All posts tagged: Cape Town

Cooking for Christmas in Cape Town

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Ok, so I love cooking, and I usually help make something for Thanksgiving or Xmas dinner, but I have NEVER, cooked the entire meal by myself, let alone for 8 people. So this xmas was definitely a first. Complicating the situation was wanting to cook a traditional (my family’s traditions that is) dinner in another country. Why? Because half of the ingredients I want are either called something different, some different variety that I’m not used to, or not available at all. Needless to say I was pretty worried when I was cooking that things wouldn’t taste right, let alone cooking a turkey for the first time too. Let’s run down the issues: 1: White potato pie: I started the xmas eve baking sweet potato pies. I baked the potatoes, and cut them open to find that they’re white here and not orange. Tasted mostly the same, a little bit starchier, but hey, I just figured I’d make a white pie. 2: How many grams of butter? In the grocery store I couldn’t find butter …

Saturdays

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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 …

Back to Africa

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Okay, maybe not the best title for a blog piece, but I did go back to Africa–Cape Town, South Africa that is. I’ve been here about a week now, and while much of my time has been spent catching up on sleep from the 2 weeks of not sleeping during finals and moving, and then jetlag, I have been having fun. My first night here I got some biltong (south african beef jerky but better) and have been munching on it everyday since then. The weather is beautiful, much better for me than winter here although cape town is a beautiful city no matter the time of year. The days are incredibly long. It gets bright by 5 AM and the sun doesn’t go down until almost 9 pm, it’s crazy. This past week I’ve done a lot of eating, taken some walks on the beach, gone to long street (a tamer version of bourbon st.) to get drinks a few times, met Efrem’s dog Pluto who is so much fun, visited a beach town …

Sobonana South Africa

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What can I say about these past ten weeks? In sum–they’ve been AMAZING! But if I break it down, they’ve been exciting, frustrating, tiresome, infuriating, cold, unexpected, sweet, beautiful, warm, breathtaking, gross, passionate, exhausting, and a number of other adjectives that aren’t quite readily coming to mind. South Africa is easily one of the most physically beautiful countries I’ve been to. It’s also one of the craziest places I’ve been to in terms of politics–especially race and language politics. But I will definitely be going back. Hopefully sooner than later. I could write for lengths on my experiences here, and I’ve tried my best to keep up to date on my posts, but there’s been too much to do, and not enough easy access to functional internet. Anyway, my last week in Cape Town, was extraordinary. It was a bit stressful trying to finish up the work for my internship, but I did finish. Maybe not to the capacity that was expected from the outset–of writing a paper that could potentially be published in a …