LIFE OFF A PLATE
The importance with food is the connection. You need to see where it comes from, watch the fish being knocked on the head, see the lemons picked. I have just done a promo for an adventure
food series for TV. We might spend a day skydiving and then in the evening I would make a fruit-drop pudding. Fruit drop means it is made from fruit I pick up along the way. There is a lot available. I found some pomegranates that had fallen off a tree right in suburbia. You have no idea what you can find on the ground. People with fruit trees seldom pick them. They are so used to going to the supermarket. Trees grow along the freeways and chestnuts are really easy to find in Upper Newlands. Someone will ring me and say: “There are chestnuts in Newlands, or fields of nasturtiums in Lakeside.” I’ve made ravioli stuffed with ricotta, which was made out of raw milk and stinging nettles picked in District Six. Vygies grow all over. I make sour-fig jam and sour-fig syrup, great to add to puddings and smoothies. They’re all labours of love. This is certainly not convenience cooking. At this time of year there are mushrooms everywhere, parasol mushrooms on the fringe of the woods, and I find a lot of boletus in the parks
around town. Boletus are my main ones but I love pine rings, crunchy, brittle and full of aroma. When I lived in Sea Point you could get
perlemoen off the shore. That is when I first started getting interested in food. In those days I had no idea about cooking and I used to bash the abalone until my walls were full of slime.
After a day’s diving, there is nothing like
alikreukel [periwinkle] cooked inside the long tubes of seaweed with the ends stopped with wild fennel. I have used seaweed for setting a jelly and aim to make a sour-fig-and-seaweed blancmange.
I do eat meat. A friend kills a springbok every now and again and sends it down and I carve it up and freeze it and it lasts me a year.
My partner and I plan to open a deli this year, and we have met with people at the Peace Garden in Woodstock. They’ll take all our bio waste. — Lin Sampson ........................................................ Charles Standing is a performance artist who lives as much as he can off the urban landscape, picking sorrel, mint, nettles, dandelions and other edible wild things from the waste ground around District Six, adjacent to where he lives.