holidaydaytwelve

This is Cape Town, right?  The folk here are renowned for their curries, right?  So where the hell do they get their ingredients from?

Let me start at the beginning.  Séan had promised our friend, Sharon, some of his legendary curry – we were supposed to visit her last night and take a pot of curry with in exchange for having a look at her keyboard/midi set up.

We cook with the basics like onion, garlic, chilli and ginger regularly but needed to purchase the more unusual spices so we set off yesterday morning and after a breakfast at the Mugg & Bean headed towards the Bo Kaap to find Atlas Trading.

Well, we were extremely dense and completely forgot that yesterday was the 2nd of January – Tweede Nuwe Jaar, when the Coloured inhabitants of Cape Town dance, play and sing through the streets wearing brightly coloured clothes in a carnival of note!  It’s a wonderful tradition, but most shops around town remain closed .... and Atlas Trading was no exception.

Not to be thwarted, however, my culinary husband had researched all spice shops on the internet and we headed off for the next shop.  To cut a long story short we were horrified to find that trying to buy basic curry ingredients is nigh to impossible.  We found a few limp bunches of dhanya at a Spar in a predominantly Muslim area, then discovered some dried curry leaves in an extremely poncy “Food Lovers Market” – it appears that fresh curry leaves are NO where to be found in Cape Town.  We soon discovered that a lot of the little spice shops that used to be dotted around the greater Cape Town area have sadly closed and only after nearly six hours of searching in all corners of Cape Town did we eventually find a small packet of dried fennel.

I mean, come on! all of these ingredients are readily available in fresh form in Jo’burg. Sjoe!

We postponed our date with Sharon because we were too exhausted to be worth anything.   And because our Jerry had been soooo good and non-complaining while we trawled the fairest Cape, I offered to take her to see a movie.  There’s a lovely South African made 3D animation called Adventures in Zambezia which looked lovely, so off we went.

Don’t know if it has gotten bad reviews, but other than another family, Jerry and I were the only folk in the movie house.  The movie was tremendous ..........

.......... until the projector crashed!  Slightly over halfway through the one character said “... and I ...” about five times and then the whole screen went green.  After about 20 minutes the hugely apologetic manager came to explain that they weren’t sure when the technician would arrive and please could he give us tickets for another movie.

Guess yesterday just wasn’t our day, huh?  ‘S all good, though – we’ll just try again.

Happy Day!!! J

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