It is April, and the city is confused. On Saturday we went out on a sunny morning and bought new plants for the apartment and vegetables for the week, and by the afternoon it was suddenly snowing. It is now Sunday, and it is still snowing. So we’ve made glühwein, started a sourdough starter, and right now I’m roasting two oven pans of root vegetables – some sweet potato, beetroot, parsnip, onion, potato, and pumpkin. We’ll be having it with our first attempt at prime rib, after scoring a marked down post-Easter piece of beef.
Canadians find the snow annoying. As both having grown up in the very hot and dusty Noordwes, we do not. Before I came to Toronto I had seen snow once, as a child, when we were on holiday far from Mmabatho. But I remember the fascination that snow held for us as children, and how, even though it had never snowed in our province, we thought that someday, maybe, it might. Especially if we prayed. On a windy day in winter, when I was seven, we decided to ask God for the sign of the fleece. We wrote on a piece of paper, God, please make it snow, and pinned the paper down with rocks on the front lawn. God’s sign to us that it would snow would be that the paper manages to free itself from the weight of the rocks, and fly away. We spent a lot of that morning praying. The paper didn’t budge. We weren’t sure if that was because God didn’t like being asked for fleeces, or if He genuinely didn’t want to send us snow. Some days I still don’t know.
Our meals for the week look like this: we’ll probably roast the aubergines and have them with garlicky yoghurt and feta, and the broccoli was last night’s dinner, roasted in a very hot oven and then topped with lemon zest, lemon juice and Parmesan, and eaten alongside some Italian sausages. The kale will join some green lentils, kimchi, pancetta and a tahini dressing for an unorthodox salad which will be our lunches for the week, and the pumpkin is in the oven right now. The asparagus will be wilted in a hot pan and topped with poached eggs and some very aged Gouda from the Boeremark, for breakfast.
CAKE AND DECAY 