Spring Flowers, Winter Snows

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

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

Snow on the distant mountains, sunshine opening up the daisies

What distant mountains, rain driving across, daisies tight closed

A hare lolloping through the daisies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewels of colour in the middle of all that white 

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

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Cauliflowers At the Market And A Soup Recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Living in a Plastic Age

Our over-flowing recycling sack

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

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

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

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

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

Basically the view is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Bowl of Hyacinths

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

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

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

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

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

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Cape Gooseberry Pavlova for the Taste of Yellow Monthly Mingle

Pavlova with Cape Gooseberries and Passion fruit

The yellowest things in our garden right now are the Cape gooseberries, golden globes hidden away in their papery lantern cases, their tart sweetness adding to the vitamin C overload that is South Africa’s winter fruit salad. We really have more vitamin C in winter than in summer here, our trees laden with guavas from April till August, oranges by the sack-full a whole lot cheaper than potatoes, lemon trees, naartjies (clementines, mandarin, tangerines and the like) small enough to pop into lunch boxes and the prolific Cape gooseberries diverting us from our purpose every time we go to the veggie garden to pick spinach.

The theme of this month’s Monthly Mingle hosted by Jeanne at Cooksister is a Taste of Yellow, the yellow of sunshine and hope, in memory of inspirational food blogger Barbara Harris of Winos and Foodies, who recently died of cancer. Read more about her in Jeanne’s post and why yellow is so appropriate to remember her by.

Our gooseberries were just begging to be included, now growing in prolific abundance for the first time in our garden.

Usually we just eat them straight from the bush, but I thought they would work perfectly with a pavlova. They have the right amount of tartness to offset the sweetness of meringue and enough flavour to hold their own in the partnership. The granadillas, or passion fruit, complement them nicely.

I use Nigella’s pavlova recipe from How to Eat, leaving it in the oven to cool and then assembling it a couple of hours before eating to allow the cream enough time to start softening the centre of the meringue in mallowy succulence, while the outside stays crisp and crunchy. The recipe follows at the end of this post.

Jeanne asked us to share either memories of Barbara or cancer stories in our posts – I didn’t know Barbara or her blog, but a dear friend of my husband’s family who died of cancer nearly ten years ago would be right at home in our food blog community, so I'll share a few memories of her.

Most of my memories of Ursie involve food: 
Home-made bread and home-churned butter from her farm made up the first course of our wedding braai served with gravad lax, simple butter had never tasted so good before;
The huge bowl of fresh fruit salad served at breakfast when we visited them a few years later with young son in tow.
Our tradition of saying 'Blessings on the meal' before each meal came from her.
When we finally moved out to South Africa in the last year of her life, she took me around and introduced me the people she knew in our local community, starting off friendships that gave our small children their first roots in a new home.

Our son remembers making fresh juices with her in their Cape Town flat, while her Sangoma husband was treating toddler Middle Daughter with herbs and homeopathy, followed by an impromptu lunch of potato wedges with mashed avo dip, still one of the kids’ favourite meals.

All this was while she was fighting her last battle with cancer, trying first natural treatments and then resorting to chemo when they weren’t enough. Their border collies Cobalt and Vygie were staying with us on our farm by this time. Used to farm life, the Cape Town flat  that Ursie and Pete were living in while she underwent treatment was impossible for the dogs.

The last time Ursie visited us was the day before our Youngest was born, sitting out on the stoep as a thunderstorm was brewing, waiting to meet this baby that was reluctant to be born and several days past her due date. I remember cutting her hair for her then, wispy with new growth after her last chemo treatment

She did see Youngest before she went; we all visited two at a time when she was in ICU and I took our three week baby in to meet her, only to be asked to leave after a few minutes by a nurse horrified at thought of exposing a newborn to unspecified possible sources of contagion in the IC unit. I was always glad I had taken her in – it seemed right for them to meet, one just starting her life journey the other just completing hers.

She will always be a part of our lives – we have a tree planted for her here, ten years later her dogs are buried near it, but her memory is as fresh as if she were here yesterday. Thank you, Ursie, for sharing your food philosophy with us, simple, home-made with love and fresh flavours. You are still an inspiration to me in my kitchen.

I hadn't thought about it when I chose this recipe, but Nigella Lawson has lost many close family members to cancer, so I hope she would be happy to have her recipe included in the monthly mingle with this theme.

Pavlova Recipe
From Nigella’s How to Eat
4 egg whites
250g/9oz castor sugar
2 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
A few drops vanilla extract
250ml/1 cup cream
Berries and passion fruit

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F
Whip up the egg whites to stiff peaks.
Add the sugar a few tablespoons at a time. Don’t put it all in one go – the important thing is to give it a chance to dissolve as you whisk, so a little at a time works best.
Whisk until the mixture is shiny and satiny and stands up in peaks.
Sprinkle over the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla and fold in gently.
Line a baking tray with baking paper and dollop the meringue mixture in a circle roughly 25cm/9inches in diameter. .Smooth it evenly.
Put into the preheated oven and immediately reduce the temperature to 150C/300F. Bake for about 1 ¼ hours. Switch off the oven and leave the pavlova to cool completely in the oven.
Remember to take it out before you heat up the oven for the roast the next day!!
One or two hours before serving, whip the cream and prepare the berries.
Turn the cooked pavlova upside down onto the serving dish. Remove the baking paper.
Pile the cream over the base and then arrange the fruit on top.

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Tropical Island Holiday

I never really thought tropical islands were my thing. Beach babe I am not. Pale skin that goes to freckles, never worn a bikini in my life – a one piece at least saves one more area of delicate skin from sunburn. But still there is something about the idea of palm trees swaying in the breezes, warm seas and constant T-shirt weather that is especially attractive from the depths of a Cape Town winter. The kids of course had been excited for months – a plane journey, the first in four years, an exotic holiday, the first ever and meeting up with my brother’s family and two small cousins that we hadn’t seen in four years.

The excitement about the plane journey faded somewhere over the Indian Ocean, after a movie or two and when they discovered that sleep deprivation isn’t much fun. By Singapore, when the clock told us it was breakfast time and our bodies told us we should still be tucked up in bed, it was only the excitement of meeting up with Granny that was keeping us all going. By the time we reached Bali we were all finished and the interminable queues at passport control didn’t help.

But eventually after two hours of mad Bali traffic we reached our villa and the holiday began. Abandoning luggage after the merest glimpse at our rooms, we headed for the infinity pool at the end of the garden overlooking the beach and lay looking up at palm trees, starting to believe we were really there.

The villa itself was beautiful. 150 year old carved wood panels from an original Javanese house made up two sides of it, a heavy intricately carved wood ceiling a major feature. Smooth stone floors underfoot and beautiful carved couches and beds.

It’s so soothing to the eye to have so much detail to feast on, especially when you are sick, as both I and my husband managed to be two days into the holiday (flu probably caught on the plane). My brother had his work cut out keeping our kids entertained in the pool, on the beach and on the tennis court, as well as his own two younger ones, while we languished on the day beds and ran through all our homeopathic remedies.

I recovered after a couple of days and was finally able to try snorkelling. The villa had its own little stretch of beach on a reef edged lagoon. The coral had all been blasted from around here back in the Eighties to make cement for new resorts in Candidasa, so an artificial reef had been put in place and all the coral was busy reforming itself. We were able to swim a short distance off the beach straight over endless coral beds full of little fish and it was quite magical. It was safe enough for the kids too and they all got enthusiastic, getting to know where the angel fish hung out. I ended up being a salt-encrusted beach babe after all, even managing to fit in a last snorkel on the last morning in between packing.


One thing that surprised me about Bali, was quite how hectic the traffic is everywhere in the south of the island. All the locals ride scooters, often whole families on one scooter, dressed in their best for a ceremony and loaded up with bags and boxes too. Tourists all ride in cars with drivers and then trucks take up the rest of the space on the road. Everyone weaves in and out of each other in perpetual motion. Admittedly we didn’t get properly off the beaten track at all, but all the bustle was a far cry from my image of laid back island living. So the peace and quiet of the villa and the little village near it was a welcome balm.

We ate out most nights, finding a favourite little warung in the local village within walking distance. Strolling in the late afternoon light along the narrow road through the palm plantations, passing the odd pretty brown cow tethered among the trees, a few pigs, lots of free range chickens, then into the village street, where people were hanging out outside the little shops, young men playing volleyball, roosters in reed cages flanking the road, we got a small insight into real life on Bali. In a place where tourism is the main business it was reassuring to see that the local communities were still rooted in their traditions and tightly knit.

One thing we loved was the tradition of daily offerings: every home, shop and villa has its own temple or shrine, ours had three, and every day little woven baskets of palm or banana leaves are filled with flowers, morsels of food and a little stick of incense as offerings. Other offerings are left on the ground at the main house door. Each day fresh offerings are left – this is so much part of life, that if you are a modern career woman with no time to weave your own baskets and make offerings, rather than neglecting the tradition you pay someone to do it for you. There are women who make a business out of making and placing the offerings for others. Even at the airport the shops had offerings outside their doors. My six year old niece was thoroughly inspired and made plenty of little leaf and flower offerings herself.

One thing I totally failed to do was to keep a foodie record of all our meals in order to blog them later. This I attribute to a combination of jet lag, flu lag and holiday laid-backness. We had a good mixture of Balinese food and western-inspired food. Our picky eater son was able to survive on things like grilled chicken and the odd burger and the girls discovered a new favourite: fish fillet with garlic sauce. I did no cooking whatsoever and even though we were longing for fresh home-baked bread by the end of the holiday it was good to have a break from the kitchen.

We are finally getting over the jet lag now and the Cape winter rain is making the tropical climate a dim and distant memory, but we will treasure memories of the time spent together as a family, getting to know my nieces, my mother having all her children and grandchildren together in one place. And of course my transformation into snorkelling diva!

Cousins getting to know each other

Edited to add: My review of Villa Citakara Sari on Just the Planet. 
Disclosure: My lovely and generous mother paid for our family holiday, but we were given a special rate on our accommodation in return for our reviews here and on Just the Planet. All opinions are my own.

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Our Winter Festival 2012

After the bonfire building, attention turns to the lanterns. For our first ever festival, the lanterns were simple, just red crepe paper tied around a jam jar with raffia. But since then creativity has exploded and the lanterns become artworks in themselves, each one individual and personal.

Reading over last year's festival post, I was surprised to find that we'd had 45 people here. The post ends with a note to self to make more mulled wine, more lentil soup, more of everything. Fortunately, since I'd completely forgotten about the notes I'd made, we only had a small gathering this year, about eleven kids and a similar number of adults. So one big pot of lentil soup was enough, along with the butternut soup and spinach and pea soup brought by friends, two bottles of wine mulled, alongside a large thermos of hot chocolate.

Now the kids are older, they were able to do a lot of the hard work together without us, building the bonfire, carrying the tables and so on. I'm looking forward to a few years time, when they can do the cooking as well!

The girls had rehearsed some winter songs to play on their recorders, so we had more music in the circle this time, as well as our blessings, even getting everyone to join in a two part round of Rise Up Oh Flame, which was surprisingly tuneful - either that or everything sounds better in the open under a deep blue sky with stars peering through a hazy mist and only a light breath of breeze.

The flames rose up cooperatively and the fire blazed high, sending sparks high, and as usual drawing a crowd of fire gazers, grouped around, faces turned to the warmth and light. Except for Amy, the Jack Russell, her back to the fire as she had espied a good opportunity. Her patience was eventually rewarded with a dropped end of roll, possibly flavoured with boerewors!

There's no age limit for sparklers. Even the fourteen year old boys kept coming back for more.

Until eventually, the sparklers ran out, the fire burned low and it was time to go inside and discover that the puddings are the same as last year, and the year before and the one before that: guava fool, chocolate pudding and stripey sun jelly.

Unusually we had no-one sleeping over. Our son was going with his friend back to Cape Town to visit, and I had the Food Bloggers Indaba to get up early for the next morning, so the evening drew to an early-ish close with a warm glow lighting us all up from the inside, after a wonderful celebration of light, family and friends.

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