Building A Herb Garden

Small seeds grow into bigger things. In the case of my herb garden, one seed of an idea has taken root, thrown out off-shoots and taken over completely.

All I planned to do was make another bed. The herb garden was looking neglected and all but the toughest herbs had shrivelled away in the heat of last summer, leaving just my stalwart rosemary and lavender bushes, as well as the scented geraniums that seem to thrive here whatever you do to them. Last year I ended up growing my basil and parsley in a pot, which is crazy seeing how much space we have here.

So this new bed was to be slightly raised, with lashings of compost and organic matter added to make a nice cushy home for the pickier herbs – basil, parsley, sage, oregano and so on. My sisters-in-law planned to give me some herbs for my birthday to re-stock the new bed. That was going to be all.

Then I thought of bricking the main path through the garden, basically just a sandy track worn by the dogs running through to chase cars, with some leftover bricks we had stacked in a corner.

That is when things took on their own momentum. Before I knew it, the whole family had taken the idea and run with it. Now one bed was nicely laid out the others needed to be raised to the same level. No point just bricking the one path, we’ll level all of them to be bricked. And what about the area beyond the bed.

We should lay out that at the same time, and round the rain-water tank… so we’d better make a proper retaining wall that side to build up the area around the olive trees, which is at a higher level than the main herb garden.

Our two farm-workers also joined in the enthusiastic makeover and have been working on the paths and beds all week making everything just so, asking me to decide things every step of the way, so my usual vague, see what happens, not quite ever finishing things off modus operandi has been thwarted. Now I have to live up to the garden, which is obviously planning to be finished and beautiful this year, rather than in some dim and distant future.

Seeing how things were taking shape so alarmingly quickly, I felt that I needed to put my own mark on the garden. The scarily straight and perfect motorway outline of the main path, so carefully worked out with string lines and levels, had to have something to slow it down, to keep the energy meandering among the herbs.

So I decided that I would lay the bricks for the path myself, in a herringbone pattern. And that is why I’ve stayed away from my blog for a couple of weeks. Last weekend I was putting in the time and putting in the bricks. Every day in the week while supper was cooking I’d nip out and put in a few more. This morning I reached the house end of the path. The only reason I’m here writing about it now is because the rain started bucketing down.

The only trouble is, our vision has expanded way beyond the leftover bricks in the corner. We’re going to have to go and order another shed-load of bricks to get all these paths paved and my weekends are sorted for the next month or so! But it’s going to look gorgeous. And once it is all planted up, I’ll have a medicine garden on my doorstep. There are already two tea tree plants waiting to go in and some buchu, as my sister in law couldn’t resist buying a few plants even before we got to my birthday.

So my next project is learning about herbs and their medicinal uses, courtesy of Margaret Roberts’ excellent books and hopefully a visit to the herb lady who lives on a farm quite near us.

I'll post some more photos when more paths are finished and the beds are planted up.

Guava Delight

Spring is in the air and yet the guava season continues. Our trees have been prolific this year, but are considerately allowing their fruit to ripen a little at a time now, so that we can get through one basket before we fill the next and stagger back to the house weighed down with golden globes of perfumery.

At one stage I really did think I was going to get sick of guavas before the end of the winter, but they keep luring me back with their fresh fragrance and unique flavour. Hard to remember the time when I first came to South Africa and found the scent overwhelmingly pungent, in my less charitable moments likening it to cats’ pee.

Recently I’ve been working on finding new ways of processing and preserving guavas, so that they will last us year round. My attempt at guava jelly was an abject failure, or at least not the jewel-bright perfumed delicacy that I was hoping for. Plus I was horrified by the wastage involved in making jelly: all that tasty fruit pulp left behind in the jelly bag. So I moved swiftly on without bothering to perfect my jelly-making skills.

I found this suggestion for using guavas instead of the traditional quinces to make a paste, or rather a sweetmeat, in Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book: my absolutely favourite recipe book on fruit of all time, in fact I'd go so far as to say it's the bible of fruit recipes, so I'd hope they use this book in cooking schools online. Reminiscent of Safari dried fruit snacks, these guava squares have a much better texture and of course they are home made, so a whole lot cheaper…. unless you charge your time by the hour that is. The thing about this recipe is that someone needs to stir the pot constantly for about an hour and a half, as the mixture burps and splutters its way to the required thickness. So this is a weekend job, for when you have several willing helpers to take turns at stirring, or at least entertain you with scintillating conversation as you perch on the counter working on your stirring muscles.

The rewards are a house smelling wonderfully of guava jam and a few months’ supply of reasonable healthy sweeties, to sneak into your kids’ lunch boxes or package as loving gifts for home-sick family members overseas who haven’t smelt a ripe guava in ages.

This is only really worth doing when you have a couple of kilos of guavas to process so that you get a goodly stock of sweets from all your hard work stirring, but you can use any amount of fruit as the sugar is put in according to the weight of puree.

We’ve christened the result Guava Delight, as it is just a bit like Turkish Delight only much, much nicer.

Recipe for Guava Fruit Sweets
(adapted from Jane Grigson’s recipe for  Quince Paste)

Ingredients
Guavas – about 2 kg/ 4lbs
Sugar – about 1.5kg

Rinse the guavas and cut into quarters. Put into a heavy based pan with ½ cup of water. Bring to the boil and simmer covered until the fruit is tender, stirring a few times so that it doesn’t catch. Puree through a sieve or food mill/mouli. Rinse out the pan.

Weigh the resulting puree and return it to the pan, with 750g sugar for every 1kg of puree. (1 ½ lbs sugar per 2 lbs puree.) Cook over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved, then raise the heat to medium and cook stirring constantly until the mixture is very thick and is coming away from the sides of the pan. This usually takes us 1 ½ hours and we could probably carry on longer to get it really thick, but we have usually had enough by then! It will splutter and spit as it thickens, so have a glove on your stirring hand to avoid burns from the hot mixture.

Line a baking tray or two with baking parchment and pour the mixture into it to cool. It should be about 1 cm/1/2 inch deep. Smooth it out evenly. Now it needs to cool and dry out a bit in a warming drawer or over a radiator for a day or so. It is ready when it can be cut with a hot knife into squares that retain their shape.

Cut the paste into squares and dip them in sugar then pack into air-tight boxes in layers separated by baking paper. These should keep for months or years as long as they are kept dry.

Storytelling

This story was related to me today from memory on the way back from school in the car; the fruit of Middle Daughter’s class assignment to make up her own story including a list of words, the meanings of which they had to check in the dictionary.

The Maid Servant
Once upon a time there was a maid who worked for a rich man, who had a long beard. One day she discovered that she was pregnant. When she told the man, he felt rage grow in him, and tore at his hair and shouted at her that she couldn’t work for him any longer. She went home and took her dogs for a walk.

Later on he came downstairs and saw some plumage on the table. He felt ashamed of his anger and wanted to say sorry, but then thought he couldn’t. He made a heart out of metal.

The next day he went to her house and said he was sorry and that she could have her job back. She said Yes.

I haven’t done justice to the story in the re-telling here and have probably got some of the words wrong, but hopefully I've captured the drama and high emotion of her story-telling.
I tentatively asked whether ‘pregnant’ was one of the words on her list, thinking it a little strange for a class of 10 year olds.

“Oh no” she replied, “but I wanted to use the word ‘discovered’.”

We racked out brains to think where she could have got the inspiration from for a story involving a woman  thrown out for being pregnant. Not Disney of course (I don't remember that particular re-working of Cindarella), none of the horse books they’ve been reading, and they never watch any soaps. Finally I remembered the scene in Mamma Mia where Donna tells Sophie,
“When I was pregnant with you, my mother told me to go, and not to bother coming back”.
Phew! That must have been the germ of the idea, I was beginning to put it down to a traumatic past life experience!

Now it remains to be seen what her rather conventional male teacher will make of it.

Green Muffin Cases

My inner Scrooge really loves the whole green movement – Reduce Reuse Recycle is a great excuse to save the pennies and polish your halo at the same time. No longer are you stigmatized as being stingy when you re-use your shopping bags, you are now a green heroine, nobly saving the planet as you shop.

Paper muffin cases are a case in point. We bake muffins every week, often double batches for school bake sales. I used to use muffin cases all the time. It’s easier and more convenient. But if you think about it, that piece of paper just becomes litter within minutes, if the kids pounce on the muffins straight away, and it’s just one more non-essential to add to the weekly shop. So I stopped using paper muffin cases most of the time for home-baking, and it wasn’t a big deal at all. I just had to soak the tins a bit before washing them.

And yet there are times when a paper case really does make a difference, like when you are trying out a chocolate chip muffin recipe and envisage gooey melted chocolate going to waste all over the tins. Of course I now had no paper muffin cases in the house after my frugal/green spree of conscientiousness. I’d also nearly run out of baking paper for the same reason, just a few odds and ends left over from a series of cakes, which left me with the stash of butter papers in the fridge.

When I was growing up, butter papers were always saved in the fridge. They knew about frugality in those days, having grown up with rationing and wartime shortages and lived through Seventies coal miners' strikes and all. Saving butter papers was a habit that transferred itself to me, despite our generation's prodigality. A fridge full of butter papers generally isn’t all that much use, not very zen either, cluttering up the place. Quite handy for greasing baking trays, but that’s about it. Except when you need muffin cases at the last minute.

I think they worked perfectly – perhaps not very elegant, but they have a certain green chic about them, don’t you think?!

But perhaps the scraps of baking paper made the more elegant version. They make me think of The Sound of Music, a drift of nuns in sparkling white wimples…

And Marisa's chocolate muffin recipe? The kids loved them, in fact Middle Daughter made them all by herself. Me, I'm holding out for dark chocolate chips for the next batch, with the good dark Nomu cocoa, but then that would be my inner chocoholic, who vanquishes the inner Scrooge every time.

Chocolate Surprise

It will come as no surprise to my blog friends when I confess to a not-so-secret addiction to chocolate, the darker the better. I have long been a reliable tester of all the big chocolate names, from Green and Black, who seem to have disappeared from the South African marketplace of late, to Lindt with their blossoming and branching out into a multitude of sophisticated flavours (perhaps the reason behind Green and Black’s ousting?), sea salt being my current Wow factor to the taste buds.

After attending the fantastic Cape Town Food Bloggers Conference in March, I found that my blog was occasionally targeted by the foodie PR people. Juno wrote about the ethics and complications of accepting freebies when you are writing an independent blog. Her rule of never accepting freebies to review made sense in many circumstances, but I found myself tested immediately by an offer from Lindt to bring me some goodies to sample. How could I possibly say no to chocolate?

I mean, when you live 60km from town it can be hard to persuade friends that it’s not too far to come for lunch. It’s not very often that you have complete strangers offering to drive out specially, just to deliver you some free chocolate, no strings attached. So I accepted and told them to ring for directions.

Two weeks later on a gorgeous sunny day they did. It turned out that they had already shot 20km past our turning and were in the next town asking at the info office for directions. Of course nobody had heard of us there. We’re quite used to talking couriers and various delivery people to our farm from all points of the compass, so I gave directions again and waited. And waited. Eventually a very sweet little Smart car emblazoned with the Lindt logo and pictures of chocolate rolled up the dirt road to our gate. It was immediately met with impassioned barking from assorted manic border collies, which is the usual welcome our visitors get. I ran out to rescue them and to photograph the cute car in its incongruous country setting... unfortunately the camera battery was flat. The two pretty girls smartly dressed in red stayed safely in the car, handing out to me a be-ribboned box of goodies, then revealed that the info office in our local town had sent them to the next town further on, 30 km in the wrong direction. They seemed quite happy though and it was a lovely day for a scenic drive around the Swartland, so I tried not to feel too bad about it.

And my spoils? Well I have to admit that my greedy chocoholic alter ego had ideas of lashings of dark chocolate samples, perhaps unveiling the latest wicked 99% cocoa bar to be tested on that secret sector of food blogging choco-gourmet elite, of whom I had now been elected one of the chosen few...

But nestled in the box were instead some samples of baked goodies from the Lindt Chocolate Studio in town: some miniature macaroons with chocolate sandwich filling, a couple of orange chocolate brownies and a white chocolate truffle…Now they were nice. But not Wow Chocolate Explosion fantastic. In fact my Lindt chocolate stash in the larder rather put them in their place on the chocolate scale of things. Which seemed a bit of a shame after all the trouble they’d taken to get them to me. Plus I think from reading about it that the Chocolate Studio sounds like a fantastic idea, learning to bake with chocolate, make your own truffles and even temper chocolate to a professional level. I’d still love to go there myself and create marvels of chocolate sculpture, tasting just a little on the way.

So thank you Lindt for going to such lengths to send me free samples. I do appreciate it, really I do. Just, if you’re going to be marketing another product, please can I have the chocoholics dark dark version, and I’ll be much more enthusiastic about it, I promise!

All this writing about dark chocolate has got to me. I can feel that stash of sea salt chocolate in the larder calling to me. Tell me what you thought of the Lindt samples if you are another Cape Town blogger who couldn't resist them.

Back To School

The World Cup is over. There is a back to school feeling all over South Africa, and not just among the kids who have had the longest winter holidays ever in honour of the World Cup. Ours go back to school tomorrow and it’s going to be a sharp shock for all of us getting up in the cold winter dark again and leaving the house before the sun is up. Our internal clocks have adjusted to hibernation mode and our once early rising toddlers are now big kids happy enough to snuggle under the duvet with a book and a torch until the sun finds its way through the curtains.

Five weeks is a long time to keep track of, when you get back to school and have to write “What I did in the Holidays”. Luckily I took photos and so here is a visual reminder for my kids to write from and to fill in the gaps of all the blog posts I didn’t get round to writing.



Our Winter Festival

We had a perfect still and starry night for our winter festival. There was just us and one family of friends this time as many of our regulars had already left on holiday, but it was a really special celebration with a wonderful atmosphere.

We found this prayer in Diana Cooper's latest book and read it aloud together. It felt like it created a powerful energy.

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 Breede River

We got away to our favourite river for four nights. It’s a wonderful place to go in summer with swimming and boating, but is just as beautiful in winter with aloes aflame and chilly foggy mornings, burning off to still sunny days.

The Weather

It rained, but never on match days!

10th Birthday

 Middle Daughter celebrated her 10th birthday in fine style with a party and treasure hunt.

Day out to the Cape Town Waterfront

A visit to Spur to spend the children's bravery award vouchers from the dentist for free burgers. A walk along the shore towards the stadium in search of the World Cup gees.

Watching the boats come in.

Some brilliant Kenyan acrobatic entertainers risking if not life then certainly limb! Then off to see Toy Story 3, top of the holiday activity wish list. What's with this 3D craze... those glasses give me a headache!

And we finally found the gees, parked right near our car. Ayoba! May this sunny shiny ayoba feeling spread and sustain South Africa even without the soccer fever!

Scottish Breakfast Tea Arrives

One of the things I love most about blogging is the way we can get to know people on the other side of the world, share a love of a place, food or pastime with strangers, who we soon feel are friends, and if we are lucky enough to meet them in ‘real’ life we do discover that they are indeed old friends.

I have a nostalgic love of Scotland from a childhood spent visiting grandparents in Edinburgh, being dragged protesting up mountains from picturesque cottages in remote areas of the north as a reluctant teenager, visiting historic houses and castles and picturing myself living there and enough Scottish blood in my veins to be entitled to a wear a kilt if I ever felt so inclined.

I’ve been reading Sophia’s blog Scotland for the Senses for ages, delighting in her gorgeous photos of Scotland’s landscapes and castles, seascapes and cloudscapes, all a million miles from where I am now in South Africa. There is something about the light in Scotland that she captures, which is so different from the light here, even though we also have endless mountains and coastline. Every now and again Sophia generously holds a giveaway of something Scottish and I got lucky last month and won some Scottish Breakfast Tea samples from the Edinburgh Tea and Coffee Company.

Since living in South Africa I’ve become a dedicated rooibos tea drinker, naturally caffeine free bush tea which is full of antioxidants and tastes great black and unsweetened. But I grew up drinking proper tea made with leaves in a warmed teapot: Ceylon tea for breakfast and China tea at tea-time: perhaps smoky Lapsang Souchong or an Earl Grey blend. We had a proper tea caddy and I learned early how to warm the pot and then  put in one teaspoon of tea per person and one for the pot, before adding the water on the boil and letting it brew for a few minutes.

Obviously I still have a hankering for these ancient traditions, as I jumped at Sophia’s offer and was very excited about the arrival of a small package yesterday with the promised tea and a gorgeous postcard of Edinburgh castle and Princes Street gardens. I solemnly brewed myself a cup mid-morning today. It seemed to require more than just a biscuit to go with it, so I made a slice of slightly singed toast with marmalade, which was just perfect. Sitting in our South African kitchen, winter rain blowing outside, one child doing sums for holiday homework, another watching a world cup DVD of the best players, I could picture myself in my grandmother’s Edinburgh basement kitchen thirty years ago, preparing to go out to Jenners or up Arthur’s Seat, finishing breakfast, looking out at her neat city garden. I don’t know whether I ever did drink Scottish Breakfast tea there, but it felt like I did as I sipped at it here. It was full bodied and strong but not overwhelming and with a lighter top note that just tickled the taste buds. I generously allowed my husband a cup and he agreed that it was a very superior tea indeed! I hope we haven’t spoiled him for Five Roses!

So thank you Sophia for sharing the tastes of Scotland with your readers, it is much appreciated!

Marmalade and Vuvuzelas

Golden tangy marmalade at first seems to have nothing to do with the vuvuzelas and flags to be seen and heard all over Cape Town today. With the excitement over the World Cup mounting, I’ve been mulling over the question of national identity in a mild way. As a transplant from England taking roots in sandy South African soil, my allegiance to a particular team is blurred. Any excitement I feel over the soccer World Cup is caught from the prevailing atmosphere, gees (spirit) and flag-waving around me, but I feel no need to get out a Union Jack to assert my original roots and cheer on ‘my’ team.

Instead I’ve realized that my national identity reveals itself through food. No surprises there! I love the variety of South African food, but still cling to my origins when it comes to a few basics. Threaten my stash of marmalade and you’re toast.

How the British developed a national taste for a preserve made from sour Seville oranges especially imported from Spain, oranges grown purely to feed the marmalade habit of a small (but perfectly formed) island on the edge of Europe, I don’t know. But the habit is as entrenched as PG Tips, fish and chips and Christmas pudding.

No-one else on our farm likes marmalade, thank goodness, so I can make a couple of batches every winter to last me through to the next orange season with a few extra for fellow devotees when they come my way. I haven’t yet discovered any Seville oranges here in South Africa; for some reason the oranges here are grown to be sweet enough to eat as they are! So to get enough tanginess to my marmalade I make a three fruit one, with grapefruit and lemons added to sweet oranges to balance out the taste. The first batch of marmalade I ever made here, with just sweet oranges, was revolting: sweet and cloying, it was orange jam, not marmalade at all.

So if your taste-buds reveal an element of English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh in your heritage and you are stranded in a country that doesn’t understand marmalade, then try this three fruit marmalade recipe; experiment with different citrus fruit combinations, (a couple of limes add a subtle and pleasing fragrance) and enjoy year round citrus tanginess on toast for breakfast, for the taste equivalent of a spirited blast on the vuvuzela!

Three Fruit Marmalade Recipe
2 grapefruit
2 lemons
3 oranges
4 pint/2 litres water
3 ½ lbs/1.6kg sugar (if you use sour Seville oranges you need more sugar - 5lbs)

Wash the fruit, scrubbing the skins gently to get rid of any chemical sprays or wax, but without losing all the aromatic oils from the zest.
Cut the fruit and rind into shreds, however thick you like your peel in the finished marmalade.
Remove any very pithy bits and pips. Usually one is told to tie these in muslin and cook with the fruit, to extract the most pectin available, then remove the whole package pips and all. I have never bothered to do this and the marmalade still seems to set.

Put the fruit and water into a large pan (preferably thick bottomed) and bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 1-2 hours until the rind is tender. Add the sugar, off the heat, and stir till it dissolves. Don’t let the marmalade boil again till the sugar has dissolved.

Boil briskly for about 30 minutes. Test for doneness by putting a drop on a cold plate. If it forms a light skin that wrinkles when you push your finger through, it is done. Keep testing every five minutes if not. The bubbles also change to be slower, larger rolling bubbles when it is ready. Ladle into hot sterilised jars and seal.

And if you love marmalade and have not a drop of British blood in your veins, I’d love to know how you came to acquire your marmalade habit, as my marmalade/national identity theory comes crashing down around my ears!

South African Baking Recipes and World Cup Fever

South Africa is exploding in a fervour of flags, vuvuzelas, rainbow wigs and World Cup paraphenalia in the lead up to the big day on Friday. We’re slightly out of it here on the farm, but every time we go to town we get absorbed into the fever. The children are asking to go shopping in Spar on Friday to see all the staff in their crazy hats and wigs and feel some of the atmosphere. As a phlegmatic Britisher, I watch all this excitement over what is really just another sporting event (please don’t shoot me, I am flying the flag in the car, honest!) with slightly bewildered pleasure .

I don’t remember any of this national exuberance when Britain hosted a World Cup… or maybe we never did, it would have passed me by completely. (edited to add: My husband tells me I'm wrong, that there was great excitement and gees over the European Football cup when Britain hosted it. I must have been in Italy at the time, enjoying the emptiness of the roads and wondering where all the people were!) Here though, even people who are not remotely interested in soccer as a game are thrilled by the whole event. Perhaps it is because South Africa was so isolated for so long, that to be the centre of the world’s attention and entrusted with the honour of hosting the World Cup, makes us all feel proud and happy (I do feel proud of my adopted country too). Perhaps it is just that we need occasions like this to bring our diverse rainbow nation together in a common opportunity for hope, goodwill and celebration. Here's an article on what the World Cup means to South Africa that expresses it way better than I ever could.

So in honour of the occasion, I'm posting a round-up of my most searched for, authentically South African recipes: all baking recipes and learned from my in-laws or adapted from South African cook books when we moved here. After all my South African gees (spirit) manifests best through food!


Malva Pudding Recipe: Number one on the list of my most searched for recipes is Malva pudding, which seems to capture the hearts and taste-buds of so many visitors to South Africa. The restaurant version is soaked in a rich creamy sauce at the end of baking and is delicious and heart-stoppingly rich, but my home version is just the pudding itself, spongy and slightly caramelley with the apricot jam and served with custard. It's the kind of pudding you can throw together from store-cupboard stand-bys and still make the family happy.

South African buttermilk rusk recipe: A lot of people come to my blog looking for a rusk recipe. They fall in love with Ouma’s rusks when they come here and want to re-create them back home. Or else they are ex-pat South Africans desperate for a proper South African rusk, for which there is no substitute abroad. I can’t promise that my buttermilk rusks are exactly the same as Ouma’s, but they have been a staple in my family for eleven years now and are essential to mid-morning tea in our house.

South African Milk tart recipe: Milk tart is another dessert that you never see abroad. Our family crustless milk tart version is a whole lot easier to make than the traditional tart, as there is no pastry case and it can be whizzed together in the processor in no time: ideal for a calcium rich snack for the kids, or just comfort food for the whole family.

South African Crunchies: Last but not least the South African crunchie: I have got in a lot of trouble, both in the family and with patriotic readers for comparing it to the English flapjack, but it is true that the flapjacks (not pancakes at all) that I grew up baking in England were just like these wonderfully South African crunchy oat and syrup biscuits, except that they didn’t used to have coconut in. I make huge batches for class camps now and they always go down well.



So stock up the biscuit tin in time for the Fifa World Cup opening ceremony and then, even if you can't be here in SA yourself, it will taste like it!

An Empty Weekend... with Chocolate Brownies

A weekend with nothing planned is a gift. When you wake up on a misty Saturday morning, knowing that there is no soccer match to rush to, no shopping still to do, the day stretches out invitingly with myriad possibilities beckoning, most of them centred around food.

Those oranges and knobbly lemons brought straight from a friend's farm are desperate to be turned into marmalade, with a little support from a jewelled pink grapefruit for extra tanginess.

The winter sun breaks through the mist, tentantively banishing the chill of morning and soon citrus smells waft out to greet it. The pot bubbles throughout an impromptu outdoor picnic lunch, preserving sunshine in pots for my personal delectation through the year. This year's first batch is now ready to fill up the yawningly empty shelves in the larder. Just in time. I was down to my last jar, an unthinkable state of emergency.

While the marmalade simmers there is plenty of time for a sortie to the orchard and veggie garden. The sun is afternoon hot now, what would pass for summer in England, so Middle Daughter comes prepared.

Our two guava trees are surpassing themselves this year, bearing the most glorious golden globes, the largest guavas I've seen before, with unblemished skins and fragrant fruit. We pick all the ones approaching ripeness, fill the basket to the brim, and still the boughs of the trees bend under the weight of more green fruit, promising to provide enough guava puree to fill our freezers over and over. We leave the heavy basket under the tree and continue on to the veggie garden, where Youngest and her aunt are busy spraying bugs with a garlic spray, checking for out-of-season strawberries (they found three!) and harvesting carrots.

The sunshine slowed our footsteps, no hurry to return to the semi-darkness and cool air indoors. We wandered back to collect the guava basket, up over the rise to our house, welcomed by the fluttering of laundry rapidly drying on the line on the stoep.

I tore myself away to the kitchen to hobnob with the marmalade and a brownie recipe and left the children to stock up on Vitamin D till sunset chilled the air once more and they had to be dragged inside from trampoline and garden.

Today the promise of more sunshine was never fulfilled, the clouds stubbornly blanketed the sky and a light drizzle hustled the kids back inside from the trampoline to find refuge on the sofa.

The importance of having a big sofa is never so apparent as on cold cloudy winter Sundays. I was getting Sunday lunch ready, but could have squished in if necessary... right in the middle of the card game.

I got busy working on my food photography instead, trying to style my precious brownies according to the advice from the Food Bloggers Conference. The clock approached closer and closer to lunch time as I went backwards and forwards between the computer and the kitchen checking out the latest shot and eventually getting what I was after, while the potatoes got crispier and crispier.

The joy of having an empty weekend stretching ahead to fill, now concertina-ing to a close with a flurry of playing Pit, hairwashing and walking dogs, but still time left to blog as my husband makes cheese on toast for supper.

Natural Firelighters

If we were truly environmentally friendly, then we probably wouldn’t be lighting fires just to warm ourselves and brighten up cold winter nights. After all wood cooking fires are one of the many contributors to the familiar murky brown line of smog that sits over Cape Town on fine days in winter, snuggling up to the mountain, after a run of fine winter weather, with sunny days and oh so cold nights. A spell of windy, wet weather blows it away and it is gone and forgotten till next time.

Sitting here on the farm the hazy tendrils of smog reach us too and yet we’re not ready to give up the joys of a roaring log fire to toast backs and warm hands before bedtime. Bedtime stories move to the sofa, so we can enjoy the fire a bit longer, before braving the chillier air of bedrooms and tucking up with a hot water bottle, bed-socks and extra blankets.*

All the kids, from an early age, have learned how to build and light a fire safely and take turns in the evenings. Our eco conscience is salved by the thought that we are only burning the wood from trees cleared from our farm as alien invaders. Our logs are Port Jackson, a tree from Australia brought to control the shifting sand dunes of our coast, which is now out of control and taking over fallow farmland at a rapid rate in our area. Our firelighters are also gathered from our property – the best natural firelighters in the world – dry pine cones. They really are the secret of lighting a good fire: two or three open cones nestled in the centre of a nest of newspaper with a tower of logs built around them will coax even the most sluggish of logs into action.

Every so often we lead a mission to the top of the farm, armed with bags. It takes no more than twenty minutes to collect all the cones we can carry and the pine trees are still loaded with more cones that will come down the next time the wind blows. The pine trees too are alien invaders, threatening to take over our top camp, but at least if we collect the cones we are slowing them down. We’re unwilling to clear them completely as they are the only full sized trees we have and they also provide us and our friends with Christmas trees. And where would we be without our incredibly effective natural firelighters?


Today I dragged the two boys unwillingly up the path to collect a sack-full, R. complaining loudly about the girls left ‘relaxing’ back home (Youngest with a sore knee and Middle daughter with a cough). I’d offered the services of our patent firelighters to the school for their St John’s festival bonfire next week, on the last day of term before our extra-long, soccer-world-cup winter holidays. Last year an immense heap of dead wood had been collected for the bonfire, but it wouldn’t burn, as the fire had been heaped higgledy-piggledy rather than built. It only really got going, (with the help of flammable liquid applications) after the kids had finished singing and throwing their wishes on to the sullenly smouldering fire, which was a bit of an anticlimax. So, this year I hope that our pine cone donation will do the trick and send those wishes merrily circling up into the air for the angels to read!


*Note for overseas readers - central heating is a rare luxury in South Africa, where houses are built for hot summers and we tough out the winter months dressed as Michelin men in the mornings and evenings. The kids often emerge from school in T-shirts at midday on sunny days laden to their eyeballs with shed layers of fleeces and jackets. The houses however stay fridge-like from May to September.

Cocoa

I have just had a cocoa revelation. Not all cocoas are equal.

I have to admit to blithely ignoring Nigella’s instructions to use the best quality cocoa in her recipes for years. Not because I didn’t think it would be better, but when feeding a family on a budget it seemed to be wanton extravagance. After all if my standard Nestle cocoa will do the job, why spend a whole lot more on another variety?

This parsimonious attitude was helped by the fact that our local supermarket only stocked two basic cocoas anyway, so in my once-a-week whisk round the shelves there was no temptation to splash out… until recently. Our Spar has been creeping up in the world. Exotic items have been finding their way onto the shelves over the last year, upmarket brands with understated packaging politely inviting the garish mass-produced goods to 'shove over, make room for your betters'. It has been harder and harder to resist impulse buys of gourmet food-stuffs. I've done pretty well, until today... when my usual brand of cocoa seemed to have run out and sitting next to its empty space there was a cool and trendy tin of Nomu cocoa. More expensive of course.

If you’re forced to try a new brand what can you do. Buy the one that is even cheaper (undoubtedly nastier) than your trusted standard brand, or buy the quality alternative that promises to be even more chocolatey? I succumbed to the lure of the good stuff. It was for my sister-in-law’s birthday cake so the choice was doubly justified. But would we be able to taste the difference?

I am proud to announce that we could. The cocoa itself was darker, finer and denser than the usual stuff. Even the cake mix of my favourite chocolate birthday cake recipe taster deeper and richer. The cake had a different texture, more crust to it and a bigger crumb, it wasn’t as sweet as usual, but deeper in flavour, much more of a grown up chocolate cake, (though the kids devoured it happily as usual) and the butter icing made with the cocoa was a chocoholic’s addiction in itself.

I’m afraid my budgeting habits are blown. I’m going to have to upgrade myself to Nomu cocoa on a permanent basis, or else start shopping in a less tempting supermarket.

Disclaimer: I wasn't asked to review this product, paid my own hard-earned cash for it in fact, so the views expressed here are completely genuine... but I'd more than happy to receive free cocoa, chocolate or other delicious goods to review here at any time in the future.

Cook Books, Chefs and Fridges

We finally watched Julie and Julia a couple of weeks ago and loved the story of Julia Child. Meryl Streep portrayed all her quirks, warmth and life so fantastically that we were left wanting to know more. I was left with no desire at all to emulate Julie and blog through a seminal cookery book, but the movie did push me to explore some of the long neglected books on my kitchen shelf.

I was given the Constance Spry Cookery Book when, in my early twenties, I asked for a proper cookery book. I’d outgrown Delia’s One is Fun and wanted a point of reference. In the end I dipped into it but rarely, its old-fashioned insistence on doing things properly and cordon bleu methodology sending me thankfully into the arms of Nigel Slater who promised a good meal in 30 minutes.

On Sunday I found myself leafing through its pristine pages, unsplattered by flour and sauce, not so much for the recipes themselves, but reading all the introductions and prefaces. Her voice was so reminiscent of Julia Child’s, that I realised they were probably contemporaries, Constance Spry grappling with the shortages of everything after the Second World War in an England only just letting go of rationing, at the same time as Julia explored the cuisine of a France that seemed far less worried about lavish use of butter, eggs and cream than dreary old post-war England.

Constance was a flower arranger with a renowned school before the war – her knowledge of cooking was limited to the domestic, but after the war she teamed up with Rosemary Hume, who headed the Cordon Bleu cookery school, to write this book and she took on the role of making the recipes and methods accessible to the British domestic cook, just as Julia did for American cooks. Their book is an encyclopedia of the British take on cordon bleu, with over 1000 pages of recipes and advice all aimed at de-mystifying good food after many years of palates dulled by war-time austerity.

One thing that must have lodged in my subconscious was a passage about fridges quoted from a letter from a Frenchwoman to a new chef entering the service of friends of hers:

“A good cook is economical. He goes to endless trouble to turn out his best efforts without wasting a crumb… To make sure of using up everything to good effect it is absolutely essential for him to plan ahead.
As soon as the washing up is done each evening he should run his eye over his provisions. Opening the door of his Frigidaire, he stands in front of it and thinks. He thinks rapidly, but that moment’s reflection is absolutely necessary…. His kitchen companions should be made to understand that he is the absolute master of the Frigidaire, and he must insist that everything in it shall be kept in absolute order. A chef proves his worth by the scrupulous order in which he keeps his refrigerator, for which he is solely responsible…”

Today I opened the fridge and was dismayed at the state of my sole domain. Usually the week’s shopping fills it to capacity: five or six 2 litre bottles of milk cram the top shelf, yoghurt crowds into another, bowls of leftovers tussle with half filled jars of olives for the best place on the shelf. It is only when the next weekly shop looms that the true state of the realm is revealed. Thriftily saved butter papers crammed in corners, out-of date medicines stuffed in the door, build-ups of gunge threatening the condensation drain thing… nothing was actually threatening to walk out by itself, no blue fluffiness breeding new strains of antibiotic, but still way short of the chef’s nirvana pictured above.

So instead of making bread and doing the laundry, as planned in my self-inflicted hour of housework before approaching the computer, I micro-cleaned the fridge, and realized that never in its life had I actually removed the shelves to clean properly, they were still firmly attached with sticky tape, just as when it was delivered.

Slightly horrified by this proof of neglect, I did manage to conjure up some memories of cleaning it in the past, just not in quite such saintly detail as I was now attempting. I wielded the vinegar spray liberally and made sure my husband was aware of these unprecedented goings on, so that my halo could be acknowledged. Not to be outdone, he got out the gaffer tape (duct tape - fixer of all things, from tents to fridges) and stuck together the plastic shelf in the door that is threatening to resign its position as holder of full milk and juice bottles.

So now I have righted my fridge in the eyes of Constance Spry’s French friend, I wonder if I dare approach some of her recipes. Flipping through now I see a recipe for croissants that looks manageable… mmmm… tempting.