Not for sissies

Lights out = ?

When the lights go out – a few things can happen. And when I say the lights go out it is not by choice, it is by ESKOM! So when all electricity made a hasty exit in the rural community of Rietkol last night at about 5h00 – we were prepared. Or so I thought!

I have a stupid little cupboard in the kitchen, above the stupid little hole where the microwave nested. This stupid little cupboard is so high you can only access it with the help of those stupid little plastic ladders that fat people should be careful of.

In preparation for doomsday, I have filled this stupid little cupboard with every hollow vessel I could find and put a candle in it. So we could have one place to access the emergency lighting when power goes off, instead of all stumbling over dogs and with hands outstretch in front of us looking for candles in the dark. I am so bloody clever!!! OR NOT!

I could not find the stupid little ladder steppies to access the stupid high cupboard. At least the sun was still shining, so I could conduct my ladder search in the dim light of dusk. Lesson learned.

Coming back to the things that can happen when the lights go out – maybe you can associate with a few of them?

- Stress about TV programs/sporting events/cooking shows being missed

- Stress about computers/cellphones/ipads running flat

- Stress about what to eat (stress about the ice-cream melting!)

- Stress about is it only us with no power (did I somehow forgot to pay or paid short R40 on previous ESKOM account – true story)

- Stress about fridges defrosting and enough chicken to keep a blog running for a month defrosting

- Stress about how you are going to keep your husband busy without the TV – what if he want to use this opportunity to rekindle some passion and you just want to make sure the fridge does not defrost and eat all the ice-cream before it melts.

- Stress about all 50 little chicks that now do not have a globe to huddle under and stay warm

- Stress that you did not fill the gas bottle so the gas stove is also out of action

- Stress that when the power comes on again – all the lights will be blown, the TV blaring, electrical equipment destroyed by the power surge.

Usually it is just a lot of stress. But after the initial stress of finding the stupid little steppies, and with all my emergency candles glowing (definitely NOT in a romantic way – more in a survival mode way) – I set to cook the chicken dish for day 4.

It is something totally different and we have been salivating for the last 3 days in anticipation of this dish. It comes from a cookbook by Conrad Gallagher, and I bought it a long time ago because the title impressed me so much; “Take 6 ingredients”. It sounded like my kind of cooking, creating delicious dishes using only 6 ingredients. Fact is – these ingredients are so foreign, exotic, non-South African that I have never made a meal from this book. Until last night!

Chicken Tortillas with Avocado, chilli and soured cream

It should have said in bold letters – NOT FOR FRUGAL FAIRIES, ONLY FOR THE RICH! The meal, with only 6 ingredients cost me R120 for 4 people. I grudgingly accept that not all blog readers are poor, so here goes for you bastards with lots of money!!!!

Step 1: Cut skinless chicken breast into cubes, rub with a bit of olive oil and grill on skewers. (I used my cheap chicken breast from yesterday’s blog experience, so if you buy special breasts, just like good silicone, it will cost you much more to make this meal. Also think the skewers are unnecessary, you are just spending an additional 10 minutes stringing raw chicken onto a wooden stick which you then remove from the stick and throw the stick away. Just grill the chicken pieces in a roasting tin)

Step 2: Boil for 1 minute, peel and cut tomatoes, slice some Avo’s, seed and chop 1 chilli

Step 3: Warm your super-expensive tortillas (R60 from P&P) either in the oven or in a pan

Step 4: Spread sour cream (also expensive!) on the tortillas, scatter chicken, tomato, avo and chilli down the middle and season

Step 5: Roll up and eat it like a Boerie Roll.

It really was very nice and tasty, and maybe I should try to make a frugal version. Like making my own tortillas, using mayo instead of sour cream? Will let you know if I have the energy to do it later in the month.

Back to my vegetable garden – because my theme for the blog is celebrations, I decided to celebrate carrots this month. No, it is not a rational, logical choice, I just think they are not celebrated enough. And I am all for the underdog!

What do we do when we celebrate? We eat CAKE!!! I will be baking various carrot cakes and publishing the results on the blog. Whoever is lucky enough or unlucky enough to fall within me and the carrot cake experiment radar, will have to taste, swallow and score so we can discover the BEST carrot cake.

I also did some old-woman stuff and here are the results. They are not perfect but do have a faint resemblance to the original picture.

It took me one night, a few swearwords and lots of confusion to turn these little babies out, but our lovely Sibosiso has cold feet and there seems to be a booty-shortage in Delmas area. Even if the booties are not perfect - the little feet definitely are.

Last exercise from yesterday was to save money on cleaning stuff. I have found a very cost effective outlet/manufacturer in Sundra for cleaning stuff, but since I have a lemon tree in my back garden I tried to clean some breadboards with just lemon juice, a nailbrush and elbow grease.

Here are the before and after pics – I left the white board in the sun with the lemon juice so it could bleach it a bit. All I did was squeeze a lemon half’s juice on each, left it a bit to bleach and then scrubbed with nail brush/pot scourer.