Cape Sauna

For the last few days, we have been sweltering in an unprecedented heat wave here in the deep south of the Western Cape, South Africa.  There have been three hikes since last posting, two in Silvermine, and one in Tokai:


The first hike on Friday was up into the mountains above the reservoir in Silvermine.  The dogs caused us much amusement.  Here are some of the fun pictures:

 This one I have christened 'Puppy Love'.  Milly, the dog on the right literally fell in love with the dog on the left.  I have never actually seen a dog flirt, but trust me, Milly flirted.  There were even whisperings of 'tart'.  The stick became a ploy on the part of her suitor to lure her into a dance.

This one I have christened 'Who's the Boss'.  Harry, the dog, definitely has alpha tendencies and causes us much joy with his antics.

 Here is Milly again, with her master, although it is still not clear to me who is the Boss.

And a stop for tea next to a ravine:

From the attire, it is evident that the Cape Sauna has not yet emerged.  It was nippy with a chill wind and clouds were racing down the mountain.  I was pleased to be with a group.  If I had been on my own, I would have been rushing down to the cars so as not to be caught in the mist.


The second hike in Silvermine was on Monday.  The Cape Sauna had set in, and there was a general malaise and ennui amongst the group:  This was a flower day.  I took several which I have posted on Project 365 as Crassula, Watsonia and Water Lilly.


On Tuesday, in a sweltering heat, we hiked from the Tokai Arboretum up towards Elephant's Eye.  As the path above the forest towards Elephant's Eye was without shade, we chose not to go up, but to follow a countour path around the mountain.  Beforehand, in the parking lot, we had the opportunity to witness the antics of a troup of baboons.  I have posted some of the photographs on Project 365 as Beauty at a Price and Gym.  There were so many others.  Here is another one which amused me:

We stopped for very welcome refreshments, making the best possible use of shade:

And then returned home to nurse those wounded knees :).


On the home front, I have been working away diligently on drying fruit, watering the garden and conserving bottles of preserves.  My latest endeavours include butternut, peach and walnut chutney.  I used the butternut, apricot and almond recipe which is on the recipes page, substituting peaches and walnuts.  I conserved some yellow cling peaches with lemon grass and cinnamon bark.  I haven't yet tried these two.  I am going to let them 'rest' to let the flavours percolate a bit, and then try them myself before sharing.  


And today is my first bird watching course.  I really am looking forward to it.  How blessed am I that life should bring me such marvellous opportunities to experience the abundance of life, laughter and learning with so much beauty surrounding me.

Kommetjie Beach Walk

Around the festive season, the various chapters within U3A organise activities which are open to all members of U3A internationally.  People travelling to South Africa can choose to join in.  The False  Bay chapter hosted a beach walk in Kommetjie yesterday.  It was a fiercely hot day.  Earlier in the day, heavy mist rose off the sea.  As the day progressed, it cleared into a wonderful beach day, with the sun beating down on the hot sand.  Here are some pictures of participants:

At the start of the walk

Stopping for Tea

The committee in action at Tea

A light lunch at the end of the walk

As always, there were dogs with us.  These pictures are of two of them cooling off:

Some lovely scenes along the way:

Slangkop Light House - reputedly the tallest in South Africa

Wave after wave highlighted in the mist

Boats navigating in and out of the channel

As always, a lovely day.  More pictures can be found at Fishing on a misty morning, Stairway to haven and Wave upon wave, on Project 365.


Whilst away, the dehydrator was busy reducing a box of bananas into a small tupperware.  

A Flat Earth Walk: Green Point Stadium

Back to hiking.  My beautiful world is restored.  

I got up at 04h00 to turn over produce in the dehydrator - out with the cucumber chips, in with some apricots.  Then I readied for the hike.  I have posted several pictures on Project 365, commencing 31st December through to 9th January.  I realise that this is a bit of a cheat.  It is just that I have been so busy, and haven't taken opportunities to take 'real' pictures, so would have posted vast quantities of drying fruit, which I am sure would have become somewhat boring.  Instead I posted lots of pictures of beadwork animals, which are far more entertaining.

Probably the best fun today, was going to the gym:

I love it when people get into the spirit of things :).  We had fun.  I have taken this shared moment and tucked it into my personal memory box - the place where I go when I want to remember how great it is to be alive.

Then we stopped for tea:

After that we walked back to the cars 'the long way round', past the military garrison and along the promenade.

It does look as if some of the innovation at Green Point Stadium has come from the Olympic Park in Seoul.  I saw several features which caused me to reminisce.  I will invite Dani to go with me and see what she thinks.

Then back home to the wilting cucumbers that I had forgotten to store, and which had to spend a few minutes back in the dehydrator to get them crispy again, and to check on the apricots which have been drying away.  These are taking forever!  The apricots are large and fresh and juicy.  I figure they're in for a 24 hour session.

The day re-ignited my love for this city.  We have absolutely no idea how fortunate we are to have the mountains, the sea, and expanses of parkland to roam in freely. 

My Inner Kitchen Goddess is graduating

With a birthday coming up, and various groups of people to celebrate with, I spent the day preparing goodies to share.  This week is my debut into sharing some of the skills that I have learnt over the past few weeks.


I went and collected fruit and veg, and this is what I have made:
4.5 dehydrated cucumbers, to serve as chips with a home made Almond/Apricot/Butternut chutney and home made yoghurt dip;
30 dehydrated kiwi fruit, some of which I have prepared as glace for dipping in chocolate;
8 bottles of fruit conserve - some peach, some apricot and some peach/plum mixes;
2 batches of jam squares, using home made jam.
I have surpassed even my own expectations :).


The cucumber chips will be for knitting club on Tuesday;
The jam squares will be for my team meeting on Tuesday;
The glace kiwi fruit are for introducing my wonderful new skill to friends;
I think I'll make some Rawlicious biscuits to share with the group that I hike with on Friday.


The conserve I will keep to see me through the winter months when summer fruits are either expensive or not available.


What is even more amazing is that my kitchen is more or less back to its normal level of chaos.  My cupboards are bulging with bottles, tubs and jars of prepared goodies.  AND I still have some recycled bottles which are pristine clean, free of their historical gummy labels and ready to be refilled with fruit and chutneys of my choice. I feel replete.

Dehydrating: A quantum leap for my inner kitchen goddess

It is not such a long time ago that I lay awake, tossing and turning, confused and bewildered, trying to find answers to questions that I never dreamed I would confront in my lifetime.  It is ever such a long time ago that I lay awake planning, checking, mentally preparing, patting myself on the back:  and a much, much longer time since I actually got up to go and admire something that I produced.


Last night was the latter for me.  I barely slept.  I had been active all day, and the hamster wheel in my head has been re-activated.  You might ask why?  Here is why:

Roll-ups, yoghurt, dried parsley, tomatoes, kiwi fruit and bananas

And just in case you don't like the side view, here is one from the top :):

The piccies are not great - certainly not Project 365 material.  I stumbled through after an all but sleepless night, dragging my camera with me, and took these when the light was shining in from the lounge window.  I didn't want to dredge up the green pepper and apricots which have already been sealed into their storage containers.  The roll-ups have now been cut up into smaller pieces and individually wrapped and the kiwi and banana have been put into bags and sealed into a plastic container.  The kiwi fruit look exceptionally pretty.  They are a definite repeat, as are the bananas.  And the roll-ups?  Absolutely.  I think of everything that I have tried so far, they have turned up trumps.

I suspect that I have found a hobby for myself which might grow into one of the small income projects that I keep dreaming about.  I thoroughly enjoy it, and seem to have a knack for it.

Busy dehydrating at the moment are small amounts of:

   The most wonderful cookies in the world;

   Some celery;

   Some cucumber;  

   Some apple;

   Some lemon;

   Some broccoli;

   Some salad corn;

   The rest of the peppers.

I am trying small amounts of lots of things to see how they turn out and how long they take.  Confession time says that I slightly over-dried the apricots.  This isn't a major problem as the role of these apricots is to become ingredients in healthy snack bars, so actually slightly crispy works quite well.  It does mean that I learnt quite a bit about not over-drying.

I have just spent a very gooey hour in the kitchen slicing up mangoes to put into the dehydrator overnight.  Then I think, if I can tear myself away from experimenting, that I will give it a rest for a while.  The kitchen is oozing bottles and jars and tupperwares and boxes and spices which need to be sorted out and packed away before I embark on the next round of chaos.  Simmering in a pot are the pips.  If the resulting puree is thick enough, they might become an experimental roll-up.  Otherwise the pips will be discarded and the puree will go into the worm bin.

A really nice side effect of all of this is that I have incredibly happy worms.  They are still alive after the onslaught of peelings, particularly fruit, into their bin.  However, they do seem to be somewhat sated.  Usually when I lift the partition above theirs, they take a bit of time and then slide under the soil into darker regions.  Now, they wriggle a little bit and go back to lying sleepily.  I have prodded a few, and they do seem to be ok.  Maybe they are doing the equivalent of a spa day.

And my compost heap is no longer looking dry and dusty.  It is covered with the citrus leftovers and the peppers that I discarded as not being up to scratch.  Which means, of course, the after a very long sleep, I'm going to have to dig out the fork and turn it a bit - sigh.

What was really spectacular is that I breakfasted on bran, fresh yoghurt, and some of the cherries that I bottled last week - all preservative free, with only the cherries containing sugar.  I mean, I dreamed of learning to live abundantly.  I think I've arrived :).

Dehydrating: Baby Steps

Yesterday I purchased a dehydrator.  Such a simple statement.  Nothing prepared me for becoming a slave to my dehydrator.  Between 15h00 yesterday afternoon and now, I have dehydrated the following:

1 box of apricots from the market.  The box is quite large, estimated at about 7 kgs.  I managed to reduce half the large box into a small bag of dried apricots, and five apricot rollups, the latter of which are still dehydrating away.

4 large green peppers.  The four large green peppers are now a handful of miniscule strips hiding in a 2 litre tupperware;

12 small tomatoes harvested from the garden;

1 tray of parsley harvested from the garden;

3 bananas.

In between, I managed to tuck in a litre of yoghurt.  I seem to have spent the entire day standing over pots of apricot puree, watering the garden, making the yoghurt, hunting down recipes, and generally exhausting myself for what amounts to the equivalent of 1 litre of dried produce and 1 litre of yoghurt.

I actually can't remember when last I had so much fun :).  It is really nice to learn a new skill and to have a reasonable success rate along the way.

Tomorrow I plan to get stuck into the box of mangoes which is waiting on the windowsill [this is where the overflow from the kitchen is living for the time being], and also to try the absolutely divine biscuits for which there is a recipe in the book entitled 'Rawlicious'.  Oh, also, I will try my hand at kiwi fruit.  The world of dried food is now my oyster.

So, no piccies today.  I will try to come up with some eye candy for the next post.

More skills in abundance

This is the first post of 2012.  Yesterday, being the first day of 2012, was both a Sunday and a Holiday.  It was ever so hot - that dry breathless air that seems to almost suck the air out of one's lungs.

Helen, one of my kitchen goddess mentors, had lent me a flask in which to make yoghurt.  So yesterday was my first attempt.  I made the first batch and let it mature for the day, and then tasted it.  It has to be the best yoghurt I have ever tasted - more like cream, really, than yoghurt - and low fat, to boot!  It was so yummy that I landed up having breakfast cereal with yoghurt for supper.  And I made my second batch:

I have the ability to make .5 litres at a time, given my current flask capacity.  The above was .5 litres of milk, some fat free powdered milk and a maximum of 15 minutes in the kitchen.  It is worth every moment, I promise you.

I also made some jammies:

Tucked underneath the desiccated coconut is the strawberry jam that I made last season.  They turned out really nicely. 

I was planning to go walking with the Flat Earth people today.  It is overcast and rainy enough to dissuade me from that.  Instead, I will continue to grow my kitchen goddess with the following:

On the left are the last of the cherries that we picked a fortnight ago.  They steeped in sugar over night in the fridge.  In the middle are sunflower seeds, soaking in a light brine, which I will roast for forthcoming salads.  On the right is a tub of gooseberries that also steeped in sugar overnight.  Today will be my first shot at bottling berries, which will hopefully retain some meausre of 'wholeness', and roasting seeds.

And last, but by no means least, I stumbled across this, care if Dipyo:

In my current journey through life, where I am emerging from a crossroads of note, I have spent some time dwelling on the masks that we wear.  Masks are always sourced in self esteem issues, otherwise why would we bother to wear them?  The physical side of masks are easy to quantify:  clothes and jewellery for our physical bodies; make-up and cosmetics for our faces; debt in order to buy the up-market house and fancy car that we can't actually afford.  What is of much more interest to me is the psychological masks that we wear:  pretending that we don't care, when actually we do - sourced in the fear of rejection, perhaps; pretending that we do care, when actually we don't - sourced in the codependence of wanting to be 'liked' by others, maybe;  aggression - sourced so often in our inner pain that we don't even begin to understand; and so, so many more.  I have two new year resolutions arising out of the above:

1)  I am going to try to live authentically, deviating from this only where I might offend others in the process;

2)  Try to remember that everyone around me is just like me.  Every single one of them is more than what I see.