Truth be told its been crickets on here for a while. The fact of the matter is Kyle and I have been swamped for the last few months. We got engaged, then we got involved in planning and running a theme camp at AfrikaBurn and finally we got married last week. Don't be fooled by pinterest boards and TV specials planning a wedding is downright stressful and one of the hardest things we have ever had to do. That said it was utterly worth it and in the end I now get to call my best friend my husband. What a pleasure. Plus I suddenly have all this free time on my hands where I am not planning a wedding so I get to write and we get to cook again.
Luckily this adventure has given us plenty to blog about, albeit in retrospect, starting with AfrikaBurn. If you don't know what AfrikaBurn is, it wont be possible to explain it within the confines of this blog post, other than to say its the SA regional Burning Man event and to go watch the delightful video below (created by what has to be our new favourite Israeli - Elisha Goshen). If you look closely at around 5:54-5:55 you can see both Kyle and I (I am the one in the green crocodile onsie).
AfrikaBurn 2016 (credit Elisha Goshen)
AfrikaBurn is about gifting, there are no shops, no money and nowhere to buy wors rolls. We joined a theme camp called X-Communication which was the temporary home of 90 odd people including an art team from Russia, many Israelis and a few Americans, some Dutch guys, and a small group of South Afrikaans. All these people needed to be fed and watered for a week in the middle of the Tankwa Karoo.
Among other things, Kyle and I volunteered to organise the food and kitchen. Planning 3 meals a day for 90 people for 7 days is no small task at the best of times but when you need to organise, buy, keep fresh and transport hundreds of kg's of produce from Jhb to Tankwa (1350 km including 100 km of the worst dirt roads in SA), all without fridges it becomes almost mindbogglingly difficult.
Dry Ice, PnP online shopping, Makro and Westpack lifestyle were all our friends (not to mention our actual friends Manon, Jacques and the rest of the X-Communication crew). We packed each days dry goods into a large black containers with menus and the corresponding perishables into cooler boxes with dry ice. Everything was labelled by day with the idea being that whichever team was cooking that day would have detailed menus and all the ingredients at hand.
Food Prep
One of Kyle's finest moments in this this had to be the design and manufacture of the fantastically simple but ridiculously effective combination braai-oven. Thanks to this we manged to bake many enormous loaves of fresh bread for lunch daily. No mean feat in the middle of the Tankwa! The Russians loved it so much they asked for the designs so as to create their own.
Kyle's Oven and the delicious Burn Bread
Would we do it this way again? Definitely not. Dry-ice is brutal on fresh produce and doesn't last a full weak. Cooking for 90 people on gas and open flame can test even the most skilled cooks espeically in gale force winds and dust storms. Next year it will be smaller kitchen groups with each one preparing a meal for 6-8 people once in the week in the communal kitchen.
Despite the lessons I would say I would say we ate pretty well with everything from borscht courtesy of the Russians, falafels and tahini from the Israelis, Kyle's famous lamb curry potjie, burgers, wors rolls, tons of fruit and fresh bread with lashings of peanut butter and jam. Pretty good for desert cooking I'd say.
