What's for Supper?

Although I do not enjoy cooking, I love cook books! Odd I know, but I can spend hours paging through them and looking at the pictures. I spend ages looking up and printing recipes from the internet, exotic dishes that I have seen done on the cooking channels on the telly. I tear pages out of magazines and once I sat in a doctor’s waiting room and copied a broccoli soup recipe down on the back of an old ATM slip. A couple of years ago I took part in one of those email chain letter things that promise you umpteen recipes if you simply send one recipe to the top name and then delete said name, add yours at the bottom and send off to ten friends. Within a few days, a week at the most, the recipes would be flying in, jamming cyberspace and guaranteeing easy, tried-and-tested, home-made, granny’s finest, mouthwatering ideas.

Right. Easy. I copied out my favourite chicken recipe (‘Saturday Chicken’ for those who know me and have tasted it), sent it off, managed to find ten friends, and waited for the recipes to arrive in my mail box. No such luck. What did happen was this: three friends came back and said that they couldn't find ten people, one said that they had tried this before and good luck, one was concerned about catching a virus, a couple ignored it completely and hopefully the rest did oblige. I finally got two recipes back, one was a lovely face cream using aqueous cream and rosewater and other things, and the other one was a chicken recipe that I swear was mine, simply copied and pasted back to me! And that was it! So, when a friend sent the same email to me a while ago, I sent back saying thanks but no thanks and.....good luck!

Even the cover looks good enough to eat!

But I digress! This morning my neighbour lent me her new cook book to page through, written in Afrikaans and called 'Die Groot Boerekos Boek' (The Big Farmersfood Book). Now, boerekos is wonderful, plates of delicious meat, vegetables done with loads of butter, sugar and cream, in a way that makes you crave vegetables. Add rice, sweet potatoes, and gravy that you can stand a spoon up in and there you have it………. cholesterol on a plate.

Hungry yet?

Reading through the recipes and the methods I realised that Afrikaans describes things far far better than English ever could. The direct translations make such sense. I have to share a few with you:
To ‘dice’ a potato is to cut it in small squares, in Afrikaans it is the word dobbelsteen, which means a gambling stone i.e a dice! Isn't it descriptive? Candy floss is spookasem, which is ghost's breath, flour is meelblom which is flourflower, and mashed is fyndruk or finesqueezed. And it’s all perfectly logical.

Lekker Tamatie bredie!

But for all my waxing lyrical about food and recipes, if I a genie magically appeared out of a tomato sauce bottle to grant me three wishes, one of those wishes would be for a full-time chef! Someone to cook each and every meal leaving me free to read cook books and surf the internet for exotic recipes!

And I would be asking ‘What’s for breakfast/lunch/supper?’