Heyla Meyer News Today

Caprese salad, is all about colour, but that’s not to say it is not also about texture and flavour. It’s all of those things.

Making jam from scratch in an old kitchen is one of the most joyful things you’ll ever do in the Karoo. And if you can somehow source red prickly pears, you’ll be blown away by the degree of satisfaction to be had from the experience.

It’s clear: Daily Maverick readers love baked puddings, even on hot summer’s days. Of the many entries received for our competition, 90% were for baked puddings.

Last weekend, the Cradock Dinner Club was born, the first of a series of pop-up restaurants for which three chefs pool their talents.

There needed to be a challenge and it needed to be tough, tight and vrot with tension, as we say in the Karoo. There would be laughter, fun and maybe even a few tears. And it would start with a kitchen pantry just like they do it on MasterChef Australia.

Though there is hardly any cooking involved, the effort that goes into an affair of this kind is quite something. The rewards are stupendous.

Can coleslaw be better than it is, in that bowl on the side table at the braai? Yes, it can.

Revelling in the discarded and the distressed, and tarting them up for the festive season.

Red prickly pears are the heart and soul of the Karoo kitchen.

This column is paired with this recipe Makataan is a lovely word. It rolls off the tongue in three syllables, the third long aaa being accentuated as if in birdsong…. Ma-ka-taaaan, ma-ka-taaaan. You can almost picture a cocky little bird topped by a brightly coloured comb trilling it as an incitement to mate. But makataan is the name of a fruit, and a wild one at that. It looks exactly like a watermelon. Which is what it is. But not the one you got to know as a child, running around the lawn...