Just add a dash of laziness and pop it in the microwave

SEVERAL of my friends and family members have built themselves biltong-makers. It doesn’t seem too much of a mission to make one. Basically, it’s a wooden box with a 60 watt globe in the bottom and a small extractor fan at the top. Obviously it must also have places inside to hang the drying meat.

I remember biltong-making was a major event back on the farm where everything came to a halt to deal with the messy business of cutting and marinating the meat.

My father would prepare a tin bath of vinegar, brown sugar, salt and saltpeter and then add bicarbonate of soda, which caused it all to froth up into a big brown foamy mess.

The strips of meat were marinated in this gunk for a couple of days, then removed, squeezed to wipe off the muck, and hung up in a cool, well ventilated spot.

All that’s changed now and biltong making has become quite a simple matter.

You buy the meat, buy ready-mixed biltong mixture (there are many variations on the market) and rub it onto the meat.

Leave to cure for a couple of hours then hang it in your biltong box to dry for three days.

Have a look at the price of commercially produce biltong and you’ll start to wonder why anybody buys it when it’s so easy to make at home.

The answer, of course, is sheer laziness. We’re willing to shell out bunches of bucks to save a little effort.

The supermarket shelves groan under selections of lazy cooks’ food – ready-mixed chicken spices, easybake cake mixes, sauces for pasta and braais, and spices for biltong. Who needs recipe books?

When you look closely at modern products you’ll realise laziness is the main ingredient in many of the foods we buy.

Pong Alley

There’s an unclaimed smell doing the rounds in our street and it’s causing the neighbours to look askance at each other, rather like when somebody passes wind on the bus.

Our street smell is distinctly sewage-based, and seems to move from place to place according to the direction of the wind. I’ve gone down on hands and knees and sniffed the manhole covers around my house, and noticed my next-door neighbour doing the same.

When I had workmen re-surfacing my driveway recently they kept nosing the air suspiciously like tracker dogs and examining the soles of their shoes.

A friendly jogger came loping past and called out: “You know there’s a smell of sewage around here?”

“Can you tell where it’s coming from?” I called back. He stopped and sniffed several manhole covers long the road, then shrugged and went on his way.

Luckily the small rain shower we had early on Saturday seems to have solved the problem for now, but if the smell comes back I shall call in the municipal sniffer-dogs. We can’t live happily in a street where we suspect each other of making unsociable stinks.

Last Laugh

Hospitality is doing all you can to make people feel at home when you actually would prefer it if they were.