Here today, gone tomorrow!

12 October 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

Here today, gone tomorrow just about epitomises last week.

Summer arrived with a vengeance on Monday and the thermometer hit 38 degrees Celsius (just over 100 Fahrenheit). Overnight, a little swarm of bees took residence in our Cotoneaster. We were delighted because a couple of months ago, a local beekeeper had put an empty hive on our plot and we’ve been waiting patiently for a swarm to occupy it. Bee man said to leave them alone. “They’ve already decided where they’re going….”

Wednesday dawned: cool and blustery and got progressively more blustery and cold. By evening it was pouring with rain. After Monday’s heat, this was all a bit much, so I persuaded The Husband to light the fire; I know he thought I was being extra dramatic. Wonderful man: he indulged me.

When Pearli thundered home, bang-crash-wallop through the cat flap, she was very glad to discover a lovely warm fire. And the sofa, with its pristine throw, was just the place to dry off. Of course.

I had planned omelettes and salad for supper, but with the cold, I thought that something more warming and stew-like would be in order. But what? Whatever I made would have to have egg or cheese as the protein, and whatever else was in the kitchen, garden, or the fridge. Thursday is shopping day, so the proverbial pantry was rather bare.

Fortunately, and don’t ask me why, we had a large number of tomatoes and in the fridge I found courgette, sweet bell peppers and mushrooms (these we would have had in the omelette, anyway). In the garden there is fennel, oregano and parsley, all of which go well with both eggs and tomatoes. Fortunately we both like egg and tomato. My dad didn’t, and nor do a few other people I know…

So, in the wok, I made a tomato stew with sautéd onions and garlic to which I added chopped peppers, mushrooms and courgette, with some fennel. I let all of that brew for a little while – not too long so that the vegetables keep some crunch. When it was all bubbling nicely, with a good bit of liquid, I made four “wells” in the stew, and broke an egg into each. I put the lid on the wok and let the eggs poach in the tomato stew until they were ready.

Boy, did we need that warm stew. It was a cold night and we woke to snow on Thursday morning – summer was gone – and our little swarm of bees had huddled themselves into a tiny little ball.

And by Sunday, winter had retreated. And our swarm of bees, still here yesterday, was gone. Our empty hive is still empty.

When spring flew in!

5 October 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

Late last summer, a pair of African swallows, built a nest under the eaves of our front veranda. At the time, we thought it a bit late in the season for a brood, but a brood they had. Many a late afternoon, we watched as they went about the very frustrating job of getting their babies to bed. Much like humans, these swallow parents had to deal with the exuberance of a new-found, fun skill: the children did not want to go to bed – flying about was such fun!

Winter arrived. Jack and Jill left and I missed their cheerful “chissick!” greeting as they swooped along the veranda past the office window several times a day. They would be back, I knew, to add to the nest that they had so carefully built.

Along with winter, came the need for work on our roof. Large men with even larger boots stomped about on the veranda roof – Jack and Jill’s house came tumbling down! I was horrified! There, in smithereens, was their hard work, and lying amongst them, the most beautiful warm bed that they had made with, among other things, guinea fowl and pigeon feathers.

Jack and Jill's feather bed - top (l) and bottom (r) — A feather bed – top (l) and bottom (r), beautifully curved to fit into the base of the nest

Then, about six weeks ago, much to our delight, as we were contemplating something or other in the office, we heard a flutter and something swooped past the window, under the eaves. Then another. And then a “chissick!”

Jack and Jill were back! For a few days they were much in evidence, flying about, and generally having a ball…

After a cold snap and some rain, we noticed that they had started to work on the old nest. The weather cleared and went from winter to summer in a single day, and there was no more mud. Work stopped.

A couple of weeks passed and we had another cold snap and rain – lots of mud about again. Jack and Jill began rebuilding in earnest, and this is what they have built over the last 10 days, from the ruins of their old home.

Yesterday and today, they have been literally feathering their nest, so I suppose we will soon see less of Jill as she sits on her eggs in the nest under the eaves of our veranda.

If I am able to get good pictures of the babies, I’ll update this post and re-blog….

Sweet peas…Tiger’s chilled minted pea soup

29 September 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

This year we grew peas.

So what?

There is something almost magical about peas that you pick and shell – to pop into your mouth – in the pea patch. Little can beat the flavour of those little round orbs as they pop with their unique sweetness.

Peas are “up there” as my favourite vegetable. I remember my mother freezing them – by the ton. It’s amazing that there were any to freeze: my sister and I used to sneak out of the house, through the courtyard, past the plum tree, over the lawn to the vegetable garden, where we would fill our faces with the sweetest peas in living memory. First the peas, and then the shells.

I always have peas in the deep freeze; besides anything, they’re a great standby. Every year, I want to grow peas, and have tried, from time to time, over the years. Tom was never that enthusiastic: “You have to have lots of plants to have enough to eat,” he said.

We hadn’t tried growing peas in McGregor; somehow this this year, I prevailed and we planted peas. Just one packet. The germination rate could have been better, but any way, we must have had about ten plants – more than we’d ever had.

I was delighted. Even more so, when I discovered that the profusion of pods were filled with tiny peas. It was all I could do to wait until they were plump enough to pluck and eat!

I suppose that as my favourite vegetable, peas are also a non-negotiable accompaniment of some the meals that are, for me, the very comforting: egg and chips; fish cakes…. I also add them to risotto (right at the end), to salads, raw, and always cook them with a large sprig of mint from the garden. Oh, and the water you drain off those peas, is a wonderful addition to gravy and/or vegetable stock.

Peas are at their best when young, but when you grow your own, it’s inevitable that you miss some and if you’re lucky to have a good crop, you can’t eat them all at their sweetest. So it was for us, last Monday, when we had our last picking. Some of the peas were, as my Mum would have said, “rather elderly!” I looked at this lot and thought that they’d not be good to freeze, let alone eat as a side dish.

It had been a hot day, and then I remembered Tiger’s chilled pea and mint soup that we had so enjoyed. I thought that I’d give it a bash. No recipe, you understand, just Fiona on the fly. So I flung the peas in a pot, along with some vegetable stock and cooked the up lot. Not for too long, but longer than if we had been eating them “as is”. Then I gave that lot a whizz with an immersion blender, and added some fresh mint, gave it another whizz and then put it into the fridge. As I recall, Tiger’s soup was smooth and refreshing, and although creamy, not heavy. So, as I didn’t have any cream, I added a little mascarpone. With hind sight, I should have strained the soup, or cooked the mint in with the peas – fresh mint is a bit fibrous, so it doesn’t give one as smooth a puree as one would like, nor the visual impact, for that matter. All of that said, the soup was more than edible.

Little did we know, as we enjoyed our Tiger-inspired chilled mint and pea soup, that on Sunday (yesterday), we would have been celebrating a lovely man, and a life well lived. He, with his beloved Jill and four-legged Denzil, welcomed us to the village, before we were resident here. They, and he, are integral to not just our earliest memories of McGregor, but the fabric of our community. I shall make this soup again and it shall, forever, in our home, be known as Tiger’s chilled, minted pea soup.

Post script: Tiger was the co-owner and chef at Green Gables at the Old Mill, two doors away from us. A visit to Green Gables is a non-negotiable part of any visit to our village. Jill, you and your family are much in our thoughts.

Veld Kos

24 September 2014 ~ Fiona ~ 7 Comments

My basic cooking and food choices are largely influenced by my English and Scottish background and living in South Africa. Over the last 20 or so years, as ethnic foods have become both more fashionable and available, it has become easier to experiment with flavours and different ingredients. My mother cooked “English” food and through a woman who looked after our house, and then later at boarding school, I was introduced to samp (dried, de-husked corn) and beans, and morogo (wild greens/spinach). Patience and I would go into the vegetable garden and pick “weeds” and turnip leaves which were then added to the warm umgqusho (as she called it in isiXhosa), or to the mealie rice or pap (porridge). These memories of the warm, bubbling pot, the vegetable garden, and the stories my Dad used to tell about the family allotment in Glasgow, are the roots of my interest in edible plants. An opportunity to learn about veld kos – edible indigenous plants – was not one to be missed.

Last weekend we joined friends at Loubie Rusch‘s talk on Veld Kos (field food) at the Pink Geranium. The Pink Geranium is a wonderful nursery not far from Stellenbosch (but more of that, another time). Loubie is a landscaper by profession, and passionate about the potential of indigenous plants for food and food security. There was a great deal to absorb, and I have come home to look at some of the plants in our garden with a new, and adult eye.

Why, “adult” eye? Well, as a child, we ate the flowers and leaves of a plant that appeared every spring, Oxalis corniculata, also known as wild sorrel, suurings in Afrikaans (suur is sour in Afrikaans) – it does taste a lot like sorrel. These are yellow ones in our garden, but the ones that we ate growing up in Grahamstown, were purple. I now know that the entire plant – flowers, leaves, stems and corm – is edible, but that it must be treated with respect because of the oxalic acid content (spinach and rhubarb also contain oxalic acid). We used to nibble Elephant’s Food – the fleshy, sour leaves of the Portulacaria afra or spekboom which hedged the property on which we lived, and past which I used to walked to primary school; in those dry, drought years, this hedge was the greenest thing in sight.

Before this weekend, I had also partaken of wild garlic (Tulbagia) . In addition to having a strong (very) garlic smell and flavour and, like the conventional garlic, it is a great companion plant for roses and an essential addition to home-made insect repellents. Again, we have the purple variety in the garden – Loubie introduced me to the white ones.

Loubie used leaves from the first three of these plants to make the most delicious tzatziki-type dip, which we tasted with carrot sticks. The sweetness of the carrots was beautifully juxtaposed with the sourness of the yoghurt, oxalis and spekboom.

She also introduced us to dune spinach, which she stir-fried with some oyster mushrooms. She had made a pesto, which which she combined with cherry tomatoes, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you (because I can’t remember) what went into it! It all looked and tasted delicious.

Loubie Rush sharing her passion for Veld Kos at the Pink Geranium — Loubie Rusch sharing her passion for Veld Kos at the Pink Geranium

I have come home inspired, and in addition to the first three plants I discussed, all of which grow abundantly in our garden, I will be experimenting with two other plants that grow there, in equal profusion: the wild rosemary, Eriocephalus africanus (Kapokbos in Afrikaans), and the sour fig, Carpobrotus edulis, a member of the Mesembryanthem family, and which has a long and rich culinary history in the Western Cape.

Wild rosemary (L) and conventional rosemary — Eriocephalus africanus (L) and conventional rosemary

The wild rosemary grows in the same, neglected corner of our plot as the nasturtiums of which I spoke a while ago, and has a more peppery but less strong aroma than the conventional rosemary that I already use quite a lot. As you see, the leaves are similar.

Coming back to the sour figs – a friend in Cape Town was very excited when she saw sour figs growing in our garden. I knew about sour fig jam and dried sour figs, but I hadn’t known what they tasted like, or how to go about using them, green and/or fresh, in a salad, let alone in a stir fry. We have loads of these in our garden because they are a great, drought resistant ground cover that helps to stabilise banks, so I will soon be experimenting with them.

Sour fig collage Sept 2014 — Carpobrotus edulis

The plants I’ve mentioned are just some of the plants Loubie told us about. Wild asparagus we also have in the garden – I’ve been pulling it out – now I shall be giving it TLC. I’ll keep you posted about this new aspect of my culinary journey…

Source: http://www.plantzafrica.com/

Wicked and wonderful things in the valley

9 September 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

Our valley is one of contrasts, and last week reflected this. It began with a slow burning fire on our mountains which had, a week earlier, been covered in snow. Neither the farmers nor the conservationists not know what started the fire, although a human element is suspected. The wild animals are fleeing down the mountains, nearer and nearer to working farms, livestock and human habitation. This area is one of the few areas where the endangered Cape leopards both traverse and live, and is part of a leopard conservation project, whose efforts are also being jeopardised by this fire.

Fire and snow, equally spectacular. The fire is still burning…

Last week ended (or this week began) in a somewhat different, but also dazzling way, with Sunday picnic lunch under the fig tree at Tanagra, another of our wonderful boutique wineries. We were entertained by two groups of very talented young people from our valley, all of whom come from very poor circumstances – informal settlements and/or farms. Both the Langeberg Steel Band and the Next Step Dance Company are award-winning groups in their own rights, and mentored by two talented individuals who live in McGregor.

We left Tanagra with a song in our hearts and a bounce in our steps. Here is just a soupcon of the sound of the Langeberg Steel Band.

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Noble Nasturtiums so versatile in the kitchen

8 September 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

I love edible flowers. Nasturtiums are just another gift we get from our garden. Like gooseberries, they are indigenous to South America. Before I moved to the Western Cape, I tried – in vain – to grow nasturtiums. Now they simply just grow… like in the picture, which are in the corner of our plot that we haven’t got to, yet….

Angel fish – astonishingly versatile

1 September 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago, the new season of Master Chef SA started, and I was watching with half an eye, as I was preparing our supper – angel fish. Imagine my surprise when the first episode concluded with a boot camp – on a wharf in the Cape Town harbour – with the contestants having to prepare a dish with, yes, angel fish!

Before we moved to McGregor, we used to eat fish regularly, and over the last 10 or so years, the range of fresh fish available in the few independent fishmongers (as opposed to large supermarket chains), has shrunk enormously. The implications of this, beyond availability for home consumption, is profound for both our environment, and for small fishers in South Africa. However, that’s a rant for another time and place.

Inversely proportional to the reduced choice, is the increased price. When I first moved to Cape Town some 22 years ago, my adventure with cooking fresh fish began. I used to ask the lady behind the counter what was nice and how to cook it. Being cash strapped, decisions were price-driven. Consequently, and because hake seemed boring (and not always cost effective, and I am not fond of snoek), choices were limited: Gurnard (shad) and angel fish. Both, I discovered, are great eating – and very underrated. In the Western Cape, Gurnard is not frequently available, so angel fish became our usual, and almost most favourite fish. It remains so. Even after moving, we still go into our “old” fish monger (Plumstead Fisheries), when we are in Cape Town. A friend who commutes, also goes into the shop to get fresh fish for us – she has now got to know Desiree who has looked after us so well for about ten or so years now. However, I digress…

A simple supper

Returning to angel fish – we eat it at least once a week. Angel fish is moderately flavoured and relatively firm; the fillets are thin, if you have a medium sized fish, so they don’t take much cooking. Tom is very fond of cooking over the coals (braai or barbecue), and will do so at any opportunity. Having grown up in a land-locked country, when we first met, eating sea fish was foreign, and the first fish meal I did for him, he ate “met lang tande” (with long teeth), and was pleasantly surprised. The next task was to get him to braai it: a typical Western Cape way of eating fish. Needless to say, some nearly fourteen or so years later, he’s a convert.

All that’s a long way of telling you that nine times out of ten, our angel fish is braaied on the Weber, over a moderate to dying fire, skin side down, regularly basted with a mixture that always includes an appropriate herb, garlic, butter and olive oil. Recently, I’ve been using my lemon and parsley pesto as a base for what what is commonly referred to as “the paint”.

This is a simple, easy meal accompanied by a garden salad and potatoes (or not) boiled in their skins. Depending on the weather (or the season, my mood and what’s in the garden) I will make a parsley or tartare sauce or a salsa, so although we eat the same thing, often, it doesn’t get boring.

Cold fish or luscious leftovers?

With only two of us, we often have fish left over, and I’m not one to throw away good food. Prepared over the coals, the cooled fish has a lovely, light smokey flavour. We have, on occasion, taken cold angel fish as a contribution to a picnic – the first time, against Tom’s better judgement. On one occasion, there was quite a quantity and he was certain that we’d have lots left over: what would I do with that? “Make fish cakes,” was my immediate response. But there was none left – no fish cakes! On that occasion, the “paint” consisted of olive oil, butter, a little garlic and some grated ginger.

Fish cakes

Fish cakes are really easy to make, even if a little messy towards the end, with the egg-dipping and crumbing. That said, they are worth it and they freeze well, making them a great stand by. Fish cakes are also a good way of using up extra potato and parsley sauce, which is what I did when I had a surfeit of fish, a week or so ago. To make them, break up the fish, and mash the potato and then mix the two together, well. Add the parsley sauce (if you have it; it’s not mandatory) and a good handful of fresh, chopped parsley. Ensure this is well mixed in, season and add a lightly beaten egg to bind.

Then divide into cakes. I’m not a great judge of size by eye and always used to end up with a load of unevenly sized fish cakes. Now, I prepare a tray, covered with a layer of grease-proof paper, and then use a cookie cutter as a mould. I press the mixture firmly into the shape and then once I’ve used it all up, I roll each cake in flour, dip it in beaten egg and then roll it in commercial bread crumbs: fish cakes ready to fry. At this point you can freeze them if you have more than you need.

I love fish cakes. For me, they are a rare but indulgent comfort food. I’ll eat them with lashings of tomato sauce (ketchup) and peas. I’m especially comforted when the peas are freshly picked and lightly boiled/blanched with a sprig of mint.

Angel fish paté

Of course, to make fish cakes, you need a relatively large quantity of left over fish. Often this isn’t the case, and one way of using up little bits of left over fish is to make a paté. This has become one of the most popular products that I sell at McGregor’s Saturday pop-up market. As far as quantities are concerned, use your discretion….

The paté consists of the left over fish, a spritz of dry white wine, a dollop of plain, creamed cottage cheese, a sprinkling of chives (or if it’s winter, and the chives have died back, green onion leaves) as well as salt and pepper. Mix that all together, and you have angel fish paté. Of course you can serve it with biscuits and/or fresh bread, but I have also served it in a lettuce leaf with a baby salad as a starter.

A last word (or two)

The South African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI) is a World Wildlife Fund initiative and, among other things, aims to create awareness about marine conservation and encourage people to eat fish responsibly, ensuring not just the sustainability of our oceans, but also, one hopes the re-establishment of stocks.

Both Angel Fish and Gurnard are on SASSI’s green list – at the moment.

I loved what the Master Chef contestants did with their angel fish and am grateful for a slew of new ideas….

Anyone for eggs?

25 August 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

I have always loved eggs. As a little girl, I loved eating Dad’s scrambled eggs; of course I had had my own, but they were much nicer when I perched on his knee, eating them off his plate. He loved his eggs on buttery toast and topped with a good sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper. Another “egg” memory associated with Dad, and which I’ve mentioned before, is my (actually Dad….) bidding for the winning egg and succeeding, at the Gonubie Agricultural Show. I guess those eggs must have been quite expensive in the grand scheme of things. Why was I besotted with those particular eggs? I have no idea, except that they were generally a beautiful white, not the brown we are used to, now. And always double yolkers.

Eggs feature quite a bit on our menu; fortunately, we both could eat them for breakfast, lunch and supper! There was a time when an egg-rich diet was considered potentially dangerous. Not so, nowadays, and for two key reasons, it seems: they don’t contain “bad” cholesterol, and it would appear that there are now even questions about whether cholesterol is the consequence of too much unsaturated fat. Adding fuel to this fire is the move to a low carbohydrate, high-fat diet – people are Banting bonkers at the moment. I’m not knocking it as I have been leaning in that general direction for a while…

Eggs are an essential ingredient in many things we eat, often without realising it, for example mayonnaise, cakes and cookies, rich pastries and of course, in custards, including the savoury custard in a quiche. My home made pasta is egg-rich. So, we eat eggs, often, and not just for breakfast.

Breakfast

Over the weekend, have sort of a ritual. I loathe early mornings and am virtually non-functional, so what needs to be done must be done in “auto pilot”. On a Saturday, because there is no alarm, things are a little more leisurely, but we still need to be at the McGregor pop-up market, and set up by nine o’clock, so our day begins without breakfast.After the market, we get home and unpack the bakkie (also known, depending on where you live, as a pick-up or ute), and Tom does breakfast: soft boiled eggs, toast and coffee. He’s a real egg-boiling pro, and if the batch of eggs contains a speckled one – it’s always mine! The speckled egg is another throwback to my childhood and Alison Uttley’s wonderful stories about Grey Rabbit and Speckeld Hen; stories that my granny read to us when she visited South Africa in 1969 into 1970. A “speckeldy” egg always gets me clucking with childlike delight!

Sunday is a whole different ball game; breakfast is the full catastrophe! Fried egg, beautiful, homemade bacon, fried tomato, mushroom, brinjal, potato… And, needless to say, toast or croissant, and coffee. We love our Sunday brunch which, weather permitting, we usually eat on our lovely, sunny veranda.

Lunch

So, if that was breakfast, what about lunch, you ask. Well, ever since I was a tot, a favourite sandwich was egg mayonnaise – it still is. I even enjoyed the ones we got at boarding school! There can be few things more delicious than lovely fresh bread, hard boiled egg, grated and mixed with home made mayonnaise, seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Jazz that up with some fresh parsley, a lettuce leaf and some sliced tomato, and you have a feast!

But you don’t have to stop there: firm, but not quite hard-boiled eggs (so that the yolk is not quite cooked and a lovely rich, orange colour), added to a green salad are delicious, on a hot summer’s day.

On a cooler day, here’s a thought: poached eggs on freshly picked spinach, wilted, with tomatoes, topped with a dollop of cottage cheese, grilled. Fresh fennel goes well with all of these components, so I use it both as a garnish and as an element in the meal – with or without lovely crusty bread.About poaching eggs: make sure that your eggs are as fresh as possible, and add a little vinegar to the water when you cook them. Once they’re cooked to your taste, remove them with a slotted spoon and place them on a cloth (not paper towel – it sticks to the egg and is hard to get off). Allow them to drain for a little while – there is nothing worse than a poached egg that deposits puddles of water over your plate!

Supper

A regular supper, one night during the week, has egg as the main protein, in one form or another: an omelette, a Spanish Omelette, a frittata, or a quiche, accompanied by a garden salad. A two-egg omelette, with a filling of your choice, which includes cheese, is a really filling and easy meal.If you’re nervous about folding an omelette, and other than practice, my technique is to make sure that I use a pan that is the right size, and I don’t believe anything is non-stick, so I always add a knob of butter and olive oil. Don’t overheat the pan…. Once the eggs are in the pan, don’t fiddle with them until you see that the edges are cooking. Then, with a small egg lifter, draw a little egg towards the centre and allow the runny egg to flow out to the edge. Once the egg is mostly cooked, add your filling – on one side and then gently lift the other over it.

Another tip about folding omelettes over their fillings: make sure that you have the pan handle at nine o’clock. Put the filling on the same side, between twelve and six o’clock. Then you can comfortably hold the pan and gently lift the other side of the omelette over the filling, and then slide it onto a warm plate. If you’re left handed, do it the other way round, i.e. have the handle at three o’clock, etc…

Have a look at another supper that includes eggs, cooked in a tomato sauce….

Veg-ing out

17 August 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

I have flirted with vegetarianism on and off for about thirty years, particularly when I lived alone – which I have done, not unhappily, on and off, until I finally settled down with Tom. One of the first, if not the first, recipe book I bought, was the A – Z of Vegetarian Cooking in South Africa. And two of our favourite quiche fillings (leek & onion, and spinach & feta) are based on recipes from this book. I do confess that I work very hard at not thinking about the journey that meat must take to reach my kitchen.

Consequently, entertaining friends who are vegetarian is fun! Well, I think so, anyway. For some, it’s a challenge, so I thought I’d share with you what I did when our neighbours joined us for a long overdue dinner, a few weeks ago.

It was a Friday evening and Fridays are my day in the kitchen, preparing for the market. This particular Friday, I was really in the mode, so it was in for a penny, in for a pound. The broccoli was ready to pick and we had ripe gooseberries, so there were two ready ingredients.

That said, it was cold and miserable and had the makings of becoming even more so, and what is more warming than cottage pie, I thought. So, instead of the beef mince, I used beautiful green lentils, soaked and cooked, that were added to sautéd onions and mushrooms. This was seasoned with chopped garlic, some tomato paste, a twig of fresh rosemary and a good glug of red wine. A lesson I learned, and which I had forgotten, was that it’s really easy to let this mixture dry out – watch it and add water and/or vegetable stock so that it stays nice and moist as the flavours develop. Transferred to an oven proof dish, this was topped with a potato and butternut mash, dotted with knobs of butter and baked in the oven for about 20 minutes to half an hour. The butter is what gives you the crispy, caremelised crust on the cottage pie which was served with a garden salad.

So, we started our dinner with broccoli soup, made with the first picking, and discovered to my delight, that not only does Ant enjoy soup, but particularly loves creamy ones.

For dessert, we had a gooseberry tart with jam I had made earlier in the day.

No meal is complete without wine. We don’t really do the wine-pairing thing. Although we do take the menu into consideration, we choose what we like, and what we think our guests will like. As usual, we chose beautiful wines from our valley: Tanagra‘s Heavenly Chaos (isn’t that a wonderful name for a wine?), a lovely red blend, which is beautifully different every year, and Springfield’s Life from Stone, one of my favourite Sauvignon Blanc wines.

Pat and Ant, it was fun – we’ll do it again!

Glorious Gooseberries

30 July 2014 ~ Fiona ~ Leave a comment

In Afrikaans, they are called “appelliefies”, and the direct translation is “little apple loves”.

Cape Gooseberries are endemic and we haven’t planted any in our garden. They just grow, and are one of the many gifts we receive from our garden.

As a small child, not long after we moved from East London, we would travel from Grahamstown to visit farmer friends for the Gonubie Agricultural Show. And, along with my memories of Dad judging the flower arrangements, my always bidding for the largest egg at the end of the show, watching the gymkhana, and the convoy of cars, draped with beautiful women (or so they seemed to me) over their bonnets, I remember Auntie Molly’s gooseberry jam.

These were the memories I associated with gooseberries, until more recently. I was reminded, by a school friend, that my mother used to make a gooseberry fridge tart, and only when Karen recounted her story, did I realise why I had forgotten: it was really sour and I didn’t like it. Nor did Karen; and it’s her one abiding memory of my mother and a weekend she spent with our family in Grahamstown!

Gooseberries are tart – full of beta carotine and Vitamin C – and they are delicious fresh and in a jam. With our first gooseberries, I added them to salads and we also had them for breakfast, with yoghurt.

As with most things, one can have too much: even with one gooseberry bush, the berries began to come thick and fast, so spurred on by a fellow villager, I thought I’d have a go at jam.

Making jam with berries is different from making marmalade (more of that, soon) because they don’t need much cooking, and in the case of gooseberries, because they are not just full of vitamin C, they’re also full of pectin. This means that it’s easy to over-cook your jam and end up with jars of something that’s rock hard, and definitely not jam. The added challenge of this jam-making session was that I didn’t have –

a) a recipe for Cape Gooseberry jam (Mum’s Good Housekeeping recipe book doesn’t talk about Cape Gooseberries, but it does give the basics of making different types of jams and preserves); and

b) with just one bush, I had a really small quantity of gooseberries to play with.

This was a test of my ability to work out ratios (which, for someone who did not do Mathematics beyond year 9 at school, is quite hectic) as well as culinary skills: until this, the closest I had got to making jam, was marmalade!

So, this is what I learned: equal quantities of fruit and sugar. Put these in a pot of an appropriate size and then add a two thirds of the base quantity of water (remember that 100g = 100ml of water), and then cook as you would any jam. Bring to the boil reduce the heat and simmer until setting point is reached (watch carefully – with a small quantity, that happens more quickly).

To test whether setting point is reached, put a little of the mixture on to a cold, china/ceramic plate and put it into the fridge for about 10 minutes. If, when you take it out, and you skim your finger across the top, it wrinkles, your jam is ready.

Allow the jam to stand for 10 to 15 minutes and then bottle in sterilized jars and enjoy!

Of course, gooseberry jam can also be turned into a wonderful gooseberry tart – a desert nowhere near as sour as the dessert my mother dished up for our family and poor Karen in the late 1970’s!