Fresh and simple life

As much as I enjoy going on an amble, one of the most pleasant things about it is coming home. So we’ve had a lovely week of overdosing on all kinds of art in Grahamstown, but that also meant overdosing on wine and eating out.

An earlier version of the salad, including avocado wedges

It means, too, that I deeply appreciate being able to stroll into the vegetable garden and pick a fresh and simple supper: fat cherry tomatoes, a handful of spinach, and a couple of small heads of broccoli. I note that the sweet peppers are starting to form healthy little fruits.

I like to make a warm salad with these ingredients, based roughly on a recipe from Kathy, so roughly that I can’t clearly remember the original.

My lemon pickle is a success!

Anyway, I wilt the spinach in olive oil in a frying pan, grind in a bit of salt and black pepper, and then lay the leaves onto a platter as a bed for the salad. I’ve also used a mix of rocket and fresh lettuce leaves in the past. No result is ever the same; see the pic I’ve given you on this page for an example.

I steam the broccoli florets, not for long because I want them to keep that beautiful green colour, and toss that onto the spinach. Then I add the cherry tomatoes – I fry them lightly in olive oil this time because it seems to enhance the taste – some feta cheese, raisins that have swelled in orange juice (I've used cranberries before), and a bit of dry roasted seeds (pumpkin, sesame and sunflower). I sprinkle balsamic vinegar over the lot.

It’s delicious. We eat it with V’s leftover ciabatta, which tastes good toasted the next day.

Sweet taste of tartness

And we get to open the lemon pickle I attempted to make towards the end of May. It’s perfect! And this is a surprise, I admit, because I was a bit doubtful. 

The texture of the peel and flesh is soft, yet far from mushy; the lemon juice itself has turned into a kind of syrup; and the taste has just the right amount of salty tartness.

Our friend, Prof, can’t seem to get enough of the pickle, and goes home with a little bakkie (plastic container) crammed full of it. That is just the kind of encouragement I need to experiment some more.

Where people remember your name

For one reason or another, usually to do with music or food, I’ve landed up at Murambi Country Kitchen regularly over the past few weeks. I wish it could stay one of those best-kept-secret things, but that would be selfish (and it would probably end up closing, which would be sad).

The wall behind the stage is lined with old single vinyls

This lovely, gentle spot has become one of my favourite East London places, and lucky for me, it’s close to where I live. I love the setting, right next to Murambi Roses: the big windows look onto a small dam, and then onto open fields that flow to the sea.

Warm place

The proprietor, James, makes a visit here very special indeed. Somehow, he remembers not just your name, but also if you are a vegetarian. It’s warm in other ways, too: on these chilly winter days and nights, there is always a log fire going.

James allows us to drum here on quiet weekday evenings. We are usually accompanied by the property owner’s collie dog, who sings along to our djembe attempts. Truly. On Wednesdays, James, a musician himself, has been known to join in with other local musicians, who gather for jam sessions in his restaurant.

You can actually eat here, too. The menu is fairly limited, but the food is wholesome and nicely prepared. My friend, Mary, loves to have breakfasts here. Cakes for teatime are good, I am told. And I can vouch for the lunches.

Close-up of the placemats

The placemats on your table are old vinyl records, including a lot of Springbok Hits from the 1970s: delightful conversation pieces. As a child in the ’70s, I (like so many kids of the time) would blow my pocket money – a rand or two – on the latest Springbok Hits record. This was how we bought our music back then, and we’d play these records until they were so scratched that you could barely get a coherent sound out of them.

Musicians

The choice of placemats is appropriate because it’s largely through music that Murambi Country Kitchen is carving its place on the map. James has managed to draw quite an impressive range of musicians to perform here.

In summer, we have picnicked under the stars while taking in the sounds of the likes of Guy Buttery  and Nibs van der Spuy. In winter, we move indoors.

This past Saturday night, were treated to an outstanding performance by singer and pianist Shannon Hope. And we’ve just managed to get tickets, selling fast, to rock band Zebra & Giraffe’s show this week.

Lemon tree very pretty

My lemon tree, slap bang in the middle of the vegetable garden, is a beautiful sight right now. It’s heavy with fruit and full of buds, too. This lifestyle we’ve chosen means that I actually have to do something with the lemons, though, and not just admire their prettiness and hand out bags to my friends.

What to do with all of these (and more) ...

In fact, I use lemons for all kinds of things. For example:

• Ordinary tap water doesn’t always taste good, so I’ve taken to squeezing the juice of a lemon into a water bottle in the mornings.
• Fresh lemon makes a brilliant cleaner. The low pH of lemon juice gives it antibacterial properties. And it really cuts through grease and dirt. I rub lemon over stainless steel, leave it for a while, wipe it off, and then buff the steel. With salt, it’s also good for cleaning copper and brass – same story: rub it on (the salt is abrasive), let it sit, and then wipe it off and buff.
•  Lemons work like a charm to ease sore throats. Heat up the juice of a lemon with a hefty squeeze of honey. Sip it slowly. The high levels of vitamin C help, too. 

Best place to store them

A glut

But even with all of that, I am still faced with a glut, so I start scratching around for ideas. I get pointed to making lemon curd, but the recipes call for four lemons and five eggs. That’s not going to make the tiniest dent on the mound. I will attempt lemon meringue (still my favourite dessert, although my last effort produced a pathetic meringue) sometime.

I want something that will last for a while so that our bounty stretches into the non-bearing months. Lemons do last well, though. The best place to store them is on the tree, and a lot of people seem to use only fallen fruit for as long as possible, which makes sense. They’ll be fine in the vegetable drawer in your fridge for a few weeks.

Get pickled

It’s quantity I’m after right now, so I decide to pickle them. Mostly, I follow this recipe, and, in my usual manner, I use it as a guideline. This is what I do:

• Wash and scrub about 20 lemons and cut them into wedges.
• Mix about half a cup of coarse salt, two large tablespoons of sugar, around a teaspoon each of various spices (I use cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cloves, ground ginger, cinnamon and chilli powder), and lots of black pepper.
• Layer the lemon and spicy salt mixture in sterilised jars.
• Top each jar with two pretty red chillis.
• Squeeze enough juice from even more lemons to cover the entire lot (that’s a lot of juice and a lot of lemons ... phew).

Now it needs to be left to ferment for three to six weeks. I’ll let you know if the result is worthwhile.

My lemon pickle in the making. Results unknown

Next, when more fruit falls, I am going to squeeze as much juice as possible (or more accurately, get my family to squeeze it), freeze it in ice trays, and then store the cubes in containers in the freezer. That should keep us going until the next lemon season. Sweet.

When the wind blows

When life deals you lemons, the saying goes, make lemonade. In the Eastern Cape, we have our own version: when it’s windy, fly a kite. And watch the march of the sand dunes. As for the lemons … well, eat them.

V and I head for a weekend break with friends at Mtati, about an hour’s drive from East London. It’s just over the Mgwalana River on the road to Port Elizabeth. We’re looking forward to spending time with dear friends, and even though we live at the sea, I’m keen to explore a part of the coast that I don’t know.

C makes the most of the wind with his stunt kite

Mtati is a gated settlement, where about a dozen houses nestle in the coastal forest. All are built of similar basic materials (face brick and wood). With care and low-pitched roofs, none jar on the laid-back feel of the area or intrude on each other. It’s a pleasant change from the sadly common practice of monstrous “homes” being put up without consideration for aesthetics or regulations, let alone neighbours.

So you can have money and taste. And all is well and good.

Howling south-westerly

But the south-westerly howls, sometimes up to 50km/hour, the entire weekend, and the temperature doesn’t edge above 18C.

No problem. M and C haul out their stunt kites and we walk through the milkwoods to the wide sandy beach, typical for this part of the coast. The kites pull and stretch every part of our bodies. Eventually, the fun ends when M’s kite smashes into the sand with enough force to shatter a graphite rod.

I resolve to scratch our kites out of the garage when I get home. We have two, one called a Skydancer (it sounds like a big mosquito) and another called a Phantom (it’s silent). We bought them when we lived in Durban, but put them away in Gauteng, where there was never enough wind to fly them. We’ve forgotten them in our decade back at the coast.

Shifting sands

Sand dunes on the march

We retreat to the house we’ve rented, and M and I suddenly notice something very strange indeed: the beach has shifted. Really. The sand dunes are bigger, and they have marched towards us. We can see the sand washing over the crests of the dunes and we swear that we can see them moving, like waves. In fact, sand dunes do move, and it’s windy enough here for us to actually see them doing so.

Clearly, I am an eastern Eastern Cape creature because I have never witnessed this. On the beaches of the Transkei, my childhood home, the sand dunes were excellent “ski slopes”: we’d scream down them on bits of cardboard. But we could never see the dunes moving. And the sand there is much coarser, as it is on the beaches around my village.

Feast, feast and more feast

My favourite kind of lunch

The chill factor escalates in the relentless wind. But our friends make it warm inside. So does the food. We punctuate non-stop conversations with feast after feast fit for royalty.

V poaches free-range eggs in a spicy tomato gravy for breakfast (I am the assistant). C and M serve up the kind of lunch I like the most: a smorgasbord of things like cheeses, stuffed jalapenos, marinated artichokes, olives and crusty bread rolls.

And while A braais (barbeques meat, which South Africans do come rain or wind) for supper, L cooks beetroot in berry juice, and then blends it with pecan nuts that she has boiled, lightly sugared and fried to recrisp. It’s a taste sensation (doesn’t turn my plate red, either). L, incidentally, eats sliced lemons with salt, just like that.

On Sunday, we lunch at the nearby Mpekweni Beach Resort. It’s pretty here behind big windows that look onto the sea. But it’s not a sensible place for vegetarians: like most of these kinds of establishments, there are countless magnificent meat dishes and even the salads are stuffed with flesh.

If a vegetarian wanted a “normal” meal, well, you’d be stuck with overcooked pasta in a white sauce. I give it a miss. Instead, I quaff two glasses of wine, descend on the cheeses and have several helpings of (magnificent) desserts. It’s a fine enough Sunday lunch. I’m not here for the food, anyway. I’m here for the company.

Hot and hotter

On weekends, V likes to get busy in the kitchen. It’s his “down-time”, he says. He picks whatever chillis he can find in the garden and turns them into sauces of varying heat. And he bakes bread.

Chopped chillis from my garden ... a breathtaking array of colours

Chilli plants of all variety fill a long strip of the vegetable garden. They range from piquant bell peppers (the trade name is “Peppadew”) to mild (ish) jalapenoes to insane naga. The latter is said to be the hottest chilli in the world: even its skin is blistered, and I’m sure that is because it’s so scorching, even to touch.

Close-up of the naga chilli

Its name is interesting: “naga” apparently means “cobra” in one of the major Indian languages; very similar sounding, “nyoka” means “snake” in Xhosa. The heat of the naga is measured at more than a million Scoville units, which is used to measure such things. 

Me, I don’t eat too much in the way of chillis. Mostly, I enjoy their array of colours, and I use them in my muti (medicine) to get rid of bad goggas (insects).

Quite a kick

But I did enjoy the jalapeno slammers – quite a kick they delivered – that V made on Easter Monday.  And I added the tiniest bit of his sauce to my rice and vegetables. Usually, the chillis that he picks get finely chopped: my farmer cousin, D, loves to do this, and he does it better than a machine, although he has insisted on gloves.

D often appears on a Sunday morning. “Where is it?” he asks. “I want to chop.” It’s very sweet. Otherwise, the chillis are indeed shoved into some sort of chopping machine.

Easter Monday’s pickings

Blend

Then V gets blending. To the mixture of chopped chillis, he’ll add some olive oil, a bit of lemon juice, maybe some dhania (coriander), pounded peanuts, and a touch of mint. Every result is different.

Personally, I prefer the milder versions, softened with a little extra of the peanuts and coriander. But his sauces are greatly enjoyed by many of our friends, and their friends, too. He gets asked when he will have some for sale, and he’s very proud of it all.

An art

At the same time, V will have got the bread underway. “Me and Jamie,” he mutters. He means Jamie Oliver, who, in one of his earlier books (The Naked Chef), talks about the baking of bread as an art. You can find his recipe here. 

V's flat bread being demolished

Made by “me and Jamie”, he says

The process lasts for hours: all the ingredients (from The Naked Chef’s basic bread recipe) are mixed and kneaded, left to rise, bashed into shape, and left to rise again. 

Here, too, it’s a bit of a lucky dip: some weekends, for example, we get cumin seeds or sundried tomato in our ciabatta; sometimes, we could have olives pressed into crusty, herby flat bread.

It all gets demolished pretty quickly, every last crumb of it, often smeared with the chilli sauce of the day.