Thank God It’s Food

11/06/2024

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/soup-recipes/

Browse our collection of soul warming soup recipes brought to you by Daily Maverick Food Editor, Tony Jackman.

15/04/2023

There goes Vanuatu.

17/03/2023

Cuddle up to your air fryer, get to know it, and your air frying days will become memories to treasure. Here are TGIFood Editor Tony Jackman’s 10 steps to getting to know your air fryer better.

25/11/2022

Winners abounded at the annual Eat Out restaurant awards, and Gauteng got a half-decent look-in this time. But the room suddenly fell silent when a strange restaurant name was announced. Then, later on, it won the restaurant of the year award. Huh?

11/11/2022

There’s more to the Karoo than Route 62. Take Route 63 for a change, for a ramble along a lesser-known Karoo road that brings a brooding mélange of dark treasures, Gothic thrills and strange secrets. There’s even a bizarre bazaar.

04/11/2022

I was supposed to go to Helsinki half a year ago but my renewed passport arrived the day before I was due to fly. I had to forgo that trip, but my Finnish angels offered me another one. What could possibly go wrong this time? Well. I’ll tell you.

16/09/2022

This was a quest. First came the hunt, the seminal day that would stay with me forever. A year later came the fynvleis and the end of a mission.

22/07/2022

The Starry Starry Night over the Karoo shone more brightly this week. We felt as if every eye in every dorp could see what the James Webb Telescope had seen; had shown us. Not only the eyes of the rich and pampered or the educated and privileged. Every eye. We even got the pots out to celebrate.

01/07/2022

There were cupcakes and milk tarts, scones and dainty sandwiches. There was roast lamb and malva pudding, and Sally Andrew and Des Lindberg among other fine participants. In the end, there were happy tears in every eye.

06/05/2022

The sun seems to bless the Karoo Food Festival every year, even if the clammy grip of early winter has kept us indoors for two weeks before the event. But there it was again, blue skies and warm air for three days in a row, the last gasp of the dying summer before the inevitable chill.

14/04/2022

The shoes we walk in take us through the times of our lives. Like ants we touch one another and move on, then find one another again when least expecting to. Along the way there’s food, wine, laughter and stories worth telling. Sometimes the drama even ends up on the plate, as it did at a fabulous...

25/03/2022

Mario’s years and experiences permeate the restaurant. You can almost hear the clatter of dinner services from the past decades and the conversations of all the people who scrawled graffiti on the walls. It’s no stretch to imagine that Mario is still there, silently keeping an eye.

18/03/2022

Sky trains over the Klein Karoo, locusts turning cartwheels on the windscreen. The Karoo is alive with wonder and surprises, even on a normal day, but these were two seminal days in this writer’s long life.

25/02/2022

It’s the monarch of meat, the benchmark of how perfect beef can be. Once the preserve of the Japanese aristocracy, the Wagyu beef that originated in the Kobe district of Japan’s Hyogo prefecture has travelled the globe in recent years. Now, the South African Wagyu industry is poised to flex its ...

11/02/2022

When the wind was in from Africa and the night was a starry dome, was she feeling the breath of the faraway Karoo, sensing something in the air that was strangely familiar. A lady of the canyon, imagined on the veld in a world of hope turned to sorrow. Somewhere in the Karoo, the cassette player in....

04/02/2022

We think of the Karoo as koppie-punctuated Platteland and endless scrubby veld. But there’s a vast swathe of it that hugs the coastline. It even stretches well into the Sperrgebiet and the arid strangeness of southern Namibia. The Karoo I called home. My birthright Karoo.

28/01/2022

On these parched plains, strangers wander like waifs adrift, far from home and bewildered in their new unfamiliar environment. Does anybody or anything really belong here, other than the makataan and the hands that forged the art of the old rock caves?

14/01/2022

A gift of Szechuan peppercorns had me defrosting a springbok loin and making this marinade, but you can use beef fillet if you prefer. This is hot stuff.

08/01/2022

Old wagon tracks led to strange bredies and inquisitive strangers in the land the ancients called ‘Garob’: dry, uninhabited, unfruitful. But in the Karoo, then and now, there is always life, drama, and mystery.

14/10/2021

Lamb can take Asian ingredients even if it’s an unusual route for this cut of meat so prized by many South Africans. Spying the jar of pickled ginger with its gorgeous curls of pink delight, I reached for soy and garlic and picked some fresh spearmint from the garden.

10/10/2021

The reps of the Fifties and Sixties drove great big sedans and knew every hotel worth staying in on every long road. They would have stayed in a hotel like this one. Only it wasn’t anything like this in their era.

08/08/2021

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06/08/2021

Three years in the planning, twice delayed by illness and then pandemic, my Day of the Hunt finally dawned.

16/07/2021

If you thought cinnamon and cassia were the same thing, you’d be barking up the wrong cinnamomum tree.

02/07/2021

Allow me to share just one small and very personal example of the effect the shutting down of restaurants can have on an individual, not to mention the desperate restaurateurs.

18/06/2021

Karoo Dreaming via De Rust and Willowmore…

The stars unlock doors to memories in their little cubby holes in the mind, stored there until a smell, a sight, a word, a thought, suddenly frees it.

28/05/2021

Michigan may seem like a dream to you now that you’ve fetched up in the deep Karoo and have to learn to understand the terrain and the local ways if you’re ever to get out.

22/02/2021

Imagine if tomatoes could decide how they wanted to identify.

14/01/2021

A reflection for times of pandemic inspired by the lyrics of songs by British and French pop divas of the Sixties.

07/01/2021

The melancholic torpor between Christmas and New Year found us stepping back to another age, a time of leafy old hotels, manners forgotten and ways long mourned.