Guava Parfait and a Search for a Chocolate Tart Recipe…

My cooking mojo has suddenly returned and I even started to get excited about new recipes over the weekend. For too long I’ve been doing the same old crowd pleasers and though I love doing a Sunday roast, it’s nice to have a little variation in the desserts at least.

So I leafed through Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book for inspiration. She is a domestic goddess of the Seventies following in the footsteps of Elizabeth David. She writes really well so it’s a pleasure just to read her books for the evocative prose, but her recipes are also really effective. Usually authentic recipes from the French and English traditions, all the ones I’ve tried have worked really well.

I was riffling through the various chapters on the fruits in season now, oranges, lemons, granadillas, guavas, when I came to a recipe that I had all the ingredients for. Not only that, but it would be remarkably cheap to make, a prime consideration when grocery bills are sky-rocketing here as well as everywhere else. The guavas were on the tree in the orchard, the last few of the season, then all it needed was one pot of cream and three egg whites, a bit of sugar and half a lemon… plus a cardamom pod. The addition of the cardamom was what really grabbed me, a subtle taste-tickling extra to the usual flavours of the guava fool that is on our oh-so-regular recipe list.


It was easy, made a whole big bowlful of guava ice cream (called parfait or chilled souffle by Jane Grigson as it has beaten egg white in, which keeps it soft and easy to scoop) that will easily do two Sundays of friends for lunch. Everyone yesterday was wowed by the flavour (except for Middle Daughter, who doesn’t like guavas) and compliments on the guava ice cream kept on coming the next day.

This recipe is probably mostly going to appeal to South Africans. We get guavas in abundance all through the winter here, but I know that in England at least guavas were rarely available when we lived there. This recipe would work with any strongly flavoured fruit though: I can imagine it tasting fabulous with raspberries.

Guava Parfait Recipe
6-7 guavas (about 250g/8oz peeled)
half a lemon
1 cardamom pod
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 egg whites
250ml/1 cup cream
½ cup/100g sugar

Peel and slice the guavas. Put them in a heavy based pan with slivers of the lemon peel, all the lemon juice, the crushed seeds of the cardamom pod, and 2 tablespoons sugar. Simmer covered until the guavas are soft. Puree the guavas through a sieve.

Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt till stiff. Whip the cream until stiff too. Dissolve the sugar in ½ cup of water and boil gently for five minutes to make a syrup. Pour it while still boiling onto the beaten egg whites, with the beater on its top setting and keep beating until the mixture is cool. Fold in the guava puree and whipped cream. Put into a freezer-proof serving dish and freeze. No stirring or ice cream machines required.

If the puree is very sloppy you can use gelatine to help it set, but I didn’t and it was perfect. While I was making this I thought that the amount of fruit puree was too little and that there wouldn’t be enough flavour. Once the parfait had frozen though the flavour intensified amazingly and it was just right. You can play with the amounts, if you use different fruit, adding another half cup of cream and more fruit puree.


So what about the chocolate tart of the title? I was trying to think of a dessert that would complement the guava parfait. I’m cooking a grown-up dinner for my husband’s birthday next weekend: a rare occasion, when the kids get put to bed and we can linger over a meal with friends who will stay the night and have no pressure to drive back to town late at night. My mind keeps returning to an image of a chocolate tart: thin pastry filled with a thin layer of rich bitter chocolate, with a French patisserie feel – the sort of thing that you just have a sliver of and eat with a spoon of refreshing orange sorbet ( yes that is on the menu again by the wishes of the birthday boy). I’ve never made one before. So do you have a recipe that you recommend? I’m seeing a scoop of orange sorbet, a scoop of guava parfait and a wicked slice of dark chocolate tart… and I’m salivating already!

Disney and Beyond

Veterans of Disney classic features, our kids now know all the DVDs we’ve got off by heart and are looking for something new in the movie stakes.

They loved Racing Stripes, which led them on to race horse movie, Dreamer and then on to Seabiscuit, which we thought might be too adult for them, with all the background of the Great Depression and family tragedies. But that ended up being their favourite of the three. They enjoyed the grittiness of it and the triumph over adversity.

My husband is a great one for recounting the stories of movies at the supper table. He was telling them about You’ve Got Mail the other day and they asked if they could watch it. We both love chick flicks and romance with a sense of humour and that and Sleepless in Seattle are our Saturday night fall backs. A quick review in our heads established that there wasn’t anything too steamy for young eyes and we let them watch it over a two night period. They loved it and I was greatly relieved not to be asked to explain what cybersex is. They are now booking Sleepless in Seattle in for the weekend.

Now we should probably worry about the dangers of indoctrinating an eleven year old boy with chick flicks before he’s had a chance to defend himself with the likes of Terminator. However he’s found his own boy thing to balance it out. Throughout the holidays they all three got up and watched Top Gear before breakfast.

I don’t know what it is about Jeremy Clarkson and the team, but they manage to make car programmes worth watching even if you couldn’t care less about horsepower and gaskets. The girls were just as engrossed.

Coming back from school yesterday, our son mentioned that he’d love to get a Ferrari XXX (my shorthand, I can't remember the letters and numbers actually involved) the latest top of the range model, which is apparently really cool. He told me the price in pounds and we converted it to rand. “OK” I said, “if we sell the farm with all our houses, we could just pay for one. Do you think we’d get nine people and eight dogs into the Ferrari?”

So he’s going to be a sports car driving, chick flick watcher. Should be a devastating combination!

Inklings of Spring

This morning I emerged from a fug of computer induced wordiness and went outside for a breath of air and to pick some grass for the guinea-pig and rabbit. I discovered that while I was working in the blinkers of cyberspace, the seasons in the outside world have crept up on me again.

Here I was thinking we were in the middle of winter – winter holidays just finished, log fires in the evening and the children’s winter ambition of driving to the mountains to see some snow still unrealized.

Outside I go in between showers of rain and find that spring has sneaked in and started to re-decorate. The orange of winter is still there in the aloe flowers and golden shower, where the sunbirds still joyfully gorge themselves on nectar, but spring prefers all shades of white and has scattered confetti as she goes.


The almond blossom, delicate blooms that are yet intrepid enough to emerge with the snowdrops, has broken out overnight. A jasmine’s starry flowers scent the path to our front door with opulent perfume.

And the bulbs we planted hardly any weeks ago have already emerged triumphantly and revealed themselves as pale multi-flowered narcissi, towering over the few lowly snowdrops that feel out of place and a long way from home. Even our spring spread of white daisies has sent out a few scouts to see if the time is ripe to roll out the carpet and dazzle us with reflected sunlight.


I hope they’ll hold off a bit longer. Mid July is too early for spring. Hold your breath I want to shout, it’s still winter, even here we might have a rare frost to nip these confident blossoms in the bud. But they know better and the spring roll call of flowers is ushering more and more blooms into the landscape. Even a few pypies (pronounced pay-pees) have been spotted in flower a month too soon.

Water

Living on a farm is great – wide open views, plenty of space, fresh air (unless our neighbour has just spread slurry on his roll-on lawn growing operation) and wonderful tasting, unchlorinated water fresh from our own borehole… that is as long as said borehole is functioning as it should. The trouble with boreholes is that they depend on electric pumps. And pumps that spend all day below ground sending water up to fill our tanks, eventually get fed up. And go on strike. They clog up. They blow a fuse. They just wear out now and again, exhausted by the task set them by these demanding farm dwellers.

At regular intervals, usually on a weekend, we find ourselves turning to our rain tanks for our washing water. Our friendly electrician and pump expert is happy to come out at short notice, but not on a Sunday and that is usually when the pump decides to give up the ghost.

So yesterday unshowered and dirty haired, I removed the dirty dishes from the dishwasher where they’d just made it through the pre-wash, hand-washed them in our carefully collected rain water, boiling kettles for hot water, and admiring the lather you get from such soft water. We had guests to a braai for lunch, so there were plenty more dishes to process that evening and another chance to reacquaint myself with the time honoured hand washing method, with buckets of water carried from the tank and every drop counted.

It really makes you think about water more carefully when you don’t have it on tap. The rinsing water got put back into the bucket to flush the loos with. My practical husband managed to link our rainwater tank into the main house pipes, so we did now have a trickle of water into the system, which made all the difference, but we were still very conscious of how long that one tank might last. We managed a (very) shallow bath this morning but left the water in for loo-flushing later.

The electrican showed up half way through this morning. His first report sounded grim. It looked as though the first borehole had run dry. My husband departed to consult and assess the damage with him, so I was left trying to carry on with the editing job I was working on, while emergency measures surged through my brain. He had said that sometimes underground water streams can collapse in on themselves, especially if someone else drills a bad borehole further upstream.

How could we survive on the farm if our underground stream gave up flowing…. I started to dream up elaborate water catchment systems to store our winter rainfall, a huge underground cistern, with an overflow to a dam. Water rationing would have to become second nature, the washing machine water would have to empty into big tubs to be re-used for toilet flushing. But would there be enough water pressure to run a washing machine? Our drinking water would have to be collected from a neighbour’s farm in big containers every few days.

Luckily my husband only left me in suspense with this vision of a post-apocalyptic survival scenario for an hour or so, before coming back to say they’d found and fixed a couple of problems with valves and fuses, there was water in the borehole and they just had to locate a leak in the pipe before switching us back on to the supply. A gust of relief as our lives returned to normal once more.

But each time the pump malfunctions, it is a salutary reminder of how dependant we all are on water. Without a supply of clean water it is impossible to keep on living in a place. That underground rainwater cistern is sounding like a really good idea!

Winter at the Beach

Winter at the beach - blue skies with wisps of cloud high above. Black rocks on Blouberg beach and shoals of mussel shells to hunt through, picking out the iridescent shards worn to jewel brightness by the waves.

Rocks and rock pools to explore, provoking the anemones to defensive closing by dropping unsuspecting sea snails on them. The girls were sure they were eating them, until I said they closed tight because they were frightened. Now we have to look up what they do eat.

You need dark glasses to catch a ball in the bright sunshine.

And the water is too cold to do more than paddle in the shallows... but then the water's too cold on this Atlantic coast in summer too.

Our reward for surviving a week of rain and mountains of laundry - a few jewel-bright days of sunshine and clear skies. One reason why we like the winter better than the summer here. In summer the wind blows too strongly on this beach in the afternoons, scouring your skin and saving you the trouble of exfoliating.

We're back home in the evening chill now getting ready to light a fire and snuggle up for a cold night with hot water bottles and a DVD.

Bedtime stories

I’m really enjoying the age we’re at now. All the children’s books we’ve been hoarding for years, the old favourites from both our childhoods that we assiduously collected in second hand book shops before we left England, now make the perfect bedtime reading for all three kids. We used to have to separate out for story time. Dad would read The Chronicles of Prydian or the Narnia series to our son, while I would read The Tiger who wouldn’t go to Bed to the girls. Now that Youngest is nearly 7 and can concentrate as well as the older ones, we can all read the same books and I look forward to bed time as much as they do. They more often than not decide to forego watching TV after supper, so that they can get into bed earlier and have longer story time.

And the books that started this modern miracle? Victor Canning’s The Runaways trilogy. All of them fell in love with the adventures of Smiler, a fifteen year old wrongly accused of mugging an old lady, who has run away from an approved school until his Dad gets back from sea to clear his name. There is a parallel story of a cheetah escaped from Longleat safari park, who makes a home on the wilds of Salisbury plain. We took a quick diversion after the second Smiler book into Noel Streatfield’s Party Shoes, which has all three of them equally captivated, but once the pageant is successfully staged at bedtime tonight, we will be returning to Smiler to see how he extricates himself from his latest dilemma and whether his father will finally return from sea. After that Ballet Shoes is booked in and our bookshelf is groaning with more of my old favourites which I want to read to them.

I loved all the historical books as a child: Geoffrey Trease, Cynthia Harnett, Barbara Willard, Rosemary Sutcliff but so far our son has avoided them in his voracious excursions into literature. His own choices tend to be fantasy adventure and the bookshops here bulge with endless series of that genre, but very few ‘real-life’ stories seem to have made it onto the modern reading list, except for the eternal Enid Blyton Secret Sevens and Famous Fives. So I am determined to brainwash the kids into some of my old classics while they’re still open to them. I’ve got a feeling though that the books will have to stand on their own merits. Our son usually has his own book on hand as I read and, if the story isn’t gripping enough, manages simultaneously to read to himself as well as keeping an ear open for our story hotting up.

What books are you reading to your children now, or do you remember loving when you were a child? I’d love to compile a list of really well written children’s books that stand the test of time.

25 Firsts Meme

It's a meme kind of day. Charlotte posted this one this morning and here I am following suit.

1. Who was your first prom date? We didn’t have proms in England then, just a few school dances. Those of us not joined at the hip to a steady boy/girlfriend went as a mixed group and it was hard to get the boys to dance at all.

2. Do you still talk to your first love? No. It was a long distance relationship which was fading for me and I callously broke up with him by phone when I met someone else. He told me not to keep in touch.

3. What was your first alcoholic drink? Probably sweet German wine that tasted of flowers, which we were introduced to in a civilized way by our parents at dinner.

4. What was your first job? Temping as a data entry person in a London office. I’d hardly even made the acquaintance of a computer by then and didn’t know how to type, so it was the lowest of the low in the temping world.

5. What was your first car? A Peugeot 205 in my last year of university. It went well for years until someone drove into me and wrote it off.

6. Who was the first person to text you today? My phone is switched off. Probably nobody, unless the bank is trying to sell me something.

7. Who is the first person you thought of this morning? A swirl of family faces were in my mind as I awoke

8. Who was your first grade teacher? Mrs Holden. I remember learning times tables and colouring in sections of a picture to show which ones we knew.

9. Where did you go on your first flight in a plane? To Italy in my gap year, to learn Italian.

10. Who was your first best friend and do you still talk? Tiggy. We’ve pretty much lost touch, but I did see her at my father’s memorial service.

11. Where was your first sleepover? At Tiggy’s. I remember being given a new red suitcase for the occasion and worrying about being able to lock the door of the loo.

12. Who was the first person you talked to today? My husband.

13. Whose wedding were you in for the first time? My own. I thought it would be wonderful to be a bridesmaid, but when my uncle got married they didn’t have bridesmaids, so my only chance of a frilly dress was foiled.

14. What was the first thing you did this morning? Staggered into the shower.

15. What was the first concert you went to? It probably wasn't the first but the only one I can remember is going to see Bryan Adams at Hammersmith Odeon with my brother.

16. First tattoo? None, but my kids are now crazy about play tattoos. We’ve told them they have to wait for the real thing until they’re 18!

17. First piercing? My ears, but not till I was about eighteen. I was going to do them when all the other girls at school did at about 14, but it was immediately vetoed.

18. First foreign country you went to? France. We were taken to Brittany when I was about 4 and refused to eat anything much because it was foreign. After that it was Scotland for several years. Then later we had several family holidays driving through France again, once we were old enough not to turn our noses up at foreign food.

19. First movie you remember seeing? Can’t remember which came first: the Herbie ones about the Beetle car, James Bond movies, Star Wars.

20. What state did you first live in? England

21. Who was your first room-mate? At school we were in dorms that changed every term. By university we’d progressed to single rooms, but our corridor formed the core of my group of friends for the next few years.

22. When was your first detention? I remember being mortified at being made to stay behind after class to finish or re-do something, when I was about nine, and then hiding rather than go into tea late and have everyone look at me, which of course resulted in a far more embarrassing school-wide search for me.

23. If you had one wish what would it be? I ought to be like Miss World and wish for world peace, but right now I’d settle for a regular and ample income stream... the joys of freelancing!

24. What is one thing you would learn, given the chance? How to paint gorgeous pictures in luscious colours and textures

25. Who will be the next person to post this? Any of you that feel inspired to.

Winter Holiday

The first day of the winter holidays yesterday and the sun was shining after four days of nothing but rain. So it was in a holiday mood that we set off for the other side of the mountain, to Kalk Bay and Glencairn. We love it over there with its seaside, eclectic vibe, part of Cape Town and yet not quite of it, but for us it is a long drive: only 30 minutes to the edge of Cape Town, but then another hour in traffic on stop start roads, however beautiful the views of mountain and ocean.

We broke the journey at Canal Walk to get a refund on the new Woolies boots, which had betrayed our initial enthusiasm and come unstuck from their soles. Middle Daughter seems destined always to be a barefoot princess. We replaced them with some unstylish but sturdy school shoes with soles that are actually stitched to the upper. Fingers crossed these last out the winter.

In Kalk Bay we stopped off in Kassia and Figg. Inge has been tantalizing us on Vanielje Kitchen with photos of all the delicious baking she has been doing with her Mum in their new deli and finally we could taste it for ourselves. Those chocolate brownies really are to die for!!


It was so great to see Inge, meet her Mum and see the deli in real life. We could have stayed all day and carried on tasting, as everything on display looked delicious, but we had to move on to our friends in Glencairn, a little further on round the coast, just before Simonstown.

The children were all agog to see whales. Inge had seen them the day before from the window of their deli, so we fixed our eyes on the sparkling blue waves all the way as we drove. The house we were visiting turned out to have a grandstand view of False Bay and for the first half hour the children were glued to the window, looking for whales. And finally they were rewarded, several whale spouts sprayed up from the surface of the water. Occasionally a dark back surfaced and then sank below. Throughout the afternoon we had tantalizing glimpses of them out in the bay.

We couldn’t go all that way without going onto the beach, so while other guests came and went (it was an open house style party) we walked across the road and over the railway line to climb down onto the beach: a little sandy stretch encircled by rocks and with a man-made sea-pool creating a protected stretch of water.


The girls and I immediately started shell collecting. There were so many different types from on our stretch of coast on the Atlantic side of the peninsula.


Our son, came prepared and sat on a rock with his book, which he is totally absorbed by at the momnet, while the family eddied round him.


My husband inspired by the gorgeous light and setting went into photographer mode and took loads of shots of the girls.


Eventually he and our son departed to watch a major Springbok/Lions rugby match with some of the fellow guests, while the girls opted to stay longer on the beach.




Bright sunshine scintillating on waves, white spray as they crashed onto the rocks behind us, a treasure chest of jewel- like shells, ours for the collecting, a French Lieutenant Woman style sea wall to walk along, challenging rocks to clamber over and mountain views all around. We stayed until a chill wind picked up and shivered us into collecting up our buckets of shells and heading back over the railway track.

We returned to the house to find a new group of guests had arrived, enjoyed some more interesting conversations, and finally dragged ourselves home as the sun set, whiling away the journey with a raucous sing-along to Garth Brooks, risking the displeasure of our son, who couldn't hear the story on his MP3 player because we were too loud. We got out our beach treasures for inspection as soon as we reached home and had lit the fire, in the chill of a clear winter's night.


We all agreed it had been a thoroughly good day.

Midwinter Festival

Mulled wine, bonfire, sparklers, lanterns, soup and sausages cooked over the fire, these are the essential ingredients of our winter festivals. Over the years we’ve held winter festivals snatched in the intervals between showers of rain, when we had to hurry inside for pudding with our last mouthful of sausage still being chewed, but this year we had the bonus extra of a still, starry night that wasn’t even all that cold.


Quite a few of our usual suspects weren’t able to be there, but we had the core tribe of children all here, who come together four times a year to construct ever more elaborate volcanoes and waterworks. Our first winter festival was seven years ago now. These kids have grown up with a midwinter fire festival every year and progressed from toddlers being helped to carry lanterns precariously dangling from short sticks, to big kids who can make their own, balance two on a long stick and understand the science behind getting fires to burn.




While the adults chatted around the bonfire, doled out soup and wine and cooked sausages, the children lit sparklers, fired up their volcano and then hurtled around the sandpit in the dark, occasionally showing up for refills of hot chocolate or more sausage.


The only way to lure them inside was also the most infallible. ‘Pudding, pudding, pudding,’ went up in a chant to the stars above and they all disappeared housewards before we’d taken a step in that direction. Reluctantly leaving the bonfire to burn itself out, we followed them in and doled out guava fool, sun jelly and chocolate pudding.


This morning the sleepover gang of kids woke to a misty damp morning, but were able to rekindle the bonfire and fire up the volcano once more, fuelling it with pine cones and dried restios. Licensed pyromania with one adult deputed to keep an eye on proceedings, lest they get too ambitious…

Winter in the Western Cape

It's pouring with rain, deluging down on our tin roof, interrupting the satellite signal broadcasting a tense cricket match between South Africa and the West Indies into our sitting room. The boys leave, clad in waterproofs, to find a house with a better signal. The girls bake rusks. Youngest is itching to get outside again. She has just taught herself how to ride a bike. This morning she at last triumphantly gained the necessary balance and confidence and keeps saying to all who will listen, "But it's so easy!"

While the rusks fill the house with that comforting smell of baking I download the photos from my camera. A reminder that winter in the Western Cape can be pretty benevolent despite the torrential rain today. This was last Sunday:


I found Youngest out on the lawn in her dressing gown, at 10 o'clock on a midwinter Sunday morning, playing with her toy horse by a bright yellow gazania.


And it was warm enough to sit reading a book on the lawn in the sun, cup of tea and daughters to hand. Later on we played Monopoly, which revealed itself to be a horribly mean and capitalist game that veiled the weekend relaxation in tears, as our son acquired Clifton (Mayfair in the UK) and proceeded to build hotels and ruin his two sisters, who had to sell the houses they'd so proudly acquired and mortgage all their properties. This was the first time we'd ever played to the bitter (and it is bitter) end. Monopoly might well find itself pushed to the back of the shelf in favour of Pictionary and rummy. I can't cope with the stress!


A baby tortoise was tempted out by the sunshine this week. The girls rescued it from an upside position on the stoep, probably left there by a dog. A satisfying crunchy bush snack for a border collie. He is no bigger than an egg, with bulgy baby eyes. He peed all down us, refused the apple we offered, and then scarpered into the restios at top speed on his thin legs when we released him further away from the house, in the hope that the dogs wouldn't find him again. We last saw him wedged firmly into a maze of restio stalks. Let's hope he's warmly tucked away in the sand today.

Next weekend is our Midwinter festival - we're hoping for a clear night for our bonfire, lanterns and sparklers. It can rain all it wants to this weekend though. The fire is lit, the satellite signal now producing roars and cheers from the sitting room and the rusks are baked.

Fashion Alert

I now know I’m beyond the outer reaches of fashion here on our farm. The first I’d heard of Uggs was when Inge mentioned them replacing Manolos, now it’s winter, on the feet of those Cape Town trendsetters patronizing her new deli in Kalk Bay. Spoken in the same breath as Manolos, I knew they must be the height of chic, but it wasn’t till I got an e-mail offering a discount to my readers on an Australian brand of Uggs, that I got to see them up close and personal… and they do look great.

This is the kind of fashion I can cope with. High heels have long been retired to a plastic box, where I fondly keep the remnants of more glamorous days, even though my feet shudder in agony, if I even dip a toe into them. The girls now and then raid it and those super elegant black suede stilettos are fast dwindling into dressing up box accessories.

Uggs however are another matter. I can see myself living in them to keep my feet warm through chilly winter weather, as I sit at the computer with my circulation barely functioning. Farm fashion personified! If I get some I may even feel brave enough to hang out in a trendy Cape Town deli one day!

Getting the chance to pass on to you guys, my wonderful devoted readers, a discount on something that you might even want, is a first for me too! I feel cool and chic and part of the blogging in-crowd!

So if you want to keep your feet warm in a pair of utterly chic, A grade merino sheepskin boots, you can save yourselves $30 by typing FOODANDFAM into the cart at www.whoogaboots.co.uk.
Apparently the discount will work on the company's .com and .au sites too, but they ship worldwide anyway at a flat rate.

Let me know what they're like if you do get some - they could well be on my Christmas list!

WTSIM Boeuf Bourgignon

Winter is really here now, a chill in the air and cold fronts bustling over in a hurry to get somewhere, showering us with torrents of rain as they pass. The scarlet vine leaves are dropping fast now, our only real autumn colour carpeting the ground with its finery.


Today was the perfect day to cook a slow stew in the oven, the aroma of its winey juices pervading the house, and the warmth of the oven giving me a place to lean against and warm up, after sitting at the computer too long. Squalls of rain drumming on the roof have no power to damp your spirits when such uplifting scents keep enticing you back to the kitchen to draw in deep satisfying breaths. If you can remember the Bisto kid, being pulled home by the wafting, come-hither tendrils of steam from the gravy on the stove, boeuf bourgignon has to be the inspiration for that! It’s worth cooking on every rainy winter weekend, just for the feel-good factor.

In fact the real title of this post should be: Waiter there’s something in my Boeuf Bourgignon and it looks like a dumpling!


The purists would be turning in their graves, after all, boeuf bourgignon is a classic French dish that should ideally be served with garlicky croutons on top, but dumplings… ? Dumplings come from a Northern European heritage and are a staple of English country culinary tradition. They are designed to fill up hungry farm labourers, soak up the stew juices and make the meat go further, distract attention from the fact that there is hardly any meat in the stew at all. They are frugal cooking at its finest. And I have another confession to make: I didn’t use burgundy, I used a South African Merlot, so this isn’t boeuf bourgignon except in the method. It is something that I am hereby classifying as Bistro Fusion: Merlot Beef with Parmesan Dumplings, invented especially for the May edition of WTSIM Bistro Food!

I’d been wanting to make dumplings for ages, ever since Homemade Heaven made them and reminded me what good winter fare they are. They don’t form part of my usual repertoire and the kids didn’t even know what dumplings were, so it’s been a long time. I went for a simple flour dumpling recipe in one of Nigel Slater’s books, that promised light and fluffy dumplings, and then left out the herbs, as I wanted the kids to eat them without being put off by green bits. They were incredibly quick and easy to make and puffed up to double their size without any fuss. These are going to be on the menu more often! Please excuse the inartistic photography - it was dark and I was hungry!!


But the proof is in the eating… I had the timing down exactly right to fit in with half time in the most exciting rugby match in years (according to my husband... it was the final of the Super14 where the Bulls trashed the Chiefs, if any of you are rugby fans!), so the dish had serious competition in making an impression. But it went down a storm with my husband and with the two girls, so it took me a while to notice the heavy silence emanating from my son’s place. He had that neutral, set look and a barely touched plate. My pickiest eater wasn’t going to be fooled into believing that dumplings are really just another version of bread. As his sisters enthusiastically ate their platefuls and eventually discovered the filling properties that dumplings are renowned for, he sloped off to the fridge and got himself an apple. Never mind – he won’t fade away – we’re having guests for lunch tomorrow: roast potatoes and roast chicken, so I’ll allow about ten potatoes just for him.

Here is my version of the recipe:

Boeuf Bourgignon or Merlot Beef with Parmesan Dumplings

About 900g/2lb chuck steak (I used stewing steak)
1 medium onion
2 cups red wine – burgundy or Merlot!
2 cloves garlic
bay leaf
2 sprigs thyme
100g/4 oz mushrooms
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon flour

For the dumplings
200g/7oz flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons grated parmesan
1 egg
about 120ml/half cup milk
(add chopped parsley and thyme if your kids eat green things!)

Cut the meat into largish chunks. In a heavy casserole heat 2 tablespoons of oil and brown the meat on all sides in batches. Put the meat aside on a plate, while you soften the onions in the same pan. Return the meat to the pan, sprinkle the flour over and stir it all in till it has soaked up the juices. Pour in the wine and stir it all together, allow to bubble. Add the chopped garlic and herbs, season with salt and pepper. Cover with a tight lid and cook in a low oven (140C/275F) for about 2 hours. Add the mushrooms (the recipe also added bacon and small onions at this point, but I didn’t have any and it still tasted great) then return covered to the oven for another hour. It can be cooked to this point in advance and reheated later, when you want to add the dumplings.

Fifteen minutes before you want to eat, make the dumplings: sieve the flour together with the baking powder and salt (the sieving helps lighten the dumplings so don’t skip this). Add the grated parmesan. Mix in the beaten egg and then add milk a bit at a time, until it comes together in a soft but not too sticky dough. Form into 8-10 balls. Slide them gently into the top of the casserole and let it simmer covered for 10-12 minutes, until the dumplings have doubled in size. I did this last bit on top of the stove, to make sure the liquid was simmering properly.

Serve with some green vegetables.

This is my last minute entry for Johanna’s WTSIM Bistro event - the deadline is today, so get moving if you haven't already submitted your entry!

Sleepover

Last night the children had a sleepover at their aunt’s house. This is all of 50m away, just down the hill, but is a major step forward on the road to independence, when up till a year ago the girls had never spent a night away from us.

Over the last year they have evolved their own traditions for the sleepover. In the morning the girls go in to town with their aunt and choose a movie to watch that evening at the video rental shop. They generally return with three, having not been able to decide on just one. Sometime in the afternoon the girls solemnly pack a black bin-bag with their essentials: duvet, pillows, slippers, soft toy, book, angel painting, pyjamas, spare clothes for the morning, tooth brush, favourite knick knacks etc. They then lug them down the hill and unpack them neatly onto a side table or chair by the bed. Our son will, a bit later, casually sling his duvet over his arm along with pillow and a spare pair of underpants and saunter down the hill, returning for forgotten necessities like pyjamas if reminded.

While they are feasting on roast chicken and roast potatoes and then trying to cram all three movies into the evening, then morning, tv-watching slots, we are rattling around in the unaccustomed silence of our house, trying to get used to just being us. The first time it happened we were completely at a loss, the house felt empty and echoey, two dimensional and flat, but this weekend we expanded to fill the empty space, with music playing and a Thai green curry on the menu.

The spectacular sunset, with whirls of rain capturing rainbows in the mid distance lured me away from the kitchen, calling to my husband, who raced back for his camera, and we stood out on the lawn in front of our house revolving 360 degrees to catch every shade of the sunset’s progress: pink glowing mountains, followed by clouds laced with pink edging in the east; rain showers creating a vertical section of rainbow suspended in the sky; sweeps of rain capturing a burnt orange hue to the west over the hill behind us. Changing every few seconds the colours held us out there for almost half an hour, until the show ended and the clouds returned to uniform grey as darkness fell. I returned to the kitchen and began cooking our supper.

The dogs are completely distraught by the sleepover concept, especially the two male border collies. Restlessly they run back and forward between the two houses. How are they supposed to guard their family when it is split in two? As soon as they come into our house they scrabble at the door to be let out again and end up sleeping outside – one by the cottage containing the sleeping children, the other on our stoep.

We lit a fire, ate our spicy supper by candlelight and settled down to watch Bourne Identity: a thriller instead of our usual chick flick (going wild without the restraining influence of children in the next room!) then slept for once undisturbed by sleep walking, sleep talking children and restless dogs.

The next morning I lounged in bed, with a cup of tea, trying to finish the fifth Artemis Fowl book. My husband is next in line to read it and itching to get his hands on it. One by one the children returned from their sleepover, and came in for a hug with reports of the entertainment: The movie was good – Firehouse Dog – the best yet. Someone snored last night. They managed to watch all three movies. Bin bags are unceremoniously dumped beside their beds and they slot back into their normal Sunday activities.

Orange

England in autumn applies orange lavishly with broad brush strokes. Dripping and splattering all shades of sunset, it spreads throughout the landscape: beech trees a golden or coppery shade, through to fiery oranges and rusts in London parks, interspersed with reds and golds. The bright colors make up for dull skies and flat light and just occasionally are picked up by bursts of sunlight that set the whole landscape on fire.

In South Africa too orange is the colour of autumn and winter, but here it is in the details, a fine brush picking out highlights: aloe flowers, wilde dagga, tekoma (Cape honeysuckle), gazanias. As soon as the first autumn showers wake the plants from summer slumber they burst into bloom: first the wilde dagga providing nectar for the sunbirds whose iridescent green flits between them and the tekoma.

Later on the aloes will provide scarlet exclamation points amid the winter green, and at the end of winter pincushion proteas provide a full stop to the orangefest. You can see why nature is sparing with her bright colors over here.

The bright winter sunshine picks up the oranges and intensifies them into glorious Technicolor – no need for a broad backdrop of orange which would dazzle and blind. We feast our eyes on the cooler green of new winter growth and then look for sparkle and joyous abandon to the shocking oranges of the flowers around us.

We’re feasting on oranges literally too. The fruit are already in season, cheap enough to buy several kilos and eat one for breakfast every day, but soon they will be piled high in the supermarket in 5kg bags for R8 each.

That is when we start drinking freshly squeezed juice, make orange sorbet to freeze for the summer, make marmalade or just eat them by the score, for breakfast, lunch and snacks. They are my secret weapon against winter ills and children who don't like vegetables are happy to eat them at any time of day. Naartjies too for school lunch boxes – all the varieties parade through the shops. At the moment it is the loose skinned tangerine, but our best clementines aren’t here yet, we have to be patient a while longer. Vitamin C and colour to cheer us through the winter, even when it is a grey rainy one.

Flaming log fires, tall orange candles, fiery sunsets and sunrises, orange silk scarves and fleeces, Le Creuset pots filled with hot casseroles and soups, these are a few of my favourite things....!