Spring Festival 2012

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

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

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

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

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?

Spring Flowers, Winter Snows

It’s that time when winter and spring are fighting it out again. Spring sends sunshine to lure out the daisies, so that they carpet the ground in snowdrifts, dazzling to the eye.

Winter sends rainstorms that drum on the tin roof and close up the daisies for days on end. Winter leaves blankets of snow on distant mountains that spring lights up with sunshine as a fitting background for the dazzle of daisies.

Snow on the distant mountains, sunshine opening up the daisies

What distant mountains, rain driving across, daisies tight closed

A hare lolloping through the daisies

We peel off our layers in spring’s warm embrace, wander among the flowers and make daisy chains.

Only to retreat under five layers of clothes and blankets onto the sofa when winter once more gains the upper hand.

Log fires and soups one day, salads and sandwiches eaten on the stoep in the sun another, or often both on the same day.

While the rest of the country was covered in unexpected snow, we  just got rain, which peeled away to reveal snow on the mountains, but none right here, right now.

Our kids would happily exchange the daisy carpet for one of snow, just to experience it once. I prefer the daisies. But then I grew up in England and know the cold of snow-drenched toes, the thrill of sliding down a snowy slope on a sack, the joy of being snowed in and unable to go to school.

Today winter is winning, it rained all night. But spring knows that it only has to be patient. A few more weeks and winter will be a distant memory, while spring unfurls its most colourful flowers, blows hot and cold on us, brings out the miggies and horseflies just to make sure we don’t get too complacent in the midst of all that beauty.

Soon the yellow and pink daisies will join the carpet, the dazzling white will turn to gold, but somehow I have a sneaking fondness for those first hard won days of spring, with snow on the mountains and snowdrifts of daisies cheering on each day of sunshine.

Jewels of colour in the middle of all that white 

Last year's flowers were also stunning. Here are two posts if you want more flowery beauty!
Dawdling through the Daisies
Spring Flowers and Sunshine

Cauliflowers At the Market And A Soup Recipe

We’ve had a break from our monthly market stall this winter, enjoying Camphill market from the other side of the table, free to wander and sample and chat.

Last Sunday we were back sharing a stall with our friends despite the showery forecast. The kids and I got up at seven and they all set to baking, with me as the supervising chef and washer-upper. Once the crunchies (baked by my son this month), the iced biscuits (Middle Daughter) and crustless milk tart (Youngest) were baked and packed, we headed off to our neighbour a few farms away to pick up some of her veggies.

She grows beautiful pesticide-free cauliflowers and broccoli in the winter, to keep her out of mischief, she says, while her bee-keeping business is quiet. She had far more than she could cope with the previous week and gave us a whole crate of them. I suggested selling them at Camphill Market and offered to take some down to sell on our stall.

It proved the ideal product on a winter market day. The forecast had kept away the casual visitors, those who come for a lovely day out in the country with their kids, as long as the sun is shining. The regulars all come along anyway, armed with their baskets and cloth shopping bags, to garner all the organic and home-grown produce on offer that month. Camphill grow their own produce to sell, but there is always demand for more, and luckily they were selling leeks, chard, kale, onions and herbs, but no broccoli or cauliflower this month, so ours started selling like hot cakes. By 11.30 I was messaging our neighbour to see if she could bring another crate along.

They were so freshly picked that a passing cabbage white butterfly was most impressed by their quality and hung out with us for a while.

The sun came out, only dimmed by an occasional shower, and all the stalls were under cover this month just in case, so we weathered the sprinklings of rain with no problem.

The kids all disappeared off with their friends to feed the donkeys, look after the lambs, pay for a pony ride (despite the fact they have riding lessons they are still happy to pay their own money to be led around the road on a pony), leaving the two adults to take care of the stall and selling their baked goods for them.

Unfortunately those didn’t sell like hot cakes this time. Perhaps it was because of the weather, fewer kids to beg for pretty iced biscuits, less dallying and more purposeful shopping by the regulars, but we ended up taking home about half our stock of crunchies and biscuits. They didn’t last long once we got home though as we sat around the table and demolished them over a cup of tea or two.

Our neighbour gave me the few remaining cauliflowers after the market, delighted with the sales of all the rest, so I decided to make soup to keep us warm for the next couple of days. Two of my kids loathe cauliflower so it was a bit of a gamble expecting them to eat soup made with it, but I managed to come up with something that they could choke down with the addition of some melting grated cheese. The flavour is mild, almost bland, with a just a hint of cauliflower nuttiness to it and a dash of chilli heat to liven it up. We enjoyed it with cheese and spring onions stirred in, which lifted it to another level.

Cauliflower soup recipe
1 large onion
1 head of cauliflower
1 clove garlic
25g butter or olive oil
1 bay leaf
Fresh thyme
1 litre stock
Dash of Tabasco sauce (optional)
Salt and pepper

Roughly chop the onion. Break the cauliflower up into florets. Chop the garlic.
Sweat the onion and garlic in the butter until it softens.
Add the cauliflower and herbs and season with salt and pepper. Stir it all together.
Cook for another few minutes.
Add the stock.
Simmer together until the vegetables are soft.
Remove the bay leaf and any herb twigs.
Whizz the soup either with a hand-held blender or in a food processor.
Taste and add Tabasco sauce if you like it. Check for seasoning.
Serve with grated cheese and chunks of fresh bread.

Camphill market is on the first Sunday of every month 11am-4pm

Edited to add: I made this soup again last night using coconut oil, which added a welcome extra flavour to the mix. Perhaps it took over a bit from the cauliflower but it's a nice change.. if you like coconut!

Living in a Plastic Age

Our over-flowing recycling sack

Plastics have been the focus of a lot of my green living reading this week. It started out with discovering My Plastic Free Life – Beth was inspired to see if she could live without buying/consuming any plastics for a year and has been living more or less plastic free ever since.

After reading I was alternately inspired and dismayed all over again at the sheer amounts of plastic in our everyday life. However green we try to be, however much we recycle, there is still  plastic making its way into landfills, or worse into our oceans.

So shopping was accompanied by a guilt trip. Could the fact that we still buy black bin bags, be offset against the choice of bags made of 100% recycled plastic? How to acquire pasta or rice without those non-recyclable crinkly plastic bags? Our local town doesn’t offer the convenient bulk buying stores that seem to be a feature of some Canadian and US cities (going by the blogs I’ve been reading) where you can fill up your own re-used glass containers.  And horrors when the fresh bunches of carrots that used to be just tied up with string have now been promoted to a plastic sleeve... (we're still waiting for several rows of carrots to produce in the veggie garden and some dear, cuddly creature is nibbling the tops).

Fast forward to yesterday, when a lovely prize I’d won in the Tangled Tree Treasures competition finally arrived. They are a new range of wines from the Van Loveren estate near Robertson, promoting green living, bio-diversity and ethical choices. The box contained sample bottles of the five wines in their range, named enticingly and with pretty labels... and bottled in plastic?!

A quick look at their site and at a few other internet forums showed an alternative perspective on green packaging thinking: PET plastic can actually have a much lighter carbon footprint than glass. I found several arguments both for and against this view. The most balanced one was an opinion piece stating both pros and cons and didn’t get all hot under the collar about it - this I think is the one I’ll go with for now.

Basically the view is this:

• PET uses a whole lot less resources and energy to produce than glass.
• PET is much lighter than glass and takes up less space, therefore it uses less fuel to ship.
• PET is much sturdier, therefore less breakage and less wastage.
• PET can now be recycled over and over again without losing its integrity, just as glass can.
• PET doesn’t have several of the ooh nasties such as BPA and phthalates that make a lot of plastics a bad choice for food products.

I resisted this a little to start with. I like glass – it feels better than plastic, worthier, greener, more real. Plastics are the big baddies of the eco-system, cluttering up our oceans and killing our marine life.

Common sense eventually makes me re-consider and admit that there is room for wines bottled in plastic, especially if they are being exported around the world, and as long as the bottles will eventually be recycled.

Glass is still going to be the best option: if it can be re-used multiple times before being recycled; if the product is distributed close to where it originates, so not too much transport is involved. Think jars of yoghurt from your local dairy that can be returned again and again.

I guess the crux of the matter lies in responsible recycling. If we could guarantee that all those plastic bottle would make it into a recycling program and be turned back into bottles again indefinitely, it wouldn’t be so bad. And if glass could be re-used indefinitely that would also be a winning solution. So in the end it comes down to our behaviour... and what a challenge that is.

Please feel free to shout at me politely tell me I’m mistaken in the comments, if you have a better understanding of this complex subject. I’m off to finish that first delicious bottle of Tangled Tree Spicy Shiraz (I’ll write more about the wines themselves once I’ve savoured all five of them), before tossing the plastic bottle in the recycling bin.

I’ll leave you with Beth’s in depth research into Pepsi’s much touted PET drinks bottle, released last year, made from plant based plastic.

A Bowl of Hyacinths

Secretive bowls of earth snugly tucked up in soft green moss, just the smallest hint of a stubby shoot peeking out at gloomy winter days; a bowl of hyacinths was a standard feature in my grandmother’s sitting room in the darkest December months. There would be a log fire in the grate, dim afternoon light barely making an impression through the small window panes, tea in cups and saucers and best behaviour.

We often had a bowl of the bulbs at home too – they were great as gifts for children to give their mums or grannies for Christmas. The bulbs would gradually send up fat snouts, growing into glossy leaves hiding the beginnings of a flower. We’d peek in to try and see if it would be pink, blue or white. Then one day it would start to open and wafts of fragrance would fill the room.

I’d almost forgotten about bowls of hyacinths until my sister-in-law made herself one this year. For some reason I’d thought that South Africa didn’t have them – our winter months are so much less dark and gloomy than England’s and it’s not Christmas, something I’d always associated with hyacinths. I went into raptures as the nostalgic scent transported me back thirty years, and when we got back from holiday I found that we now had our own bowl of bulbs, thanks to my lovely SIL.

The first two flowers are now open already. Do they grow more rapidly here, or is the remembered slow progress and weeks of anticipation just a feature of time passing more slowly when you’re a child? Anyway the first two flowers are white ones and as fragrant as I remembered. In our huge living room the scent isn’t overwhelming, coming in wafts as you pass the table. The house has never smelled so sweet before! This is definitely a new winter tradition to keep alive in our family.

I've also written about hyacinths over at Green Living Tips as a natural alternative to air fresheners.