Hot and hotter

On weekends, V likes to get busy in the kitchen. It’s his “down-time”, he says. He picks whatever chillis he can find in the garden and turns them into sauces of varying heat. And he bakes bread.

Chilli plants of all variety fill a long strip of the vegetable garden. They range from piquant bell peppers (the trade name is “Peppadew”) to mild (ish) jalapenos to insane naga. The latter is said to be the hottest chilli in the world: even its skin is blistered, and I’m sure that is because it’s so scorching, even to touch.

Its name is interesting: “naga” apparently means “cobra” in one of the major Indian languages; very similar sounding, “nyoka” means “snake” in Xhosa. The heat of the naga is measured at more than a million Scoville units, which is used to measure such things.

Me, I don’t eat too much in the way of chillis. Mostly, I enjoy their array of colours, and I use them in my muti (medicine) to get rid of bad goggas (insects).

Quite a kick

But I did enjoy the jalapeno slammers – quite a kick they delivered – that V made on Easter Monday.  And I added the tiniest bit of his sauce to my rice and vegetables. Usually, the chillis that he picks get finely chopped: my farmer cousin, D, loves to do this, and he does it better than a machine, although he has insisted on gloves.

D often appears on a Sunday morning. “Where is it?” he asks. “I want to chop.” It’s very sweet. Otherwise, the chillis are indeed shoved into some sort of chopping machine.

Then V gets blending. To the mixture of chopped chillis, he’ll add some olive oil, a bit of lemon juice, maybe some dhania (coriander), pounded peanuts, and a touch of mint. Every result is different.

Personally, I prefer the milder versions, softened with a little extra of the peanuts and coriander. But his sauces are greatly enjoyed by many of our friends, and their friends, too. He gets asked when he will have some for sale, and he’s very proud of it all.

An art

At the same time, V will have got the bread underway. “Me and Jamie,” he mutters. He means Jamie Oliver, who, in one of his earlier books (The Naked Chef), talks about the baking of bread as an art. You can find his recipe here. 

The process lasts for hours: the ingredients are mixed and kneaded, left to rise, bashed into shape, and left to rise again. 

Here, too, it’s a bit of a lucky dip: some weekends, for example, we get cumin seeds or sundried tomato in our ciabatta; sometimes, we could have olives pressed into crusty, herby flat bread. It all gets demolished pretty quickly, every last crumb of it, often smeared with the chilli sauce of the day.