THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY
Theo and I have put our names down on “the list” so perhaps we can buy cheap property when De Beers sells off the town of Kleinzee. It’s the perfect place for us to some day start up a little pub serving Theo’s nibblies and I could carry on dabbling in my efforts to find different things to do with all the seaweed and salt around here. I’ve smoked chunks of salt rock crystals, for culinary uses not in a roll up. It adds good flavour to food although I hope it’s not enhanced with guano or pickled miggies. I’m drying the Nori seaweed by spreading in out on my hammock in the sun, then roasting it for a few minutes drizzled with peanut and sesame oil. Then you crumble it and add it to your food as you would a spice. It tastes frigging awesome. I’ve made a good soup / seafood stock with fresh chopped Gigartina radula (that’s the stuff which looks like flappy rough riders), a dash of red wine, onions and stock. Yummy. Even Theo is impressed with my experimental dishes lately. I’m not serving him slimy green snot anymore but he draws the line at letting me wrap him in fresh seaweed then making him soak in a bath with lumps of natural salt drifting around blobs of jelly slime. Nor does he like my salted seaweed glycerine soap. It doesn’t lather so he can’t make soapy Mohicans between his nuts in the shower. People pay a fortune to go to health spas for a treatment which I’m offering for free.

One of the planned projects for Kleinzee is a frail care retirement village around the currently deserted little hospital. I fear the grannies who move in might have a hard time adjusting to this wild environment. Besides the confusing lonely robot (traffic light) stuck on the wall outside Spar, they could get blown all the way to the Port if they went for a stroll down to the beach. Dodging the wild ostriches patrolling the dunes in search of shiny things to eat and the odd fat fur seal sunning themselves on the beachfront could line them up for a pacemaker. I’ve never seen or heard of ostrich roadkill but it’s a strong possibility out here in Kleinzee and according to the manne, a true South African man has to eat his roadkill. You are expected to skin it and cook it on a fire right there on the roadside or in the unlikely event that you don’t have a bag of wood in your boot, you have to cook the meat on the cars manifold and eat it later when you arrive at your destination. Trying to wedge a dangly ostrich under your hood could be tricky I reckon.

You might have noticed that I’m becoming a bit blazѐ about hunting, me being a bit of a softie when it comes to cute furry animals and all. Well, truth is, I’ve come to grips with the fact that man is a hunter gatherer by nature. I’ve joined the good natured West coast toppies down at the abattoir for a brandy and coke (strange place for drinks you might think) when they slaughter their meat for the month (the same stuff which you buy in styrofoam bakkies from Pick ‘n Pay) and I haven’t blinked an eyelid. These guys aren’t one bit gungho and don’t swagger around with a rifle over their shoulder proclaiming their manhood. In fact they prefer free range or organic meat as apposed to eating animals penned in a cage the size of its body. Bottom line is I no longer feel like a barbarian devouring flesh when I eat meat.

I’ve really been industrious lately and quite enjoying myself. I’ve made a batch of green fig preserve and green fig jam which is a moerse lot of PT. I’m wondering how many wasps I will be eating as a by-product. The whole wasp fig tree relationship is nogal quite interesting. Did you know that fig trees go back as far as 80 million years ago and that each species (about 750) fig tree only has one species of wasp which is able to pollinate it. They therefore rely on each other for reproduction. Fig trees must have been pretty common back in Adam and Eve’s days cos Adam used a fig leaf as a loin cloth. They probably were originally vegans munching on things like pears and apricots, peaches, melons, basically everything to make a fruit salad except apples until that fateful day. Adam wouldn’t have had any animal skin lying around to cover up his suddenly exposed manhood so a fig leaf had to do. Maybe it was the result of strenuous hard work getting a soap tree to lather up (after eating a Granny Smith) and resulted in more than a hairy Mohican. But I digress from my wasp story. In most cases a female wasp squeezes herself through the tiny hole in the fig, her legs transferring fig pollen to the flowery seeds inside as she squeezes in, leaving a trail of now useless body parts. Her wings and antenna break off, and I bet she gets a tight facelift as she wedges through the tiny opening, then she lays her eggs and dies with a grin from ear to ear so to speak. That’s assuming she chose a male fig tree, otherwise she just dies and you get to eat a mouthful of dried up pregnant wasp on your jam sarmie. If things go well, the eggs hatch, they grow and the wingless males have a good time in the dark fig with all the females then they spend the remainder of their life trying to burrow an escape route for the pollen covered females to bugger off so that they can die in peace while the life of fig trees carry on as they have for millions and millions of years.
Now that the Biology class is over I’m off to swallow a spider to catch a fly and everything else living inside my stomach. I don’t know why.


Miggies- migges / dam nuisance flying bug
Manne – main guys
Toppies – old guys
Moerse – a hell of a lot of
Bakkies - container
Nogal – actually

BILTONG AND POTROAST DIKDERM

BILTONG AND POTROAST DIKDERM

Last week Theo nursed his mother yeast while I nursed a mother of a babbalas.  No he doesn’t have a fungal growth between his toes but he does have this dough besigheid under a lappie which he fiddles with every few days.  He read up about these bakeries in San Francisco who are famous for their sour dough breads. One bakery has been making sour dough bread from the original mother yeast which they’ve named Lacto Besillus San Francisco for the past 170 years.  A la de da mouthful but basically what you do is make a small ball of dough with flour and water and a pinch of salt and then every few days you add another balletjie and then when the stuff smells sour its ready to use.  You add some of this fermented dough to your actual fresh dough and after a bit more vroeteling, wala you have a sour dough bread ready to be baked. You need to keep feeding the mother yeast more little balletjies like a Tamagotchy to keep it alive. Or you could just pop down to Pick ‘n Pay and buy a packet of yeast. That’s if you aren’t after a loaf of bread as extraordinary as Theo’s or the famous bakers who live in San Francisco. 

The babbalas which I’ve been nursing is due to working behind the bar at the Crazy Crayfish where I’ve been meeting more of the locals and drinking mandatory shooters.  Last night I met Rooi Voёl. I just love the nick names these West Coast people go by.  Apparently byname goes back to the old days when many of the farmers had the same name and it was necessary to distinguish from Jan Hoender who farmed with chickens to Jan Jakkals who was popular with the ladies to Jan Petrol who owned the garage to Jan Bakoor with the lopsided head. These byname were even printed on their cheque books so the people at the bank could tell the difference. Genuine. 

Since Voortrekker days, the boere haven’t had much imagination in naming their many offspring and they still prefer to stick to tradition by keeping oupa groetjie’s namesake alive but they sure do have imagination when it comes to things like biltong and braaivleis.  I think I could write a book just on different ways of eating biltong.  The most unusual way so far is Oom Danie’s who soaks his slices in his coffee which gives the coffee a smaaklike flavour and then afterwards he chews on his coffee marinated biltong.  Natalie, the owner of the Crazy Crayfish likes to cut a few slices, not all the way through, and then sandwich slivers of garlic in between the biltong which she snacks on.  She also spruces up her potato bake with layers of sliced biltong.  These people grew up on doorstopper sarmies with lashings of butter and dik slices of biltong wedged in the middle.  They all have their own secret recipe to make their biltong and would probably suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they went without any for a week.  Usually they hunt Gemsbok to keep their supplies topped up but yesterday Theo helped them slaughter 7 cows for meat and beef biltong.  Guess what happened to the cow hides.  Yip, he brought the whole bloody lot back to the caravan park.  7 brides for 7 brothers or was it 7 hides for 7 hundred kilos of thongs.

I helped him to work the smelly tick infested hides by spreading them on black bags and he rubbed 50 kg’s of coarse salt onto the fatty side.  We left them like that overnight so that the moisture could draw out and they become pickled which prevents them from vrotting (the hides that is, not the ticks).  Next morning Theo strapped a few planks together for supports and we hung the hides for a little while for the moisture to run off.  We folded the still salted hides into black bags as air tight as we could and you can apparently store them like that for years.  Theo plans to sell a few hides to the tannery in Springbok which would help pay for our 100 kg heifer which we bought.  Alternatively we will have to build a new cupboard on the back of the truck to transport the hides so that Theo can eventually make enough bullwhips and thongs for the whole of Namibia.

My birthday came around again this year much to my disgust.   The first thing I did that morning was coil a snake around my fingers.  It was Triston’s, Natalie’s sons, pet Rat Snake which he brought around to show us.  This being the day before hungry Anchovy (they are west coasters remember) was fed his weekly tiny pink mouse.  Theo surprised me by booking us on a horse ride in Port Nolloth as a birthday present which I absolutely loved although I didn’t have the guts to break into a gallop across the sand dunes with the wind in my hair and a feeling of freedom as the horse and I became one.  Mmm I’m loosing my nerve I think although I didn’t want to look too competent on a charging horse and give Theo ideas of how to salt his biltong.  I recently read that in the Voortrekker days, some people used to wedge a chunk of spiced raw meat under their horses saddle so that it could get salted from the horse’s sweaty flanks.  Now that’s one kind of biltong I could give a miss.       

The Spar in Port Nolloth sold vetderms which I think excited Theo much more than the horse ride did.  He grabbed the last packet of the stuff and excitedly dragged me off to make a fire to cook the coiled slippery stuff.  Before you go eeuuuw, what do you think they use for sausage casing?  Theo braaied the marinated derms until they were crispy and quite tasty although I suspect your heart will stop if you eat the fatty stuff on a regular basis.  We washed it down with champagne and Theo boiled the last 2 pieces to extract the fat.  He wants to make a lard mixture to rub into the leather thongs when he plaits his bullwhips. 

Well I’ve gotta go now.  I want to see if the ticks have crawled off the 7 cow tails so that we can turn them into 7 flyswatters.

Babbalas - hangover

Besigheid - business

Lappie - cloth

Balletjie – small ball

Vroetel - fiddle

Byname – nick name

Hoender - chicken

Jakkals – Jackal

Bakoor – cauliflower ears

Boere - farmers

Oupa groetjie – great great grandfather

Braai Vleis – barbeque meat

Oom - uncle

Smaaklike - tasty

Dik – fat

Vrotting - rotting

Derms – casing

Vetderms – Colon

Rooi Voёl – Red bird (in this case-  Red dick / penis)

   

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE
A day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee is literally going off to pick up your own salt directly from mother earth. How freaking awesome is that!
Today we jumped on the XT for a ride down to the deserted yacht club, accompanied for a kilometre or two by a panic stricken steenbokkie who finally dashed off while 7 ostriches ran alongside us, not even 100m away, in their prehistoric-like gait before disappearing over the dunes. The yacht club dam is no longer in use but instead it’s become a salt bay. We were amazed at the fantastic crystals which had naturally built up over time, caking the whole perimeter. We chopped off a whole bunch of salt rocks to take back and now I’m a regte soutie.
It seems people have been using salt since the late stone age. That’s like a moer of a long time ago that people have been using the stuff to preserve food. Fred Flintsone and his tjomma, Barney, probably stood around the braai as they did most nights and as it should be, cooking their Gemsbok steaks, the home brew or magic mushrooms just kicking in and discussing their kill and how it put hairs on a mans chest, back, face and knuckles. Perhaps Wilma was in the cooking area sharing ideas with her sisters about what to do with the left over pieces of hide after making a karos bedspread. By then they would have already been using salt to season their bulbs or other ratatouli veggie dishes since there would have been natural salt pans to be found and being exploratory entrepreneurs, they would have stock piled the stuff for bartering. Maybe that night things got excited as the men chased the women around the braai, dragged them by the hair, you know, the usual foreplay stuff, and maybe that’s when the salt jug fell over onto the wild boar hindleg which Fred was saving for midnight munchies. No-one would have noticed till the next week, what with the rain and the females excited about the new hide mini skirts they were making and the men off hunting and looking for sharp stones to trim their hairy knuckles and to make goatees. And that leg my friend, lying in a salt puddle, could have been the first Parmaham eaten by Neolithic man.
These days salt has got many more functions that just preserving fish, meat and vegetables. For instance it’s used in many descriptive phrases in the Oxford dictionary and the Bible. “The salt of the earth” is a term used to describe these West Coast people. Taken with “a pinch of salt” is probably how you could interpret the story of Little Lotta when she turned back to look at her sinful orgy city and next moment she turned into a pillar of salt.

More salt is used to make pulp, paper, soap, fabric dyes and detergents that actual condiments which only uses 17% of the whole world’s salt. And then its soooo refined and chemically enhanced that it’s hardly of value. Eish now that’s almost like rubbing salt in the wound.
The Chinese were the first recorded people to actually mine the stuff out of the bowels of the Earth. That’s where the really good stuff comes from, deep down, because its been compressed over millions and millions of years and the minerals which salt is made of, being sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium have had enough time to form magical crystals which are full of transmittable energy. So, if you wear a salt crystal around your neck, not only will you never have to eat bland food again cos you could just use your stone necklace like a salt lick, but you could attract all the dust bunnies in your house like a static feather duster and best of all, if there’s a power failure you might still be able to use your washing machine cos salt is charged with electrolytes. I find these electrolytes quite intriguing although I must say it’s all a bit too scientific for me. I never partook in those school experiments using salt and a battery is probably why I don’t get it. Under normal circumstances I’m quite electrically charged. I use to hate opening my car door because I knew a shock was waiting to jar me into reality and then when I got to work another one would be lined up when I closed my car door. Sometimes I tried to avoid the electric surge by shutting the door with my elbow pressed against the window but the charge would remain in my body and catch me out when I opened the toilet door. These days I don’t drive much but I wonder what would happen if put a few of these salt rocks in my pocket and went to work in the bar with the metal fridge door.

Mmm that could give new meaning to a depth charger. OOhhh the thrills of working a day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee are never ending.


Regte soutie – real English through and through
Moer – heck
Tjomma - friends
Braai - barbeque
Karos – leather patch work throw
Eish – Golly gee whizz