Saturdays

Saturdays for me mean Old Biscuit Mill for breakfast/brunch. Old Biscuit is like an outdoor market/shopping center, but on Saturdays, there is a whole section of food vendors, and the food is EXCELLENT for a food-lover like myself. I always tell myself I’m going to try new things when I go, but there are certain things that I like so much, that I always end up filling up on those. My usual is a breakfast of a potato pattie (like a big latke) with a poached egg, topped with either smoked salmon or bacon and hollandaise sauce.

After I make a little room in my stomach, its a kebab of different mushrooms. Then wash it all down with either some fruit smoothie, sangria, a beer, or when I was here in winter, hot chocolate. But there are so many other things that look great–paella, flat bread pizza, juicy burgers, indian curries, middle eastern foods, crepes, dessert waffles, dumplings, sausages, and even a new york bagel stand.

There’s also always a raw oyster bar that has intrigued me a bit, but the oysters are much smaller than the ones I get in New Orleans. But this week I decided to try them–even in Cape Town they dress them with Louisiana tabasco sauce. After much prodding and guilt tripping of the raw meat I ate with him over the winter, I finally got Efrem to try an oyster. Funnily enough he ate a second one–he liked them.

 

 

My other Old Biscuit favorite is to stock up on biltong, which I hope will last until the next week, but never does.

When I was here over the winter I used to buy a lot of my groceries at old biscuit, because they always have fresh bread, local (yummy!) honey, and better looking and more diverse produce in the market than there is in the grocery store. The produce looks even better now that it’s summer.

Yesterday, I continued my novelty tasting and bought a red velvet cupcake. Anyone who knows me knows I am incredibly picky about baked goods–not too sweet, has to be rich, perfectly moist, good blend of flavors, I don’t want to feel like I’m just eating sugar for frosting, and so on. Red velvet is also tricky because everybody and their mama wants to make red velvet *fill in the blank* nowadays. But I’ve been wanting to experiment with baking my own red velvet cake using beets for the red coloring instead of food dye, and good chocolate, and it just so happened that a woman was selling beet root cocoa red velvet cupcakes. It was DELICIOUS! the best red velvet cupcake I’ve ever had.

 

After Old Biscuit, we went for wine tasting. We had intentions of going to a couple of vineyards in Constantia that are right nearby each other, but after we went to Groote Constantia, I was too tired and too hot to keep going. Another day. At Groote, you taste 5 wines for R30 (~$3.50). I’m not a big white wine drinker, but the chardonnay was excellent and I bought a bottle. I also had their reserve white and red, the pinotage, and shiraz.

After a long first half of the day, I spent the next couple hours taking a nap. I woke up to Efrem continuing his soccer marathon. We went for a walk on the beach just before the sunset and then went to dinner. Pretty good day in all.