FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

This week I ate fresh seaweed which I picked from the sea myself and my taste buds had a few surprises.  It’s been a week of discovery.  I’ve been carting the back page ripped out of a Village Life magazine around with me for the last year.  It had intriguing recipes using seaweed but I never actually got around to trying them, until now.

Wikipedia informed me that seaweed has more nutritional value than many land vegetables and in fact contains Vitamin B12 which is in not found in any land veggie and which is very good for you.  There are different types of seaweed on different coastlines and they can be used in different ways.  Some taste meaty, some are eaten fresh and others are good for sushi.  We’ve bought dried sheets of seaweed from the Chinese food shops before to make sushi but that’s not the same as actually getting the fresh stuff.  I’ve now found out that I’m eating the seaweed called Nori when Theo makes sushi.

Now before you incorrectly assume that I’m a health freak living on nuts and sprouts and analyse everything which I put into my body let me just remind you that living with Theo 24 -7 does not allow for that.  I’m not skinny with pasty skin either, in fact I’m getting rounder by the day. The nuts we eat are in his home baked bread which we snack on with lavishings of butter.  I do make my own sprouts from mung beans which I buy from the Chinese food shops while Theo stocks up on sushi ingredients and other strange things like fermented black eggs or packets of odd looking curly things which we never know what the hell they are since they only have Chinese writing on the packets and the Chinese shop owners don’t speak much English at all.  Nevertheless, Theo loves experimenting with all the exotic things and I make my sprouts to put on cheese sandwiches with lavishings of butter in between eating lots of meat, fried food and Theo’s endless assortment of breads.                       

Theo has also made devine seafood dishes by stuffing sea bamboo with perlemoen (abalone) when it was still legal to collect the gift from the sea gods, or mussels taken out their shells or alikreukel.  You shove them down the bamboo, alternating with a chunk of garlic now and then, and seal the end with a thick piece of rolled up ribbon fronds from the bamboo.  You plonk the bamboo onto the coals and the food steams inside.  We slice the bamboo open but only eat the seafood inside, which has a delicious flavour from the bamboo.  Next time I’m gonna take a bite of the bamboo as well.

I never thought about eating seaweed before.  I mean, jeez the Chinese and Japanese who are healthy, live on the stuff so why the hell shouldn’t I give it a try.  And it’s free, just sitting there on the rocks for the picking.    

So there I was, on the beachfront at Kleinzee, poking around in rock pools looking for Gigartina radula.  It’s brown and covered in knobbly bumps which reminded me of a sheeps tongue but felt like a slab of squeaky rubbery plastic.  I boiled my firm knobbly rubber for 7 minutes as per the recipe by which time the caravan smelt like the depths of the ocean.  Once the stuff is boiled, not too long or it becomes slimy (ah there’s the rub) you can do a whole bunch of things with it.  I tried the first recipe which was fritters.  I dipped the now floppy bright green knobbly leaves in batter and deep fried them.  They tasted awesome.  Not salty or slimy but more meaty and had a good texture.  Theo enjoyed them.  I was keen to try the more healthy ideas, since if you’re gonna eat stuff the colour of grass you might as well go all the way.  The next day I made a egg Tortilla (that’s a fancy name for a Spanish omelette if you didn’t know).  I used some of the bright green chopped gooey leaves which I’d boiled the previous day.  They’d become a bit slimy but I wasn’t going to be put off as I draped the luminous green stuff over the diced potatoes in the pan and added a few cherry tomatoes to balance the brightness of my colourful eggs.  Theo tried a mouthful but made a face saying it was too slimy for him.  He eats snails and oysters so baa, why not my seaweed.  I encouraged him to try more, saying he wasn’t giving it a chance.  Anyway, I endure all his strange concoctions like 100year old fermented eggs and sheeps heads and fish eyes and chilli which makes me dread bowel movements for the next week.  I ate my slimy green eggs (no ham) with a determined grimace as the food slid down my throat.  He could at least pretend.   

Tomorrow he’s getting a vegetable bake with seaweed layers and then I still want to try the yummy sounding tomato soup with floating green bits.  And he better not pull a face otherwise I’m headed back to the rocks in search of the fronzy green lettuce seaweed which you eat raw and I’ll stick it on his cheese sandwich instead of my sprouts which he loves so much.              

Mmmm, maybe that’s why I never get a chance to cook.

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES AND THE CYCAMORE TREES

You send shivers up my spine

Do that to me one more time

Look at me, Look at me

Natures Toys

Red hot for you

Wanna share my morsel

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES AND THE CYCAMORE TREES

The birds around here are having a big fat jol. Its spring and they are flirting and fluffing like mad and stuffing themselves with insects and berries as they rush from tree to tree in the chase. It’s a bit like watching people on a night out on the town, except without the booze so there’s no waking up next to a stranger on a park bench in your underwear the next morning and feeling guilty. In fact there’s no guilt in animal procreation, just pleasure.
Many male species of antelope get very excited as they chase the females around then stick their noses up the females’ displayed end to check how horny they are. Some even go as far as gargling with a mouthful of the female’s urine and pucker their lips as if they are swirling a good red wine. I hope sheep don’t do the whole phlegmy tasty thing cos I’ve just remembered the curled lips and blanched tongue of the sheep’s head which I ate at the Calvinia Vleisfees.
Some snakes have 2 penises, ooee lucky them, while some drone bees loose theirs in a moment of ecstasy as they explode their whole tool box into the queen bees vaginal clamp. Ouch. Many male insects have their heads bitten off by the very excited females while they are still on the job and other male spiders become midnight munchies for the satisfied females. You’d think they’d have learnt their lesson after millions of years but clearly getting laid is more important. Poor male songbirds on the other hand don’t even have a penis yet they still get all a flutter at the thought of rubbing themselves against a willing female to touch vents.
Right now I’m watching the birds bonking in the Bitou bushes. The males are having noisy singing competitions to get the attention of the females who sometimes also join in. It’s sort of like what goes on in a noisy Irish pub except without the alcohol making it much easier for the birds to hold a note and harmonise in B flat. The males are fluffing themselves up and prancing around showing off their bright new spring colours, the same way that guys do their disco moves on the dance floor after a few tequilas. The females are coyly watching the display, urging them on and a fight is about to break out as the testosterone levels reach their limit. I watch a male chase his competition away and return to feed a berry to a flushed female in a last desperate act to get laid. He succeeds after all his efforts and she lets him touch vents for half a second. Most male animals don’t have much else to do other than eat and bonk so that’s probably why he doesn’t have time for a smoke break before being distracted by another inviting female. Mrs bird, who has just recently got her socks off, stocks up on the abundant berries and insects as any pregnant mother would and contemplates the most effective way to get hubby to follow her back to the nest. “I’ll bite your head off if you don’t come home with me right now” is a common line used by female praying mantises. Mmph, the conniving lengths some females go to.

It’s all about pheromones, hormones and testosterones. Animals must have high sex drives since yes they do seem to be preoccupied with spreading their genes but they do also enjoy getting laid. Foreplay can take days to play itself out before being culminated with the actual deed. Most female mammals and a few other species have a clitoris so yes they must enjoy it just as much as the horny males. Female mammals have a oestrus cycle releasing pheromones which drive the horny males into a frenzy. You don’t wanna cross the path of a male elephant is musth who can smell an inviting female from kilometres away. Move out the way. Horny bull coming through. So what happens the rest of the time. They still get horny. You don’t just stop thinking about getting lucky and I bet they have wet dreams. That’s why they try to bonk anything that moves. In fact it doesn’t even have to move. A rock will do but if they could get hold of a blow up doll I’m pretty sure it would be their first choice. Many primates give themselves a hand job, or even help each other out. And don’t think hand made tools used to reach into termite hills are the only tools out there in the wild either. National Geographics doesn’t tell you about the wooden dildos crafted by Orangutans. Next time you see a female elephant carrying a sausage tree pod around you’ll know what I mean.
So what’s the difference between the mating game of animals and humans?..... PMS?

THIS TOWN, IS COMING LIKE A GHOST TOWN

THIS TOWN, IS COMING LIKE A GHOST TOWN

All the clubs have closed down.  The pottery club, the photographic club and the sports club are just some of the deserted buildings but Kleinzee is special and I’ve fallen in love with the town.  It’s made up of about 30 or so different types of characters in a ghost town setting.  There used to be about 4 000 or so employees working for De Beers diamond mines but now that they are no longer mining here, the remaining people are finishing things off and there’s big talk of a boom happening in January when De Beers sells off all the vacant houses.  The die hards are patiently waiting as they have been for the last few years.

Simon has already become my favourite customer at the Crazy Crayfish.  He usually blows in to the diner barefoot and in his pyjamas and we discuss important issues about humanity which I never seem to be able to remember much of the next morning.  It could be my brain is so full of information which I’ve been accumulating these last few months or it could be due to Jugermeister which I’ve come to enjoy and which no longer tastes like Vicks Acta Plus.  He often brings his Jack Russel along but when the family of Cape Foxes come around and creep right up to the door for scraps, the dog gets too excited and Simon takes him home.  I’m holding thumbs there’s a litter of Fox pups safely stashed away in a hole somewhere.  Brown Hyenas (Strand Wolfe) roam around here as well but they comb the beach front and the golf course for food.  We nearly bumped right into a little Steenbokkie late one night walking back from the diner.  The poor thing left skid marks in the dust as it dashed round the corner barely a foot away from us.  I got such a skrik I nearly left my own skid marks.     

Miskiet, a Crazy Crayfish regular, has a busy life hunting game on a neighbouring farm or diving for crayfish and fishing and driving his 4x4 to isolated beach front spots or fitting his beach buggie with a moerse V8 or some or other turbo charged engine or buying rounds of Jugermeister. 

Kai is also a regular.  He is Finish and is the local baker. He makes a Pantoffel loaf which is a strange baguette hollowed out in the shape of a stokie slipper and which I think is as odd as his sense of humour. 

Que has a oyster farm which seems to do very well and he has the concession to harvest seaweed which he exports.  He is always rushing around everywhere.  He’s given me some dried seaweed to make jelly which I’m dying to try out.  Mmmm perhaps Tequila shooters.    

Yesterday we explored the surrounding area and met Rocky, Karen and Timo, arty surfers who live on a piece of farm ground on the beach front.  They have the most awesome view of their own private beachfront in a remote setting. Karen & Rocky sailed the world in their yacht for eight years but now it’s moored in Cape Town and they make their living by mining the shoreline for diamonds and ride the waves in their spare time.  They have to wait for the sea to be just right to be able to get their mining pipe down among the rocks so they have loads of free time to catch a wave. 

We visited Noup which is about 40 km out of town and is a remote cluster of authentically restored old diamond divers cottages in a beautiful setting.  Perfect for romantic getaways and when its crayfish season the place is fully booked according to Dudley, the owner.  He liked Theo’s XT Thumper and I liked all his pebbles.  As we stood chatting about the guided 4 x 4 shipwreck tours which he offers, he harry casually scratched around in the pebbles and picked up a tiny fossilized mussel, a petrified piece of wood, a fossilized piece of elephant enamel, and a fossilized fish ear bone.  He blew my mind when he told me they were all 80 million years old.  Wow, to be able to touch something that lived on the earth that long ago is just wow.  Big time wow.  He’s a geologist and has offered to ID my stone collection. Cool, I’ll be back and I’d love to see his prehistoric megalodon sharks teeth which he collected from Hondeklip bay, not too far from here.  That’s what I love about this place, it’s untouched, undiscovered and uninhabited.  Well except for the areas which De Beers have mutilated.  But still, it feels like I’m in virgin country recently pioneered by diamond diggers.

I’ve met a few of the more traditional west coast locals who live here in Kleinzee and they all live up to their name of being friendly. I love the Namakwaland style of putting words together and it has become apparent to me that I’m gonna be doing a lot of kuiering here in Kleinzee and less soul searching.  Finding the meaning of life is hard work with a construction team doing renovations inside your head so I’m up for a bit of partying. Oh hell, life here on the wild front is tough.  

Moerse – very big

skrik  - fright

Miskiet - Misquito

kuiering – party sessions

Diamonds are Forever

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

And so is the destruction in its wake.

We are back in Kleinzee and looking forward to sitting vas here in the small town with a big drinking problem and a small mining problem. After exploring the surrounding area including a bit of the Rigtersveld Park we were keen to start working at the Crazy Crayfish restaurant and meet the local yocals. The road between Alexander Bay and Port Nolloth was quiet so I had my first driving lesson. Yeehaa – now I’ve driven the truck
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All I can say about Alexander Bay is that it’s wedged in the most north western hoekie of South Africa where the Orange River empties into the ocean. It’s not really a town, but rather a dusty bland vaal sandy place where diamond mining has drastically devastated hundreds of km’s of the coastline and eliminated all signs of plant life leaving mounds of barren dunes with buggerall nutrients. By now I imagine you’ve realised I’m not keen on diamonds. In fact that’s probably why Theo married me, not because I’m clever, sexy, funny, or humble but because I don’t require expensive shiny jewellery in exchange for sex. Oh yes, did I mention that I’ve finally driven the truck
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We travelled east following the Orange River as it wound its way through the dry arid desert hoping to find a place to stop and do some fishing. It’s difficult to distinguish between some of the bare natural koppies in the dessert and the koppies created by piles and piles of gravel deposited by diamond mining even within the Rigtersveld National Park at the Sendlingsdrift area. We camped at Potjiespram and walked along the Orange River filling our pockets with more stones to add to our collection. Even Theo is hooked now and has a packet full of unpolished tigers eye. I’m not sure what the point is of driving around with a box full of stones on the back of the truck but we can’t seem to stop picking them up. So yes, I have driven the truck and it rocks!

The dry heat sucked out any speck of moisture or sweat before it had a chance to escape my pores and my dusty skin felt like the dry scales of a snake. The scenery of nothingness against a backdrop of majestic blue mountains creates its own unsurpassed beauty which had such a relaxing effect on me that I barely noticed my dried out nostrils, burning eyeballs or crevices in my heels. We were only about 100km into the Rigtersveld Park, so I wondered what the real desert in Namibia would be like. Yikes. We’ve decided we will wait for winter before we cross the border
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On our way back near Wondergat, a natural sinkhole in the rocks where the Namas believe a giant snake spirit lives, we came across a little oasis at a dried up riverbed. Someone lived there in a plastic covered maatjies hut with his own little camped off veggie garden so we sommer stopped there overnight. I was hoping to meet the owner but he was nowhere to be found. We assumed he was a herder judging by the amount of drolletjies around, and had probably moved his goats in search of better grazing grounds in the harsh environment. I felt like an intruder peeping through his makeshift door at some of his worldly possessions, a dented pot or two on a little wooden shelf, a chair and his neatly made up bed. It seemed that he expected to find everything as he had left it when he returned months later, even his veggie garden seemed to be doing ok on its own. I wondered if he had asked Heitsi Eibib, the snake spirit to watch over his stuff while he journeyed on foot across the desert. According to Nama legend the snake spirit sometimes appears as an irresistible young maiden and lures men into its deep black hole to devour them. Perhaps he had got lonely and had finally succumbed to the deceptive spirit. Either way, I respected his space for the 2 days which we hung around there and I didn’t wander across to the big black hole.

Food for thought – I wonder if a spirit guarding your stuff wouldn’t be more effective than SAPS?!?
PS. I’ve driven the truck and I’ts awesome!
Vas - tight
hoekie - corner
vaal - bland
Koppies – hills
Maatjies – traditional reed ma
Sommer – just (what the hell, if not why not)
Drolletjies - poop

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

I’m really fascinated by how different these West Coast people are and what spending time with them does to a persons innerste. These people don’t have degrees as long as your arm but they do know where to find crayfish the length of a mans arm and their stories are just as long and fleshy. The higher up the diamond mining coast we travelled the more interesting the people became. I mean, there we were, parked on the beachfront in Port Nolloth, minding our own business, checking out the diamond boats, when this couple stopped off and before you could say potsnot we had moved to their place to drink lots of beer and listened to the Ewings and the doings of Port Nolloth. Andre has a tow truck business and is your typical a grease monkey, although he seemed more of a placid monkey covered in grease. His wife Ria is, well lets just say she’s a very colourful character. She started a non profit animal shelter and does a wonderful job of rescuing the neighbourhoods abused cats and dogs, all at her own expense. Her method of collecting these animals is on a take no prisoners system as she cruizes the neighbourhood with a long beer, a baton and a vengeful glare. Being a mercenary is more her calling I think. She even sorts out the drug dealers here (apparently Port Nolloth the drug mecca of the West Coast) and isn’t afraid to smash a car windows or a face if anyone gives her problems. She says people here either have too much money (the ones who strike it lucky with diamonds) or too little (the ones who spend all their money on drugs). By the end of the evening I had heard all about the illicit diamond dealings of the towns main kanonie and how lucrative the Nigerians drug business was and about all the poor mange dogs in the townships. And here I thought Port Nolloth was a sleepy little sea side village with plenty of fish. I didn’t question her in case I got head butted but the next day in Spar Supermarket I scrutinized everyone pushing their trolleys around and wondered if they had a hidden cache of diamonds tucked away or if they were high from snorting kilos of coke.

Another out of the ordinary character we came across was Oom Josef at Lekkersing, a village in the harsh middle of nowhere. We headed there because the brochures led us to expect a Nama village with matjies huisies all touristy like and I was hoping to chat to the people there and find out more about edible and medicinal plants. Yip, I’m still hoping to find Kougoed (Sceletium tortousum) while everyone else is hoping to find diamonds. I’ve grown really fond of my Hoodia plant and every day when we stop driving for the day, I lovingly put it outside in the sun and feel guilty about it being cooped up inside. The other day the moerkoffie kettle fell over and drenched the poor plant in coffee grinds and I apologised profusely to it. (in my head of course so Theo didn’t hear and think I’m going cuckoo). When I do eventually try a bite of the appetite suppressant plant a bit of caffeine thrown in can surely only add to its effectiveness. I often give my beautiful stones plakked on the dashboard a good morning smile when I climb into the cab. Maybe I should get a dog but actually I’m finding the concept of positive energy to be quite rewarding.
Anyway back to Lekkersing. The people who lived there were Busters who lived in old houses, some were pretty corrugated houses which looked as old as the original settlers and were probably historical. The town offered nothing in the way of tourism but we stopped to chat to the friendly brown people with blue eyes. Theo was hoping to find someone to teach him how to plait a whip so we stopped to ask a group of guys if they knew of anyone but we were first invited into the shed to look at a caracal hide which a proud boy told us he and his dogs had killed. They pointed out Oom Josef’s house and said he knew how to plait leather. Oom Josef didn’t seem to have a busy afternoon planned and was quite willing to show Theo how it’s done so we spent a couple of hours hunched on home made riempie chairs on his stoep. He was as old as toeka se dae and I would have loved to have spent more time with him but the clouds were rolling in and Theo got worried about the corrugated dirt road ahead so we rattled on and hoped no body parts worked themselves loose and fell off. We had a long dusty road ahead and it surely would lead to somewhere.
innerste – insides – the place where good feelings come from
Potsnot – translated to pot of snot but actually means bullshit
Kanonie – head honcho
Matjies huisies– mat houses which the Nama people live in
Moerkoffie – ground coffee boiled in a kettle
Plakked - stuck
Riempie – leather thong - not the one’s you wear – the ones used to make furniture
Stoep – veranda
toeka se dae – days gone by