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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Building a Bonfire

A base of straw bale and dry pine cones

 A bonfire is the central focus of our winter festival. A nice big fire, sending sparks flying up in to the sky – there’s something magical about it that hypnotises you into staring into the flames for hours.

As a child I remember hating bonfire building. For several weeks before Guy Fawkes Night at school, we used to spend one afternoon games period a week scouring the woods for fallen branches, lugging them out along the path to the bonfire site and returning for another load. I don’t know why I hated it so, surely it was better than running around a field kicking a ball, but it was all worth it eventually  when the fire was lit and burned for hours, while we drank hot chocolate, ate parkin and watched the fireworks go up.

Our kids weren’t much more enthusiastic than I used to be about dragging logs and sticks to the fire site on Saturday afternoon, but with all of them hard at work we had a good sized bonfire in no time.

Here is the building process in pictures:

 A fine job done by the team!

The fire burning fiercely, sparks flying into the night to meet the stars.

More winter festival posts and pictures going back through the years... 2011 festival, 2010 winter holiday, 2009 festival, 2008 festival, 2007 festival, 2006 festival  for a nostalgic look at how the kids have grown and how the sparklers and lanterns stay the same!: I'll post this year's sparkler pictures in my next post.

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The Food Bloggers Indaba 2012

I admit to suffering from severe brain overload yesterday in the aftermath of the Food Bloggers Indaba. So much useful information, so many great speakers, bad jokes, tasty snacks, lovely people and crammed goody bags, packed into over 10 hours of a rainy winter Sunday.

As a six-year-old blogger some of the stuff I knew already but still gained new ideas and perspectives. Other stuff was new, new, new, to me at least, and I’m left weighing up the pros of leaping into the greater social media scene with both feet (increased traffic to my blog, building it as a brand to monetise it, being part of a larger community, making friends and of course having fun, against the cons (more distractions competing for my time and attention, when I’m already far too prone to procrastination and Facebook attention splatter).

Am I going to launch into Pinterest? Am I finally going to surrender to Twitter? Still not decided. What about you? Are you already devoted to Pinterest...or Twitter? Good idea? or desperate distraction?!

Afternoon workshops on Writing and publishing a cookbook and then Food Styling and Props were both very interesting and got me thinking and re-thinking vague ideas of one day writing a food book myself.


And then the finale an auction in aid of Lavender in Lavender Hill, and then a lucky draw giveaway. All I can say is that the sponsors were amazingly generous, and the three goody bags weighed a ton overflowing with good stuff.

My girls had a ball helping me unpack them back home and have designated themselves official product tasters.

All in all it was a fantastic day. Congratulations are more than due to Colleen Grove for a wonderful job organising the whole event. and thanks to all the generous sponsors too.

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Coffee, Rooibos and Chicory

Coffee is one of those addictions that I almost wish I hadn’t kicked. It smells so good brewing, it looks so rich and it goes so well with dark chocolate, my one ongoing bona fide addiction. Way back when we lived in our London photographic studio, we’d stagger down the ladder from the mezzanine to the kitchen and make a pot of real coffee first thing, to wake us up. Without that coffee I wasn’t fit to speak to. It was an essential morning ritual.

Working in Italy, the  morning coffee was more than a ritual, more like a religion. We’d bypass the watered down coffee served at some of the hotel breakfasts and sneak a real cappuccino directly from the bar. And the coffee and brioches in a certain bar on a cobblestone crossroads in Siena were the highlight of our trip in breakfast terms, greed frequently demanding a second cappuccino and a third brioche, perhaps the one with chocolate or the one with raisins and orange zest, later to be worked into the trip accounts as a legitimate expense. To be fair to the hotels, I’m sure they served the coffee watered down in the best interests of the foreign guests, who were often in the habit of downing several long draughts of hot liquid coffee over breakfast and would have had heart palpitations if the coffee had been of traditional Italian strength – these were the days before Starbucks brought the espresso to the masses of the English speaking world! Anyway back then my body could take several fierce espressos in the course of a day’s work without any ill effects.

It took having a baby to knock the caffeine out of my system for good. Once he was born and I was no longer breastfeeding I tried to go back to my bad old ways. The first time I drank a mug of coffee made in strong jug fashion at a friend’s house, I thought I was having a heart attack, so strong were the palpitations. I was more cautious after that, but to my dismay I found that coffee no longer tasted so good. My taste-buds must have shifted or something. It still smelt wonderful, but the flavour never quite matched up. So I gradually switched my allegiance to rooibos tea, which I can happily knock back black and unsweetened at a rate of several mugs a day. And it’s guilt free too, healthily full of anti-oxidants, even produced fairly locally to where we are now in South Africa.

Unfortunately for my husband he hasn’t had the easy switchover from coffee to something else that my pregnancy hormones did for me. He’s been going through a particularly difficult cycle of giving in to the coffee craving for a few weeks, then getting terrible nauseous headaches whenever he stops drinking it. He’ll stay off it for a while and then the temptation when we have friends to lunch is too strong and he’ll start all over again. So he’s been looking for an alternative, something that he can enjoy drinking instead of coffee or regular tea. Rooibos tea gives him wind (sorry for sharing that!) and there are only so many cups of fresh herb teas that you can cope with a day. Decaffeinated coffee  seems to have more health drawbacks than regular coffee so that’s not a long-term option either. So he sent me out to look for a chicory substitute to try.

I came back with Chikree – a South African chicory drink, that contains chicory, corn syrup, caramel and quinine. It passed his flavour requirements, not tasting just like coffee but having enough of that type of taste to be satisfying. I wasn’t sure how healthy the corn syrup and caramel are, but chicory is naturally bitter so you do have to have some sugar to balance that out.

Another option that a friend directed me to is Romi by Health Food Connection, which describes itself as a cereal beverage – it is again flavoured with chicory but also has rye and barley as ingredients which give it a more creamy flavour, which my husband likes, and is sweetened by beet sugar. It is imported from Poland, so not at all local and that is reflected in the higher price – 100g of Romi costs the same as 250g of Chikree. Isn’t that always the way that the preferred option is the more expensive one! As far as the health benefits of chicory go, it is supposed to help with liver function and cleanse the blood, it is a natural anti-inflammatory, contains vitamin C and prevents constipation.

I did surreptitiously taste the Romi – I still have to get over my instinctive rejection of chicory as anything but an ersatz wartime poverty coffee – don’t know why that’s my kneejerk reaction. It tasted to me not very different from an ordinary instant coffee. A far cry from real mocha java but still not unpleasant. I’m perfectly happy in my rooibos bubble though, so am not going to be joining my husband on this one!

What about you – is coffee essential to your survival? Or do you have another alternative for us to try?

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Rusks Revisited

South African rusks recipe has to be the single biggest search term that brings new visitors to my blog. It seems that there are an awful lot of ex-pat South Africans desperate for a good rusk to dip in their rooibos tea, stranded in foreign lands where the only option is to bake your own. And not only ex-pats: my sister-in-law turned to Google when looking for a new rusk recipe and found the recipe she picked from the search results rather familiar – she’d ended up on my blog with the same recipe I’ve already shared with her the old-fashioned paper and pen way!

I discovered this recipe many years ago in an old South African cookbook, back when our son was a baby and we were living over here for four months. We went back to London for another two years before moving out to SA for good and this rusk recipe kept us connected with that fine old tradition of dunking rusks in tea and getting crumbs all over the sofa.

Occasionally I have lapses in concentration and the rusk tin stays empty for a while, but mostly I keep it filled. However I have played with the recipe over the years, using different combinations of flours. One thing I have never adjusted, but perhaps should, is its requirement for two teaspoons each of baking powder, bicarb (baking soda) and cream of tartar. One commenter pointed out that baking powder is essentially a mixture of cream of tartar and bicarb... so maybe the original recipe writer was just hedging her bets?!

My latest experiment has been to substitute half of the vegetable oil with coconut oil. Reading up about healthy and unhealthy fats, omega 3s versus omega 6s, has made me less happy with the regular sunflower oil that I used to use without question, so I’m trying to find alternatives from among the unprocessed ‘good’ fats: coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, butter(!). Mind you the whole field of dietary fats is so controversial at the moment that everyone just has to make their own decisions... and luckily these rusks work just as well either way. I didn’t notice any difference in flavour or consistency from the coconut oil, except perhaps they have stayed crunchy for longer, but that could be my imagination!

So here is the latest incarnation of my favourite rusk recipe, or go back to my original version if you prefer.

South African Buttermilk Rusks - The Revised Recipe

1.240kg / 2lb12oz flour (800g wholewheat, 200g rye, and 240g plain white flour)
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 teaspoons salt
250g / 9oz butter
½ cup raisins (optional)
½ cup seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame) and/or nuts
2 eggs
250g / 9oz dark soft brown sugar (molasses sugar)
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup oil (sunflower, or coconut oil warmed to liquid state, or half and  half)
(1 cup=250ml)

Preheat the oven to 190C/380F

Grease three loaf tins of base measurement 20cmx10cm / 8”x 4” approx or any combination of deep baking dish that adds up to about the same.

In a large mixing bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cream of tartar and salt. Cut the butter into small cubes and rub into the flour. Add the raisins if you are using them. You can experiment with various nuts and seeds as well, though the rusks are equally good plain.

In another bowl mix together the buttermilk, sugar, eggs and oil and beat until well combined. Stir liquid into dry ingredients and mix well. Knead to a firm but soft dough.

Form the dough into balls about the size of a ping-pong/golf ball and pack them tightly in one layer into the loaf tins. I usually get six rows of three into each of my tins. Bake for 45 minutes until well risen and firm.

Turn the loaves of rusks out onto a rack and leave to cool for 30 minutes before breaking up into individual rusks along the joins of the balls. Watch out for family members pinching the soft rusks. My kids and husband like them at this stage too!

Dry in a very low oven for 5 hours or more until the centre of each rusk is completely dry. I usually break one of the larger ones open to see - it's no hardship eating up the broken pieces, even if it isn't quite done! These can be kept for ages in an airtight container.

Note: If your family is divided as to the merits of nuts and raisins in their rusks, it is possible to keep both camps happy: just leave one half of the dough plain, and then knead the nuts, seeds and raisins of your choice into the second half before rolling them all into balls.


If you are looking for more South African recipes to try, here is a post from the days of the World Cup, where I collected together  my top South African baking recipes.

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