Musings – Page 16 – Rossandra White

It’s Biltong Weather Again

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Admin

For me here in the States, that is: it’s getting cooler and the beef won’t get funky in the heat and kill me. Of course it might still, because as Wikipedia notes, biltong is a kind of cured meat from South Africa: the “curing” being salt and a brushing of cider vinegar. The word biltong comes from the Dutch words “bil” (rump) and “tong” (strip or tongue) from the days of yore when pioneering South Africans sun dried their meat during The Great Trek of the 1830s, eastward and north-eastward away from British control in the Cape Colony.

I dry my “rumpstrip” in a wooden box with a 60-watt bulb in the bottom. My ex built it for me. I hang the beef for about three days using eight inch cable ties. The hooks I used to employ rusted out, this is better. I like my biltong “wet,” that is to say, on the raw side, more taste, if you know what I mean. Of course, you’re probably making a face, unless you’re South African and then you’ll understand. The biltong back there is much tastier, not sure why—the beef isn’t as hormoned-out?—and the strips much bigger than my dinky little Supermarket specials. The Americans who’ve tried my biltong love it. Of course, I have them sign a waiver—just kidding, but I probably should.

Recipe

Beef (Preferably Round steak)—1-inch thick
Rock Salt
Coarse Ground Black Pepper
Coarse Ground Coriander
Vinegar (preferably Apple Cider vinegar)

Sterilize all your hooks, knives, and working surfaces by washing well in hot water and soap.

Cover both sides of the meat with rock salt and let stand for an hour. The longer you let it stand the saltier it will become. Scrape off all the excess salt with a knife (don’t soak it in water!). Cut into two-inch strips then brush (do not dip) with the vinegar, just so the meat is covered. Let the excess vinegar drip off then sprinkle with pepper and coriander and hang.

Pumpkin Fritters

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Admin

When I first came to the States, I brought all my old South African recipes with me. All two of them (in the now rusted little recipe tin pictured below). Okay, I wasn’t big on cooking, too busy learning to change a nappy (diaper). But Pumpkin Fritters (pampoenkoeky in Afrikaans) is one of the recipes I did bring with me. Not because it was a favourite, although it’s delicious, but because it was easy. I definitely prefer it to Pumpkin Pie.

Ingredients:

1 medium cooked pumpkin to make 2 cups
or 15 ozs canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder (not soda)
½ tsp cinnamon
2-3 tsp granulated sugar depending on your taste
2 large free-range eggs, lightly beaten
Canola oil for frying (your call, you don’t need that much)
Cinnamon sugar (1 tsp cinnamon and 1-2 tablespoons granulated sugar) for later

Method:

To cook pumpkin cut into cubes, and steam until tender then mash in a mixing bowl (I add a little butter), or use the canned pumpkin. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar, add to the pumpkin and mix together. Stir in the lightly beaten eggs until thoroughly combined. You should now have a batter that drops easily off a spoon, if not add a little flour, or if too stiff, a tiny amount of milk. Drop tablespoonfuls into hot oil, and brown until firm on the underside, then flip over and brown on the other side. Don’t crowd.

Combine the sugar and cinnamon, sprinkle over the cooked fritters and serve immediately, preferably with some kind of meat dish. They’re actually good cold as well.

Class Act

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Admin

The projector was always the last thing Skelly switched off before locking the doors to the Shangri-La, home of the most famous stripper in history, his eyes lingering on her graceful flickering image up there on the wall behind the stage where his girls did their thing on poles these days—she was a real class act.

She’d liked the idea of the show when he told her, just until her ankle healed of course, and then she herself would be back filling the place and mesmerizing the men.

But she only had eyes for him, and he for her.

He smiled and headed up the stairs to where she sat waiting for him, her long dead body propped up in her favorite chair.

Moments later, he’d retrieved the roll of bandages and sitting on the floor beside her chair, told her about his evening while he changed her dressing.

Leg Beards and Hairy Pits

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Admin

So, last night as I’m about to step around Jake into my bathtub, I glanced down. Holy Cow, the hair on my legs was long enough to plait!

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it got me thinking about when women first started shaving their legs. And their pits. And their nether regions (I could’ve used the word pubes, but I like nether regions better). I also thought about the first time I saw a woman with full-on leg beards and hairy pits. It was in Laguna Beach—natch—and yes, she was a hippie.

I wasn’t that long off the boat from Africa and was totally fascinated. I was never inspired to try it myself, it just doesn’t appeal to me. But I’m not fond of shaving; it has ruined the skin on my legs. That’s because we had to use bits of tin to shave with in the wilds of Africa. Yes. I’m exaggerating again. Anyway, here’s the scoop.

originally posted by Mental Floss on August 13, 2009

Earlier this week, Ethan Trex taught us about the history of shaving. Several readers left comments inquiring about when women started shaving their legs and underarms, so we cracked open the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. Here’s what we learned:

Underarms
American women had no need to shave their underarms before about 1915 – after all, who ever saw them? Even the word “underarm” was considered scandalous, what with it being so near certain other interesting body parts. Then came the sleeveless dress. An ad in the fashion mag Harper’s Bazaar decreed that to wear it (and certainly to wear it while participating in “Modern Dancing”), women would need to first see to “the removal of objectionable hair.” They didn’t need much convincing, and by the early ’20s, hairy underarms were so last decade, at least in America.

Legs
The ’20s fashion was risqué on the bottom half, too, but most women of the era didn’t seem to feel the need to shave their legs, and when hemlines dropped again in the ’30s, the point became moot. The ’40s, however, brought even shorter skirts, sheerer stockings, and the rise of leggy pin-ups such as Betty Grable. “The removal of objectionable hair” suddenly applied to a lot more surface area.

Naughty Bits
Was it porn actresses who started this one? GIs concerned about disease? The Brazilians? Nah. For hundreds of years, the bikini wax has been a common practice among a group more often associated with extreme modesty: Muslim women. In much of the Middle East and North Africa, brides-to-be remove all their body hair before the wedding night. Yes, all of it. Frequently, they stick with the aesthetic after marriage – and some men do likewise.

You can pick up a copy of ‘In the Beginning’ in the mental_floss store.

Old Post Resurrection Hop–Silkies

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Admin

I’m re-posting this blog I wrote in December, 2011 as part of Old Post Resurrection Hop:

Check out these chickens. They’re actually Silkie bantams: one of the oldest of the rare breeds of poultry. Marco Polo wrote about seeing them in the Orient in 1200 A.D. I included the photo at the very bottom of this blog, just so you can see their fluffy little legs (and toes!), from a website run by a guy who raises them. It was his contention that Silkies are one of the most docile, sweet tempered chicken breeds he’s ever kept.

I’ll go along with that. Not that I’ve ever raised any, I’ve just had the pleasure of seeing these two in the photo above float around the perimeter of this guy’s yard at the end of Llewellyn Drive even with my dogs and their kinetic energy around. All the Silkies do is stop for a moment, raise their magnificent little white feather-duster heads and stare down at the dogs. Their eyes are surprisingly large and dark and winsome, kinda like those of the Olsen twins. No, wait, I take that back, an Olsen stare has been called vacant and bored, the Silkies’ eyes are filled with curiosity. There’s no fence around them. And I’ve never seen them stray. Way too cool. Don’t they just make you smile?

This is a Blog Hop!

Click here to read more resurrection blogs

Shoe Regrets

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Admin

Victor stumbled from the pied-a-terre, tripped over a pair of crystal-heeled Christian Louboutins he’d bought for her one month anniversary then remembering, swung around and stared at the sea of shoes she’d thrown from the second floor window before his arrival earlier that evening, all the shoes he’d bought for her when they rendezvoused.

She’d done it in anticipation of the Wizard of Oz ruby slippers she wanted; but instead of those heel-less, gnome-like monstrosities, he’d bought a pair of red strappy Stuart Weitzman’s, just as expensive, but with six-inch stilettos that gave him a hard-on imagining her tiny arches straining against the diamond-encrusted straps.

Why hadn’t he realized that even she would throw a fit; they always did. He just spoiled them too much. But this one had gone too far and so had he. In moments Hermann would arrive and it would be as if nothing had happened. But what about all these shoes?

Mad Hatter Day

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Admin

Today is Mad Hatter’s Day, the second word to be pronounced Hatta, in the English way if you really want to get into the spirit of it. According to Ari Rapkin, a blogger who posted the following in 1996, the date was chosen from illustrations by John Tenniel in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wherein the Mad Hatter is always seen wearing a hat bearing a slip of paper with the notation “In this style 10/6”.

He goes on to say that we take this as inspiration to behave like the Mad Hatter on 10/6. But the real spirit of Mad Hatter Day is turnabout: The nonsense we usually pretend is sane can be called madness for one day in the year; the superficially crazy things that really make sense can be called sane on Mad Hatter Day.

And so it made perfect sense to me those many years ago, when on October 6th, I got married for the first time at eighteen years old.

Milestone Plans

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Admin

Next May is a “big” birthday for me. Don’t ask. I want to do something special. My childhood friend Joan was born the same year, except her birthday is in June. When I visited her in tiny Morland in North Western England in April, after not seeing her since we were twenty-years old in our home country of Zambia, we made a pact to get together to celebrate this milestone. Of course this was in a pub (pronounced poob in that neck of the woods) after a couple glasses of wine. We talked about meeting in London.

But here’s the thing, she never mentioned that pact again and well, I don’t want to remind her. I mean after all we have all these starchy British/South African/German/French genes that preclude “pushing” oneself on another. Know what I mean? Plus, I started getting these brochures from The Sierra Club advertising hiking trips to The Great Wall of China, Ecuador, the Patagonia Circuit, Argentina and Chile.

And America. I’ve always wanted to explore the U. S. of A., ever since I was eleven years old, plotting my escape from Africa. But after thirty years in this country, I still have a lot of exploring to do. Not one for making as they say, a “bucket list,”–I hate cliches–I’m making a list nonetheless, just not calling it that.

Here’s my plan, rent or buy one of those little old teardrop caravans, which were popular from the early 30’s to the mid 70’s, hitch it up behind my nine-year-old Nissan Altima and tool around the country with my dogs. Maybe I’ll even hook up with “Sisters on The Fly” (We Have More Fun Than Anyone)—Caravans, Campfires, and Tales from the Road. What do you think?

High School Reunion Regrets

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Admin

There were a couple of class reunion celebrations down Canyon Acres this past week. Oh, how I yearned to have attended an American High School—American Graffiti, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club.

Instead, I went to Kitwe High School, with its strict, no-nonsense British teachers in the middle of the Zambian bush, where the boys dropped tomato and cheese sandwiches on your head from the second floor and the girls got “cuts” across the knuckles with a ruler, the boys across the seat of their pants for things like repeatedly forgetting to do homework, fighting in the yard, or punching someone’s arm while passing on the staircase—I was caught doing the latter.

And then the reunion where one could have an opportunity to see how everyone else turned out. A reunion would never be possible for me. Any trace of my high school life was obliterated after the country gained independence, amidst rioting, death and uncertainty. Everyone left, scattered across Africa, England, Australia and America. Lamentable as it was, and not the American one I’d always dreamed of, I wanted that reunion.

Old Post Resurrection Hop: The Things You Remember

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Admin

I’m re-posting this blog I wrote in March 12, 2012 as part of Old Post Resurrection Hop.

My dad also wrote a book. What I remember is a chaotic heap of papers, pockmarked with cigarette burns that seemed to grow every time we moved. I never caught him at it.

The first time I saw this pile was when we moved to Rustenburg, frontier post of the Kalahari Desert and unpacked this one big old trunk that belonged to my dad’s parents. I was seven. My dad was back doing shift work on the mines, platinum this time. We’d just spent two years in Zimbabwe where he’d managed a sisal plantation (a species of aloe used to make rope and mats). We might’ve stayed longer if there hadn’t been an African uprising over wages when I almost died from eating bread the rebels had laced with strychnine. By then my dad’s stack of paper was as high as a small end table, ratty as hell and tied with string.

The thing is my dad had a lot to write about. He would’ve made a good David Livingstone, that intrepid Scotsman who became the first European to explore the central and southern parts of Africa, famous for discovering the Victoria Falls. By the time my dad married my mother, who at first refused his offer of marriage—he’d already been engaged three times—he’d traveled the length and breadth of South Africa at a time when it was mostly dirt roads and wild animals were still plentiful. He even tried to make it up to the Congo by himself in a banged up 1930’s Model A Ford. He didn’t make it. No roads to speak of.

I bring this up now because I’m doing a final on my memoir, Loveyoubye, and it just hit me that he’d written a book. How could I have forgotten that? I can’t ask him or my mother what it was about. They both on passed years ago. I’ll never know. It’s been quite the wild ride writing this memoir.

(Note: my memoir was completed a few months after I wrote this blog and is now being considered for publication.)