Cooking with FIRE

I love South Africa in the summer. And despite the dooms-day naysayers it still is an awesome place to live. Summer sun sets later and nothing is about but Christmas beatles (it's that time of year), mozzies (I look like a mosquito-bite leper) and the thick smell of braai fires every weekend.

And since we have been down on our luck and looking for simple pleasure we rediscovered fire. Which is strange because the farm has only fire to cook with and in Big Smoke we become lazy to build fires. No longer.

We have built a fire and eaten lush about once a week for the last few weeks. It's heaven, the smell alone is intoxicating. All that smoke and familiar smelling fare brings to mind endless days of childhood in swimming pools or zig-zagging through sprinklers. It smells like hide and seek in the late night at the coast when the shy cicadas are out and singing their songs and we have to be wary of fruit bats overhead. It smells like the ocean, or the back yard, or your friend's house, or your brother's place, or that awesome birthday you had. It smells like when we were young and could still run. It smells like life lived at its best.

And you know it might seem that I am waxing incredibly lyrical about something as silly as a braai fire but when life is in tumult it is so good to light a fire and remember great times. Times when worries concerned a new bathing suit or a song name you don't know and might be quizzed on by the cool set at school. Times when anxieties were contained in childhood dreams about not being prepared for an exam. Nice times. And the present? This current time with smoke curling into the curly willow overhead and three near-depleted candles blinking around the grill, settling deep into that chair that is so comfortable even though it's only meant for gardens, looking at Tristan and hearing the hiss of the sausage as it drips it's fat onto those white hot coals?

This time isn't so bad either. Despite so many worries and anxieties and what if's, this time could always be worse.

Besides, we get to light fires and cook our food. Nurturing ourselves with the deepening realisation that all of life is connected and that happiness is a decision.

I am grateful for the smoke that seeps into my clothes and makes them smell muggy, the same smoke that burns my eyes and those errant coals that splinter onto a bare thigh in summertime when thighs are known to be bare and cut-grass lawns in suburbs remind me of my horses and the constant smell of sweet feed in the car. The smell of the rain always lingering and the fresh blast of ozone from highveld storms that somehow still manages to take me by surprise.

But mostly I am grateful for the fire of life and coming to realise that both good and bad times are connected. And that gives me so much to think about.

Found this online, too good not to share, will do a photo post with all our braai pics next :)

Cook with fire, you won't regret it.