Zurie

about me

We're the proud grandparents of one little grandson, but unfortunately live 700 km away. However, we did spend December near him, in Stellenbosch (near Cape Town).




As I had succeeded in deleting, by accident, everything I wrote here before, here's my bio again.

We live on the sea, which is great: we now find we can't stand the inland summer heat of S A!

I was once a magazine food editor and I used to write books, but I seem to have struck a final writer's block. So now I loaf around which is why I spend some days looking in on Zaar several times. I still do a recipe column for a local monthly sheet.

I've travelled quite a bit with my husband (when it was possible) when he was a businessman in Johannesburg. We lived "up there" for 30 years.

Seeing other countries, other cultures, and tasting their foods was inspiring.

My career was checkered, as they say ... university, teaching, journalism, doing an honours degree and then taught at a college.

We joyously departed Johannesburg/ Egoli/ Gauteng/ Witwatersrand/ the City of Gold/ Jozi, (choose your name), and came to settle in our former beach cottage, which we renovated and enlarged to fit a permanent lifestyle.

We have a small cattle farm about 10 mins. drive from this house. I try to keep a small organic vegetable garden going there, but oh, my aching back!!

We do have a family living on the farm, but Stephen, the chief borehole pump and cattle watching man, is not a gardener despite my best efforts at teaching him.

So I have a patchy garden, but there are always fresh herbs and parsley, and sometimes there is an overflowing bountry of veggies, fully organic and always lush with health!

Favorite Foods:

Favourite comfort food is plain:

Well-flavoured oven-roasted chicken with potatoes alongside, with green bean stew and our unique round gem squash, with a red-ripe tomato-and- onion salad.

A deeply-flavoured fish soup in winter, with home-made bread — peasant food. Sheep offal. (Oh, sorry about that, please don't puke!!)

Fresh Cape Rock Lobster, fresh oysters. Fish just off the boats (we have a large variety).

Cold-smoked salmon, salads, arugula, green asparagus, vine-ripened tomatoes with sweet basil ... (The list is endless!)

Most of the time I cook with what I have at hand. Where we live, I don't always have the choice of "fine dining" ingredients, unless I go shopping far afield!

We have excellent wines in South Africa, and naturally we drink them!

HOW I RATE A RECIPE NOW:

I've learnt a lot in the few years I have been a Zaar member. A good and tasty, reliable recipe gets 4 stars, but a 5 still has to be an almost perfect recipe, no matter how simple! I do tweak recipes sometimes, but in small ways. It's very unfair to change a recipe and then leave a snotty review.

If it's a 3, I'll spell out in the review exactly why, which at least gives the cook an idea why the recipe didn't rate higher.

If I test recipes in a cooking contest, I might make recipes worth no more than 1 or 2 stars, but normally I would pass recipes by if I can see it will not work well for me.

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