Slow Food Mother City » Slow Food Mother City

Farm Visit and Waterblommetjie Lunch at Lelieblom Farm, Darling

Pia — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:00:25 +0000

UPDATE: event fully booked

Slow Food Mother City is celebrating the last cozy days of winter with a visit to Lelieblom Farm just outside the West Coast town of Darling to sample waterblommetjies, an indigenous winter delicacy.

Waterblommetjies are the flowers of the Cape Hawthorn (Aponogeton distachyos), which grows wild in vleis and on riverbanks in the Cape.

They are historically linked to Afrikaans cuisine, but were probably first consumed by local hunter-gatherers. The buds are used in bredies (stews), soups and curries, and taste a little like green beans. The flowers can be added to salads. This is a true heritage food, and we are thrilled to be eating and learning more about them before their winter season ends.

Lelieblom is a working family farm, owned by Karen and Michael Basson, and shared with sheep, horses and other animals. They welcome visitors for a traditional farm feast in their farmhouse. Karen describes it best in her own words:

“YES!!!!! The waterblommetjies are still growing in August and we do sell.

The waterblommetjies grow in our dams on the farm and they come up every winter and sleep the whole summer and when the rains come again they wake up and fill the dams all by themselves, we don’t do anything to them, they look after themselves! We will gladly take you to tour the dams on the farm, the dams also only have water in winter, and it is great fun wading into the freezing cold water to pick the flowers. My husband is the brave one!

Lelieblom is really a true farm, we have no window dressing here for tourists or visitors, Children are welcome and we have lots of lovely tame hand reared farm animals! They are always a treat for the children.

Lelieblom is what you see is what you get and cooking is home cooking! We do things naturally and somewhat old fashioned. I am a home cook, nothing fancy, as far as possible I cook in the old ways. Waterblommetjies to me calls for a bredie, and I hope that is fine with you!

A menu for you could include the waterblommetjies obviously, curried tripe (delicious!!!!) which I would recommend as it is very traditional round here, served with soetpatat always!, rice, vegetables and dessert. I would really like to do tripe for you…dis lekker! Malva pudding with hot custard is my favourite dessert. We bake our own bread, served from the farm kitchen.

We use our home for functions so the experience is coming to a farm home and sharing the day with a farm family, that is the Lelieblom ethos.”

So join us and the Lelieblom family on Saturday, 21 August. We will walk around the farm for an hour and then sit down to a traditional home-cooked farm meal.

If waterblommetjies are still available, you are welcome to wade in the dam and pick your own, for which Lelieblom will charge you per bag picked. To learn more about Lelieblom, visit www.lelieblom.blogspot.com.

MENU
Waterblommetjie Bredie
Curried Tripe
Sweet Potatoes, Rice & Vegetables
Bread from the Farm Kitchen
Malva Pudding with Hot Custard
Tea and Coffee

Space is limited, so to reserve your place, please fill in our online booking form or email kate@slowfoodmothercity.co.za

EVENT DETAILS

Date, time and venue:

Saturday 21 August
Lelieblom Farm, Darling
11.00am (lunch will be served at 1pm)

Cost:
R135.00 for Members, R155.00 for Guests. Children 4-12 yrs R65.00 (parents are wholly responsible for their children during the outing).
Please bring your own wine and nonalcoholic beverages; only water and tea and coffee will be supplied by Lelieblom.

Bookings:
Given the popularity of this outing, we suggest you book and pay quickly. We have limited space! If you would like to come, please fill in our online booking form or email kate@slowfoodmothercity.co.za

First come, first served (members do get advance warning). If you have not made the deposit within 4 days of booking, and there are others waiting, we will make your space/s available to the next person in line. Please book before the 6th of August 2010.

REMEMBER TO BRING
For the farm tour: appropriate shoes and rain protection (Wellies if you plan to do some wading!)
For your meal: your own wine and nonalcoholic beverages.

Event feedback

We’d love your feedback on our events! If you’ve attended a Slow Food Mother City event, please let us know what you thought by emailing events@slowfoodmothercity.co.za. All comments and suggestions are welcomed.

Upcoming events:

If you can’t make it, but are keen for future outings, here’s a taster of the events and projects we’re organising for the months to come.

Port & Chocolate truffle tasting (September, date TBC)
Slow Food Film Evening (September/October, date TBC)
Organic plum picking (November, date TBC)

If you would like to become a member of Slow Food Mother City (only R70 per annum), sign up here.

Photo credits: Chapman’s Photo Odyssey/Flickr and BigBlackBox/Flickr.

Fungi Foray

Michelle Matthews — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:08:58 +0000

Father’s Day dawned gloriously with perfect mushrooming weather – a crisp, clear morning after half a week of soaking rains. More than thirty slowfooders of all ages joined us to forage for fungi at the Tokai Arboretum in Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs. We were lead by the knowledgeable Dr Nicky Allsopp, who has a background in ecology and plant ecophysiology, and is a mushroom expert and enthusiast.

Dr Nicky Allsopp tells us that pretty much all of these mushrooms are inedible...

Instead of simply searching for mushrooms to eat, we were dispatched to go and find samples of as many different mushrooms as we could, which we would then bring back to Nicky for identification. The Arboretum is the perfect place to find a variety of fungi – it was established as a nursery to test the viability of various trees in our climate. The saplings that were planted were usually brought from overseas in the clump of soil they were growing in, soil full of different spores.

Exciting finds for kids of all ages!

Off we tramped into the forest… Some people were lucky within minutes; some got competitive; some wandered aimlessly, questioning their eyesight; others became engrossed in one mushroom through their camera lenses; and a few ran wild, screaming “Mushrooms! Mushrooms!” (the little ones, you’ll be relieved to know).

Look sharp - it can be easy to miss perfect specimens

We brought back a wide range of fungi, ranging in colour from bright orange to purple to white; in shape from “Smurf houses” to flat-topped to puffballs. The truth is, mushrooming is not for sissies. Quite a few were poisonous, with effects ranging from hallucinations to vomiting to liquefying of internal organs (hmmmm…). Books can help you identify these toadstool terrors. If you find a copy of this pick it up, it’s a classic:

RandomHouseStruik publishers will be releasing a new Pocket Guide to Mushrooms that will cover about 100 species in late 2010.

White gills - be afraid...

Tips for newbies: In the Western Cape, most mushrooms with white gills are poisonous. Also look out for a ‘veil’ on the stem and large bulge at the root of the stem – also signs that a mushroom is probably toxic.

Rainbow fungi nation!

A few were not poisonous, but not nice to eat, such as the purple-topped russula. Porcupines love it, but the few people who dared to taste a sliver of russula-gill declared it “more hectic than wasabi”!

Yum! Yes, you can eat pine rings.

However, a couple of Tokai mushrooms are delicious to eat. The porcinis (also called ceps or boletus) with their easily identifiable yellow spongy pores (instead of gills) and the orange pine rings with their distinctive green patina and indents on the stem, are the two most common. The best way to eat them, as with most mushrooms, is to slice them, fry them in some butter (maybe with some garlic and a few herbs), season them and eat them on toast. Their meaty umami flavor also goes well with the buttery nuttiness of avocado, also in season in June.

Mushroom soup - hot from the boot!

We rounded off an informative and invigorating morning with mushroom soup served in the parking lot. (Hot boxes are awesome, by the way.) Slowfooders loved the day. Alice and Pat said: “Many thanks for organising such an enjoyable fungal foray today! We just loved it, and the good company.”

Mushrooming meets high fashion

And, as Slow Food Mother City committee member Pia Taylor points out on her blog post on the event: “As long as those who forage do so without having to take everything all at once (or destroying the things they don’t like), we should (in theory) be able to share this incredible natural resource indefinitely.” That’s truly sustainable eating.

If you’d like Dr Nicky Allsopp to help you identify a mushroom you’ve found, e-mail a photo of it to her.

Mushroom soup recipe

Serves 4

25g butter
1 large leek, white part only, sliced
400g brown and/or Portobello mushrooms, chopped
2 tbls flour (or brown lentils)
100ml red wine, sherry or brandy
Squeeze of lemon juice (about ¼ of a lemon)
½ tsp dried thyme and/or rosemary
10g dried porcini mushrooms, soaked in 250ml warm water
750ml vegetable stock
Salt and pepper
50ml sour cream (optional)

1. Soak the dried porcini mushrooms in 250ml warm water for about half an hour.
2. Fry the leek gently in the butter until soft, then add the mushrooms and allow to cook down for a few minutes.
3. Add the flour. You can also use brown lentils to thicken the soup, and they’ll enhance the mushrooms’ nutty flavor.
4. Add the booze and cook for a few minutes to evaporate the alcohol.
5. Add a large squeeze of lemon and the herbs, and stir for a minute or two, then add the porcini mushrooms with their liquid.
6. Add the stock, bring soup to the boil, turn the heat down, and then simmer for 20 minutes.
7. Take the soup off the heat, puree until smooth and season with salt and pepper.
8. Stir in the cream, if using (you can also substitute milk for some of the stock if you want a creamier soup). Gently reheat the soup. Serve with buttered seed bread.

A ruffled mushroom (not poisonous!) popping up from the leaf litter