Winter Walk to Read the Signs of the Wild

Prospect Park Winter Signs Walk
3 March 2019
2pm - 4pm*
$45

Plants are not silent in winter. Walk with me to listen to them.

To me a winter walk is like being backstage before the show starts. When I was still performing (as an opera singer) I was always amazed that the audience knew so little of what went on behind that heavy curtain, and in the wings. But winter is what is necessary for the razzmatazz of spring.

Appreciating the apparent rigor of the frozen and dormant plant world is key to celebrating its resurgence in spring. Winter for foragers is a chance to map what is good, for the week and months to come. Winter burs mean delicious burdock stems in May - the plant grows in colonies.

We will learn to recognize the signs that wild foods leave us:; learn them here and you can apply your pattern recognition anywhere. A dry stalk is really April's pokeweed, a brittle stick is an excellent and aromatic mugwort kebab skewer, a rattling seedhead is juicy Japanese knotweed in a few weeks' time - so that we can find them again in spring.

We will scratch and sniff spicebush twigs, pounce on winter's delicious field garlic leaves, and read the stories that bark tells.

And then we will enjoy a warming picnic of hot soup (tomato and spicebush? hen of the woods, above? - yes, the recipes will be from Forage, Harvest Feast!) and watercress hand pies as we stamp our double-socked feet.

Meet up and route-details will be emailed to you in the week before the walk.

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WALKS COMPLETE

An arrival

The jet-lagged Frenchman, fresh from his long-haul flight, was met at No. 9 by pink bubbles, and pink ham.

And one of my mother's beautiful salads, with pink segments of Cara Cara orange from Babylonstoren, and nasturtiums and mint from the garden.

And by a pink-dressed corgi or two.

He brought summer with him. The temperature turned from spring to 30'C/86'F, and a warm wind is blowing.

Press Pause for Lunch

This Cape Town trip has been less about a holiday than it has been about trying to help sort out family matters.

But for two days I put The Matters into a box, stapled the lid down, duct taped it, put some bricks on it, pushed it under the bed and threw a lunch under the tree for friends. Two Days? Well, one for cooking, of course.

Even faraway friends were there in essence: above, Gabrielle Langholtz's delicious New Greenmarket Cookbook - which I brought to Cape Town as a New York gift for my mother - provided the herby cucumber soup (contributed by Marlowe and Sons).

One of the unexpected bonuses of Lunch is the trove of interesting and beautiful gifts that accompanies it. Here is a hand axe which Dave told me is 250 000 years old. Resting on a brand new tea towel printed and sewn by the lovely Lily. The striped shade cloth below came from Mustafa.

Also on the menu: Ajo blanco (sometimes called white gazpacho - recipe in my own book) made with a South African strain of garlic so strong that I had to toss half the soup and dilute it with with more broth and almonds! Wow. Even so the soup sippers' eyebrows were a bit singed.

The trestle tables and wooden chairs were given a work out, and every pillow was put to good use.

An ice bath took care of the wine.

My mom, Mustafa (visiting from Turkey), Connie and my dad.

My mother's garden bursts with plectranthus in the autumn. Also in the jugs, from the garden, were tree fuchsia (Fuchsia magellanica), salvia and honeysuckle; plus indigenous plumbago (Plumbago auriculata), drought-tolerant Bulbine frutescens, and diascia (the small pink flowers).

And finally, the overcrowded pavlova. I don't like things that are too sweet, so I prefer the meringue to be subservient to the tart passion fruit, tree tomatoes and luscious prickly pears (cactus pears, for Americans).

Add autumn sunlight, and stir.

Lunch for One, please

I visited the lovely Babylonstoren this week. In the shop were quinces, now ripening in South Africa at the end of a long and very hot, dry summer. 

After a morning in the gardens I sat beneath a passion fruit arbour and ordered a quick lunch for one in the Green House, the more casual of the two restaurants on the farm. My mom and I have a date at Babel, soon. 

The salad-in-a-jar was topped with a slice of persimmon, also beginning to ripen nearby.

 You build your own sandwich, and I chose biltong. Of course. 

Salad and coffee are my two standards for restaurants. If they are done badly, flee.  If they are good, everything inbetween will be excellent, too.

Late summer lunch

For a Sunday lunch for three, under the tree, I made two salads to accompany my mom's pizzas. Fig and spinach leaf, above (EV olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper)...

...and a salad inspired by Gabrielle Langholtz's The New Greenmarket Cookbook, which I brought to Cape Town to give to my mom (the recipes are motivating and I love the essays about the farmers).

I have always loved savoury fruit salads, and the recipe here also called for purslane, a favourite of mine - and there is plenty in the garden. Peaches were specified but I subbed perfectly ripe nectarines. The onions are quick pickled, and the combination of flavours and textures was divine.

The bubbly did not hurt, either.

To Paternoster, to eat

I drove my mom up to Paternoster so that we could eat at Oep ve Koep. She had never been.

We spent the night at The Oystercatcher's Haven, a B&B on the beach, where I have stayed several times over the last many years (it has just changed ownership, so check up to date reviews if you're thinking of booking).

At lunch we drank wine we didn't know. Kookfontein - very good.

The wonderful bread arrived in its napkin of fresh herbs, with pots of farm butter and smoked mackerel and a preserved green fig.

Oysters followed, with the fresh syrup from sour figs (Carpobrotus edulis) and crisp Mesembryanthemum crystallinum leaves. The syrup, which comes from sour figs' fleshy seed capsule, is slightly salty and a little sour.

Below: this was a surprise. The broth is also made from Mesembryanthemum leaves, but this time another species, M. guerichianum, and called soutslaai ('salt salad,' in Afrikaans). I have eaten them raw (here, as an edible plate for marinated raw fish), the cooked flavour was unfamiliar - a little bitter and very, well, green. I liked it very much, my mom was less sure. I thought it worked well with the sweet nectarines and just-cooked mussels.

Later there was a delicate carrot bobotie, smoked farm-raised kabeljou (unsustainable, otherwise) and pieces of kudu speared on local sage, with the same sage turned into ash, as a condiment. To end, delicious traditional moerkoffie, whose picture I should have taken, as well as a taste of very special buchu honey.

After buying a copy of Kobus' beautiful Strandveldfood for friends in America, we headed back to our temporary home.

I took myself for a long walk.

Pink Limomium was in bloom, papery flowers improbable in the sand.

Below, I recognized lunch - soutslaai!

I don't have a West Coast field guide with me, so feel free to hop in with ID, below

...and here: tiny plant, tiny grey leaves, blond flowers, extremely fragrant; possibly a Helichrysum.

...help. Cotton bud-sized flowers. More fragrance.

In amongst those rocks out there live the local rock lobsters. Once upon a time I cooked them on a camp fire... I think those days are over. I feel too sorry for them.

The oyster catchers appeared on cue. Their wild call is one of the most evocative, especially at night.

We always scoff at their endangered status, because they seem to be everywhere, though never in large numbers.  Apparently they are returning from the brink.

And the place seemed to be swarming with rock kestrels. There was a family, with juveniles being pursued and harried by irate parents who wanted them to leave home, already.

 (Rock kestrels, rock lobsters, what can I say? There are rocks! It's evolution.)

I think the young one is in the foreground, below.

They could also be called kitchen door kestrels. Not afraid at all.

After my walk I sat with my mom on her little patio and looked at the view. 

And sipped the requisite gin and tonic.

And watched the fruits of her labours: The birdbath had been empty and she'd asked someone to fill it. Empty birdbaths irritate us. Immediately birds appeared.

The wagtail submerged itself.

The weaver went, as we say, te kere.

A wind picked up and the sun began to set.

We watched the waves, and walkers.

That night we ate out again, elsewhere, a bad meal featuring bad fish.

Fortunately that memory has faded and seems insignificant in the light of the bright things happening at Oep ve Koep, where integrity shines in every plate.

Go, if you can.