Les Fleurs dans le Jardin de ma Mere

I will love real garden roses forever. My mom has relegated the roses she still keeps to pots on the patio, while the rest of the garden turns indigenous.

One of the many agapanthus in bloom. These "African lilies" grow like weeds in the Cape. One forgets how lovely they are.

Helichrysum, aka hotnotskooigoed - one of my favourites. If beds really were stuffed with these flowers in the old days, I think sweet dreams would have been had. They smell somehow of mustard and honey and holidays.

On the trail of the Familiar Bread

It showed up at Harbour House.

Harbour House, Kalk Bay

The view from our table (#83) at Harbour House, at lunch today. One of my favourite places, anywhere. You'd think that good seafood restaurants abound in Cape Town, but that is not the case. Harbour House is what a restaurant on top of the sea should be - bright, airy, consistently well-staffed, both on the floor and in the kitchen, meaning that the service is good and what one eats is delicious. That combination makes for an extremely happy lunch.

We're not sure what this guy was doing*, but it looked interesting. [Ed. 01/13/08 - according to Steve Pike's article in The Weekend Argus, January 12th, this is Stand Up Paddling, fresh(ish) from Hawaii].

Looking towards towards Simonstown.

Above, my mom and I were a bit worried when this arrived: the return of nouvelle cuisine?

...then that arrived...

...from there, below: one and a half Cape crayfish (actually spiny lobster but here they are called crayfish) each, a big piece of very good kabeljou (a local linefish), prawns with heads on and mussels.

Happy campers.

The wine? Since clearly we'd had some...Haute Cabriere's Chardonnay Pinot Noir.

Klein Constantia

It's a good year for agapanthus. Here they line the driveway leading to Klein Constantia, where we stopped in to buy a couple of cases of their Sauvignon blanc (yup, in Cape Town they stop at local estates to buy cases. None of this Brooklyn stopping-in-for-a-bottle at the liquor store on your home home from work...). It's a beautiful place on the slopes of the Constantiaberg, the lower reaches of which I used to ride on the chestnut, ornery horse, Cromwell. Back in the day.

The blue agapanthus are everywhere: gardens, sidewalks, medians, fallow ground. Newer varieties are bred to have darker colours and more tear-like flowers: deep indigo and near black, and are gorgeous. These almost outmoded, standard blues still impress in their swathes of colour, and from my Northern Hemispheric viewpoint, speak of a climate at once mild and half forgotten, exotic in its ability to impress a mind imprinted with countless agapanthus Christmasses, now seeing them as one does who returns to a place remembered to learn it again.

Funny how one's focus changes. I've been to this cellar many times and probably just galloped through the doors thinking of Vin de Constance. This is the first time I actually looked at the terraced water feature. I don't think I can have visited since designing gardens in New York, or it would have struck me before. It's very simple, very effective - flanked by the iris-like Dietes bicolor with its peacock accents on each petal, and planted with the local, scented waterblommetjies (Aponogeton distachyos), so delicious in lamb bredies:

September bredie made when the seeds pods are fat.

The Familiar Bread

My mom and I had lunch at The Olympia Cafe in Kalk Bay, a rowdy place on the Main Road with a good view of the harbour, populated by local women with telltale, creased blue eyes, tanned skin and a slightly vague air, chilled-out tourists who've heard the word, and lone newspaper-reading men with a similar, preoccupied but serene look. The service is slapdash and tardy but goodnatured, the food is for people with gargantuan appetites; they have wine too - my mom was anxious about this: red wine and white wine. We ordered white wine and it turned out to be a totally drinkable Bovlei Sauvignon blanc. The bread, when it arrived, looked familiar. It's a very nice ciabatta, squooshier than it should be but a little resistant near the crust, with holes and not caverns inside, and we'd just seen it at a little shop on the Main Road understocked with an assortment of jams, olives, etc. You get good olive oil to dip it into.

The cooks at The Olympia Cafe believe you should eat salad (so do I, but...). When my mom asked for her fishcakes without the usual mash, she got a side salad. Just in case she didn't have enough already.

Home

Over Africa:

The first sighting of the home mountains...

A welcoming glass of Taittinger on the patio...

One of my mom's beautiful lunches, just the two of us...

The reason I feel so at home at Prune. It's a little like home.

On the wing

Robin and Eileen fetched me at Heathrow and we drove to Bray, the little village that is home to quite a concentration of Michelin-starred establishments: Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck (aka The Bloated Duck, now shunned), the Roux's Waterside Inn just down the way, responsible for my first hangover, at age 13 (not recognizing the symptoms, everyone thought I had food poisoning and for years blamed the crab terrine), and Blumenthaler's non-starred Hind's Head Pub. I had been looking forward to my specially-requested* lunch at the latter for ages, remembering my only other experience there with gluttonous fondness: a wonderful take on oxtail, inside a sort of bread bomb, like the oldfashioned summer pudding, which is red berries contained by juice-soaked white bread...

We arived at 11am, an hour before the kitchen opened, so drank our ale at the fire and waited...

Eileen and Robin made sure to order the triple fried chips, below...

...and I could not resist the oxtail bomb again. Memory was not served, though. This bomb was more the size of a grenade (about 3 1/2 inches high). The contents, oxtail off the bone and pieces of kidney, were still delicious and rich, but the bread was a little on the been around too long side, and the demi glace poured around it the degree of stickiness just shy of superglue. Not the bomb of lore or yore.

Naturally, I had sausage envy. These are Robin's. Eileen had a delicious pork chop (I had a bite)made from something called a Spotted Pig. I think. And my dandelion salad was good, though Al di la's recent puntarella one left it in the shade. On the whole it was still a good lunch, with a bottle of Buitenverwachting's Christine, 2002 - a Bordeaux style Constantia red. They both felt that the food and service had fallen off, and I agree. *Next time it's their pick.

Thank you, Robin! Happy birthday on the Winter's Solstice, happy Christmas in Venice, and happy 50th anniversary to you both on January 18th...They dont make 'em like you no more...