Bring on the Garden Gnomes

What is the opposite of green-fingered? I had some flourishing nasturtiums growing in pots outside our door. They'd just got to the abundant flowering stage and were looking really bright and cheerful, when I noticed they were covered in blackfly, which were killing off all the new buds. My sister-in-law suggested spraying with soapy water.

I think I overdid it. Or else dishwashing liquid is the wrong sort of soapy water. Instead of green but bug-ridden flowering plants, I now have dessicated looking leaves that are ghosts of their former selves and poor faded looking blooms.

The silver lining is that the bulbs in the pots with them might now have a chance of enough air and sunshine to flower. They were completely drowned in a sea of saucer- sized nasturtium leaves before. I’m afraid I haven’t inherited my grandmother’s gardening gene after all!

I'm not going to show you a picture of what they look like now... it's too depressing!

Chocolate Tart

Good chocolate, dark chocolate, seriously bitter chocolate… how dark can you go? Do you stop at 60% or can you take the almost no sweetness of 85% cocoa solids that stays on your tongue with no holds barred, chocoholic, I’m-in-need-of-a-fix madness.

Looking for a chocolate tart recipe for a grown-up dinner party, I was thinking really bitter chocolate in a light pastry case: dark chocolate flavour and richness to complement an orange sorbet and the guava parfait that I’d just discovered. Chocolate with no distractions, was the mission and I finally found a recipe that worked perfectly.

It was a chocolate tart to end all chocolate tarts, as dark and rich and grown up as they come. Served with a scoop of guava parfait and one of orange sorbet it was the perfect ending to a meal. The orange offset the bitterness of the dark chocolate I’d used and the guava added an extra flavour dimension and creamy texture.

Chocolate tart before baking

Chocolate, cream and eggs fill a blind baked pastry case and then bake to a rich and solid, extremely chocolatey filling, where the pastry serves just as a container, a plain foil to its filling. Mine didn’t have the smooth and sleek looks of the official recipe photograph, but it tasted like chocoholic heaven!

I used my own sweet pastry recipe and bought really good chocolate – one bar of Lindt 85% and one of Lindt 65%, which combined perfectly to make it bitter but not so bitter as to shock the palate. I think their 75% would work just as well, but the shop was out of it.

Just out of the oven

At dinner the dessert faded the conversation to silence. Everyone was too busy savouring the flavour combinations and getting exactly the right amount of orange sorbet with a nibble of chocolate tart. I served thin slices, so the tart easily went round the eleven of us, with plenty to spare for those tempted to embark on seconds. I wish I’d photographed a slice of tart plated up with the scoop of orange sorbet and one of guava ice cream. It looked stunning, even though my presentation isn’t quite as neat as it could be. When can we have another dinner party? I can't wait to bake this again!


(Edited to add: This is the chocolate tart recipe I used.)

Spring Blooms

I was toiling unenthusiastically at the computer this afternoon, when Middle Daughter sidled over tentatively and said she wanted to show me something. It took me no more than a second to abandon my screen in favour of distraction. She took me outside into the breezy spring day and opened my eyes to the new flowers that have bloomed overnight. Several of these pink pypies are blooming among the restios.

These bobbejaantjies ( pronounced bubiankies) have a delicate and elusive scent outside. The girls picked just one of them and put it in water on our kitchen table. Its fragrance mingled with the scent of guavas and I was suddenly transported to an exclusive Parisian perfumery that creates subtle and exotic signature notes for the rich and famous. If I could bottle it, I'd market it as the scent of spring in South Africa, a heady yet subtle blend of fruit and flowers.

Refreshed I returned to the computer, but not to my work. The flowers just had to be posted to blow away the remnants of stuffy flu from our house with a fresh spring breeze.

(Youngest is better now, but the weekend was a story of sunny days spent chained to the sofa and mopping fevered brows.)

Guava Parfait and a Search for a Chocolate Tart Recipe…

My cooking mojo has suddenly returned and I even started to get excited about new recipes over the weekend. For too long I’ve been doing the same old crowd pleasers and though I love doing a Sunday roast, it’s nice to have a little variation in the desserts at least.

So I leafed through Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book for inspiration. She is a domestic goddess of the Seventies following in the footsteps of Elizabeth David. She writes really well so it’s a pleasure just to read her books for the evocative prose, but her recipes are also really effective. Usually authentic recipes from the French and English traditions, all the ones I’ve tried have worked really well.

I was riffling through the various chapters on the fruits in season now, oranges, lemons, granadillas, guavas, when I came to a recipe that I had all the ingredients for. Not only that, but it would be remarkably cheap to make, a prime consideration when grocery bills are sky-rocketing here as well as everywhere else. The guavas were on the tree in the orchard, the last few of the season, then all it needed was one pot of cream and three egg whites, a bit of sugar and half a lemon… plus a cardamom pod. The addition of the cardamom was what really grabbed me, a subtle taste-tickling extra to the usual flavours of the guava fool that is on our oh-so-regular recipe list.


It was easy, made a whole big bowlful of guava ice cream (called parfait or chilled souffle by Jane Grigson as it has beaten egg white in, which keeps it soft and easy to scoop) that will easily do two Sundays of friends for lunch. Everyone yesterday was wowed by the flavour (except for Middle Daughter, who doesn’t like guavas) and compliments on the guava ice cream kept on coming the next day.

This recipe is probably mostly going to appeal to South Africans. We get guavas in abundance all through the winter here, but I know that in England at least guavas were rarely available when we lived there. This recipe would work with any strongly flavoured fruit though: I can imagine it tasting fabulous with raspberries.

Guava Parfait Recipe
6-7 guavas (about 250g/8oz peeled)
half a lemon
1 cardamom pod
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 egg whites
250ml/1 cup cream
½ cup/100g sugar

Peel and slice the guavas. Put them in a heavy based pan with slivers of the lemon peel, all the lemon juice, the crushed seeds of the cardamom pod, and 2 tablespoons sugar. Simmer covered until the guavas are soft. Puree the guavas through a sieve.

Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt till stiff. Whip the cream until stiff too. Dissolve the sugar in ½ cup of water and boil gently for five minutes to make a syrup. Pour it while still boiling onto the beaten egg whites, with the beater on its top setting and keep beating until the mixture is cool. Fold in the guava puree and whipped cream. Put into a freezer-proof serving dish and freeze. No stirring or ice cream machines required.

If the puree is very sloppy you can use gelatine to help it set, but I didn’t and it was perfect. While I was making this I thought that the amount of fruit puree was too little and that there wouldn’t be enough flavour. Once the parfait had frozen though the flavour intensified amazingly and it was just right. You can play with the amounts, if you use different fruit, adding another half cup of cream and more fruit puree.


So what about the chocolate tart of the title? I was trying to think of a dessert that would complement the guava parfait. I’m cooking a grown-up dinner for my husband’s birthday next weekend: a rare occasion, when the kids get put to bed and we can linger over a meal with friends who will stay the night and have no pressure to drive back to town late at night. My mind keeps returning to an image of a chocolate tart: thin pastry filled with a thin layer of rich bitter chocolate, with a French patisserie feel – the sort of thing that you just have a sliver of and eat with a spoon of refreshing orange sorbet ( yes that is on the menu again by the wishes of the birthday boy). I’ve never made one before. So do you have a recipe that you recommend? I’m seeing a scoop of orange sorbet, a scoop of guava parfait and a wicked slice of dark chocolate tart… and I’m salivating already!

Disney and Beyond

Veterans of Disney classic features, our kids now know all the DVDs we’ve got off by heart and are looking for something new in the movie stakes.

They loved Racing Stripes, which led them on to race horse movie, Dreamer and then on to Seabiscuit, which we thought might be too adult for them, with all the background of the Great Depression and family tragedies. But that ended up being their favourite of the three. They enjoyed the grittiness of it and the triumph over adversity.

My husband is a great one for recounting the stories of movies at the supper table. He was telling them about You’ve Got Mail the other day and they asked if they could watch it. We both love chick flicks and romance with a sense of humour and that and Sleepless in Seattle are our Saturday night fall backs. A quick review in our heads established that there wasn’t anything too steamy for young eyes and we let them watch it over a two night period. They loved it and I was greatly relieved not to be asked to explain what cybersex is. They are now booking Sleepless in Seattle in for the weekend.

Now we should probably worry about the dangers of indoctrinating an eleven year old boy with chick flicks before he’s had a chance to defend himself with the likes of Terminator. However he’s found his own boy thing to balance it out. Throughout the holidays they all three got up and watched Top Gear before breakfast.

I don’t know what it is about Jeremy Clarkson and the team, but they manage to make car programmes worth watching even if you couldn’t care less about horsepower and gaskets. The girls were just as engrossed.

Coming back from school yesterday, our son mentioned that he’d love to get a Ferrari XXX (my shorthand, I can't remember the letters and numbers actually involved) the latest top of the range model, which is apparently really cool. He told me the price in pounds and we converted it to rand. “OK” I said, “if we sell the farm with all our houses, we could just pay for one. Do you think we’d get nine people and eight dogs into the Ferrari?”

So he’s going to be a sports car driving, chick flick watcher. Should be a devastating combination!

Inklings of Spring

This morning I emerged from a fug of computer induced wordiness and went outside for a breath of air and to pick some grass for the guinea-pig and rabbit. I discovered that while I was working in the blinkers of cyberspace, the seasons in the outside world have crept up on me again.

Here I was thinking we were in the middle of winter – winter holidays just finished, log fires in the evening and the children’s winter ambition of driving to the mountains to see some snow still unrealized.

Outside I go in between showers of rain and find that spring has sneaked in and started to re-decorate. The orange of winter is still there in the aloe flowers and golden shower, where the sunbirds still joyfully gorge themselves on nectar, but spring prefers all shades of white and has scattered confetti as she goes.


The almond blossom, delicate blooms that are yet intrepid enough to emerge with the snowdrops, has broken out overnight. A jasmine’s starry flowers scent the path to our front door with opulent perfume.

And the bulbs we planted hardly any weeks ago have already emerged triumphantly and revealed themselves as pale multi-flowered narcissi, towering over the few lowly snowdrops that feel out of place and a long way from home. Even our spring spread of white daisies has sent out a few scouts to see if the time is ripe to roll out the carpet and dazzle us with reflected sunlight.


I hope they’ll hold off a bit longer. Mid July is too early for spring. Hold your breath I want to shout, it’s still winter, even here we might have a rare frost to nip these confident blossoms in the bud. But they know better and the spring roll call of flowers is ushering more and more blooms into the landscape. Even a few pypies (pronounced pay-pees) have been spotted in flower a month too soon.

Water

Living on a farm is great – wide open views, plenty of space, fresh air (unless our neighbour has just spread slurry on his roll-on lawn growing operation) and wonderful tasting, unchlorinated water fresh from our own borehole… that is as long as said borehole is functioning as it should. The trouble with boreholes is that they depend on electric pumps. And pumps that spend all day below ground sending water up to fill our tanks, eventually get fed up. And go on strike. They clog up. They blow a fuse. They just wear out now and again, exhausted by the task set them by these demanding farm dwellers.

At regular intervals, usually on a weekend, we find ourselves turning to our rain tanks for our washing water. Our friendly electrician and pump expert is happy to come out at short notice, but not on a Sunday and that is usually when the pump decides to give up the ghost.

So yesterday unshowered and dirty haired, I removed the dirty dishes from the dishwasher where they’d just made it through the pre-wash, hand-washed them in our carefully collected rain water, boiling kettles for hot water, and admiring the lather you get from such soft water. We had guests to a braai for lunch, so there were plenty more dishes to process that evening and another chance to reacquaint myself with the time honoured hand washing method, with buckets of water carried from the tank and every drop counted.

It really makes you think about water more carefully when you don’t have it on tap. The rinsing water got put back into the bucket to flush the loos with. My practical husband managed to link our rainwater tank into the main house pipes, so we did now have a trickle of water into the system, which made all the difference, but we were still very conscious of how long that one tank might last. We managed a (very) shallow bath this morning but left the water in for loo-flushing later.

The electrican showed up half way through this morning. His first report sounded grim. It looked as though the first borehole had run dry. My husband departed to consult and assess the damage with him, so I was left trying to carry on with the editing job I was working on, while emergency measures surged through my brain. He had said that sometimes underground water streams can collapse in on themselves, especially if someone else drills a bad borehole further upstream.

How could we survive on the farm if our underground stream gave up flowing…. I started to dream up elaborate water catchment systems to store our winter rainfall, a huge underground cistern, with an overflow to a dam. Water rationing would have to become second nature, the washing machine water would have to empty into big tubs to be re-used for toilet flushing. But would there be enough water pressure to run a washing machine? Our drinking water would have to be collected from a neighbour’s farm in big containers every few days.

Luckily my husband only left me in suspense with this vision of a post-apocalyptic survival scenario for an hour or so, before coming back to say they’d found and fixed a couple of problems with valves and fuses, there was water in the borehole and they just had to locate a leak in the pipe before switching us back on to the supply. A gust of relief as our lives returned to normal once more.

But each time the pump malfunctions, it is a salutary reminder of how dependant we all are on water. Without a supply of clean water it is impossible to keep on living in a place. That underground rainwater cistern is sounding like a really good idea!