I was reading Marita van der Vyver’s captivating piece French Letter on the TGIFood pages about living in a stone cottage with one gas ring in rural France and I thought to myself, well I may not be in France which always adds that je ne sais quoi but I am living alone in a fall down cottage with one gas ring. What I want to know is, where are the “shapely little figs” and why isn’t the ground covered in walnuts?

Why am I not able to stretch out of the window for a bunch of grapes? And why are my neighbours not popping over with their wine press instead of firing up their Range Rovers and driving to the nearest wine farm?

I also have a tiny fridge with a shoebox freezer, which would just fit my Arche boots, and boy do I know that tiny electric stove which takes three hours to boil a pan of water; mine was called a Baby Belling and living in London in the 70s it was our main means of cooking. We even managed a turkey one year but had to cut its legs off. I could cook better on a cigarette lighter.

And then I remembered Andre Laubscher’s farm, Erf 81, this oasis in the middle of the city just down the road. I catch Andre early in the morning. He always says, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and then disappears for the whole day.

Andre Laubscher, the old man of the city on Erf 81, a farm in the middle of the city. (Photo: Lin Sampson)

But I wandered around the vegetable garden which has forged ahead since I last saw it, bushes of burgeoning artichokes, a lot of spinach gone to seed, but the small leaves at the bottom are still delicious, strawberries just appearing, beans and tiny cauliflowers, all I need for a wonderful meal with small sweet apples (thanks Marita).

Andre says, “For 10 minutes’ weeding you can take as many vegetables as you like.”

Sadly, unlike the south of France, there are no walnuts lying on the ground but NUDE Foods in Harrington Street (take your own basket) is like a whole French village in a shop with bread, olive oil and lots of nuts and grains, a really great food shop with organic vegetables. Fill your own jars with honey and olive oil.

Artichokes ripening on the city farm, Erf 81. (Photo: Lin Sampson)

Strenuously vegan, which is always a pity for me, but they do have cheese and butter and all those awful oat milks that are trending, filled with chemical additives. 

I have a frying pan, a very expensive one, already a bit wrecked, and a saucepan, now called a pot. I asked in two shops in Cape Town for a saucepan and they had no idea what I was talking about. They brought out little pans with ruffled edges etc “for making sauces”. The girl behind the counter said she had never heard of any such thing and she thought it must be something used by speciality cooks.

An advantage over French village life in the City Bowl is that shops stay open later; in fact I suspect that Checkers Kloof Street never closes although some of the assistants look at you when you ask for something as if to say, “Excuse me, can’t you see I am asleep?” Yep, a lot of dozing behind the counter and although I have tried, apart from the fruit and veg, there is little to eat, but I did find freshly squeezed, no added sugar, grapefruit juice which is so mouth wateringly delicious that it has been taken off the shelves. 

Saucepans. (Photo: Annie Spratt on Pixabay)

I love the idea that in France, according to Van der Vyver, flowers and wine are considered essential and can be bought on Sundays. There is a wilted bunch of chrysanthemums in Checkers this Sunday, hospital-visit blooms.

I love bread and could live on it. That is what I loved about living in the Middle East, there was always bread, even from a hole in the wall.

When I do not have bread in the house I feel I need therapy. Without it I might be driven to sipping my spinal fluid through a straw.

But for years I have been running a jihad against flour. I suffer from Fear of Flour. It is so bloody uncontrollable and then very quickly sulks in stony silence. I would more easily be able to knock up a couturier frock than make a loaf of bread. I left my mixture of dough for 10 minutes and when I returned it was as hard as the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain.

My attempts at making “flat” bread turns out an ill-shaped hard sort of leathery piece of fried dough, distantly related to naan, but not enough to make it really palatable to anyone except me. I love it and now make it every morning for breakfast.

If, like me, you have been addicted to what I call prairie or prison novels, you will be familiar with the words biscuit or biskit as it is sometimes called. Most people in American prisons appear to  live on something called biscuits and gravy. It seems I have, by mistake, stumbled on this biscuit. It is just a matter of mixing flour and sometimes yoghurt if I have it, and it turns into glue, like the stuff you use at craft class, but when you stick it on a very hot griddle it becomes like a biscuit.

I call it the Death Row biscuit.

Okay, so God in his bountiful mercy must have given Tamboerskloof something, if not tiny sweet black figs. Yep, he has given them lemons, thousands of them, every small garden has a bent double lemon tree, dripping with this useless fruit. Mindful of the ridiculous phrase, “If you’ve got lemons make lemonade”, I did try once but how much lemonade can one drink?

And there are pomegranates, more beautiful than useful. As I stare at a dish of them, I wonder what Marita would do with 68 lemons; not limes, and six pomegranates. The internet has a recipe for preserving lemons if you’re interested, preserving for what? Here in South Africa we do not have the long winters where such stuff would be useful.

But once you start looking around the ’burb, there are explosive little surprises, tiny tomatoes growing on the pavement in Nick Street kept me going last summer but now the wall is being repaired and the plants are gone. The Cape’s Mediterranean climate could be as bountiful as the South of France but people are much less resourceful.

The local artist Elsa Verloren van Themaat lives opposite me, also in a tiny cottage, and she grows on her little stoep the sweetest tomatoes and even paw paw.

There are also a lot of bananas, mainly growing on pavements. I pick them green and keep them in a dark cupboard until they turn sweet and yellow.

When it comes to cooking I find prison YouTube videos the most helpful where utensils are Heath Robinsonish and the cell looks much like my kitchen. In their severely restricted circumstances prisoners have to make do. It’s all a bit touch and go because sometimes the cons start smoking the seasoning.

It might not be haute cuisine but it suits my cooking style. One of the “cooks” for example has nothing in his cell except a rolling pin, probably one of the reasons he is locked up in the rozzer in the first place. I even have a sort of handmade toaster I can use on top of a flame, from the days I lived on a Greek island without electricity or water.

I find my guy on a YouTube channel called Prison Break. He uses foul language, minimum equipment and has Flip the Bird written on his T-shirt.

He adds corn flour and buttermilk to his biscuit mixture which I now do as well for added spritz. He also uses something called Mrs Dash. He says it is something you find in every prison. I checked it on Takealot and it costs R1,000 a tub. I think it is something like our Aromat but too expensive for us non convicts. Last week when he was angry with his cooking, he chucked in two whole tubs of Mrs Dash.

He swears under his breath as he cooks. “You gotta turn the heat down, you don’ wanna burn this shit. You can’t go wrong with Mrs Dash.” He’s a messy cook but a dab hand with dicing and I wonder if he is in chookie for knife crime.

He is an expert at what he calls “spreads”, often made out of things like ramen, and corn puffs which you can buy at the prison shop. Who of us has not eaten a bowl of corn flakes in the middle of the night?

This is all a long way from a village in the French countryside that inspired this article but the principle is the same: make use of what is around you. DM/TGIFood