ode to a dehydrator

I was in someone else's kitchen, washing dishes. Not just dishes - also all possible hardware designed for the purpose of turning dead animals into dinner table delicacies. Not the greatest fun, and a remarkably good place to discover that I had some distance to go in the cultivation of a generous & non-judgemental heart...

My hosts were accepting (mostly) of my fruitarian ways, but I found that I was reluctant to prepare my fresh fruit meals among the blood splatters. So for a while I survived - very happily - on my dehydrated fruit. Home-made and taken along on the trip as a sort of experiment, to see how well things lasted without refrigeration. It was a huge success, and I am now a committed dehydrator - if you know what I mean.

My current favourite - persimmon. The overflow from my brave & generous little tree turned into delicate discs of translucent amber, light as air, intensely flavoured. I should post a picture of it here, but I ate it all. Perhaps from the next batch.

Highly recommended therefore: EZIDRI dehydrator. And don't mess around - get the big one which can stack up to 30 trays - you buy it with the initial 5 trays, but you'll soon be ordering extra trays as you discover how useful & effortless the whole process is.

This is where you find the SA distributors.

And herewith my thanks to Alison from Tierhoek Organics - this generous, lovely lady who said to me: "But you should do your own dehydrating... this is what you do..."

This was at the Organic Expo in Cape Town - I wanted to buy some of Tierhoek's excellent dehydrated products, and Alison did the noble thing, and looked beyond her own profits, and advised me to MY best advantage.

A toast therefore, to the lovely Alison of Tierhoek Organics, and to those good Ezidri people who made it possible for this fruitarian to ALWAYS (whether in the bush, on a long expedition, or indeed in meat-eating territory) be able to eat a variety of excellent, organic, non-preserved fruit, without being troubled by considerations of weight (try carrying a bag of oranges up a mountain...) or refrigeration.

Thorns & satsumas

Here's one of life's little lessons: Never prune fever trees in the wind. Here's another: Never use a pair of loppers to cut a slightly too thick fever tree branch above your head, without noticing that said head is positioned right in between the two lopper-handles you're trying to force together.

Fever trees ? One of our most beautiful acacias - or it was until the Australians decided that "acacia" better fitted their thornless mimosas & we should call our thorned acacias "senegalensis". Yes, I know there's more to it than that, but with a lopper-whacked skull & thorn-stabbed arms I don't really care that much right now.

Point is, it's while I was entangled in the fever trees that I noticed the satsumas. They'd quietly been ripening in the little citrus grove between the fever trees & the pomegranate hedge. Now, isn't that something. Just as the persimmons finish, the satsumas begin.

the beginning (continued)

By the time we found it, it was late autumn. Now you know what autumn does to grapevines - and there was this stone courtyard, vine-covered. Catabwa-grapes - but we didn't know that at the time. In fact you won't believe how little we knew about what we were blundering into. But we did know one thing. We'd found it. Kyloe.

We didn't ask about the climate, the water, the soil. Nothing. It was enough that it had drystone walls - and that, on the other side of those walls, it was just veld. Real dusty, scratchy, rocky Karoo veld. Which means of course that we should have asked those questions about the climate (vicious), the water (not enough - not nearly enough), the soil (requiring earth-moving equipment for doing anything at all.)

Blind ignorance is a wonderful thing - it brings it own rewards. We would not otherwise have been stupid enough to plant a persimmon tree. And yet here we are now, rewarded with yet another ridiculously generous crop on this little tree. I share with the mouse-birds, & remember the grandmother who gave me my name & my love for the Karoo. And for persimmons.