I am descended from settlers. Dutch settlers, Huguenot settlers, 1820 settlers and possibly a Malay settler. They all came to Africa so long ago that for generations we have not even had contact with any family in the mother countries, we are just pure SA. When I was 21 I had no relatives living overseas, just a few in the Rhodesias but that does'nt count. Now, 50 years later, I have more cousins living overseas than in SA. The family has increased the populations of the USA, the UK, France, New Zealand and Australia. As far as friends are concerned very few are left here. Even my lifelong friend from army days has migrated at age 71 to Scotland.
A friend and his wife have just returned from a visit to their children in Australia. On the way back they stopped in Perth to visit friends of theirs. These friends threw a party for them inviting only others they knew from SA. There were 70 people at the party and not only were they all from SA, but from Benoni and Boksburg alone!
The latest blow is a niece and her husband who travelled to London to assist with a family matter and have now sent a signal that they are not coming back! Hubby will return to sell up but niece is staying awaiting his return.
I wish all these relatives and friends well. In fact, I think more should go. But it does make me sad.
My loss is personal. The economic loss to the country, counting in all the other migrants, is staggering.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
A very easy supper
I promise this is not going to become another cooking programme but here is one more recipe. It deserves a place in any one's repertoire because it is so sinfully easy.
To accompany this dish I decided on TOD's (third oldest grandson) cashew nut salad (you can find it in fromcollenspen.blogspot.com). First problem was avocados were not available. Likewise ripe pears or any other suitable fruit substitute. Bananas there were but I didn't think they would do. In the end I decided on feta or cottage cheese but, lo and behold, in Woollies the brie was cheaper than either. Since I was being economical a whole brie was cut into chunks and dumped into the salad. Very tasty! I found making the salad a mission though, it took forever. I later discovered that TOD just cut the peppers and stuff into small chunks. Because I don't like raw peppers and spinach I sliced everything into delicate little strips as thin as any woman longs to be. Tasted great, better than TOD's I'll bet.
The main dish was to be the last remains of a roast chicken carcase. All the grisly bits and bones were removed and the meat cut into chunks. These were added to a can of asparagus soup together with sliced mushrooms (I would have preferred buttons if I could have found them) and heated through. Heavenly! A mistake I made was to thin the soup with milk and water. Don't do this, just use the soup direct from the can.
I like this easy cooking. Next time I will add the left over chicken to tomato soup and add some green bits and serve it on rice. Should be good.
To accompany this dish I decided on TOD's (third oldest grandson) cashew nut salad (you can find it in fromcollenspen.blogspot.com). First problem was avocados were not available. Likewise ripe pears or any other suitable fruit substitute. Bananas there were but I didn't think they would do. In the end I decided on feta or cottage cheese but, lo and behold, in Woollies the brie was cheaper than either. Since I was being economical a whole brie was cut into chunks and dumped into the salad. Very tasty! I found making the salad a mission though, it took forever. I later discovered that TOD just cut the peppers and stuff into small chunks. Because I don't like raw peppers and spinach I sliced everything into delicate little strips as thin as any woman longs to be. Tasted great, better than TOD's I'll bet.
The main dish was to be the last remains of a roast chicken carcase. All the grisly bits and bones were removed and the meat cut into chunks. These were added to a can of asparagus soup together with sliced mushrooms (I would have preferred buttons if I could have found them) and heated through. Heavenly! A mistake I made was to thin the soup with milk and water. Don't do this, just use the soup direct from the can.
I like this easy cooking. Next time I will add the left over chicken to tomato soup and add some green bits and serve it on rice. Should be good.
Friday, February 5, 2010
I too can cook a little.
With Wonfy taking on a job looking after anklebiters at a creche she gets home late. Consequently, I do a little (very little) of the cooking. Wednesday evening I did MY signature dish, Cottage Pie. Goes like this.
Chop up two onions and soften in a large pan. Use butter, nothing else does onions as well. Add a little water and stew one kg beef mince, a bunch of chopped ham (we had none so I chopped up a packet of back bacon instead) and the three large carrots (I used six small ones) that you have chopped into little pieces. Use that flat wooden stick thing to stir and break the mince up. Add a tablespoon Soya sauce (Worcester is just as good), salt and pepper to taste. When done transfer to a deep dish suitable for the oven. This is a lot of food so I divided it into two dishes, one for the freezer.
At this point I used to take the potatoes that had boiled in the meantime and would mash them with a little milk, butter and a sniff of baking powder for the pie topping. This time I took a shortcut. With my superpowerful Teutonic potato ricer I riced the potatoes directly onto the meat. It worked just as well but next time I will also brush the top with a little butter. Shove into the oven for a while to finish off and brown the crust. I served the above with frozen peas nuked in the micro.
Wonfy, DMC (Dearest Male Child) and I pigged out, even half the recipe is plenty. DMC said it leaned in taste towards venison and I think he was right. Any road, it is very different to run of the mill mince.
A word about the potato ricer, if that is what it is called. That's what we called it when I was sub-adult. The one I have now comes from Germany and is built stouter than a Bavarian hausfrau. I don't even peel the potatos, just boil them, cut them in half and rice them. The fractured potato comes out in beautiful, delicious rice-like grains and the skins stay behind. My DDM (Dear Departed Mother) would have killed for a device like that.
Being a man I know little of cooking except for one thing, you (or at least I) can not cook successfully by remote control. You have to stay in the kitchen (or braai) close to food, you have to give it attention, you have to care for it, you have to feel for it. It is not easy but the more effort you put into the dish the more the people you share it with will enjoy it. The part I like least is when eveyone has stuffed themselves they express varying degrees of appreciation and you are left with bugger all else except dirty dishes. At least when you paint a picture,no matter how crappy, you have something tangible in the end.
No, Matilda, this is not an unhealthy and fattening dish. The proof is my slim, trim 34 inch waist.
Chop up two onions and soften in a large pan. Use butter, nothing else does onions as well. Add a little water and stew one kg beef mince, a bunch of chopped ham (we had none so I chopped up a packet of back bacon instead) and the three large carrots (I used six small ones) that you have chopped into little pieces. Use that flat wooden stick thing to stir and break the mince up. Add a tablespoon Soya sauce (Worcester is just as good), salt and pepper to taste. When done transfer to a deep dish suitable for the oven. This is a lot of food so I divided it into two dishes, one for the freezer.
At this point I used to take the potatoes that had boiled in the meantime and would mash them with a little milk, butter and a sniff of baking powder for the pie topping. This time I took a shortcut. With my superpowerful Teutonic potato ricer I riced the potatoes directly onto the meat. It worked just as well but next time I will also brush the top with a little butter. Shove into the oven for a while to finish off and brown the crust. I served the above with frozen peas nuked in the micro.
Wonfy, DMC (Dearest Male Child) and I pigged out, even half the recipe is plenty. DMC said it leaned in taste towards venison and I think he was right. Any road, it is very different to run of the mill mince.
A word about the potato ricer, if that is what it is called. That's what we called it when I was sub-adult. The one I have now comes from Germany and is built stouter than a Bavarian hausfrau. I don't even peel the potatos, just boil them, cut them in half and rice them. The fractured potato comes out in beautiful, delicious rice-like grains and the skins stay behind. My DDM (Dear Departed Mother) would have killed for a device like that.
Being a man I know little of cooking except for one thing, you (or at least I) can not cook successfully by remote control. You have to stay in the kitchen (or braai) close to food, you have to give it attention, you have to care for it, you have to feel for it. It is not easy but the more effort you put into the dish the more the people you share it with will enjoy it. The part I like least is when eveyone has stuffed themselves they express varying degrees of appreciation and you are left with bugger all else except dirty dishes. At least when you paint a picture,no matter how crappy, you have something tangible in the end.
No, Matilda, this is not an unhealthy and fattening dish. The proof is my slim, trim 34 inch waist.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Eating chickens
What the young set have had to say about food has put me in a pensive mood. DD (Dearest Daughter) has great difficulty finding suitable fish. Well, as an old toppie I don't think you can get a decent chicken either. The newer generations are used to the foul fowls offered by todays supermarket so are not aware of what we are being cheated out of.
When I was a brat chicken was a rare and very expensive dish. So expensive that we raised our own. When chicken was to be on the menu there was no collecting one off the shelf. You selected your fowl, caught it, chopped it's head off, plucked it, feathers and guts, and burnt off the remaining tiniest feathers over a Primus stove. The gizzard was cut open and cleaned and retained with the liver and heart to enrich the gravy. If the unfortunate fowl was broody it had in it a fascinating set of eggs ranging from the size of a golf ball down to a pea or less.
Almost always the chicken was roasted in the coal stove's oven with roast potatoes that split down the centre, crisp outside and soft inside with sweet salty juices that spread to every part of your mouth. The chicken would be tough by today's measure but tasty beyond belief. Sometimes, rarely, there would be chicken pie with thick crust and juices drawn up into the cup placed upside down in the middle of the dish. Then the chicken was as tender as my mother's parting words as my departed father would say.
I learnt that nothing is more stupid that a chicken. It will run when you try to catch it, but once caught, it lays dead (pun) still as you stretch its neck on the block. It just lies there and looks at you. After the axe had parted head from body the chicken would thrash around for a while splashing bright crimson blood on the sharply contrasting brown sand. Fascinating. Well OK, a bit gruesome but remember we had no telly in those days. OG (oldest grandson) tells me fowls do not have a wide gene pool. I can believe that!
By the time I went to school I knew that the meat we ate with such pleasure was not manufactured by the butcher but came from a once living animal. There was no such thing a sex education then (nobody dared use the s-x word) but I had a fair grounding in conception, birth, life and death. Exposure to fowl guts gave me some idea of animal biology. Feeding the birds and collecting eggs developed responsibility. In all, not a bad education for a pre-schooler. I doubt that todays city child has as good a preparation for life.
When I was a brat chicken was a rare and very expensive dish. So expensive that we raised our own. When chicken was to be on the menu there was no collecting one off the shelf. You selected your fowl, caught it, chopped it's head off, plucked it, feathers and guts, and burnt off the remaining tiniest feathers over a Primus stove. The gizzard was cut open and cleaned and retained with the liver and heart to enrich the gravy. If the unfortunate fowl was broody it had in it a fascinating set of eggs ranging from the size of a golf ball down to a pea or less.
Almost always the chicken was roasted in the coal stove's oven with roast potatoes that split down the centre, crisp outside and soft inside with sweet salty juices that spread to every part of your mouth. The chicken would be tough by today's measure but tasty beyond belief. Sometimes, rarely, there would be chicken pie with thick crust and juices drawn up into the cup placed upside down in the middle of the dish. Then the chicken was as tender as my mother's parting words as my departed father would say.
I learnt that nothing is more stupid that a chicken. It will run when you try to catch it, but once caught, it lays dead (pun) still as you stretch its neck on the block. It just lies there and looks at you. After the axe had parted head from body the chicken would thrash around for a while splashing bright crimson blood on the sharply contrasting brown sand. Fascinating. Well OK, a bit gruesome but remember we had no telly in those days. OG (oldest grandson) tells me fowls do not have a wide gene pool. I can believe that!
By the time I went to school I knew that the meat we ate with such pleasure was not manufactured by the butcher but came from a once living animal. There was no such thing a sex education then (nobody dared use the s-x word) but I had a fair grounding in conception, birth, life and death. Exposure to fowl guts gave me some idea of animal biology. Feeding the birds and collecting eggs developed responsibility. In all, not a bad education for a pre-schooler. I doubt that todays city child has as good a preparation for life.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Traffic fine
So I got pulled over for talking on the celphone while driving. The putrid tick in uniform addressed me as follows: "Are we going to right each other?" Translation: Are you going to see me right with a bribe and I can then see you right by not writing the ticket? My indignation level rose faster than an Apollo rocket but I did remain polite and told him to do his job and write the ticket while giving him a viciously contemptuous look and a sneer on my face that would peel a pineapple at forty paces. In the end he wrote the ticket. I had put him on the spot and there was nothing else he could do.
Afterwards I complicated the incident by forgetting to pay the fine and a warrant was issued for my arrest. In the end I (or rather Wonfy who went to the traffic dept. for me) had to pay the R500 fine plus R300 contempt of court.
Do I now avoid answering the celphone while driving? Noooo. Do I have greater respect for our traffic enforcers. Nooo. Put it this way, my hatred level for them has gone up 800 notches ( 1 notch per R1) and my dearest wish is that they and their bosses would never come out from under the dog's vomit which is their natural habitat.
Next time I will pay the bribe. It will be less stressful and I will save R600. The tick will be happy and I can always hope what he spends it on will kill him.
That is now the South African way. Puke.
Afterwards I complicated the incident by forgetting to pay the fine and a warrant was issued for my arrest. In the end I (or rather Wonfy who went to the traffic dept. for me) had to pay the R500 fine plus R300 contempt of court.
Do I now avoid answering the celphone while driving? Noooo. Do I have greater respect for our traffic enforcers. Nooo. Put it this way, my hatred level for them has gone up 800 notches ( 1 notch per R1) and my dearest wish is that they and their bosses would never come out from under the dog's vomit which is their natural habitat.
Next time I will pay the bribe. It will be less stressful and I will save R600. The tick will be happy and I can always hope what he spends it on will kill him.
That is now the South African way. Puke.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Rodney
Rod was a friend I made through the sport of pistol shooting. He did his apprenticeship in the Royal Air Force and landed up in France at the beginning of WW2 with the British Army. He saw the outdated RAF planes shot out of the sky by the then superior German planes. He was in the subsequent British retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk. After that he ended up in Burma via South Africa where he saw at first hand some of the Japanese atrocities. Rod did not let this embitter him but he developed a strong morality and did not suffer fools.
Back in London he found the smog and cold weather intolerable so he and his wife settled in S.A. where he opened a small engineering shop. I had a great interest in making things and Rod was always ready with help and advice. He often gave me materials and tools that I could not afford or get elsewhere. I always offered to pay but Rod never took money. One day I told Rod that it was embarrassing for me to take stuff from him without payment. I will never forget his reply : "The materials I give you are left over from a job and are already paid for. The tools I give you are still of good quality but the slight wear they have gone through makes them unsuitable for the extreme accuracy I need in my work. I have recovered the costs of these and do not want another payment. If, by giving you these items I improve your life, you may carry that on by doing something kind for the next person and in turn they may help another. In that way there will be a little more happiness in the world and that is all payment I need."
What a man. I wish that I had implemented his philosophy more often in my own life.
Another gem I got from Rod: Before you make something do a drawing. That way you make the mistakes on paper where that can be corrected cheaply and easily rather than having expensive box-ups on the job.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Trees
I am beginning to hate trees. They are fine where they belong but on a small suburban property they are a curse. We have a great karree planted by me before dearest daughter was in matric, two podocarpusses (podocarpi?) planted by Wonfy (wife of nearly fifty years) against my advice, a bottlebrush, one of those creations where the flowers change colour from blue to white or perhaps the other way around but smell nice and various other overgrown shrubs, all planted by Wonfy. Our neighbour has an elm (I think), a mulberry as well as other trees and a huge monstrousity that is already destroying the gutters and roof of HIS house.
The consequence is that our home is in perpetual shade. The eastern aspect of the house is now covered in moss and algae, not even kikyuyu grass will grow where once was lawn and the gutters need continual cleaning. Admittedly my attitude is affected by being claustrophobic as a result of being trapped inside a box ottoman as a child. I need space, damn it! And light! And air! In a normal household the solution would be to cut the trees down. However, Wonfy sees herself as the protector of all growing things and I would rather face a gang of taxi drivers with AK47s than take her on.
No doubt this will upset any number of greenies. Too bad. There never was a forest here on the Witwatersrand in the first place. Nor am I in raptures over the arboreal birds that have migrated here. My sympathies are with the unfortunate grassland species that have been pushed out.
Nothing I can do about it now except hang over the fence and take pleasure in watching the dogs piddling on the trees on the pavements. One dark night I might do the same.
The consequence is that our home is in perpetual shade. The eastern aspect of the house is now covered in moss and algae, not even kikyuyu grass will grow where once was lawn and the gutters need continual cleaning. Admittedly my attitude is affected by being claustrophobic as a result of being trapped inside a box ottoman as a child. I need space, damn it! And light! And air! In a normal household the solution would be to cut the trees down. However, Wonfy sees herself as the protector of all growing things and I would rather face a gang of taxi drivers with AK47s than take her on.
No doubt this will upset any number of greenies. Too bad. There never was a forest here on the Witwatersrand in the first place. Nor am I in raptures over the arboreal birds that have migrated here. My sympathies are with the unfortunate grassland species that have been pushed out.
Nothing I can do about it now except hang over the fence and take pleasure in watching the dogs piddling on the trees on the pavements. One dark night I might do the same.
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