Playing with electricity

It was a dark and difficult weekend.

ESKOM had no water, no diesel, no brains, no planning, no electricity, no NOTHING!!!! Not too sure how you all coped with the situation, but we decided that the clue is in the description: ROLLING BLACKOUTS.

Rolling is such a fun word, and I associate rolling with childhood. Do you remember rolling down the green hill with your arms folded tightly to your chest? Or rolling your little play-play pram with your plastic-smelling baby down the road? Or putting tennis balls in your bicycle wheels so you could make the rolling action so much more visible? Rolling had a certain kind of magic when we were children, so this weekend we celebrated rolling.

The game was all about waiting for ESKOM (for international readers – this is our electricity provider or non-provider, depending on the roll of the dice) Waiting for them to roll their black-out our way. We then had to devise a counter-attack and roll a toffee back to them.

Another part of the game was to anticipate and guess when the rolling would start. Since we could find no timetable, no reason and no rhyme, it made the game so much more exciting.

We had so much fun, nature decided to join in and duly wet our electricity board during a freak (or should I say rolling) thunderstorm, and we had to wait for the sun to warm and dry it out before we could have electricity again.

Even my candles were playing games - look how this one is bending!!

So here are some of the tactics we used to play the game, and since we want to be off the grid in a few years, we would like to thank ESKOM sincerely for helping us prepare for the day we will never have to use them again.

-        Make the silly little cupboard with all the candles more accessible by storing the stupid little steps for thin people in a safe and east-to-find spot

-        Hide boxes of matches all over the house, then when the lights go out pretend they are Easter eggs and all run around trying to find them (great fun, except you cannot eat them when you find them)

-        Have enough left-over food in the fridge to avoid mass-hysteria around meal times

-        Adapt meal times. Have some freshly-baked carrot cake with yummy icing for breakfast. Eat dinner at 5h00 instead of 8h00, foiling ESKOM big time. Lie around snacking on chippies, nuts, left-overs until the electricity comes back – then jump up and spark around the kitchen producing meals, cakes, potential left-overs, popcorn, coffee in flasks, etc.

-        Find things to do that does not need electricity. Reading, knitting, talking, sleeping, napping, thinking, writing, dreaming, planning, loving (this is for emergency situations only), gardening, cleaning, driving, walking….sjoe – looks like we can have a brilliant and full life even without full-time electricity.

-        Build a fire. We made lovely farm coffee on Sunday morning as part of the game, and then warmed up our chicken-liver sosaties left from the night before. Also fried mealie pap from the night before in the bacon fat – and let me tell you – ESKOM was the loser in this part of the game.

-        Become flexible. No, not like bending over or anything, but flexible in your planned activities. Settled nicely into bed last night, fully fed and content, we started watching the movie on MNet. And ESKOM rolls it! Power off at 8h30. So we rolled it as well. We rolled over, closed our eyes and had a wonderful long sleep, waking up all refreshed and ready for the week. The same movie will be on again on another channel, or available on video.

S

So while the power was on – I cooked. I cooked 2 chicken dishes, one was great, and the other was OK.

Chicken dish number 6 was from Evita Bezuidenhout's “Evita se kossie sikelela”. It cost us R40 for 4 people with some left-overs for breakfast braai the next morning.

 

Chicken liver sosaties:

Step 1: It starts off quite easy, but be warned – this is not for the squeamish! Take your slippery, bloody livers and trim off all the horrible stringy bits. Cut your bacon strips in half crosswise. Cut 1 onion into quarters and cut 4 mushrooms into quarters as well.

 

Step 2: This is where it becomes extremely difficult! Wrap bacon around chicken liver, and then skewer it, alternating with mushrooms and onions. (I wanted to use a good analogy, but my family forbade me to use it in a public forum, so the best I can do is that this exercise is like trying to catch frogs with your bare hands. It is slimy, it is slippery and if the bacon goes one way, the liver goes the other way)

Step 3: This is the homerun! Pack it in a dish, sprinkle olive oil, pepper. Do not let the escaped liver bits get the best of you. Put them together with all the small bits of orphan mushrooms and slivers of onions in the pan with the skewer.

Step 4: Grill (or braai) until done, make some nice poetoe-pap and feast. We had some salad leaves left which we served with it and a lemon dressing really complimented the meal by adding another dimension to the richness of the meat.



Bad quality picture due to slow shutter speed in darkness!!

Yumminess: 10/10

Frugality: 7/10

Easiness: 6/10

 

Chicken dish number 7 was from Nigella’s cookbook “Forever Summer”, and the name of the dish sounds better than the taste of the dish. Cost was R47 for 4 people.

 

Slow roasted garlic and lemon chicken.

(The lemon made it very bitter! Maybe if you have juicier, sweeter lemons it would be better? I used puny, small, dry ones from the top of our back-yard lemon tree) Try it and let me know please?

Step 1: Put lemon quarters, whole garlic cloves and fresh thyme in a roasting pan.

Step 2: Put chicken pieces, olive oil, salt and pepper in the pan and mix with your hands before spreading it out with skin-side up.

Step 3: Pour over half a cup of white wine, wrap in foil and bake for 2 hours at 160

Step 4: Remove foil and bake at 200 for another 45 minutes.

Step 5: Eat it and let me know if the lemons make this too bitter for you as well.

Yumminess: 5/10

Frugality: 6/10

Easiness: 10/10

 

In between all the cooking, we have to do some cleaning. So I tried another natural way to clean grimy tiles. Please note, these tiles get washed and cleaned everyday with Dettol Kitchen Cleaner. After this exercise, my conclusion is that it might be cleaning the kitchen, but it is definitely not cleaning the tiles.  So here is my before picture. Not very dirty (I thought), but the touches of candlewax would be a good test for the experiment.

What you do is sprinkle Bicarbonate of Soda on the dirty bits.

 

Then you spray vinegar onto the bicarb. And viola – you get a reaction. It bubbles and foams a bit like a garden snail that has received a sprinkle of salt. You leave it for a while (no determined time, just when you feel ready to tackle it again). I then took an old wooden skewer and got to work on the grout areas between the tiles.

 A wipe with a wet cloth, leaving lots of bicarb on the floor but I think the tiles look great!

A finger to Dettol! This method can be used for cupboards, tiles and other surfaces as well. To avoid making your kitchen smell like a Fish-and-Chip shop, put some herbs in your vinegar spray bottle. I used lots of Rosemary, as it is a natural antiseptic and bactericide, used in French hospitals until early this century.

Please do not think that I have neglected my carrot obsession. I used grated carrots in a lunch dish for Saturday, and also baked 2 different cakes on Sunday.

The “Carrot and Courgette Roulade” comes from the series “Baked and Delicious” volume 68 – and it gets a 10 all around!!! It was sublime with its cream cheese-herby filling, served cold with a green salad. Let me know if you want the recipe, this would be brilliant for lunch boxes and take-to-work meals.

 

Both carrot cakes came from YOU Magazine 100 BEST reader’s recipes, and they are both delicious. We do not have a front-runner yet. I prefer the Microwave carrot cake with cream cheese topping; my hubbie prefers the Carrot and ginger cake from the previous blog, and my son loves the Carrot and apple chocolate cake.

 

Microwave carrot cake

Chocolate carrot and apple cake

So I took the cakes to work – and after an intensive tasting session – there is still no clear winner. The chocolate version might have finished slightly ahead of the microwave one, but only by a crumb or so.

 

Thanks again to Mirilene, she has brought another car-load full of happiness for less privilaged children , and my ambulance has collected all patients and I am now on my way to clean, fix and get ready any of the items that need intensive care.

 

Please join this drive if you can - I promise you will feel great and make someone else feel great at the same time. It is what we call in business world a WIN-WIN Situation.

 

Lovies

Lizette