Getting roasted in veganovores versus carnivores Christmas lunch
I started her up today.
Dolores, tendrils of blue smoke rising from her silicon-coated exhaust, told me in her deep throaty tones: “You need a holiday from holiday, my okie!”
Inside my man den in East London, half of our family party were billeted in a happy morass of gear, food, Christmas prezzies and a mangy half-breed ginger dog, his butt a healthy dark bronze after two weeks of Eastern Cape sun.
We had hung out in Steinbeck-like Pastures of Heaven; a valley at the end of a 28km dirt road straight up from Joubertina into the Kouga mountains.
Here, under apricot trees, sheep blahed and baa-ed on a strip of green cutting along the river bed with rough, spikey hills towering above.
It was hot, 40.5°C at 4pm, but not as hot as 45°C being experienced by my colleague on the other side of the Baviaans range, in the sweltering rooms of the Royal Hotel in Steytlerville filled with dry humour!
Our party of vegans and “carnis” (the epithet for carnivores) was packed into the the KougaWildernis River Chalet cabin on stilts with its weird wooden jetty running out and ending on the lawn.
A few metres below it is a wild pond, nothing like the original pool which lapped the now-stranded jetty a few years ago.
But the “billabong”, as it came to be known, was still overhead in places, and had enough wildlife stuffed into it to support a Cape clawless otter seen bounding along the banks one night by a thrilled daughter. The preparations for the Christmas Eve dinner started with my fulsome mate, Ben, asking my precious and brave vegan child – without blinking – if he could use her prized Oppinel chopping knife to score the rind of his slab of pork belly roast!
Her eyes widened in further shock as she blurted out “No!” but then realising the C in Christmas stands for “compromise, quickly agreed, on the promise that it would be thoroughly washed and cleansed.
“Look,” he said proudly, as he delicately laid his precious chunk of pig down upon six rounds of half-cut white onions. The juices of the pork would soak into these wheels and would be the crowning glory!
My bud then hogged the stove unknowingly for too long, meaning the perfectly roasted potatoes promised by the vegan cookie were only going to be par-boiled. Disappointment and tension hung in the thick, hot kitchen air.
But the feeble flexitarian father had a plan: I would chuck a few pieces of that fineburning apricot wood on the coals, build some moerse flames, and roast the tatties in a braai pan till they were crispy and mooi.
Ok-a-a-y said my disheartened, disbelieving vegan child.
By then Ben’s pork roast was being finished off to perfection on the braai, and we plonked it nicely, covered in foil, on the ground, while the roast ’taters were being negotiated.
Unbeknown to me, every time a round of negotiations, and placation was taking place in the kitchen, Ben was out rearranging the braai coals.
But I got those big flames up, put that pan in the inferno, and raked and scraped and scored those damn ’taters. It was devilishly hot under the dak, but the extended family of seven watching this little drama, drove me into a frenzy.
As those little nuggets turned a golden brown, my soul broke into song!
But wait, what the hell is that silvercovered thing lurking in the back of the braai behind my ’taters, but getting utterly smelted by the flames?
“Ben! What have you done!” I yell! “What the *&^#!” he roars in reply.
For there, in the smoking maw, behind the dancing, toasty taters, is his, by now, utterly poked pork belly “roast”.
He had slipped it in without my knowledge or permission and I, in my singleminded obsession with potatoes, had simply failed to register anything else on the braai.
The great reveal came when the ’taters were declared to be completely delicious by the ecstatic vegan-o-vores who devoured them, while the pork belly sort-of survived its incineration, though the crackling was burned to perfection.
The “caramelised” onions, however, were nowhere to be seen – totally obliterated.
Beer and wine lubricated the friction and a great meal was had by all, followed by a superb, drifty holiday.