*Soda Streams and Dried Cabbage

It’s a busy week! I’m getting the shop ready for a special day. We’re having a jumble sale this Saturday, filled with new Kisma Kreative stock, post-spring clean stuff, and new summer stock from other crafters. It seems the winter is mostly over and we are celebrating the return of the beautiful South African sunshine. Says me, as I sit in the darkness of a rather dreary rainy day. Oh well. The shop will be quiet and I can get on with the job at hand.

If you're in Grahamstown do join for complimentary coffee and cake while you browse.

The jumble sale is full of household stuff from our home as we start to empty out so we can fit in our new, small, simple house. It’s amazing how much randomness we can collect, just because there is space to put it. The money we make will go into a special savings tin to be spent only on what we need in the new house.

My Mom- made granadilla
syrup comes in  old beer bottles
that neither of us can throw
away.
The other bottle is an old Soda
Stream Bottle.  They used to be
made of glass. Do you
remember them? The bottle top
was white but I lost it. FYI, an
old Soy Sauce  bottle top fits
just fine.
I guess I'll need some
new fashioned ones now.

One of those things is a Soda Stream machine. Something I haven’t used since I was a kid but what fond memories.  It was a novelty then but now it will be much more practical. My Mom makes this awesome granadilla syrup. Totally amazeballs! Yes, that’s what I said - it’s that good. We add it to a glass of soda water, a few ice cubes and it is the most refreshing, delicious drink in the word - forget Sparletta Granadilla. It is also chemical and preservative free. Yes, it has sugar (a natural preservative) in it - probably a whole lot of sugar. But it is sugar that I understand - those little white granules - not some derivative, or sugar-like substance - TTPD42 something or other. Personally I feel sugar has got a raw deal. Use a little moderation, people. The other ingredients are fresh, natural granadilla and lemon juice.  Both grown in Mom’s back garden. It doesn’t get better than that.

The problem is I hate all the plastic 2l bottles our soda habit is producing. I mean, yes, you can reuse a 2l plastic bottle, but only so many! The answer - the humble Soda Stream machine. Who thought an eighties invention would actually be practical? It turns out they are quite a bit more expensive than I thought so some of the money from our jumble sale will have to go towards it. Unless of course someone out there has a Soda Stream machine they want to swop for something off the jumble sale? No really - wanna trade? Then all we need to do is find a recipe to make tonic water and that’s Tom’s  summer G ‘n’ Ts sorted too. This would make me happy.

One more thing I want to share with you this week - dried cabbage. It’s a thing. We get a veg box from Nitarah Farm every week. The box is full of  freshly picked, organically grown, in-season veg. You get whatever is growing and ready for picking that week. We often end up with an overflowing supply of a certain vegetable and I will not let this go to waste. There will be more vegetable preserving recipes on this blog. If you have any recipes of your own please do feel free to share them in the comments below. It would be much appreciated. I’m always looking for new ways to preserve excess vegetables.

This is my shriveled cabbage. Cool hey?

We have had a large number of baby cabbages recently. Beautiful, sweet baby cabbage. We’ve eaten loads of coleslaw, I’ve made a ton of pickled cabbage and we’ve had stir fry for days. There is, however, only so much you can do with a cabbage. Quite by chance I came across a post by someone on the Internet with the same problem. When she sent out a request for new ways to preserve cabbage the common reply was: dehydrate it. Really? Dehydrated cabbage? The thought never crossed my mind.

What I have discovered is that a lot of the time folks do tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. Now I’m sure you could dry your cabbage out in an electric oven on super low. I have a gas oven and the temperatures range from really quite hot all the way up to super-hot. We live in a fairly dry climate and we did have a lot of beautiful sunshine this week.  I sliced the cabbage really thin like they said and laid it out on a clean tea towel on a large baking tray. Then I stuck it in the useless spare room with an ordinary fan angled on  the tray. I thought, let’s see what happens.

At first there was a rather pungent cabbage smell and I thought, hmm, this might not be worth it. But the smell hung around for about an hour and then dissipated ( thank goodness). The slivers of cabbage started to shrivel up quite quickly. I went in from time to time to move the bits around so they didn’t stick and to let the air get into all the nooks and crannies. The next day - fully shrivelled cabbage strips. Like little worms. They were still a little leathery so I popped them in the hot oven after I’d done a casserole. I turned the oven off but the residual heat was just enough to crisp them right up.

So now I have a stash of dried cabbage I can through into soups and stews. They say you can use it in stir fries but I don’t see how - sort of crispy. But maybe if you soak them first? I dunno - I’ll get back to you on that one. I hope we get more cabbage in our box this week!!

Ok boys and girls, I have to get back to jumble sale tagging and shop renovations. Go dry a cabbage and tell me how you get on.

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