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)

   

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