Dahlias in the house

Dahlias, in staggering perfection, from Jaftha's Flower Farm in Constantia.

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Summer, all of a sudden

From a cold picnic with hot soup beside a Northeastern mountain stream (my last post, dated November 15th), to a summer kitchen in Cape Town.  A bunch of sweetpeas from the garden, where my mom asked her gardener to remove the almost-spent plants to make way for the burgundy sunflowers I sowed for her several weeks ago, and that are now ready to be planted out.

I touched down at Cape Town International on December 2nd, on United's first direct flight from Newark, New Jersey.

In the last few days the first figs of a South African summer have arrived in supermarkets, and I am making good use of them. The best way to eat a fig is raw and ripe, or perhaps sliced into an early-evening apéritif.

And now I have some green (unripe) figs to preserve, to take back with me when I head home to Brooklyn.

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(I am usually here at Instagram)