Dinner

Mrs B produces magic from the kitchen.
Tonight it was chicken breast stuffed with blue cheese and spinach, a melange of sweet potato and carrots, and a salad with our favourite dressing.

That's lovely, B, uncomplicated, colourful and nutritious. When you think of grub like this why do some people consume so much junk?

We had a roast chicken on Sunday with leftovers on Monday. It was a large job of 2.5 kilos. The man and wife team who provide fresh farm chickens from our local farmer's market said they had a kind of bumper crop this time and that one of these weighed in at 5 kilos so the abattoir photographed it for the newspaper . We had our last one from our freezer on Sunday. I roasted it and we had it with carrot, bean and apple medley, new potatoes, rice, sunshine yellow gems and cheese sauce. Monday crispy leftovers (drumsticks) with oven chips and tomatoes.

My engineer will be going to fetch the new batch on Saturday morning at sparrow gas time and they are all between 2.4 to 2.5 kilos so it'll be more of the same kind for a while. They are absolutely succulent and tender. A credit to their breed and the pride of the farmer, who also grows beef up for the slaughter and butcher's outlet market. (I couldn't do that job.)

At the moment our chest freezer is full of frozen lemon juice. I like to freeze this when the bottles are standing up so they don't leak while freezing. Once they are frozen I will transfer them to the upright freezer trays where they will join what's left of their comrades from last season.

I have just extracted 9 litres worth of juice and now need to make more marmalade and then when I have enough jam for the next year, I can squeeze the remainder of the trees' harvest. It's becoming a rather mammoth job every winter. And I can see a crop of green lemons coming up under the ripe ones I have just picked so there have been secret spares I didn't know about. Argh! It won't be long before my lemon juice extractor appliance grinds to a standstill. It sounded quite exhausted last week, poor thing.

...Saturday morning at sparrow gas time....

I've tried to use a little imagination but the meaning still escapes me !

I can claim to only having a Salad yesterday evening.

why do some people consume so much junk?

I pass KFC on a regular basis late afternoon. You can tell the direction of the wind by the smell....

Ian C wrote:

...Saturday morning at sparrow gas time....

I've tried to use a little imagination but the meaning still escapes me !

Oooh, now I can say it without anyone accusing me of being rude. Sparrow gas time is my socially correct version of "sparrow fart", which is dawn.

By the way, I'm no bunny nosher. I am a sugar eater of consumate ease, and I can polish off a large packet of crisps as well as the next junk food-aholic. I just think that many people today tend to eat mostly junk food on account of their lifestyles and should get into the habit of also eating good food.

Today at dawn, my engineer went off to the farmer's market to buy our chickens on order. He got twenty. They cost a fortune, but will be nourishing us for a long time to come and are very good quality, so doing it this way avoids the nasty little supermarket jobs that collapse when roasted because they're mostly fat. I've never had this many chickens in the freezer in my life.

I nearly also received a lovely little Netherlands dwarf bunny as someone at the market was selling these, but my engineer managed to control his impulse to bring it home and got me three sunflower daisies instead.

Frith wrote:That's lovely, B, uncomplicated, colourful and nutritious.

For me, anything with more than four ingredients is complicated.

Yesterday was salmon with fennel and herbs in a creamy sauce with pasta and broccoli.
Today it was devilled eggs with a salad followed by beef stroganoff and wild rice.

Tomorrow we had planned for a braai.
But the washing machine has just screwed up, so I guess I'll be working o that......

I detest braais so am, very un-South African. I don't know why the barbeque doesn't appeal to me, but I just hate it. I love cooking inside. I hate sitting outside fending off insects and getting covered in smoke and smelling like a bit of burned animal afterwards. Quite a lot of people do fish braais in SA, especially in the Cape Province. And some do chicken braais. Every weekend and at any other time they can find an excuse for one, the neighbourhoods will be filled with the smoke of cooking fires. It's like going back to ancient times. And there's me in the kitchen, cooking like a Victorian.

A big favourite in the South African cuisine scene is the potjie (pronounced pawikee), a meal cooked, over a fire, in a small, medium or large three-legged African cooking pot. As you probably know, Besoeker, there are cooking competitions here for the best potjie and the sacred family recipes and secret ingredients of the potjie wizards are guarded with as much venom as dragons once guarded their accumulated treasure.

I even have a potjie recipe book. I've never made one as I hate cooking outside over a fire, but potjies are essentially stews cooked very slowly and so layering of ingredients and spices and cooking time, etc are very important because long ago, among the early Voortrekkers and wanderers of the wild veld and mountains, one was cooking a meal in one cauldron, as cooking pots took up space and so ingenious methods were devised to put as much into this one chance to cook as possible. You can buy potjie cooking pots all over the place and the potjie stew and the pot it's cooked in have a symbiotic relationship. At least so potjie myth and legend goes.

People today make veggie potjies, seafood potjies, mutton, pork or beef potjies, chicken potjies, Hawaiian potjies, you name it they've done it.

But then there's another essentially South African braai scene ingredient never absent from a traditional SA barbeque or potjie meal and that is traditional pap (pronounced pahp). This is mealiemeal (cornmeal) made into a variety of consistency porridge. You get stywe pap (stiff porridge), "saf" pap and gradations in between and people can get as iffy about their pap consistency and quality as they can about their potjies and braais. Apart from being a breakfast meal that can be eaten soft with the traditional milk and sugar (or melted butter and salt), this is also eaten with the meat of the actual braai, or barbequed, meat or with a potjie instead of a starch like rice. Pap is a very versatile starch based ingredient in African cuisine. Before there were mealie fields there must have been African corn varieties that were used for a similar thing.

The most important accompaniment to the pap meal is the sous, or sauce in English. (In Afrikaans sous can also be jokingly referred to in connection with booze but that is another matter.)

The variety and complexity of sous is about as finely studied and diligently practised by both amateur and professional traditional cooks as the art of the braai or the potjie.

If you Google these things in a South African context under food I think you may find all you'll ever need to get some idea of what a Saturday afternoon on the high veld plains and down in the bush lowlands is like when there is a rugby match on TV and every household is glued to the TV, Dad and a few Ooms (uncles) are outside watching the sacred braai fire and turning the sizzling meat and watching the delicate balance of the potjie fire and Ma and the Tannies (aunties)are inside making salads and talking girl talk and skinner (gossip).

Beer is used to splash onto the flames should the braai fire get a little over-enthusiastic and roars of approval or groans of disappointment go on throughout the afternoon, depending on whether a try has been scored by the favourite team, or not. A southern version of a footie day in England, perhaps where people are just as devastated by defeat and just as elated by victory and everything goes down well with a couple of "cold sods" and some friends.

A final visit to the braai scene way down here is the sosatie, a version of the kebab. Afrikaans cooking has some exotic quirks because it is greatly influenced by African ingredients and cuisine and also by the early Malay slave cooking at the old Cape Colony during the time of the Dutch East India Company.

So there are many amazing dishes to be investigated for the adventurous foody and sosasties would be one them. They are little squares of mutton or pork or chicken (anything today really, even seafood) stuck on the long steel kebab skewer, interspersed with interesting flavoursome things, even little bits of fat to make for flavour, heart disease and smoothie taste experiences mixed with the spices that run in the juices from the meat.

But the big thing with sosaties is the marinade the day before. This is also pretty closely guarded among fundies, but there are many recipes available to those who aren't keeping theirs in the family "skat kis" (treasure chest). So curry, exotic spices of all kinds, booze and whatnot goes into these marinades. Also tomato and ginger and especially tumeric which gives a yellow colour. The Afrikaners also make "yellow rice" tinted with tumeric and containing raisins, also a legacy from their exotic spice trade heritage.

So a traditional braai can be a cholesterol heavy experience and isn't recommended by today's terrified anti-fat foodies. But for the stalwart traditional Boer, it's a cultural must. It's part of the past and the present and will no doubt continue into the future, more carefully skimmed and leaned and adapted, but nevertheless still a braai.

Frith

I'm sorry that the braai doesn't appeal to you.
Mrs B, from Georgia, would probably agree with you on the flying insect aggravation. Here in UK, it isn't such a problem.

Back to food.
Today I had an early start. Breakfast at 06:00 was seasoned cheese toasties. I wasn't home in time for lunch but we had an early dinner.
Dirty rice, mange tout, and a home made Thai sweet curry.
Millions of calories..........
Especially after three helpings.

You only live once, may as well enjoy the ride. Our brief visit to this place can be made a whole lot worse by worrying about everything we eat, drink or do.

Within reason, of course.

I am having chocolate for breakfast, so I am guilty as charged, yer Honour.

Frith wrote:You only live once, may as well enjoy the ride. Our brief visit to this place can be made a whole lot worse by worrying about everything we eat, drink or do.

Within reason, of course.

We do actually try to eat a healthy diet. That's not because we are fanatically health concious. We just like good fresh fruit and vegetables and not too much red meat.

A farmer cousin of my engineer has given us some dried Bortolli beans. I keep getting asked when I am going to "do something with the beans", so when I get a chance I am going to go for a nice bean soup and after that maybe a little stew with Bortollis among the ingedients.

Will let you know if we live, or rather, if you hear nothing, you'll know it's the Bortollis wot done it.

Frith wrote:Will let you know if we live, or rather, if you hear nothing, you'll know it's the Bortollis wot done it.

Eat enough beans and we'll hear something....

Tomorrow we have my daughter, hubby, and grandchild coming for a visit.
Mrs B has put the food factory into full swing.
So far, devilled eggs, slow-cooked ribs, chicken (method TBA), coleslaw, salad, and salmon fillet.
My contribution was making the coleslaw.
Difficult to screw that up....
And Roomba, our robot vacuum cleaner, has been a bit busier than usual........

Ah, the joys of family visits......