepare a loose bottomed tin ( I use my 23cm cake tin but anything 20-25cm would work) by smearing generously with butter. Sprinkle in the breadcrumbs to cover the butter. Shake them around until the tin is well coated, then tip the excess crumbs onto a plate.
Put the spinach mixture into the tin, level it off, then sprinkle the top with the rest of the grated parmesan and the leftover breadcrumbs. Dot the top with butter.

Bake at the top of the oven for about 15 mins until the torta is set and golden.

Allow to cool for about half an hour, as it is best eaten warm rather than piping hot.

Anyone want some spinach? - we have plenty and to spare!

A blog post featuring this recipe with US quantities.
Another Italian recipe from Marcella Hazan featured on my blog - celery risotto.

In Memory of Badger

2013-04-26T20:35:00.001+02:00

We returned from our blissful visit to Grootbos to find all the children happy and well, but Badger, our 10 year old border collie, was not doing so well. He’d been to the vet a week before and there were no obvious infections, so we knew it was probably going to be something more serious if he hadn’t improved with the general remedies they’d given him.

On the Sunday evening he didn’t eat, although he plainly wanted to, so first thing on Monday I took him in and left him for the vets to check him out. Sadly it turned out to be a horrible throat cancer and so we had to make a decision over the phone then and there. I was far more upset than I’d expected to be, usually I manage a stiff upper lip with the eventual demise of pets, perhaps it was because it felt too soon and too sudden.

We’ve had Badger from a puppy. He was born on the farm, one of six pups to Berry, my SILs collie who has also recently died. Cobalt our collie, inherited from our dear friend Ursie, was his father, an incestuous liaison that is probably against all the rules of good breeding and happened by accident.

We’d picked one puppy from the litter already, Indigo, who our son had fallen in love with, and were only intending to keep the one puppy. But when a family of prospective puppy buyers came to view the last three pups, this little ball of fluff with huge brown eyes kept coming up to me and gazing up with those eyes saying 'pick me, pick me'. Impulsively and irrationally we kept him too.

So there we were with a four year old, a toddler, a three month old baby and two border collie puppies to bring up. The puppies used to curl up on the baby play mat in the kitchen with Youngest, when I was cooking supper.

Indi was bright, energetic and eager to please, Badger, noble looking and we suspected slightly on the dim side for a border collie, but very loyal and protective of his family. He was always ‘badgering’ us for attention, so the name (given for the broad white blaze down his nose) became doubly apt . He was a total farm dog and hated going in the car. We tried to get both puppies used to it, by taking them to pick up the kids from kindergarten. In the end we gave up and they have always stayed home to guard the house, a duty they take seriously.

A stormy relationship with his father Cobalt, made the house less than peaceful as Badger grew up and there was much snarling and jockeying for the prime position under the kitchen table. They never did resolve their differences, so it has only been since Cobalt died a year ago that Badger has really had a chance to be the boss and lie unchallenged in all the best places.

It feels strange to only have the two dogs following me out to the washing line or the veggie garden. There is a gap. Indi feels the responsibility of having to bark for two at arriving and departing cars. Amy, the Jack Russell, tends to join in noisily only once the defences have been truly breached and the invaders are at the door.

The family has been clamouring for a puppy for months now, ever since my husband suggested that as our dogs are starting to get older we need to introduce and train the next generation (me as always resisting the pressure as long as possible). So we have to decide whether we will go the puppy route or adopt a rescue dog. We will be getting another dog, when the time feels right, but we will miss Badger for a while yet.

Badger joining in Youngest's birthday party six years ago.

Grootbos Nature Reserve Part 2 - Fynbos and Philosophy

2013-04-19T08:30:00.000+02:00

This is the second installment of our wonderful night away at Grootbos Private Nature Reserve. Read the first part here.

The view from our deck at dawn

Waking up in the morning to a dawn sky, soaking in the bath and watching colours change as the sun creeps over the hill behind us, listening to bird chatter in the fynbos, a magical start to the day at Grootbos

The bath tub with the best ever view

We’d planned two activities for the morning – if we’d been staying longer we would have just chosen one and had a lazy lie-in, but as it was we were at breakfast by 8 and spoilt for choice both with the buffet and the cooked to order hot breakfast.

There were cereals, muesli, yoghurt and bowls of seeds, nuts, raspberry and passionfruit puree as toppings, fruit salad, sliced fruits, cold meats and even smoked trout as well as fresh croissants and muffins. I went for a very decadent Eggs Benedict and then re-visited the buffet because I couldn’t resist the smoked trout and a croissant.

Grootbos is so much more than just a lovely five star retreat, though it does all that superbly well in a friendly and unpretentious style. I loved all the pampering, fantastic food and comfort, but it was the activities and the place itself that made the biggest impression. The nature reserve grew out of the owner, Michael Lutzeyer’s, mission to conserve the beautiful fynbos eco-system of this region and their conservation programme has developed to an award-winning world class level. Not just that but the importance of enriching and giving back to the community here is actively recognised in two very successful social responsibility programmes.

The plant nursery at the Green Futures project

We were shown round both by Anecke, herself a graduate of the horticulture Green Futures training programme. Every year eight candidates are carefully selected from the two neighbouring communities of Stanford and Gansbaai and receive a very thorough grounding in both indigenous horticulture and basic life skills. As well as learning all about the fynbos plants and how to grow them, they learn computer skills, how to keep accounts, how to drive, language and interview skills. There is also an exchange link with the Eden Project in Cornwall UK, so every year three students get to travel there for three weeks and experience conservation overseas.

The vegetable gardens at the Growing the Future programme

The second programme Growing the Future is aimed at local women between the ages of 18 and 35 and is a year course in growing organic vegetables and fruits. After three years this is becoming a self-sustaining initiative, growing produce to sell to the lodges, free-range chickens providing the eggs we’d just eaten for our breakfasts, bee-keeping producing delicious fynbos honey to sell in the shop and making preserves for the restaurants. Graduates from both programmes receive a nationally accredited certificate and can go on to do further training on site as guides or as lodge staff, or apply to do further horticultural training elsewhere. Many of them choose to work at Grootbos and the cheerful faces, confident and individual personalities of all the staff and guides we met are a testament to the success of the training.

Lavender for companion planting in the vegetable garden

We were whisked back to the lodge just in time to sally forth once more on our 4x4 fynbos safari with Jo, a wonderfully eccentric guide with a passion for her subject and a sprinkling of philosophy thrown in.

As we left the road and headed up a mountain trail she stopped to pick mysterious sprigs of restio, erica, protea and with hilarious deadpan anecdotes showed us so much more about how the natural fynbos eco-system works.

I’d never realised that the humble sour fig, which grows like crazy on our farm, is a vital refuge for small animals such as tortoises during fires. They can creep into its shelter and the succulent leaves protect them from the fire’s heat. I hadn’t known that restios are either male or female, that certain ericas need fire to reproduce: so many details shared in an entertaining and fascinating way. We also discovered the source of that elusive honey fynbos scent that pervades the bush around the lodge – metalasia muricata, or its less than glamorous common name, the cauliflower bush.

Jo picking sprigs of metalasia muricata

Jo stopped the vehicle at a beautiful viewpoint for snacks, delicious home-baked cookies in four flavours, and while we were eating and chatting she wove all the plant samples picked on the way into a stunning bouquet, then turned wedding photographer to each couple in turn.

After this tour we were filled with even more respect and admiration for how much Grootbos has done in the last 20 years to preserve, restore and protect the incredibly rich flora, gradually acquiring more land as neighbouring farms were sold, until they now have over 2000 hectares of pristine hill, milkwood forest and mountain.

The main lodge at sunset

Back at the lodge it was already lunch time, time for us to reluctantly leave, but we stayed long enough to sample the lunch buffet, a fresh and flavoursome feast of salads with a choice of three hot mains to follow and even a dessert, though we were still too full from breakfast to make it all the way through the menu.

There were so many more activities that there just wasn’t time for in our short visit: horse riding trails through the fynbos, beach walks and picnics, a coastal cave tour, whale watching in the winter months, and of course the spa in the milkwood forest where there is no need of canned birdsong relaxation tapes, as the real thing wafts in through the open doors.

All in all I found Grootbos a thoroughly magical place to visit and the memories are sustaining me through a rather hectic week. If you get the opportunity, do not hesitate – go there and stay for as long as you can!

Fynbos bouquet

Note for my non-South African readers: fynbos is the name given to a particular type of vegetation mainly found in the southern tip of Africa. Low bushy green scrub is what it looks like to the eye, not a tree in sight. But when you look up close you find an enormous variety of different plants and flowers. Our guide, Jo, explained that to be identified as fynbos it should have four principal types of plants: proteas, ericas, restios and bulbinous plants. It’s an eco-system that supports many birds and small animals, but not a single giraffe or elephant! It's beautiful, fascinating and just as an essential item on any traveller's bucket list as the Big Five.

Disclosure: Our stay at Grootbos was complimentary, but I received no remuneration for writing this post and all opinions are my own.

Grootbos Nature Reserve – Five Star Fynbos Getaway

2013-04-16T16:20:00.000+02:00

The view from our suite

We’re back from a fabulous night away at Grootbos, a gorgeous nature reserve overlooking Walker Bay, near Hermanus, whither I was very kindly invited, to experience its magic for myself. A patchwork of impressions and memories: a rich green canvas of incredibly varied fynbos, friendly faces, fabulous flavours, mysterious milkwood forest, winding paths and entrancing views. You could stay for a week and never have a dull moment, but we crammed as much as we could into our 24 hours and would happily go back for more tomorrow!

Looking up at Forest Lodge from the road, we had no idea of what we’d find... we saw an unimposing row of low linear buildings perched high on a hill that seemed uniformly green with the native fynbos, dense and bushy, of the forest there was no obvious sign... But as soon as we parked the car the magic began to weave its spell.

Winding paths led through a beautifully planted fynbos garden, scented with honey and shaded by ancient milkwood trees. The paths are designed so that you hardly see the main lodge building until you are upon it, feeling almost lost in the forest, when in fact it is right there all the time.

Forest Lodge is spacious, understated and modern, soaking up the views from huge glass walls, softened by lots of wood, textured fabrics with patterns of leaf and protea, natural decorations and fynbos flower arrangements.

The warm welcome from all the staff, who are always smiling and genuinely happy to be working in such a beautiful place really adds to the positive energy.

The pool at Forest Lodge overlooks pristine fynbos and the ocean

In our suite/cottage we were spoilt for space. Built on the same understated modern lines as the main lodge, it is warm and welcoming, with wooden floors.

There’s a bedroom, a sitting room with a built in fireplace, a huge bathroom with the tub right in the big window looking out of the view and even a second bathroom. The deck in front links both rooms and the fynbos comes right up to it, so that you can lie in bed watching the birds flitting in and out of bushes and smell that delicious honey scent in elusive wafts on the morning breeze. There’s an outdoor shower out there too, but it wasn’t quite warm enough to tempt us. The sitting room has a comfortable leather sofa, lovely wooden tables and best of all the fireplace with a generous stack of logs. We lost no time in making a cup of tea and putting our feet up after our long drive.

Patrick and Chumani on our Milkwood Forest walk

We’d signed up for a guided walk through the milkwood forest at 5. It was just us and our guide Chumani, who led us off down the paved paths, until we came to the beginning of a small trail. As soon as we’d left the main path it felt like we were in the middle of ancient forests far from anywhere. The milkwood trees take forever to grow, some of them being several hundred years old, and they are not tall, but there is a peace and quietness to the air, hanging lichens, twisted branches. It’s baboon territory, the home of birds and buck, but although we see the tracks of buck and the baboon poo and twigs they have broken, the animals themselves are elusive. Chumani was an entertaining guide, telling us all sorts of stories and the uses of many plants learned from his grandfather.

Twisting branches of ancient milkwoods, festooned with lichens and mosses

Then it’s a meander back to our cottage to relax and change before dinner. The sun is streaming in now as the sun dips lower and we both start to go mad with our cameras catching angles and patterns and feeling almost giddy off on our own without the kids.

Photographers on holiday

A spectacular sunset over the ocean reminds us why sundowners are such a great South African institution. We have cups of tea instead and leap up every five seconds to take another photo.

Then just when I think the drama is over and am about to view the afterglow from the vantage point of the shower, I spot a sliver of new moon hanging just above the sunset orange. It feels like a wonderful promise of more magic to come.

Dinner was a five course gourmet feast. A full on review would be a blog post in itself, but suffice it to say that I had a wonderful time identifying flavours, tasting my husband’s dishes as well as my own and trying desperately to photograph the plates in appropriate food blogger style in low light conditions. We had a hilarious time improvising a mini studio with his phone as light source and napkin as a diffuser.

The taste highlights for me were the amuse bouche of fish tartare, mussel cracker fish with coriander and lemon zest in a crisp filo pastry shell, and the oh so tender kingklip with a pea and chorizo sauce.

Grilled kingklip, pea and chorizo veloute,tatsoi and truffle salad with improvised studio lighting

The night was clear, starry, windy and rather chilly, so it was a brisk walk rather than romantic stroll back to our cottage after dinner, where the fire had been lit for us, curtains drawn, bed turned down. It was cosy and intimate, the bed very comfortable and, we fell asleep to the sounds of wind gusting around the roof, looking forward to all the activities planned for the next day.

Our next morning’s activities and fynbos safari make up another post, so read Part 2 for more Grootbos magic!

Disclosure: Our stay at Grootbos was complimentary. I received no remuneration for writing this post and all opinions are my own.

Easter Trees and Easter Goodies

2013-04-02T14:48:00.000+02:00

The Easter bunny has never been known for his restraint when he visits our farm. Egged on by two doting aunts he provides an egg hunt of epic proportions, spread around the four houses on our farm. This year one aunt was deeply worried that the children would be disappointed as she hadn’t had a chance to furnish the bunny with much in the way of eggs, and just maybe they wouldn’t have the usual excessive amount of little eggs.

He has always left an egg in the children’s trees. They each have one. Our son’s planted on his first birthday (now a well established flowering tree), the girls’ planted together just after Youngest was born. Unfortunately theirs never thrived where we put them. Middle Daughter’s pompom tree sadly died, needing richer soil and far more water than it could find and Youngest’s had to be moved into the orchard irrigation system as it was surviving but only just. So it was of utmost importance to plant themselves new trees before Easter Day.... something that from this tree planting post I see I’d been promising for nearly two years.

On Saturday I finally took them tree buying. There is a nursery down a very long dirt road not far from us, that we’d never been to, so we trundled and bumped along there and were pleased to find a good selection of indigenous trees. Middle Daughter had in mind a coral tree, which has gorgeous flame red flowers in spring, but they only had some tiny new plugs. The girls perused all the rows, reading all the labels.

Eventually Youngest decided on a White Stinkwood (an elegant deciduous tree much prettier than its name) and Middle Daughter chose a Red Alder (which apparently has creamy white flowers that the birds and insects like in autumn). I bought two coral tree plugs as they are so pretty once they are flowering, even though it will probably be ten years away growing them from so small.

Back home we got out the dowsing rods to find suitable places to plant them.

A few meters each way can make a huge difference to whether a tree grows well here. You can see the ones that have found their own water. The ones that haven’t have hardly grown in ten years, despite being watered through the summer months.

Then we waited for the fierce south-easter to drop to do the actual planting. It never did, so we went back out into it at the end of the afternoon, dug, composted, watered, planted mulched and staked.

Those trees are going to be the best looked after trees on the farm, already having been treated to the proceeds of a cleaned out rabbit hutch today!

Easter morning dawned overcast but not at all cold. I had to hop out of bed fairly smartly to beat the children to it, not that any of them still have any illusions about where the eggs come from, but it still spoils the fun if they actually witness the eggs being hidden by human hands! It turned out that the Easter bunny’s other major source had over-compensated for the one aunt’s lack and I had to be even more ingenious than ever to find enough hiding places that were both in the shade and reasonably dog-proof!

When the children went out to search at 7.30 on Easter morning, eggs were discovered in nooks and crannies all over the place and of course in the new trees.

The total harvest came to more even than last year and after the grand counting and re-distribution had taken place each child had a shocking 79 small eggs! Enough to last them till August at least!

Our Autumn Festival

2013-03-29T10:00:00.000+02:00

We long ago realised that our festivals now have their own energy and momentum. Whether we invite them or not, the people who are meant to be at any particular festival come. Sometimes there are big crowds, other times just one family. Each festival somehow comes together perfectly out of the chaos of our last minute organisation.

Our autumn festival last week was a case in point. We usually have them on the nearest Saturday to the solstice or equinox but that Saturday was taken up with our friends' wedding. The following weekend was Easter. So we thought we’d have it on the Thursday, the equinox itself which happened to be a public holiday. But then we didn’t get around to organising anything, or inviting anyone – we were all tired, recovering from colds and completely lacking in energy.

We thought it would probably end up just being us. The girls of course protested – half the fun for them is running around with their friends. So the day before we asked two sets of local friends if they’d like to come along to a very last minute festival. One family could, the other mother couldn’t get away, but her kids were determined to come anyway, another school friend asked to come and the daughter of the girls' riding teacher begged to come along, though her mother was going to be working. All of a sudden it became a children’s festival with just a bare minimum of adults along.

It worked perfectly. We put all the kids in charge of getting the circle and sandpit sorted. They carved gem squash, while two adults had a go at the pumpkins, and then the kids disappeared outside to build and decorate sand-castles.

The few adults sorted the food (soups, bread and bean stew, followed by the inevitable choccie pudding and guava fool), and wrote our blessings, found the printed vision prayers, put together a basket of harvest goodies and that was it. Simple and effective and just right for this particular occasion.

The one element that we didn’t manage this year was making straw angels, or rather angels from restios, flowers and any found natural material, but here are two posts from previous autumn festivals that show some pictures of them, as well as our kids looking so much younger that it begs sentimental nostalgia every time I look back!

A Wedding and A Quiche Recipe

2013-03-27T17:25:00.002+02:00

We went to a lovely wedding last weekend. As a nine-year-old the bride had helped open our presents at our wedding and now it was her turn. Having watched our wedding video once a year all their lives, our kids now think it’s normal to sit on a picnic blanket and open all the wedding presents there and then, so they were rather disappointed to hear that they were unlikely to see the pressies being opened at this one. I had to explain that baking a batch of cookies as a gift might not be a good idea, because some couples even wait till after the honeymoon to open their wedding presents. How could that be possible!

Weddings are exciting and infrequent events for our girls. It’s a far cry from Four Weddings and a Funeral where Hugh Grant wakes up and says wearily, “Who is it this Saturday?” As soon as they heard that our friends had become engaged, it was, "When is the wedding?" and "Will they have bridesmaids?" They are just the right age to enjoy an occasion to dress up and have an important role to play, so were thrilled when they were asked to be flower girls. Youngest already had the perfect dress and Middle Daughter had her first ever shopping expedition dedicated to finding her the perfect dress, exhausting but successful.

They were married under an ancient oak tree in a completely home-made ceremony that involved all their family and of course the strewing of rose petals by the flower girls. The girls said it was the best wedding they’d ever been to!

And the quiches? The maid of honour organised all the guests to contribute a recipe to a book she was compiling for them. Due to a long-standing, if rather well-worn in-joke, my sister-in-law and I both decided to provide our quiche recipes. I immediately searched through my blog, convinced that I must have shared the recipe at least once in the last seven years (Yes, it’s coming up to my seven year blogiversary already!) only to find that I never had put the whole recipe up. Once I’d posted a pea quiche recipe, once a sweet plum quiche, but never my staple spinach and feta quiche recipe with pastry instructions attached. So here it is, along with a little of the story that goes with it.

Spinach and Feta Quiche Recipe

Once long ago, pastry was a terrifying mystery to me. I loved it, but it did not love me. So I avoided it in the kitchen and gave quiches a wide berth.

That is until one day, when we still lived in the cottage and Youngest was a new baby, Kirsty (the daughter of our dear friend Ursie, who was a home-cooking inspiration and who had recently died of cancer) offered to show me how her mother made hers: the pastry turned out to be simple, no great secrets and it’s been working perfectly ever since.

So here are my jotted notes from Kirsty’s impromptu lesson. She, being her mother’s daughter, didn’t need a recipe to work from, but I usually refer back to my notes just in case I lose the magic touch!

Pastry for quiche or any other savoury tart
1 cup cake flour
50g cold, hard butter
Pinch salt
Iced water to mix

The only secret of pastry seems to be keeping it all cold. So use the butter straight from the fridge and use icy cold water to mix it.
1. Cut the butter into dice and rub it quickly and lightly into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs.
2. Mix in the iced water a little at a time until it comes together as a dough. It might need half a cup of water or more or less. Just add it a tablespoon or so at a time, stirring with a knife. When there is enough water, it will knead into to a ball of dough quickly. It should be soft but not sticky.
3. Wrap the pastry ball in cling film and rest in the fridge for at least half an hour.
4. Roll out the pastry thin enough to fit a roughly 23cm dish or tin.
5. Blind bake: put piece of foil or greaseproof paper in the pastry case, fill it with dry beans to weight it down and bake at 190C for 10-15 minutes.

Filling for Spinach and Feta Quiche
3 large eggs
1 cup of cream
1 bunch of spinach
1 round of feta (from those Simonsberg pots)
Salt, pepper and nutmeg

Steam or boil one bunch of spinach or swiss chard until just tender. Drain well and chop roughly, discarding the liquid as it oozes.
Chop or crumble one round of feta cheese into small pieces.
Beat together cream and eggs and season with salt and pepper
Once the pastry has blind baked, put the spinach in the bottom of the case, sprinkle over the feta, pour in the egg mixture. If you like nutmeg, grate a little over the top.
Bake the quiche at 190C for30-40 minutes until golden and set.

You can make the pastry the day before, and roll it out into the dish. Cover it with cling film and keep in the fridge till ready to bake.

Vegan Treats and A Market

2013-03-04T17:47:00.000+02:00

Most months I share a market stall with a friend at our local Camphill market. It’s more a social day out than a money-making enterprise, a chance to meet local friends, for the kids to earn a bit of pocket money by baking and selling their biscuits and for me to earn enough to pay for our lunch and a few other goodies.

It means getting up at six on a Sunday, baking up a storm with the girls and then, more often than not, leaving the kitchen an icing sugar dusted chaos of baking trays and mixing bowls for my husband to sort out, as we dash for the door bearing trays and containers of crunchies, muffins and iced biscuits.

Last month I had two customers asking if I had anything vegan. I didn’t. All my baking is lavish with real butter. But I promised to work out a vegan version of my crunchie recipe and bring it to the next market. I reckoned I could replace the butter with coconut oil, decrease the refined sugar quotient (to make them healthier) by using molasses instead of syrup and go from there. What I didn’t know was quite how the texture would turn out. Would they be crunchy, or cakey, or crumbly? I left it till the last minute to try out, so only on Saturday did I put my re-jigged recipe to the test. It worked.

They were crunchy and only a tiny bit crumbly. And they tasted good, though of course different to real butter crunchies – more deep molasses flavour and less buttery toffee smoothness. I’m not going to share the recipe just yet, as I want to tweak the quantities a bit more, but I sold most of them and had good feedback.

The other coincidentally vegan recipe I’d been meaning to try ever since I read it on Lucullian Delights was farinata. It’s a traditional Italian flatbread-come-pancake made with chickpea flour. It’s the perfect example of Italy’s cucina povera coming up with the ultimate in dishes catering to modern food preferences – gluten free and vegan - and is very easy to make. It’s a brilliant snack or accompaniment to a meal, if you have unexpected vegan or gluten intolerant visitors to cater for.

I’d bumped into some chana flour in our local Spar, so grabbed it (pretty sure that I remembered chana meant chickpea). Then I tried the recipe out on my family in the week, was very surprised that the girls really liked it, and decided that farinata too must come to the market.

We have home-grown onions hanging in the garage, tomatoes being harvested quicker than I can cope with them, so I was even able to feel virtuous about its organic locally grown ingredients... apart from the flour of course which was bound to be flown in from somewhere far-off!

It was a hot day and the market rather quiet, as people headed for the beach instead of inland sun spots, but I sold most of my wares. The girls were busy with organising and taking part in games for their school stall, so were rather weary by the end but nothing that a refreshing dip in the pool wouldn’t fix as soon as we got home again.

Dreaming of Luxury and Romance

2013-02-07T21:19:00.001+02:00

My husband is very bah humbug about Valentine’s Day. He quite rightly reckons that if you love someone you tell them so every day and in every way without being dictated to by the hype of one particular occasion. So we’ve never done the roses and dinner by candlelight 14th of February thing. Instead we have our own funny little tradition that I shared at the end of this post with hearts on our hands.

However it looks like this year I’m going to have a luxury romantic break come my way anyway. Out of the blue yesterday I received an invitation from Grootbos Nature Reserve to come and stay for a night. Now this is a stunning nature reserve two hours from Cape Town, overlooking the ocean. A place of beach picnics, whale watching (in winter and spring) of beautiful views and pristine fynbos, it’s a five star luxury retreat with fabulous food, and a whole story behind it that I’m looking forward to discovering. So romance in a luxury nutshell, and I get to take my husband!

We probably won’t get there till March, things being busy here right now, but Grootbos do have a fabulous special offer on for the whole of February if you are feeling tempted to go overboard with the spoiling. Their Month of Love offers a Valentine’s half price special (half price is R2100 a night per person sharing, so think lavish!) which includes all meals, a selection of activities including that beach picnic, horse-riding and all sorts, and a free spa treatment.

I’ll let you know all about it after our visit, but if you do get there first let me know what you think... or, on second thoughts perhaps, keep it a secret so it’ll be a wonderful surprise for me!

Disclosure: I am being offered a complimentary night at Grootbos but am receiving no other remuneration for writing about them and all opinions are my own.

Ginger Oat Cookies on A Quiet Saturday Morning

2013-02-02T13:55:00.001+02:00

An unusual silence for a Saturday morning. The house is holding its breath, a dog’s snoring the only sound above the rustle of leaves in trees, as an infant south-easter prepares to ruffle the hot morning air.

I’m home alone, which hardly ever happens; the girls at an impromptu sleepover, my husband dropping our son and his inseparable computer at a friend’s house for the weekend before heading off to a meeting.

I made all my noise earlier with the vacuum cleaner, washing machine and dishes, in a fit of virtuous housewifery. Now I’ve run out of steam and virtue, finished my book and I’m not ready to do any of the 101 things that I ought to do. The siren call of bloggery lures me and I remember a half finished post intended to feature an essential biscuit recipe... can I find it? Of course not.

Waiting for something to happen

We’re out of biscuits now; the full tin that I was preening over in the vanished post a distant memory. But instead of baking up a storm and wowing my family on their return with tantalising wafts of newly-baked goodies, I’m going to write that post all over again instead. Maybe, just maybe, the girls will bake something when they get home, if they don’t just collapse in a heap after their jollities. In the meantime it's too hot to bake.

This recipe for ginger oat biscuits is one that I always used to keep stocked up in the biscuit tin, back when I was a full-time mother and the kids were toddlers in urgent need of regular snacks. The oats are a sop to the health freak in every mum, and if you are avoiding wheat you can use rye, oat or combinations of almost any other flour; it’s very forgiving recipe. And they are tasty, satisfying and not too fancy for everyday.

Ginger Oat Biscuit Recipe

115g / 4oz butter
1 cup / 250ml plain flour (or wholewheat, rye or oat flour)
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda / baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup brown sugar (soft dark brown or demerara)
½ cup white sugar
1 egg
1 cup rolled oats / porridge oats
1 ½ teaspoons ground ginger

Preheat the oven to 160C / 325 F
Makes about 24 cookies

Cream together the butter and sugars. Add beaten egg.
Sift flour with baking powder, bicarb, salt and ginger. Stir it into the butter mixture.
Add the oats and mix well in.

You should now have a soft rather crumbly dough.
Dollop generously heaped teaspoons of mixture onto two greased baking trays about one inch apart. The biscuits will spread as they cook.

Bake for 15 minutes until they are firm at the edge. The biscuits will crisp up as they cool. Cool on a rack and then store in an airtight tin. They keep well if you can manage not to gobble them all up in a day or two!

Here is the same cookie recipe but as a chocolate and cinnamon version, posted back in the early days of my blog, when the kids were little.

Home alone is only a relative term with so many companions of other species available for conversation at any time.

Horror’s Story – The Final Episode

2013-01-15T08:00:00.000+02:00

Our little black cat had the most fiercely independent and tenacious nature, I’ve come across even in a species known for those qualities.

She used up most of her nine lives in narrow escapes and hazardous exploits, but hung on to that last one for another five years after the vet shook his head over her and advised us to take her home to be comfortable for her last few weeks. She recovered, relapsed, recovered and never ran out of determination for an instant even at the last.

Back when we lived in our London photographic studio, before the children came along, our cats were our kids. We bought them solely to solve our mouse problem, so we told ourselves, they were to be studio cats with a job to do... they quickly became part of the family.

The studios were old factories and warehouses with tin roofs, surrounded by railway lines and archways. Our kittens soon became streetwise, finding their way around the rooftops, making it safely along the street to the pub, playing with mice in the cobblestone yard, miaowing to be let in at our skylight at three in the morning, urban cool cats to the core. There were delivery vans and trucks in the yard, express trains on the tracks, long drops from the railing that they used to access the roof. Sometimes they featured in fashion shoots, other times they entertained visiting photographers and models and looked decorative. Certainly the mouse population moved out to safer pastures.

Horror (named Horatia, shortened to Horry and thence corrupted) among other exploits managed to stowaway on a trip to Birmingham in a furniture van (luckily being brought back to our yard on the return trip). We think she fell one time from the high platform that led to our first floor studios as she came in limping. She definitely lost one life one Christmas, when we were away: our friend came by to feed the cats for us and found her with her head wedged in an empty cat food tin, limp, almost out of air. He was probably more traumatised than she was and remembers it to this day.

Her middle and old age has been mellower. Since we brought her to South Africa, she adapted to country life and showed the dogs who was boss very early on. Last year she used to enjoy taking showers in the herb garden sprinkler, getting herself thoroughly soaked and washing furiously.
More recently she has been weaker, lying out in the sunshine in the middle of the path, where she would be right in the way, sprawling in the centre of the kitchen floor to be tripped over. It was as if she wanted to make sure she was close to the action, even though she was getting rather deaf and blind. I’d be making bread and step back only to find she’d crept up behind me and I was treading on her tail again. Yet she was still fiercely clinging on to life, demanding to be fed, expecting attention, purring, deciding for herself exactly where she wanted to be. With some animals you know it is time to take them on a final journey to the vet, that they are ready to go, but with Horror that moment never came.

We came back from our week’s holiday at the river to find her a little weaker than before. She greeted us and lay in our path as usual. The next day she didn’t bother eating and lay out in her usual place all day slipping gradually into a comatose state. We thought then it was the end, wondered about taking her to the vet, but decided that would be more traumatic than kind. It was the right decision; she slipped away gradually in her own time, at her own pace. At the end of the evening found that she’d gone. It was her time, she’d finally decided to let go.

Summer Holiday

2013-01-13T19:03:00.001+02:00

I’m sitting on a stack of rocks half-way up a steep track, the smell of fynbos and scrub wafting in hot afternoon sun, looking down on the roof of our home for the week. A wide stretch of brown river catches the sunlight, cliffs on its far side bounce back the cries of hadedas and geese. We’ve been in and out of the water all week swimming, canoeing, drifting, paddling. I’m only perched up here right now because the girls have decided we must have a pudding for our friends’ last night and this is the only place where I can access the internet on my phone.

I’ve been ignoring technology all holiday but I need to look up the ingredient quantities from a couple of my trusty recipes and there they are right there on my blog – our crustless milk tart and the pastry recipe for Nigella’s translucent apple tart, both simple recipes using basic ingredients that we happen to have with us, for improvised puddings when none were planned. So my phone, which has been ignored all week, is dusted off and put to use just long enough to grab the recipes I need before I dip back into the water for another swim.

That’s one more reason why I love blogging – I can put up my recipes once and know that I can get hold of them from anywhere, as long as I can get online that is. Then when you’ve been blogging for so many years, a blog becomes more like a family album. Sitting on that dry scrubby hillside, I started getting nostalgic looking through those early posts; a time when the kids were little and I blogged a lot more often, about them as well as about food.

And yet another reason to love blogs came through my email today. My second cousin got in touch – we haven’t seen each other for years now that we’re in South Africa, but she’d just found my blog and it was lovely to hear from her. And then there are all the lovely blog friends that I would never have met if it were not for blogging.

I’m feeling like an old fogey championing the blog over more recent and ephemeral forms of social media... who would ever be able to scroll through years of old Facebook statuses to find a recipe they knew they’d linked to there once... Twitter is there for a day, Facebook for a week or two but blogs are forever (cue cheesey soap opera theme tune in the background). Remind me to back mine up again!

We’re back from our holiday now, half the laundry mountain dealt with, poised between holiday relaxation and return to work stress. School starts next week and plans have to be made; my mother’s visit comes to an end; clients have to be contacted to get the work flow going again; early January in SA is rather like limbo with half the country determinedly clinging on to summer holidays, the other half frustrated in trying to get things happening again.

So I’ll just pretend we are still on holiday and post a few more pictures of Breede River magic, so that I can remind myself for years to come - the feeling of silky soft river water on skin, the squish of mud at low tide, the somnolence of a day devoted to water, reading and food, long days that pass by happily and seamlessly all too fast.

Summer Festival on 21.12.2012

2012-12-30T16:21:00.000+02:00

There was so much hype about Mayan calendars and the end of the world potential of 21.12.2012, that, now the date has been and gone and we’re all still here, it seems a slight anticlimax: just Christmas as usual, presents under the tree, too much turkey stuffing, and torn pieces of wrapping paper still decorating the floor.

Not that we were expecting the world to end. Our take on the numerological significance was that it might be a major energy shift, the start of a new way forward. So we went as far as shifting our summer festival one day, to celebrate it on the actual day of the solstice, 21.12 itself instead of on the nearest Saturday. How better could we deal with a portentous date than by gathering friends and family together in our circle and creating some positive energy around us all.

The day was hot, hot, hot, and friends came Friday-late, after last bits of Christmas shopping, finishing off work and escaping the clutches of town. They disappeared into the swimming pool to cool off and so all the preparation was even more last minute than usual. But our festivals have a way of panning out and it all came together in perfect timing, so that we went into the circle in the soft half-light after sunset, when the heat had faded from the day and a warm glow lingered in clear skies.

Our summer festival theme is air, so it was about making windmills, flags in chakra colours, prayer flags and blowing bubbles, anything that blows in the wind and captures the lightness of air.

Our long table was filled with a confusion of windmill making, salad preparation, tea and champagne drinking, with the Christmas tree in the background for the first time, mingling festivals and reminding us of the next one on the list... usually we get the tree on the day after the festival, but with Christmas on the Tuesday already it seemed a shame to leave it so late.

The vision prayer has become a fixture at our festivals now and had a strong energy said all together, and if the energy shift is about new beginnings I can’t think of a better prayer for it:

THE VISION PRAYER
I have a vision where all people are at peace, fed and housed,
every child is loved and educated to develop their talents,
where the heart is more important than the head and
wisdom is revered over riches.

In this world, justice, equality and fairness rule.
Nature is honoured, so the waters flow pure and clear and
the air is fresh and clean. Plants and trees are nurtured
and all animals are respected and treated with kindness.
Happiness and laughter prevail

And humans walk hand in hand with angels.
Thank you for the love, understanding, wisdom, courage
and humility to do my part to spread the light.
May all the world ascend
So be it

The next morning I went into the circle early, as the sun was rising, and the energy felt wonderful, full of beauty and vibrancy, or perhaps it was just the flags catching the sunlight and the cool morning air.

An Abundance of Ducks

2012-11-13T21:19:00.000+02:00

Abundance is one of those wonderful words that we use all too often. Unspecific, it conjures up visions of harvest festivals, cornucopias of plenty, everything we need, just when we need it. We add it to our list of positive intentions for the year; love, health and abundance, our grown-up Christmas wish list for our families.

Sometimes though I wonder whether perhaps we should have been slightly more specific about what we wanted in abundance, especially now, when our ducks have produced brood after brood of ducklings, which seem to be thriving all too abundantly, with far fewer casualties than most years.

Ducks are notoriously bad mothers. My sister-in-law has regularly been traumatised by losing ducklings to birds of prey, snakes, or simply to their mothers letting them get cold and wet on a chilly spring day. Several years back it got so that the only way of raising the next generations was to take them away from their mothers and raise them under a light until they were big enough to weather the big wild world on their own.

Setting up a pen to raise the first brood this year

About three years ago we were down to one lone duck after an eagle picked the rest off one by one, and we had to advertise in the lonely hearts column for two more ducks to keep him company. Last year however one mother duck successfully raised two broods, immediately laying a second clutch of eggs after her first eight ducklings were whisked off to be raised in safety. We were suddenly up to twenty or so ducks on the farm.

This year her offspring have proved remarkably dedicated to their reproductive duties and, over the past month, no fewer than seven mama ducks have emerged from the bushes proudly leading lines of fluffy yellow or brown ducklings. The first two broods (of eight and twelve respectively) were duly taken to a safe warm box of straw to be raised. The next ones were herded into the duck pens with their mothers to be kept safe from predators but take their chance with the vagaries of ducky mothering abilities. Mamas five and six were also penned in a big run on our stoep to keep them safe.

By the time we got to Mama duck number seven there was nowhere left to pen her, so she was allowed to roam free. She’s amazed us by only losing one duckling so far and being a remarkably good mother. She supervises water play and calls them out to get warm and preen feathers after they've had long enough. She keeps them warm and hidden away at night and has restored our faith in ducks instinctive mothering skills. We then started feeling bad about one penned mama who was getting very frustrated with her captivity, so we thought we’d give her a shot at raising her ducklings free range too. They were a week old already, still cute and fluffy but not as tiny and vulnerable as newly hatched ones.

So before the girls went off to school today, we caught the whole family, took them to a nice area of bushes and released them. After five minutes of the girls running around after her with the ducklings that had got left behind, mama duck seemed to have calmed down and have all her ducklings under control. Until, that is, free-range mama duck arrived at the water run-off with her brood. This is where the grey water runs out into a small ditch and is a favourite duck playground and wallowing area.

The newly-freed ducklings rushed off to join the free-range brood and played happily in the water for ages. By the time free-range mama called her family out of the water to preen their feathers, the other ducklings had so far identified with their new friends that they went and joined free-range mama, copying all their movements.

Duck grooming session

Their own mama meanwhile was wandering around quacking desultorily, looking for them in all the wrong places. Even when we shooed her down the hill to join them, she didn’t seem to recognise them as her own. Three of them wandered towards her, then changed their mind and ran back to their new friends. In no time free-range mama had a family of fifteen clustering around her and other mama was quacking around distractedly any time she remembered, in between having a nice bath herself and forgetting about them entirely.

I was inclined to leave things as they were, free-range mama seeming to be quite happy with her extra large family, but in the end distracted mama was given a slightly larger pen area and put back in with most of her babies. One of hers has remained with free-range mama and nobody seems to mind the swap.

Distracted mama duck re-assigned to high density housing

The first hatchlings now have their adult feathers and are ready for new homes. I think we’ll be repopulating the entire local area with ducks at this rate, so if you hear of Cape Town being overrun by a mysterious plague of ducklings next spring, it may well be our ducks to blame. Unless of course this was a freak breeding season and next year we go back to cocooning our few precious survivors once again.

We are lucky enough to have an abundance of strawberries too this season, so I’m not going to complain about the Universe’s generosity. Just need to get jamming to show that I really do appreciate it!

Birthday Treasure Hunts

2012-10-13T14:41:00.002+02:00

“You haven’t organised anything yet?!”

A look of wide-eyed horror flashes over our friend’s face. It’s the afternoon before Youngest’s birthday, I’ve picked the girls up from their school and am waiting at the stables for our son to arrive with our lift-share. The party is still unplanned apart from the four friends invited after school the next day. I’m slightly tense but by no means as panic stricken as the situation might warrant. I always do the skin of my teeth method of birthday party planning these days.

Perhaps I was more organised way back at the beginning of our kids’ party career. That first treasure hunt for our son’s fourth birthday, when the treasure was buried in a tin, in the heap of building sand awaiting the foundations of our house... had I worked that out in advance? I’m sure I would have shopped for the treasure further ahead than the actual birthday morning itself, which is what happened yesterday. With only 35 minutes before picking up girls and guests from school, to do the week’s food shop plus find treasure, it was more a case of grabbing mini bars of Lindt chocolate and hurried phone calls exchanged with my sister-in-law who was out and about in a more frivolous shopping area. But at least I had spent the morning thinking out the story, working out and encrypting clues and they were all in place; not like one party, when the guests had arrived and I was still running around writing and hiding clues around the farm.

For some reason inspiration only seems to come to me at the very last minute... perhaps the angels take pity on me, racking my brains to come up with a new story and new angle after 10 x 3 birthday treasure hunts.

The first years were easy – buried pirate treasure, flower fairies, angels, unicorns and a very simple trail of clues geared for five-year olds to work out. Now we’re on about the third year of pony themes for both girls. Clues have to be more complex and preferably there is some de-coding work involved.

A rather rumpled map of our nature conservation area!

This time the six girls got a map of the farm, with ten trees that had to locate – the back story was that they were trail riding in our beautiful nature conservancy and the map took them to all the beauty spots. They were please to ride only on the trails to keep their ponies safe from snakes and avoid disturbing the wildlife (our grass is long at the moment and the start of warmer weather is bringing snakes out of hibernation). Each tree would yield a coded clue that would show them the way to a secret part of the conservancy.

So they set off armed with the map and a Schleich pony and rider each (these six girls all have their own collections and play elaborate games together every time they meet). Amazingly they found all the trees from the map, only defeated by one rather too well hidden clue in a poplar tree. They then had ten slips of paper with a jumble of unintelligible words on.

The code was a simple letter shift A=C and they all set to de-coding and then fitting the pieces of paper together in the right order. The de-coded message sent them to the sand-pit where our festivals take place, where a jam jar of more slips of paper was buried in the sand.

These sent them back to the herb garden where a Five Roses tea box was hidden in a different herb bush for each girl. The treasure ended up being the chocolate bar, a felt strawberry made by Middle Daughter and some body stickers, fun erasers and a notebook contributed by my sister-in-law. Phew all accomplished and then it was time for tea.

Youngest had ended up making the cakes (one for school and one for home) mostly by herself, with just a bit of my help, while I made bread and got supper the night before. My SIL helped making sandwiches when we all piled out of the car after the school run and there were strawberries that the girls had picked the day before to wash. Lays ready salted crisps, carrot sticks and some mini biscuits were all else required (the traditional cheese biscuits never made it to the top of the to do list this time). Then they all played horses again while I made pizza for supper -gone are the days when guests were packed off home at 6 o'clock... now they sleep over or at least stay until the end of the evening, after supper and a pony movie!

So one more birthday has been ticked off the list and our Youngest is officially 10. I wonder for how many more years the treasure hunts will be required? Our son dispensed with them when he turned 13. Middle Daughter thoroughly enjoyed her 12 year old one, which involved the Code of Claw from the Underland Chronicles and had them all clustered around iPods de-coding from the digital copies of the book that they had all been reading. So maybe I won’t be putting away the treasure hunt hat just yet. My husband is hinting that we should start a tradition of grown-up treasure hunts at Christmas for the whole family.... not sure whether my last-minute creativity will be able to cope with that as well as all the rest of Christmas, but we’ll see! Maybe I could set the rest of the family to devising clues for me to follow to an extra large stash of dark chocolate... now that would be a treasure hunt!

Two more treasure hunt posts: the detective treasure hunt for our son's 10th and the night time treasure hunt by torch light for his 11th.

Blog Envy

2012-10-11T10:23:00.000+02:00

Reading other people’s blogs is something I love, strolling through snapshots of other lives, finding new friends, enjoying a clever phrase here, admiring ideas and envying tastes of other countries. It’s a distraction from my own life, expanding horizons, filling gaps.

There are times though, when I’m in a grumpy slump that I find myself gritting my teeth, envying in a resentful way rather than a gleeful one, feeling that I fall short because I haven’t achieved those things that I would normally be admiring: that larder stuffed full of home-canned organic produce, that beautifully made art work, that perfectly styled and thoughtfully devised new recipe.

That’s when I have to kick myself sharply, remind myself that my blog only shows the highlights, the public smiling face. While I’m busy going green over some other seemingly more perfect life than mine, there may be readers of my blog who sometimes have to grit their teeth in envy of our seemingly idyllic life.

Because it can be idyllic, but it is also life with all the gritty bits. Some blogs manage to pour out woes as well as triumphs and still be absorbingly readable, but it needs a perceptive honesty and a wry sense of humour to air the downsides of your life as well as the ups. Something I’ve not even attempted here. Not that there are any huge tragedies, but who wants to read about the small wearing difficulties of life, the price of petrol that makes living on a farm out of town ever more expensive, making you think twice about scheduling any extra activities, the rutted dirt road that shakes all our cars to pieces... I’m not sure that I even want to write about them and give them space, rather keeping my rose-tinted spectacles firmly wedged on my nose, putting my fingers in my ears and going lalalalala....

So instead of berating myself for not having accomplished all the best bits of everyone else’s achievements, I need to accept that we’re all different and get on with my own, even if they seem less interesting and more mundane to me. Writing, posting, social media stuff, interspersed with feeding ducklings, hanging out laundry, picking up kids from school, planning tomorrow’s birthday treasure hunt, a bit more writing, ticking off the list of articles and pushing aside the accounts again until they reach crisis point... again. Seems I’m human, not perfect after all, hard for a Virgo to admit!

So do you suffer from blog envy too? Is it OK to grumble out loud on your blog, or do you also feel the need to put on a smiling face for your readers?

Spring Festival 2012

2012-09-23T17:56:00.000+02:00

Our festivals have gained a momentum of their own by now, unfolding each time in different ways with very little management by us. It’s almost self-defeating to plan things in advance. We have a whole list of things we think we should be doing and then everyone arrives at the end of the afternoon rather than the beginning and it all has to be concertinaed in to fit. I’ve almost managed to stop stressing about this now. Our latest spring festival was one of those.

On some spring festivals everyone arrives before or just after lunch and the kids spend the afternoon building elaborate water sculptures in the sand-pit, other decorating the circle lusciously with flowers and a river of light (candles in brown bags) winds down to the circle. Year by year it gets more elaborate until the list of tasks to complete is almost daunting. This year it was more of an exercise in cutting it all back down to essentials. Only three families were coming and they all arrived at five o’clock or after.

The big kids were immediately despatched to tidy up the circle and the sandpit, then to gather some flowers for decoration. One friend started immediately on the archway with the help of his little kids, others started making flower crowns from real flowers as they chatted over tea. It was the first time that no-one had time to sit down at the computer and write their blessings. But it all came together.

The arch was flowery, two gorgeous vases of flowers arranged by Youngest and a friend stood at the entrance to the circle. The water bowls were clean and fresh. Everyone except the big boys (now at once too old and too young to be seen dead wearing a flower crown) had their own quirky concoction of flower crown aloft. Water was poured into bowls, flowers sprinkled on top. Blessings were said spontaneously rather than written and Middle Daughter played recorder for us at the beginning and the end.

We love it when we have a whole leisurely afternoon for preparation, but it was good to be reminded that the spirit of the festival is there however simply we decorate, however rushed the preparations.

Three quiches, two roast chickens, two plaited loaves, one large salad and a bowl of baby potatoes fed us, followed by chocolate pudding, a pavlova with the first strawberries of the season and a bakewell tart with the last frozen youngberries of last season.

The kids, who are now mostly getting too big to be called kids, all lounged on the sofas, leaving the table to the adults, and the three little kids ran around between both groups. Quote of the evening: our son looking tolerantly at toddler and four year-old running around enthusiastically: “We were like them once.” The whole weight of being fourteen was in those words! He was actually very good with them and ended up with a devoted four year old at his heels the whole evening.

Now the sunny but cool spring day has given way to a chilly wet almost winter day again, but spring has been celebrated in due style!

Because everyone arrived so late yesterday I had plenty of time to play around with my latest obsession: my phone photography apps. I've had this phone for a year now and only now have I really discovered the possibilities- instagram, picframe and a host of other addictive apps. So in between baking bread and quiches and picking flowers I had time for photographing our elderly cat Fluff enjoying the spring sunshine.

And messing around with the bread dough.

So let me know if I go overboard with the framed photos, cos right now I'm probably having far too much fun playing with them!

Spicy Chicken Wings on the Braai

2012-09-19T16:54:00.000+02:00

Chicken wings weren’t even on my food radar before I came to South Africa. All skin and bone with only small morsels of playing-hard-to-get meat inside... I didn’t see the point of them at all. Fast forward a few years and I am educated in all things braai by my husband’s family: chicken wings have become a delicacy, fragrant and crispy skin coated in spice, tender, falling apart meat inside, eaten hot from the grill, juggled between scorched fingers but irresistible all the same.

Last weekend was an unseasonably warm hint of summer, perfect for an impromptu first braai of the season. I was cudgelling my brain for a new recipe, original, startling and noteworthy enough to mark the occasion and to make a good blog post for Cooksister’s Braai the Beloved Country event. My husband requested chicken wings and boerewors.
“But I want something to blog about.”
“Have you ever done a blog post on chicken wings?”
I hadn’t, so there we go, decision made, not startling or original but a braai staple, in our family at least.

I decided to assert my food bloggerness by devising a new signature spice rub for the chicken wings. Usually we use my brother-in-law’s secret spice mix, which may or may not burn your lips off with its chilli heat, depending on the batch and his inspiration when he mixed it. It has a whole variety of spices and barbeque spice mixes in it, but I hadn’t yet come up with a version that was my own.

I wanted something spicy but slightly more subtle: something to entertain the taste buds rather than bludgeon them into submission. I ended up turning to Jamie Oliver’s section on rubs and marinades for inspiration and adapted his fragrant and hot dry spice rub. It was good but leaves room for more experimentation – the fennel was a bit too in your face at the start, though it mellowed out after the first mouthful, and I wouldn’t mind a bit more of the fragrant cardamom coming through. It’s spicy but not at all burny, no chilli at all, which I don’t think my brother-in-law would approve of!

So I’ll give you my adapted version of the recipe that I used as a starting point. Feel free to experiment with it and let me know what other versions you come up with. I’ll add any further adaptations and improvements through the summer braai season.

Fragrant spice rub for chicken wings
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons nigella seeds*
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 clove
½ cinnamon stick
2 cardamom pods
2 cloves garlic crushed
Salt and ground pepper

*I used the nigella seeds that came in my FBI goody bag, but they aren’t easy to find. Fenugreek was what the original recipe asked for if you prefer to try that.

In a heavy pan over a medium low heat, toast all the whole spices lightly, stirring occasionally.
Either pound the spices to a powder in a pestle and mortar... or give up half way and pour them all into a coffee grinder and do the whole job in about two seconds flat. Clean the coffee grinder out well afterwards!
Crush the garlic cloves and mix in with the ground spices. Add salt and a bit more ground pepper to taste.
Rub the spice mix into the chicken wings and leave the spices to permeate for a few hours before braaiing.

Then let your wings sizzle over hot coals, turning frequently, while you sip a chilled glass of Tangled Tree * butterscotch chardonnay, as the sun dips below the horizon and you pretend it really is summer.

This post is in honour of Cooksister's annual Braai the Beloved Country event, whcih takes place on south Africa's Heritage Day, 24th September, otherwise known as National Braai Day.

My entry last year was this ostrich and butternut kebab recipe, also a darn fine thing to cook over the coals!

Look out for Jeanne's round-up of braai recipes on Monday.

*I'm really enjoying sampling the range of Tangled Tree wines that I won in their competition last month - all very palatable, full of flavour and accessible. I'm saving the Chocolate Cabernet Sauvignon till last!

Spring, Veggies and Bunny Bouquets

2012-09-03T10:33:00.003+02:00

Spring is fickle. One minute wooing you with bouquets of daisies, the next blowing a gale and laughing manically as it catches you in a shower of rain. Luckily our vegetable garden seems to thrive on this callous treatment.

The cabbages are pictures of bursting health, we have an enviable broccoli crop this year, and while for some bizarre reason our last carrot planting failed, there are new rows beginning to show promising signs.

An evening walk - Youngest still immersed in book

Most mornings we walk around the farm road to try and get at least a bit of exercise before freezing in front of our computer screens for the rest of the day.

We walk purposefully along, stride up the hill until we reach the veggie patch, where I veer off the road and start gathering a bouquet of greens. Bunny bouquets for the two rabbits and two guinea-pigs, who must have the healthiest diet of any caged pets: beet leaves, nasturtium leaves, cabbage leaves, broccoli leaves, rocket gone to flower, spinach, lettuce, radishes.

Picking all this fresh food for them delights my frugal-disguised-as-green-living soul. All they need is the outer cabbage leaves, the lower broccoli leaves, the thinned beets from overcrowded rows, the radishes that have got too huge for us to eat.

It’s free for the gathering, unlike the extortionate bag of designer guinea-pig food sold to my husband in the pet shop, where the girls chose their new guinea-pigs. State of the art flakes of dried fresh food, guaranteed to have a residue of vitamin C and originate from real apples and carrots... like eating your salads in the form of breakfast cereal.

The bouquet looks so pretty that it’s a shame to let it drop to the floor of the cage... the guinea pigs stand up on their back legs and squeak desperately until I hand it over. It’s polished off in twenty minutes flat. Thereafter any time we go past the back door heart-rending squeaks ask for more, more, more.

Inspired by all this free goodness I made a Thai green vegetable curry for supper last night, hoping to convince the kids that this is an edible option. I put in plenty of potatoes as a base (they will all eat potatoes at least!) then added in the just-picked broccoli and spinach. All I can say is that three out of five of us ate it quite happily and at least our son will eat plain rice till the cows come home... what was that vitamin deficiency linked to rice-eating, I wonder?

And spring on our farm continues to look gorgeous, every time the sun shines and brings the daisies out in a blaze of dazzling brightness.

Sun Safe

2012-08-27T12:16:00.001+02:00

In my lifetime we’ve gone from a tan being the ultimate goal of every summer holiday, and a sign of health and beauty, to having a suspicious love/hate relationship with the sun. Yes we love sunny days, yes we need sun to make the plants grow, but let’s keep it off our skin in case it gives us skin cancer, let’s slather ourselves with strong chemical sun-screens at all times before going outside, let’s protect our eyes with wrap-around sunglasses.

It seems that this devotion to sunscreen has back-fired. Current research suggests that incidences of skin cancer have increased since the general white population took to using sunscreen from the mid 70s onwards. Not only that but some kids are so well protected from the sun that they are suffering from vitamin D deficiency. We need the UV rays in the sun to help our bodies make its own vitamin D. Apparently we also need to absorb full spectrum daylight through our eyes for good health. So sunglasses and filtered prescription sunglasses are having a negative effect.

Living in sunny South Africa we have always been dutifully on the sunscreen bandwagon. Our kids have fair skin, summers here are hot and burny. We’d be bad parents if we didn’t surely? This article has me thinking seriously about re-defining our sun strategies. Perhaps we should reserve the use of sunscreen just for days at the beach rather than for every day going to school? And I should definitely look for a physical sun block instead of a chemical sunscreen. And a new face cream for myself without the chemical SPF ingredients. If you’re interested go and read the article – I’m not going to try and summarize it here, as there’s a lot of information and long scientific names for me to get wrong!

Another article on our need for full spectrum sunlight has me taking off my glasses to go and sit outside in the winter sun for a while, baring my arms to soak up a little vitamin D. This second article on the work of John Nash Ott is based on anecdotal evidence due to the impossibility of getting funding for a controlled scientific study, who’s going to fund a study proving that you can get healthier from free sunlight after all? But it makes sense to me. There are many examples of cancers that slowed their growth or healed once the patient was regularly exposed to full spectrum sunlight.

I guess what it all comes down to is getting some fresh air every day outside in the sunshine, being sensible about how long you stay in the sun and not messing around with artificial chemicals, UV filters and all the rest. Chucking the kids off the computers to go and play outside and build up a natural tan gradually, going for a walk instead of switching on the television... all those usual healthy common sense things, that our parents urged on us when we were kids, and not a quick fix pill in sight.

Are you a sun lover or a shade seeker? Do you use sunscreen all the time or just occasionally?

Marmalade Making

2012-08-22T10:40:00.000+02:00

When winter is more than half way through and you reach for the last jar of marmalade on a nearly empty shelf in the larder, you know exactly what you will be doing next weekend. At least I do.

Life without marmalade is unthinkable, even if no-one else in the house eats it. A piece of lightly singed toast, butter melting into it and spread with chunky, tangy marmalade is one of the perks of a dull winter morning. The sunshine lingers in the citrus peel, I’m convinced of it.

So the last three Saturdays have been marmalade making days. A last minute panic at the end of the orange season, while we can still buy bags of oranges cheaply and limes are still sometimes available. Eek... August already and usually I start making in June, where did the year go? One batch isn’t going to last me out the year, two batches might just, three batches allow for judicious gifts to fellow marmalade lovers. If I do a fourth I might even have enough to sell at the market.

I use my mother’s three fruit marmalade recipe and combine eating oranges (we can’t get Seville oranges here), grapefruit and lemons, usually adding limes or naartjies too. So far this year each batch has had its own distinct character. There’s the batch where I had some rather old, hard limes that I squeezed the juice of but didn’t add the peel; the one where I had no limes at all and put in a naartjie (tangerine) instead for an added fragrant note, forgot about the pot on the stove and just made it in time to prevent it from a repeat of last year’s burnt pot disaster; than then the last one where I finally did have fresh limes and got exactly my favourite balance of sharpness and sweetness.

I frequently forget to label them before putting them up on the shelf, so later in the year it’s a lucky dip when I grab a jar and never know which one I’m going to get. Not quite the way to go for serious product development, but as I’m the main customer I forgive myself in advance!

I’ve finally got the perfect tool for cutting up citrus fruit. At the Food Bloggers Indaba we were all generously given this ultra sharp serrated Wusthof knife by Yuppiechef who sponsored the event. It has made slicing and shredding almost effortless, whereas my hand used to ache afterwards – I now realise the difference between a truly sharp kitchen knife and a dull old one. I’m just wondering how long it will stay sharp after slicing mountains of acidic fruit for several batches of marmalade... and is there any way of sharpening a serrated knife like this? Anyone know?

It seems like every year has to have its marmalade post, just as it has to have its daisy post. Here is the one from 2010 where the marmalade recipe competes with the world cup and the blasts of vuvuzelas for attention. And this 2011 post has sun-drenched pictures of the finished jars of marmalade.

Are you a marmalade devotee or do you loathe the stuff?