Baking bread

Sarah and I are making bread.  We use stone ground flour from Eureka Mills, free from chemicals and preservatives, and it feels good when you knead it - alive, filled with goodness.  We are conscious of our thoughts and moods when kneading, banishing worries and negativity, willing happiness to flow through our hands into the dough.  The whole kitchen smells like a brewery and the dough sits quietly in its bowls, allowing the yeast to do its work, slowly puffing itself up until it bulges the covering cloth, declaring itself ready to be shaped into loaves in the tins.  Then the house fills with the smell of baking - reassuring, familiar.  We feel good, knowing that these loaves will feed many people.  We picture them closing their eyes and groaning with pleasure as they bite into the steaming slices of bread and thick melting butter, experiencing it with all their senses.  This is true bread!

This is usually a weekly activity, and we bake eight or sixteen loaves at a time.  We stand and admire the brown shapes when they are tipped from the tins, as if we see them for the first time.  We burst with pride as we rub a little butter onto the crusts to make them shiny.  Some loaves are sold to friends and people in the village, others kept for our family.  Sarah loves adding rosemary and cheese, sometimes even garlic, making a savoury loaf, but we have learned that many people are hesitant to try out unfamiliar flavours, so we make sure that we have traditional white and brown loaves as well.   I love doing this.

Autumn in Kommetjie

I hear that my friends have had lovely spring weather up in the north, but here in Kommetjie we have been experiencing autumn, the days are getting shorter and the temperature dropped by about 10 degrees to a chilly 18 or 19 degrees Celsius.  We've made fires on a few occasions already, and stocked the tins with ginger biscuits, because everyone seems to be feeling more peckish than usual.  I am wearing cardigans inside the house, because we don't have central heating in our homes here in South Africa.

The thing is that climate change has made our weather very unpredictable.  Here on the southern tip of Africa, we have a Mediterranean climate - dry summers with strong southeasterly winds and wet winters - but the southeaster has been blowing for the past two days, in autumn, when we are supposed to have still balmy days.  I have basil seeds that are sprouting in several pots, and a few sweetpeas will hopefully make it through the winter and grace us with their flowers in spring.

We are preparing for local elections on the 18th of this month here in South Africa.  Everyone aged 18 and over may vote.  This is a privilege that many people had been denied for several decades, but over the past 13 years the novelty of democracy seems to have worn off and many people don't vote.  The ruling African National Congress (ANC) had failed to deliver on promises of employment and education to the masses, but there is only one reasonably strong opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), which appears to be mostly white and coloured.  The political clash is interesting because it pitches Jacob Zuma of the ANC against Helen Zille of the DA - black against white, male against female.  Several smaller parties are paticipating in these elections though, and they might weaken the opposition. The major issue is service delivery - many people in rural areas are still without tap water or adequate housing.