Fun and games as Gran, also called Omsie, starts a new project
Life decided that it was time to retire. I had no idea what to do with that. In my mind there had been no retirement—just working forever, eventually falling asleep under an apple tree never to wake up again. Always an apple tree. What’s with that? Maybe my German roots…
Trying to decide what to do next! Here I thought that I was fairly inventive. Apparently not. Even praying to all the gods and angels I could think of—and a few random spirits on the side—has not helped me to clarify what I could do with a few remaining years. It should be something interesting, fun, cheap, not too stressful, and flexible enough to be done with minimal investment in tools and skills. That sort of thinking. Mmh.
How has it worked out so far, 18 months later? Not so good. Three starts. This is my third attempt. The first idea was to get people to share an interesting moment in their life. Didn’t have many takers on that idea. Then I tried a kind of free business school to encourage people to start their own little side hustle and found that it didn’t really do it for me. That’s never a promising start.
After much and mostly irrational thought, I came up with the idea that cooking might be fun. But quick cooking—that is, quick preparation. Cooking time on the stove or in the oven need not be included. Perhaps there could be some fun in creating very easy recipes focused on sauces, relishes, jams and pickles: the kind of food accessories that add flavour to meals but can cost quite a bit to buy. South Africans are particularly avid sauce enthusiasts and collectors. That doesn’t mean that my recipes would be exclusively South African, just that we are used to having Mrs Ball’s chutney or Nando’s spicy sauces sitting right next to our steak.
What stoked the fires somewhat was buying a jar of onion marmalade at a small boutique store nearby selling wine, wine-tasting sessions, pickled olives, olive jam and a bunch of other good stuff. That combination—marmalade and onion—caught my eye. It was a product by Elana’s Homemade Goodness, situated at Drie Eike Farm (Three Oak Farm) in the Robertson district (elanas.co.za). The family’s taste buds did not know what had hit them!
This then became the first experiment. And the experiment is still ongoing. It’s now batch four and hopefully it will be a success after all the learning. The family and various unsuspecting testers, also called friends, have been lumped with my in-house onion marmalade attempts, and I must just say they’ve been absolute stars. They’ve loved the marmalade. However, what has stopped me from making this the first recipe has been the texture. As much as marmalade has larger bits of the fruit or veg in it—hence it’s marmalade rather than jam—the actual bits should be more elegant than the big blobs in my variation.
Pink Blocks Pantry is finally spluttering awake. What’s with the name, you might ask? Well. Coming from a family business that’s been in design—and more specifically web design—since the HTML days, around 2000, we would of course have a bunch of domain names available. I picked one that the family had bought in 2006 and that we’ve messed about with different ideas on and off. The word Pantry had to be added so that folk didn’t think it was about nail varnish or rose patterns on upholstery fabric.
I’m hoping to build a community of like-minded people. Chat, ask for ideas, discuss recipe ideas, complain if one of mine doesn’t work for you—and anything else you can think of!
P.S. Creating pickles can be very useful too. This is the photo before cooking of the strawberry and apple jam I made as a birthday present for my sister-in-law.
