THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET

THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET

I’m soooo excited about selling our products at the Earth Market in Tokai on Saturday.  It will be our first time, in fact I wonder if anyone has ever sold dried seaweed foodstuff at a market in South Africa. 

It’s funny how Theo and I tend to get ourselves into unique situations. I bought my first motorbike when I was in my 30’s and rode like a bat out of hell till I hit my 40’s.  We sold everything we own and bought a bus to travel South Africa on an indefinite working holiday.  Now it’s seaweed.  Except this time, it’s not just us eating the stuff, I want to introduce it to other people as well.  Will Cape Town be ready for seaweed meat rubs and Dukkahs, seaweed nut bars or seaweed pies?  Well, we will find out soon enough.  Once I’ve stimulated everyone’s thyroid and flushed out all their toxins from all the junk we expose our bodies to and once all the poor people living on the coast know that there is a free, super food growing in the ocean ready for them to pick, then I’ll be ready to try something new.  

So if you are looking for something to do over Easter, why not come around to the Earth Fair Market on Saturday morning and treat yourself to some exotic seaweed chocolates or stock up on gourmet goodies.

I’m hoping to sell out so that we can put diesel in the tank for another trip up the west coast to pick more Nori and Kelp.  

The Earth Fair Market is Main Road Tokai, behind Builders Warehouse www.earthfairmarket.co.za.  If you want to know more about seaweed check out the website which Theo is developing called  www.sealogix.co.za

 

  

SLIP SLIDING AWAY

SLIP SLIDING AWAY

My inspiration to eat seaweed started months and months ago when I came across some interesting seaweed recipes written by Louie Lemmer and which I tested when we were back in Kleinzee.  Her ideas about using free food from the ocean (which just happened to be super duper healthy as well) led me to me cook with the stuff, bath in the stuff and I would have wrapped up Theo’s unique physique in the stuff had he let me.  

Back in Cape Town and having decided to turn funny green food into something tasty and sellable to the South African market where men are real men who eat real food wasn’t easy. We had decided to turn this into an income and the tension between Theo and I was mounting.  I wake up stiff from tossing and turning, trying to come up with a seaweed jam recipe then head for the kitchen, while Theo wakes up stiff in different places then wonders what’s happening in the world so he checks out facebook or news 24. When the pressures on, there’s only one thing to do.  Hit the road again. We jumped in the truck and a few hours later we were setting up camp at Tietiesbaai beachfront with plans to stock up on Nori and relax a bit. 

Drying Nori in Tietietsbaai

Over the next five days we collected about 50 kg’s of wet Nori which we processed daily by rinsing and then hanging to dry on our hammocks.  Waiting for low tide to expose the Nori growing on the rocks gave us enough time to crack a cold beer, cast a line, work on my tan and some much needed R & R.  Theo cooked deevine seaweed pasta dishes which we will be placing on our new website sealogix.webs.com.  We didn’t do any exploring or even stop at the well known Paternoster Hotel, instead we monitored our seaweed draped all over the show. We took enough dried Nori back to my mothers kitchen where we roasted it, ground it and surprised her by giving her kitchen tiles a new look of speckled fish food flakes. 

Smoking out the box

A week later we met earthy Jenny, Louie Lemmer’s daughter who hopes to one day print her mother’s seaweed recipe book. Jenny is also experimenting with seaweed from food to skin products. It’s been great meeting someone just as excited about seaweed as I am.  She uses Wakame seaweed (not local), and makes chocolate sweets with Kelp.  Kelp is abundant along our coastline and until this stage all I had made with it was pickles but suddenly another trip to the coast sounded like a good idea.  Anyway, we still hadn’t visited Theo’s folks since being back so we warmed up the truck’s engine for a trip to Struisbaai near L’Aghulas where there’s no pollution or chemicals being pumped into in the sea.  We arrived with bottles and buckets and ideas to make watlemoen konfyt and dried sugared sweets with kelp.  Collecting kelp is not as easy as Nori which I just pull off the rocks, leaving the base behind so that the plant doesn’t die, whereas picking Kelp you’re gonna get wet.               

Yammy Fish Rub

We soon had a snail trail all over Theo’s mother’s kitchen.  Jeez Louise, that kelp is slimy.  Apparently kelp grows so fast that if you’re patient enough, you can see it grow (like who would do that) but I reckon it’s more a case of the more you watch it, the more it mutates into jelly until everything gets coated in a film of goo.  The more you wet the goo, the more it spreads.

Oh well, Theo’s mothers kitchen has been coated in a healthy dose of Vitamin B12 gel and I’m nowhere near my destination but still slip sliding away.

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