Last week sometime we bought a nice big avo. Not quite ripe yet, so I wrapped it in newspaper, stuck it in the veg basket and… didn’t forget about it, for once.
It was nicely ripe on Thursday, but we didn’t get around to it until this morning. Very ripe, extremely tasty, so I made guacamole. With a red onion from the market, a handful of cherry tomatoes… I licked the food processor clean :-)
Guacamole Recipe
Take one large very ripe avo, one small onion, 1 or two or (I used) 3 cloves garlic, a small tomato or a handfull of cherry tomatoes, the riper the better, 1 1/2 teaspoons lime juice, and some salt and pepper, maybe a teaspoon or two Tobasco sauce, and blend in the food processor.
I submitted 22 (!) applications back in August, but the wheels of government turn slowly, if at all.
Maybe next year I can burn some powder with my JMB toys.
(I’ve shot the 1911 before, before my friend Etienne (who moved to the states) sold it to me for a pittance. Man oh man, that’s a lekker pistol. (I think it’s a 1944 Remington-Rand model)).
We went to the Porter Estate Market, bought all kinds of nice things, including an aubergine, five or six heads of garlic, some spinach, and a bag of grenadillas, which are called passion fruit in most parts of the world, it seems.
The aubergine was for making pseudo-Baba Ghanoush. “Pseudo”, because I used hummus instead of tahini. I had to bake the aubergine, so I also roasted the garlic. Now to find some tahini to make the real thing, to compare.
Tanya felt like a vegetable bake, so we googled this recipe, added broccoli and cauliflower, tastes as good as it looks. I made Tanya do all the work, but she still claims I made it, because it came out well…
I don’t often see grenadillas for sale, so when I saw this I figured I could use them to top a cheesecake — since I had a tub of cream cheese left over from the last time I made cheesecake a few weeks ago (I finally found a recipe that works really well).
Behold, bitchez! (Roughly translated, I think it came out rather well :-)
Meanwhile, Tanya was rooting in the freezer and found an unlabelled container of what I suspected was a meat sauce for pasta, made… can’t remember when or why. Defrosted that and added the five heads of garlic’s worth of roasted garlic. Since the topic under discussion was lasagne, that’s what I decided to make. Except I choose my recipes carefully (that is, IMO, the #1 rule for cooking — cheat!) I had the sauce already, mixed up the cottage cheese, sour cream and egg sauce, and layered meat, one layer lasagne sheets, spread some sauce, another layer lasagne, some more sauce, and repeat. Top with cheese.
No prizes for presentation, but it was goood. Had the rest for lunch today, I think we’re both flea proof for the next few weeks.
Oh, and I tried making a sourdough starter but it didn’t take. Fortunately I have a sachet a friend brought from Yellowknife, will try that next.
The Wiggler (imported) kit sells for R930, including worms — probably not that much more than the bits to make my own would cost me. They also have a locally made one for slightly less, but I prefer the look of the imported model, which is what I ended up buying. I picked it up from Vernon’s house in Lakeside.
Yup, those are the worms, in the top box…
So now I have a colony of earthworms, eating some spinach leaves… will see how it goes.
I looked back through some photographs… we’ve come a long way, and we did a helluva lot, but it’s not so obvious if you’re living it day-by-day — it’s much more striking when you look back.
This was the stoep area outside the kitchen door, back in April.
By July, it was looking a lot better.
Of necessity, Frank paved the bricks at quite a slope. This is good, from a water runoff point of view, but I had to chock the washing machine with a couple of 2x4s, otherwise it would bleat piteously and give up on the spin cycle.
I had planned a platform to keep the machines dry and off the deck, as well as a partition to keep the wind and dust at bay, and a table for sorting and folding the washing.
Christmas left me with a whole lot of tomatoes in the fridge. Half a container of small red cocktail tomatoes, most of a container of mixed red and yellow cocktail tomatoes, and a whole unopened bag of Roma plum tomatoes.
And with Tanya and the kids off to Knysna for a week, I figured I would make tomato bredie (Tanya hates mutton, Jessica’s a vegetarian, but Tamsyn might have liked it, except I put a whole lot of chili in).
Found an Ina Paarman recipe online, used a whole lot less mutton, and three whole green chillies from a packet that I stuck in the freezer a couple of years ago.
Used this nifty Christmas present to reduce the sauce. Ain’t it cute?
Those following this blog will know that I’ve had many hassles with Lansdowne Boards. This is the second time I’ve run across this specific problem, which is that the board goes through the machine at a slight angle, which means that things don’t line up.
It’s not a lot, but it makes the front of the shelf stand proud by half a millimeter or so, and that looks bad.
The whole point of Lansdowne Boards‘ system is that they have the precision machines so that you can just assemble the stuff without using any complicated tools. In theory this is good. But if your machines are out of calibration or your operators just don’t care, this is the result — one pissed off customer.
So, sadly, I can’t recommend using them. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to suffer, and if you do know what you’re doing, you don’t need them anyway. Go to Davidson’s or someone else instead.
There’s a chinese shop close to Cavendish. They sell, amongst other things, frozen Dim Sum type stuff, and I bought half a dozen veg and half a dozen pork buns this afternoon. Steamed them in my bamboo steamer, excellent. The veg ones are nicer than the pork, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try the pork too.
Tanya doesn’t like the umeboshi. That, was to be expected. Jessica doesn’t much like it either, but she might grow into it. (Tamsyn, of course, had hamburger patties :-)
Me, I like it, but a little bit will last a long time. Now I want to try making Nibuta.
Footnote: since this blog posting I referenced above, we’ve tasted the Confucious Family Liquor. I prefer the Baijiu. The Confucious stuff is really bad.
We got this yucca tree from freecycle. In a large pot with a small base, so it wasn’t very stable. We found a better pot at Builders Warehouse, transferred the yucca to that, and then figured that the new pot was still not big enough.
So we found an even bigger pot at Harry Goemans, which meant that we had to buy another yucca to go in the smaller pot.
In the process of transferring yuccas and moving pots around, I pushed the larger pot just a little too hard. Sprained my arm. Ouch.
