Look, it’s the new year. Ring the changes. In with the new.
Clean slates all round. Even if nobody has any money. Well, nobody I know at any rate.
Even the potatoes I’m buying at the moment are little ones. Oh, sorry – happy new year. Did I forget that part?
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I’ll do better, I promise. Oh and I did make a resolution, by the way, but it has nothing to do with the fact that it’s the new year. Even though I made it on the 1st of January.
It’s not a new year’s resolution – it’s a new book resolution. I have a new book coming out – and I’m finally allowed to tell you that – and I’ve decided I need to trim down if I’m to be seen in public and speak at book launches and those larney book fairs that writers get invited to. Which I will be doing, and I’m pretty excited about it.
More details about all of that in due course, but before the book hits all the bookstores I need to walk at least 20km a week, or 80km a month, and in two months that will be 160km. Gosh it does look daunting seeing it in print. (I walked 4km on my first morning walk, 7.5km on my second.) Today’s was more modest: 6.5km.
So maybe I’m heading for 200km in two months. My longest walks in the Cradock years were just under 3km so I’m off to a pretty good start. Now to keep it up.
And I’m being inventive in the kitchen, which I suppose comes with the feeling of reinvigoration that we try to adopt at this time of the year. I spied some baby potatoes and the family were doing a smoke braai so I said I’d bring a potato salad. Here’s the thing: there’s no working hob in the new house as yet so I can’t boil anything.
The solution was to cook the potatoes in an air fryer. So they’d be roasted. And I thought, well, let’s throw some whole garlic cloves in too, in their husks.
This would create little hot parcels of squeezy garlic delight, little plops of molten pungent allium that could be added to a dressing. And that’s exactly what transpired. As well as vinegar of some sort and olive oil, I felt it needed an additional element, so I toasted some white sesame seeds and stirred them into a dressing of prosecco vinegar, olive oil, smoked Maldon salt and black pepper.
I squeezed the garlic pulp into the dressing and stirred it in, then added the hot potatoes immediately after draining them, tossing them around while steam blasted acid-vinegar at my face. Quite exhilarating. 2 Tbsp prosecco vinegar or quality vinegar of your choice (mine was a Checkers Forest and Feast product)
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