Our Autumn Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!