All About Food, Almost

Because I am a food guru and because I am in love with the food of South Africa I decided a blog must be dedicated to explaining the deliciousness of it.

Over the past month and a half I have been lucky enough to try some traditional dishes of the afrikans (South African) culture and have to say the least fallen in love with them.

Two typical meals that you will find while having a large group of people are a braai and a poike. 

A braai is much like a BBQ in the states except instead of just having hamburgers and hotdogs each person invited to the braai brings a dish to share.  Typical dishes include browurst (similar to bratwurst except it is generally drier meat then we are used to), steak, lamb, chicken, sandwiches, ribs, etc. There is always a large variety of food that is brought which makes it so delicious!

Generally, instead of having a modern grill, like we would, they use a very old fashioned grill (almost like what you would see at parks and campgrounds). Logs of wood are then burned in order to provide coals to heat the grill. Generally one of the guys cooks as it is almost an honor to cook a good braai. So delicious!

A poike (poy kie) is a traditional stew here. It is also very traditional to have with a large group of people or for some sort of event. It is a stew that is made in layers and can range from 3 to 7 hours to make. It takes so long because you cook the layers at a variety of time intervals. For example, you start with the things that take the longest to cook, maybe carrots and some sort of meat (generally lamb, beef, or chicken (they eat a LOT of lamb here which is really exciting)) you just cook the meat enough so that it is seared on the outside. Then you can add your squash and carrots which take the second longest to cook. Later you add your mushrooms, onions, etc. And lastly you make a broth, which can be made out of a variety of things. Some use a packaged soup mix and gravy. I’ve also heard using Coca Cola, which I have yet to try yet, but that is a very big thing here. Apparently marinating chicken in coca cola is also supposed to give the chicken a very nice flavor, who woulda known.

I’m a big snacker, so snack items are always a must for me. My all time favorite snack food is called biltounge, which is a lot like our beef jerky, except Biltounge is like 10x better. I don’t know how I will survive without it when I go to the US! I probably go through at least one 200g bag a week! Biltounge is made out of any type of meat (I’ve had beef, buffalo, kudu, and ostrich (which is currently my favorite)). They hang up this meat to dry (which sounds quite disgusting) and then they go crazy with seasoning all over it. The flavors just melt together so well in your mouth it’s almost indescribable.

Then there are always chips, but the flavors here are so different from the US. They have sweet chili, chutney (which I will describe later), and some other strange ones I can’t remember. And then their candy and drinks and such comes in so many amazing flavors! Mango, peach, guava, papaya, pineapple, and squash (which is not actually squash its just a very sugary drink, kind of like soda (speaking of soda their cream soda here is green which I find very bizarre.))

Lastly, they have a bunch of different condiments they like to use on their foods. The big one is chutney (which I stated before). Chutney is almost the texture of a jam, and it often comes in different flavors such as peach and mango. They put it on everything, in sauces, on meat, mixed in with curry, but not generally on bread. It is sweet but savory enough to go on meat, its quite delicious!

Of course with every great thing you must have a not so great thing. Here it is mayonnaise. They put mayonnaise on everything and in such copious amounts! And its not like the mayonnaise in the US it is much more sweet and tangy so I find it quite atrocious. Just to put this in perspective I ordered a wrap at KFC the other day (yes they do have KFC), and it was like asking for chicken with your mayonnaise, I couldn’t even eat it all it was just too much mayonnaise. Also I went to have sushi about a week ago, and you wouldn’t believe it! They put mayonnaise on all the sushi pieces! Lucky enough I asked before hand for absolutely noo mayonnaise on any of my dishes. They of course looked at me like I was insane.

My life over the past couple of weeks hasn’t been filled with too many stories. I have been spending most of my time working on my project doing herbivore counts and behavioral surveys. I will have to go more in depth on these projects in a later post.

This last weekend I was able to venture with a coworker through some more of Mpumalanga (the county outside of the park). We went to stay at a friend’s vacation house that is situated in a nature reserve residential area. It is quite fascinating because there are all these gorgeous houses and then you’ll see some zebra and giraffe grazing in the yards. The animals are quite tame in this area as they are used to having humans around more then in the park. I had the opportunity to feed a Zebra an apple, which was quite extraordinary! It wouldn’t let me pet it but it took the apple right out of my hand which is quite cool. Some animals however cause lots of problems around the area. For example, that same night, one of their other friends in the neighborhood had a baboon attack. The baboons came in and ripped out all the plants in their garden and then took a luggage trailer and threw it at their car!

The next day we went to a resort in a town in the mountains called Badplaas. The mountains surrounding this area were amazing to say the least! They were lime green, almost unreal, I’ve never seen anything comparable to it.

This resort is where the only water park is situated in Mpumalanga. It was quite exciting; the park is located on a hot spring so there were 6 different hot pools (3 inside and 3 outside). There is 1 very hot pool, 1 warm pool, 2 luke warm pools, 1 cool pool, and 1 cold pool. The hottest pool was 43 degrees Celsius (about 107 F)! It is so hot you can only sit in the pool for 10 minutes maximum, according to the rules, I however could only stand about 4 minutes of it. When you jumped into the hot pool you had to be sure to move quickly to sit down and then not move until you got out otherwise you would get too hot. There was a cold pool just a couple of steps next to the hot pool so that you could go from one to the other. Apparently this is good for your circulation, I think it sounds more like a health hazard haha. There were also 2 luke warm pools, which I spent the majority of my time in.

In addition they had two body slides and a tube slide with waterfalls and what not. It is a lot smaller then our water parks but very nice for the price you pay. I was actually surprised at how cheap it was to get in.