While our family quite often has vegetarian meals, these probably don’t occur on a weekly basis, and certainly not on a fixed day of the week. So, this evening we had our first-ever Meat-free Monday.

I made a curry, with chickpeas and roast butternut, and it really was a hassle-free experience. The first step was to make the curry base (if you’re not in the mood for all this, simply buy one ready-made here).

Making the Curry Base
I fried two chopped onions, and then added two cloves of chopped garlic with about two inches of ginger (grated). Once the onions were translucent I added the spices:
2 heaped teaspoons of NoMU Indian Rub
5 heaped teaspoons of NoMU Masala Rub
I also put in about 100g of flaked almonds, which added flavour and gave a nice texture to the finished result.
After a minute, or so, of roasting in the pot I added the liquid:
1 small tin (400g) of chopped tomato
1 small tin (same size) of coconut milk
This whole lot was left to simmer covered for an hour, after which I added NoMU Vegetable Fond (concentrated liquid stock) to taste, as well as salt and about a cup of water.

Assembly
A couple of minutes before service I added two 400g tins of chickpeas (drained), as well as the pre-roasted chunks of butternut, to warm through.

The curry was served with Basmati rice and steamed broccoli. I washed it down with Cloof’s The Very Vivacious Viognier, which was a very happy companion to the spicy (but not ‘hot’) food.

Curry is one of those meals that often features as a takeaway meal, largely – I suspect – because we’re too intimidated to make it ourselves. Our curry this evening was every bit as successful as anything we’ve bought it. And, four of us ate ourselves into a stupor for a fraction of the cost of a lamb roast.

Thank God, though, Meat-free Monday only comes around once a week. As delicious as this evening’s meal was, a perfectly grilled pork chop is so much more satisfying.

(Disclosure: my sister, Tracy, and her husband, Paul, founded, own and manage NoMU. The name arose from Tracy’s interest years ago in opening a vegetarian deli, which would sell no meat, or No Moo, hence the name. NoMU’s online shop is one of my web projects.)

More gangsta than police boss (in dress, certainly), Bheki Cele

Three weeks have now passed since the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, released her report, in which she found National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele guilty of improper conduct and maladministration. There are no signs of Cele facing any disciplinary procedures, and the R500 million lease that was the subject of the investigation remains in place.

The bare bones of what went down is that Cele’s mate, Roux Shabangu, bought a R50 million property once he had the assurance that SAPS would enter into a R500 million rental agreement. Sweet deal.

If the guy who heads the police service can act without probity – with impunity – it is time for us to be asking Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guards themselves)?

Last night’s Carte Blanche highlighted the appalling state of schools in the Eastern Cape. At best, it’s a product of inept administration and negligence. At worst, well, you can toss in every variation of fraud, theft or corruption that pops into your head.

Apart from the loss of taxpayers’ funds, the people most affected by this knavery are the kids being deprived of an education (not to mention the lunch they’re supposed to get while at school).

I’m not suggesting that Robin Hood lived his life by exemplary morals, but he occupies a place of some respect, if only in legend, in that he relieved only the rich of excess belongings. The robbing being done in South Africa is from neighbourhoods who can least afford it. And the robbing isn’t of surplus material objects; communities are being deprived of safe water, sewerage, education, housing and basic health care. Yes, some of these shortages are the result of insufficient resources, but how much more could be done if government (at national and local levels) was both honest and efficient.

Zuma and his cronies should be aware that the demographics in South Africa (large numbers of unemployed people under the age of 30) are very similar to Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

The upcoming local government elections could get very interesting indeed. I’m not expecting a huge shift in voters to parties other than the ANC; the number to watch is the percentage turnout. A low voter turnout in traditional ANC areas will be tantamount to a vote of no confidence.

I grew up with my mother using the words “England expects” as preamble to any important assignment I had, whether it was sporting or academic. It wasn’t that our family has any fealty to England; more that it seemed appropriate to borrow from Admiral Nelson’s “England expects that every man will do his duty”, which was the message that went out to his fleet just prior to the Battle of Trafalgar.

The expectations of a nation are a heavy mantle; especially when either of the Proteas or Springboks (South Africa’s national cricket and rugby teams) take to the field. Sunday’s group stage match in the Cricket World Cup, against England, was no different.

Except, every time the Proteas lose an important match they would have won most other days they are accused of having ‘choked’.

Scoring at three runs to the over, even on a dodgy pitch, is not a tough ask of a team that has aspirations to winning the entire tournament. But, to the disappointment of millions of South Africans, they were bowled out seven runs short of the target, with plenty of balls to spare. Two fours would have done it; a six would have resulted in a tied result. But no, in the final analysis, the team was devoid of the heroics that would have brought victory and honour to the team. How many times have we not seen – in a one-day international – victory being snatched from the jaws of defeat by a single batsman standing tall, smashing the ball to all corners of the stadium?

It is very easy to sit at home, watching the ball spinning harmlessly through the air in slow motion, and suggest that the men did not do their duty. That they choked when confronted with the hugeness of the task at hand.

On the other hand, a group of men (and women) who certainly didn’t choke on Sunday – either literally or figuratively – gathered for a late afternoon lunch at our house. They were predominantly chefs, their spouses and kids, as well as a few foodie-inclined people. The centre-piece of the lunch was slow-roasted shoulder of pork (two of them, to be precise), weighing in at 13kg. It was way too much food, but we knew that only one shoulder would be too little.

In cricketing terms, it was a bit like being asked to score 100 overs’ worth of runs in only 50 overs, but the guests went about their eating with such gusto that the leftovers were quite minimal. No-one could accuse them of having ‘choked’!

As an experiment, we cooked the two shoulders slightly differently. Each of them was rubbed with a mixture of fennel seeds and salt, and laid atop a bed of chopped onion, carrot, garlic and fennel bulbs, moistened with a bottle of white wine. They were roasted for about eight hours at 100-degrees. One of them, though, was covered with foil, which trapped the moisture. Just before service we added half a litre of chicken stock to each roasting tray and cranked up the grill to crisp the now-uncovered covered one.

The crackling on the one that had been roasted uncovered may have had the slight edge, but the meat of the covered one was juicier and more tender.

I took a little straw poll amongst the chefs, and we agreed that the best way to get perfect crackling is to remove the skin from the roast, slice it thinly, season it well, and then whack it under the grill. Getting the perfect roast, as well as the perfect crackling, is a lot easier when the processes are separated.

Cricket, of course, is a symbol for gentlemanly behaviour, in which the principles of sportsmanship are theoretically sacrosanct, hence the expression: “It’s just not cricket.” Losing with grace implies that one praises the excellent performance of the winners. To say that South Africa choked yesterday against England is to give insufficient credit to a few excellent balls bowled by the likes of Broad, Anderson and Swann.

The literal meaning of ‘choke’ is to restrict the flow of something. In this case, the flow of runs was constrained by a combination of good bowling and tricky pitch. The Proteas’ batting certainly wasn’t up to par, but was it the product of a psychological problem running through the team? I don’t think so. Golf is perhaps the most ‘psychology-driven’ of all sports, and even the best golfer in the world doesn’t win every tournament he enters.

Saturday’s game against India is a shot at redemption, and I’m pretty sure the Proteas are going to be pumped up for it. South Africa expects.

I took these pictures just before 7.00 am on Wednesday. The day before had been hellishly hot; when I walked out of the front door at 6.00 am I could feel the wonderful chill of the fog off the Atlantic Ocean.

Looking north, towards Blouberg

Our usual Wednesday morning ride takes us to the King’s Blockhouse, on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. The views were spectacular, and thanks to my iPhone 4 I was able to record them!

The City Bowl, with Lion's Head to the right

I have been known to projectile off the front end of the bike, so maybe these sleek bits of metal have something in common, after all!

During the fabulous U2 concert, at the fabulous Cape Town Stadium, I needed to buy drinks for our group.

Four of us wanted beer. No problem there, other than the somewhat pricey R20 for Heineken. However, I also needed to buy one white wine and one red.

I can understand the principle of brands paying for the rights to certain concessions, hence Heineken being the only beer on sale.

However, for a city within such close proximity to the Cape’s winelands, it seems completely unbelievable that its biggest taxpayer-funded facility would not have wine for sale. The wine industry, of course, is one of the biggest contributors to the Western Cape economy, employing some 275 000 people.

The argument that Heineken paid for the concession rights doesn’t hold. Imagine if some other principality paid for the rights to display the backdrop of another land feature, so that visitors to Cape Town Stadium saw not Table Mountain, but Mont Blanc or the Sugarloaf.

The stadium is going to be funded by taxpayers for decades to come. Is it too much to ask that the benefits are holistically extended throughout the Western Cape economy?

Looking at this from another angle, distribution/availability of product is one of the wine industry’s biggest obstacles to building market share. This largely has its roots in the fact that no single brand has sufficient budget to buy its way into the market, the way that brands like Heineken can. Collectively, the entire world’s industry could, but one cannot imagine them co-operating to that extent.

Until then, Capetonians will pay a premium to drink Dutch beer in their own stadium.

Gloria Origgi: "Kakonomic worlds are worlds in which people not only live with each other's laxness, but expect it: I trust you not to keep your promises in full because I want to be free not to keep mine and not to feel bad about it. What makes it an interesting and weird case is that, in all kakonomic exchanges, the two parties seem to have a double deal: an official pact in which both declare their intention to exchange at a High-quality level, and a tacit accord whereby discounts are not only allowed but expected. It becomes a form of tacit mutual connivance. Thus, nobody is free-riding: Kakonomics is regulated by a tacit social norm of discount on quality, a mutual acceptance for a mediocre outcome that satisfies both parties, as long as they go on saying publicly that the exchange is in fact at a High-quality level."

There was a time when ‘bugger’ was a very rude word. While it seems to be an acceptable expletive these days, I’ve never been able to work out how one could also use it to refer to someone (i.e. in a ‘bloke’ or ‘fellow’ type of context), when one of the senses of the word is what the blokes are allegedly doing to each other. Oh well, such is the evolution of language.

Closer to home we have our own beloved kak, which can be a verb, a noun, or an adjective. It is furthermore used as an expletive and as interjection. The word is most likely derived from the Dutch kakken (i.e. shit), but it more generally is used to denote that something sucks (interestingly, the vowel sounds in the middle of kak and ‘sucks’ are the same).

I was amazed to discover last week that academic papers have been written about kakonomics. The South African in me was quick to jump onto the prefix, and without any further study I assumed that I had a grasp of what the content was likely to be, especially when combined with yet another beautiful South Africanism for which there is no adequate translation: gatvol.

The literal translation – full hole – doesn’t come close to conveying the particularly ‘fed-up’, ‘had-enough’ state of irritation/frustration implied by gatvol. I assumed that gatvol had a role to play in kakonomics.

Of course, even the word kakken had to come from somewhere. Many European languages have their own versions (think caca), and they all refer to the same smelly stuff. The person behind kakonomics – Gloria Origgi – is a published academic in English, French and Italian, so she presumably has a bird’s eye view on the language side of things.

So, what is kakonomics? To use Origgi’s definition, it’s “the strange preference for low quality outcomes”. In other words, a tacit expectation of mediocrity from the person on the other side of the transaction enables one’s own mediocrity, and hence reduced feelings of guilt.

I think there’s plenty of that all around the world, but a particularly gatvol South African could pin-point dozens of instances every day where compromised exchanges take place.

Basically, it all comes back to buggery. You know that you are kind of going to get screwed by having to accept a lower standard than what you may have professed to expect, but you are going to screw the half-deliverer back by reneging on part of your promise.

And, because no-one feels any guilt it all has a happy ending. That’s kakonomics.