Celebrating Seasonal Fruit and Store News
I feel like starting this newsletter off by saying that I’ve become an accountant. Something as crazy as that but actually it’s just that if you’ve found me a little scratchy and pre-occupied lately it’s because it’s been a time of having to spend a little too much time understanding every damn nuance of Pastel which I think could put anybody in a challenged mood.
It’s just that I have learnt – the hard way – that it’s an area of the business I need to understand in detail so that I can direct anybody looking after our books more adequately and never be caught unaware because somebody understands it better than I do. So that’s where my focus has been which has been a touch draining but one of those times when you need to address a weakness in your business and things go a bit unbalanced for a spell. Lesson learnt, I can’t adequately manage book keepers until I understand the system they have to work on intimately. I do hope to get some form of character back in time once I can confidently hand over with enough knowledge to direct it going forward.☺
Wow, this has been an intense year. I’m going to focus on giving you two of my best recipes I’ve done this week in this newsletter.
Probably the most exciting food topic for now though is Summer’s gift of abundant stone-fruit at this time of year.
One of the greatest treasures and joys to be found in living an organic lifestyle is following nature’s guide to what she gives for each season. Organic eating means eating seasonally and in our particular context it means that stone fruit is ours for Summer. Living and eating with the seasons is an eternal reminder and our connection to nature’s promise to trust in the process of life – that there is a season for everything. Our job is to honor each season for its own gifts and to notice the abundance and sense in them.
Knowing that the cycle of life is an ebb and flow, an ongoing cycle of death with a certain promise of re-birth is to be living in touch with a sacred truth and eating seasonally – consciously – reconnects us to the miracle and joy in that. Nothing that lasts forever can be truly treasured, we need to miss something to notice what it means to us and experience it’s opposite to know its true value.
So we live without fruit through Winter and then our South Africa Summer bursts with stone fruit and berries. To celebrate the abundance – in full knowledge that this season will too quickly pass – we are celebrating every gift of nature that she gives us in the form of stone fruit, just one of a South African summer’s delights, as much as tomatoes.
I’m going to spend every moment doing the best I can with the glut of this fruit we suddenly have.
Not only in-store but in my own garden, I have an abundance of peaches going on right now. Plums have just started arriving as well and this recipe will do well with plums, apricots or peaches.
I used peaches for this one as they were literally falling off the trees but I know that I’m going to try this again with plums over the week-end as I just got news that plums arrived in store today from Penny’s food forest. Too excited for words.
Anyway – so try this peach crumble for a more nutritious take on traditional apple crumble. If you’re one of our typical customers – I feel your pain that your children are probably not much appreciative of your endless ‘no’s’ when it comes to what they can and can’t eat. Living in a world of convenience and refined food in Jozi, conscious parenting from an enlightened point of view about how their food effects every aspect of their lives – is a chore – you’re having to say ‘no’ a lot. No, you can’t have those sweets, that dessert, those fizzy drinks, that fast food – and because that food is the norm and is what the majority of their friends are eating – kids of awake mothers don’t much always appreciate the effort which can manifest in a long list of ‘no’s.
This is a dessert that is made celebrating seasonal stone fruit and that they are going to love – that is sweet and yet nutritious silly. To make it even better, we’re using Moffett’s organic heritage wheat flour – so they’re getting an entirely different flour to the industrial variety we were all stuck with until James Moffett arrived in our world and changed it irrevocably. We now have access to the healthiest variety of wheat and flour we have ever had in Jozi.
Other than that – good news for today is that Jan’s dry aged heritage chickens are on their way to Jozi as well as his eggs and lamb – that’s always a good day for us. This lamb is generally preferred to those that don’t like the herbaceous nature of Karoo lamb. Karoo lamb is much like Marmite – people either love it or hate it. I’m a firm Karoo lamb girl but I do enjoy Jan’s Free State lamb too – it’s just different. The heritage chickens do fly off the shelves as anybody who has tried them generally chooses to buy them again and again as they are so much more rewarding in flavor and taste than chicken with a higher white meat ratio where the heritage breeds are a more flavorful brown meat roast so if you need any set aside call the store 011 514 0958.
The large Haversham farm chickens to replace industrial turkey for Christmas are also in. It is our last order for the year so if you want these for your Christmas table be sure to book one now. We don’t have volumes on what we sell as we have real farmers behind the scenes and no conveyor belt efficiency, consistency when nature is the boss and a good farmer honors that isn’t something we can ever sell or represent. We just sell connection to the best farmers I can find and getting their produce to you when we have it.
Other than that, plans for the new store and eatery are cracking on. The more it develops, the more exciting it gets. To be able to give you an eatery with the same ethos as the store – where you can relax and trust me to source the best food for you without having to worry, will be a dream come true for me and I hope a beautiful place for you to be nourished in.
A reminder that we will be open up until 1pm on Christmas Eve and then re-opening on Monday 9 January. The week prior will be about re-stocking and ordering and then we’ll crack on with 2017 which will lead us to the larger store and Organic Emporium eatery.
Enjoy this time of winding down and looking forward to a respite from a year that was bat sh*t crazy really. It was.
Thank you for your support as always,
One Green Love
Debbie Logan
