Happy Christmas

Wishing you all a wonderful and joyful Christmas time!

This picture sums up a summer Christmas for me. A miniscule smidgen of cake consumed alongside copious slices of watermelon for a late tea, followed by a gentle stroll around the farm just after the sun had gone down. It was cool enough to have a hot Christmas lunch with roast potatoes, bread sauce and the whole caboodle, so we indulged mightily until we could scarcely move. I'm happy to say that we managed to make more inroads into the cake this morning, with the help of visiting family, and are dealing well with the leftovers.

The fridge should be nice and empty by the time we go off on holiday on Sunday. A week away at a house in Knysna, near beaches, lagoons and boats and more family... then two days on safari, for our first time ever, all courtesy of my mother who is staying with us now. We have to pack lightly with six of us in the car, but I'm going to find room for some of the art materials that I got for Christmas and have a play with paints and pastels.

The children got Twister for Christmas and so are now in a tangled heap on the ground, amid constructions of 'Planx' (another present that Dad has also been enjoying), and wearing sparkly princess jewels and dresses (not Dad though).

The star on top of the Christmas tree is bowing lower as the tree wilts slightly in the dry air. We'll leave it up when we go and come back to a needleless tree skeleton probably, but it would be too sad to take it down so soon. We get back on the 6th, so it will be the first thing we do when we come home, putting away the decorations and sweeping every last needle out of the house on the last day of Christmas.

In case I don't get back to my blog before then I'll say Happy New Year now too. May it be peaceful, prosperous and full of happy surprises!

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Christmas Trees

At last I am starting to feel a bit Christmas-y. It's the scent of pine that does it. First of all we cut some branches of a wonderful, almost lemoney smelling, pine for the children's nativity scene, which has taken over the fireplace. It's way too hot to gather around a log fire here, so the fire place has been turned into a stage for Mary and Joseph, who are tortuously making their way day by day, painfully slowly, to the stable at the front. An angel is sitting on the roof with the baby Jesus. The plan was to suspend her from a wire on the chimney, which needed Dad's expertise to attach, and then lower her a tiny bit every day until she alighted on the roof on Christmas Eve. But she is quite happy lolling on the roof with the babe in her arms and Dad has been busy on other things, so there she has stayed throughout Advent.


We chose our tree carefully from the ones flourishing at the back of the farm. There were loads of big ones and loads of tiny self-seeded baby pines, but it took us ages to find a good shaped tree the right size this year. In the end we decided on a siamese twin tree. Two trees had grown so close together that they made one tree, so we cut them together and they are now looking festive, if slightly drunken from some angles.

The two dolls houses both got a tree this year. There were so many seedlings that we just pulled a couple up for the doll's house family to celebrate with.



We had our Summer festival yesterday, which was lovely, so now there is nothing else between now and Christmas. I anticipate a flurry of making marzipan and icing the cake, wrapping presents, painting the rest of my presents and finishing off last bits of work.

The other Christmassey scent of smoked gammon, which has been tantalising me every time I open the fridge, will pervade the whole house on Christmas Eve, when I am going to cook the hams, mingling with clove notes and cidery fumes, and we'll have them cold with salads and cold turkey on the day itself. Cinnamon will find its way into the couscous salad, aslo filled with mang and toasted almonds, so those traditional spices redolent of Christmas will still get a look in despite the hot weather.

Hope you are all having a wonderful lead up to Christmas!

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Christmas Heat

Feeling Hot hot hot!
It’s 38 degrees C out there and was hotter yesterday – summer has come blasting in, making it hard to think of Christmas. Baking and spicy scents of cinnamon pervading the house just don’t really work when you are melting in the shade. Candles, firelight and warming spiced food are so much part of the Christmas atmosphere to me that it is hard to get in the mood sometimes.

Christmas carols waft through the house, shimmering like snowflakes: ‘earth stood hard as iron, frosty wind made moan’. They demand huge leaps of the imagination, as we swelter in T-shirts trying to think of a Christmas present to make that does not involve sewing felt – just thinking about felt makes me hot.

Christmas as a hot weather festival hasn’t really made it into my sub-conscious – here people take off for the beach and have big barbeques for Christmas, but it just don’t feel right to me! I need turkey and ham, Christmas cake and mince pies, candles and frosty carols... here’s wishing for cooler weather, so I can restore the illusion of Christmas festivities for my inner child!

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Camping Rediscovered - Part 2

My husband is fond of quoting his father’s adage “Any fool can be uncomfortable”. This means that camping for him is not a matter of roughing it, but more about assembling the barest minimum of comforts and then adding some more. As we are at the beginning of our camping career we haven’t got anything like the amount of equipment that would create a home from home, and not enough space in the car to transport it. Last weekend though our friends had suggested a weekend foray to a beautiful place in the mountains that we’d heard about from all and sundry, and rashly we agreed to go even though end of term madness was in full flow.


So into the car went the tent that their aunt had just bought for the children for Christmas in honour of the class camp. Out went the borrowed family-size tent that took up half the luggage space in the car and didn’t allow room for the foam mattresses. Back in went the mattresses taking up 2/3 of the available space. A mental shopping list was started there and then: item number 1 – blow up mattresses.

An ill-timed stop off in our local town to buy rolls for lunch and a camping lamp delayed our journey a bit – it happened to be the last Saturday of the month, when the whole world flocks to town and queues at the cashpoints to draw out their wages, then potters through the super-markets en famille.

However the mountains aren’t too far away for us – only and hour and a half, so a game of I-spy and a packet of Sugus (Opal fruit type sweets) was enough to get us there fairly painlessly.


And the reward was the wonderful view from our tent.



Mountain rock pools, with accommodating tadpoles willing to be caught and relocated, cool breezes and sunshine, shady trees in a space a long way from anywhere much. All those rocks and mountain streams created a powerful energy – peaceful and deep.


Older bones are less resilient than they used to be and sleep harder won these days. The foam mattresses weren’t quite thick enough to make-up for the sounds of late-night revelers nearby; for Youngest, nappy free at last, who didn’t make it through the night and had to move into Dad’s sleeping bag half way through; for the barking dogs, which belonged to the campers who had set up their tent next to the ablution block and which decided that it belonged to them, defending it volubly against any night-time wanderers in search of the toilets; for the guinea fowl, who provided an resounding dawn chorus in the trees close by. If you have never heard guinea fowl, think peacocks, or roosters that are off-key and competing with each other – they are Loud. Nature in the raw also provided backing vocals by the Haadedaas, whose strident call sounds like the name they bear.

A rather grumpy set of adults emerged to greet the stunning dew splashed view of the sunrise. The list of essential shopping before the next camping foray grew longer: chairs; a second tent for Mum and Dad to sleep alone; extra thick blow-up mattresses; ear-plugs.

Tea and rusks in early morning sunshine helped restore a little equilibrium and the children had a great time, plus it is a beautiful place that we would like to go back another time to explore some more. But in the end the best thing about camping is the wonderful night’s sleep that you get, when you arrive home exhausted from fresh air and sleep deprivation, to crash out at 8.30 in the comfort of your own bed and sleep without stirring until morning!

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Camping Rediscovered - Part 1

This has been a week of discovering the joys and discomforts of camping. Having never spent a night under canvas since my teens, I suddenly had two consecutive bookings for a night out in nature.

The first was my son’s class camp, that I was inveigled along to, as a parent helper: a night away with 24 kids and only just enough tents at a campsite on the beach, with 30 loaves of bread and a ton of sausage to sustain us.


It was a beautiful campsite, literally on the beach, with flat grassy lots to pitch our tents and an ablution block with hot running water – luxury compared with the camping of my youth, which was more of the scout camp, roughing it variety.

All I had to do was keep an eye on the kids and make sure that none of them headed out to sea, help pitch tents, which are a whole lot easier to put up these days than I remembered, with their pop up poles and so on.; plus try my hand at lighting the fire and braaiing half the shed-load of sausage that fond parents had sent along to make sure their cherished offspring wouldn’t starve.


My husband is usually the one to braai in our house, as a good South African male - it is a gender thing! But I hadn’t watched in vain and managed to produce a decent fire and cook the sausage without charring it too much. One tent had been forgotten at home and another turned out not to have the right poles, so the boys were re-allocated six to a tent, fitting in like sardines in a tin.


With the beach right there at hand we hardly had to organise any activities at all - they went from collecting crabs and coralling them with seaweed, to making kelp horns, to fishing, to splashing in the chilly water, to playing cricket and finding starfish. The girls, on the verge of adolescence, seemed to dive into the showers at every opportunity and spend ages in their tents eating chips and trying on make-up, until chased back out onto the beach, turning back into children again as they splashed in the water and dug in the sand.


I had a foreshadowing of what it will be like in a couple of years when Middle Daughter reaches that age and wanted to stop the clock and make these childhood years last longer...


A day full of unremitting sun and salt exhausted them enough for them to sleep eventually, once scary stories had been told and screeched over, until their teacher patrolled the tents to quiet the chatter at 10 o’clock. I managed to find a reasonably comfortable sleeping position on my foam mattress and the sound of the waves on the shore lulled me to sleep too, though dawn broke far too soon.

I felt sorry for the young couple who had set up camp on a deserted site earlier that day only to have us arrive and shred the peace and quiet with girly screeches and boyish hollering, as the bunch of 10 and 11 year-olds took over the air waves. They were up at dawn packing up their tent and trying to get a recalcitrant bakkie started, and I watched them push start it with a slightly guilty feeling, while I endlessly stirred a pot of 30 eggs in an attempt to scramble them for breakfast without burning them into an inedible mess.

A sunburned lip was my souvenir of the trip – Botox for free – plus a fine collection of shells. Our son brought home about forty stones he’d collected on the beach, weighing down his rucksack until it could hardly be lifted, plus sunburnt feet and backs of legs that made him tired and cranky on the second morning. I was relieved that we were having one night at home in our own beds before setting off on out first ever family camping trip.

Part 2 tomorrow, when far less sleep was had by all!

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WTSIM Sunday Roast

The scent of roast chicken wafts through the house – the reassuring smell of Sundays, leisurely family days spent at home, everyone doing their own thing in different directions until lunch gathers them around the table. One nose buried deep in a book, another child intent on an elaborate game with toys and animals, another off at an aunt’s house until recalled for the meal. Sunday lunch is a family ritual that holds fast through winter, but loses ground to Saturday evening braais in summer, when just the thought of a roaring stove at midday would bring you out n a sweat.

Johanna announced the roast for the theme of this month’s WTSIM and I wondered whether the weather would allow me to sneak one last roast in before summer took hold. Luckily this weekend was sunny but not too hot, with a cool wind that dissuaded the children from swimming, so last week’s summer braai by the pool has been followed by a return to a wintry Sunday lunch round the table.

Crispy roast potatoes are the draw card in our house – even without the meat the kids would be happy with a plateful of them. The meat can be chicken or lamb, we hardly ever do beef or pork. This week it was a chicken: lemon-scented, a whole lemon in its cavity keeping it fresh and juicy as it cooks and preventing it from drying out; a clove or two of garlic and some herbs underneath it, with a quartered onion or two grouped around in the tin and a liberal splash or olive oil to anoint the skin. The lemon makes sure there are plenty of juices (don’t forget to pierce the lemon skin) and the onions caramelize to give a wonderful rich colour and flavour to the resulting gravy. One tip I learned from Marcella Hazan is to start the chicken off breast down in the pan, so the lemon juice soaks it and the underside browns, then turn it over for the second half of cooking. It doesn't keep so perfectly shaped but it really does taste better.

Besides the chicken and potatoes we always do a tray of baked butternut, sprinkled with cinnamon and just catching at the edges for a sweet caramelly taste. Some fresh steamed vegetables are needed to offset all this roast richness, something green like broccoli and some carrots or peas.

Roasts are simple enough, once you have mastered the rhythm. Most of the work is in the preparation: peeling and par-boiling the potatoes, anointing the chicken with whatever oils and herbs you’ve chosen, peeling and dicing the butternut. Then you can shove it all in the oven for an hour and a half and leave it to cook, just checking in a couple of times to turn the potatoes and butternut and baste the chicken. Too much attention and you let all the heat out of the oven, losing the necessary degrees to achieve crispness and perfection. At the end there is another flurry of activity, draining vegetables and making gravy, carving the meat. The potatoes stay in the oven until the last minute, so they are as crisp and crunchy as possible and don’t sit sulkily in their bowl going soggy in their steam, while people are called to the table.

I have written a whole article on the perfect roast potato, so I won’t repeat the secret here and anyway, everyone has their own pet way of getting them just right, from Nigella Lawson’s semolina to those who swear by using goose fat for flavour. Mine just require short par-boiling, a shake in the pan to rough the corners and just enough hot olive oil to coat with a bit over, followed by an hour and a half in a hot oven.

Gravy is another controversial topic. My mother always used the juices from the meat, without any help from Bisto and that is what I like best, while my brother-in-law likes ‘army sauce’, thick brown Bisto blanket sauce, so sometimes we have two jugs on the table. To make my gravy, I roast onions in the pan with the meat to get a good caramelised flavour and brown colour, as chicken juices are pretty anaemic looking. When the chicken is cooked I take it out of the roasting pan and keep in warm, draw off most of the fat from the pan and then add in a liberal dash of wine, some water reserved from par-boiling the potatoes and then bubble it all up. The flavour is usually fairly concentrated, so taste it and see if you need more water. The only problem is it almost never quite makes enough gravy for my family, who love it soaked into their potatoes, even on their third helping!

After at least three weeks without a roast, there were a series of yums around the table as everyone tucked in happily to their favourite meal. The potatoes were shared out equitably, totaling six each and there were very few leftovers. I remember in my childhood, my mother managed to carve a chicken, so one half was Sunday lunch and the other half eaten cold with salad the next day. I think chickens have shrunk since then, as ours was a quivering ruin of bones with a few shreds of leg meat still attached by the end! And they had room for pudding...

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A Trip into Town in an Orange Silk Scarf

Most of the time I am at home here, take sights that would astound someone fresh in from Europe for granted, like a lorry crammed with people in the open back, barreling along the main road. Sometimes, though, I feel like a tourist here, seeing things with fresh eyes, especially when I go into Cape Town on an almost joll, which doesn’t happen all that often.

I don’t know whether it was my bright orange silk scarf, or the flu I was warding off, but I seemed to float around the most confusing shopping mall in Cape Town (the Cavendish, if you’re wondering) even with a heavy bag over my shoulder. It is the local mall for loads of Cape Town friends, who treat its tortuous layout with casual familiarity, but I was adrift without a compass.

Desperately in need of a pee, with no obvious signs in sight, I at last found the X marks the spot map of the centre. Pondering its intricacies I was rescued by a kindly young security man, who politely enquired if he could help. I immediately received detailed and step by step instructions to the nearest toilets without a hesitation, or a flicker of amusement at my plight. The instructions were spot on and I found the elusive rest rooms round a corner, up a flight of stairs and across a hallway, just as he said.

Upon entering I was welcomed by an effusive and genuine ‘Hellooo’, by a smiling, tall and elegant woman who was mopping the charcoal tiled floor, in case a drip from the basin should cause anyone to slip. She made me feel like a long-lost friend, maybe she thought she knew me? Telling it back now, I fear I was hallucinating – this has never happened to me before, not even in Harrods or Liberty’s!

The main errand to the bank was achieved and some atypical advance Christmas shopping completed before fatigue set in, the flu was fighting back, despite the floaty orange scarf. I put on Mamma Mia to get me home on a wave of good cheer.

At the petrol station heading home was a truly modern African scene. It is undergoing building renovations and was bristling with men in hard hats, doing complicated things on scaffolding. At the pump next to mine two sinewy men in orange hard hats were trying to trim a short metal rod with a hand saw. Their orange reflective vests were flapping in the gusting south-easter, as they stood round a black plastic dustbin, which they had turned into a makeshift workbench. A half brick on top raised the rod enough to clear the dustbin lid and one man held the rod while the other sawed. It wasn’t working and a petrol attendant came over to help by holding the other end, several more men grouping round to watch. They were still sawing when the attendant brought back my card and I drove off, wondering what would happen in Europe if Health and Safety caught you up to something like that … but at least they were wearing hard hats!

The flu did get me, but I took yesterday off and am feeling well enough to go to belly dancing tonight. It must be the orange scarf doing its work after all!

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