Month: May 2011

  • Our little elves

    For the last two weeks we have had the hardest workers you can imagine living in our house and pushing us to get ready for this move! Grandpa came all the way from the US of A to South Africa to help us MOVE IT! My baby brother, who is now known around this house as Uncle Scott, came along for the ride and the two of them transformed our house! They emptied every cupboard, looked us in the eyes and said, “Do you really need this?” They played with the kids, packed boxes, sorted through ten years of our life with us, and went home very tired.

    They have left for the States and there is a big hole in my heart. It seems very lonely here. It is hard and sad to live so far from my family, but the joys of it are this: when we are together, we appreciate it to the nth degree.

    With Ben about to leave to make the drive from South Africa to Burundi in just a few days, I am trying hard to cling to our last moments as a family in this home. This is it folks, just two weeks until we are going to be living in a new land. Today it scares me. There are so many unknowns…. and so many great people we are leaving behind.

    Love,

    Kristy

     

  • Yuppiechef Love

    Those of you who know me know that I love anything that has to do with cooking. I am so excited today to introduce you to new friends of mine (hi, guys!) who are taking the world by storm with their cooler-than-ever-company, Yuppiechef. They have just published my photos and writing on their lovely blog (get ready for all things cooking, baking, and kitchen… just try not to drool over their beautiful kitchen tools, they don’t want to wipe up after you!). Yuppiechef is the best way for those of us here in South Africa to get our hands on fancy pants kitchen tools… in the color (or should I say colour) we want.

    Myles and I made Graham Crackers from scratch and oh boy, what an adventure…

    I don’t know what it’s like to cook with your kids, but cooking with my two boys is like directing a herd of elephants across a highway in busy traffic. It’s impossible to control, someone’s bound to get hurt, and something will break. Because cooking with them is like a full contact sport, and often involves a kitchen that looks like it was struck by a hurricane afterwords, there are certain rules of the kitchen that we must be abide by.

    Rule number one: Quit taking yourself so darn seriously.

    Rule number two: There are no other rules.

    Read the full article in Spatula, Yuppiechef’s online magazine.

    Luv,

    Kristy

     

     

     

  • the road to burundi

    The road to Burundi is probably not paved with cheese, just like it wasn’t in an American Tail. All the mice sang about it, about a place where the streets were paved with cheese, where there were no cats. A threat-less path made of food sounds pretty good to me right now too!

    I can’t sleep. I really want too, but I can’t. There are so many details flying around in my head… so many things stressing me out. The truth is, I don’t think we are great with big huge detail oriented things… like moves. Yesterday Ben told me that he thinks he should leave for Burundi with the vehicle on Monday. It’s Wednesday. Do we have a vehicle? No. Can we afford to buy one? No. Does he have visas to get through the borders he’s going to cross? No. Have I packed what will go in the vehicle? I’ve started, but really… No.

    Then, if I turn my head two inches in the other direction I start to think about how today I signed my house away. I signed it away, just like that. The place I brought my babies home to. Our first home. A home in a city that I love… a city that loves me. When we bought this house we wanted it to be a home that was always welcoming. A place people could journey to and feel safe, as if they had arrived at their home away from home and were immediately a part of the family. It has been that for so many, including ourselves.

    On Saturday we sold off most of our household belongings. It was like our house had vomited on the lawn. Ten years of life in a place laid out bare, for everybody to pick through. Watching people look at my things and decide if they wanted it and then haggle on the price was a bit too much for me. So, I hung out away from the sale and had good talks with great friends and pretended none of it was happening. Friends volunteered to take money and run the whole thing, and even make everybody coffee. My dad is here all the way from America, along with my little brother Scott, and he watched the kids all day while we sold. And sold. And sold. I feel such gratitude for people like these, it was a labor of love.

    I will say that it is kind of freeing to be sort of possession-less. It feels good to know that our things will be of good use to others and we can move on with just the essentials. The essentials, at this point, include a whole lot of dark chocolate.

    Luv,

    me

  • overwhelmed

    Getting ready to sell off most of our things tomorrow.

    It’s kind of sad and a little scary, but mostly just draining.

    No time to write, gotta get back to organizing.

    But I wanted to say “hi”.

    Hi.

    Until a calmer day…

     

  • These Old Coffee Trees

    I just wrote a seven page report on the intricacies of this season’s Burundi coffee harvest.  I’m not going to let you get it!  If you love coffee, it’s like a good novel that you won’t be able to put down and it might just destroy any hope of productivity you have until you can lay your hands on a freshly brewed mug of this citrus sweet coffee.  That, or you’d be bored out of your mind. Or, you might read two lines and wonder how, despite the continuing social turmoil and simmering political unrest, I can coax tired old Burundi coffee trees and their skittish fearful farmers into producing the worlds best coffee.

    I knew if I was going to pull off finding 48 containers of the champagne of Arabica coffees I couldn’t do it standing still.  So, I was back in the hills of Burundi last week to survey the start of the harvest season and check on my chances for success. I was struck with the raw enthusiasm of the farmers as they poured their baskets of coffee cherries into the large fermentation tanks.  Blood red cherries sinking into tanks of mountain water, drowning, and then resurrected to face the pulping discs and fermentation tanks.  The raw enthusiasm for the start of the harvest was palpable. I was taking part in the start of of something great. The love affair of following coffee from these old trees to your cup.

    It was another week in the heart of Central Africa.  I got another taste of what I’m diving into.  I wonder, will these old trees be able to do it? They are generations too old and the soil is way too thin after one war too many.  Burundi needs new trees… or my dream of a better life for these farmers will not happen.

    Coffee Guy

  • Today…

    I need to remember this.

    Love,

    me

    image via Pinterest

     

     

  • The Burundi House

    Just a sneak peek at the house Ben found for us in Burundi.

  • The Teeny Tiny Human Dilemma

    undefinedundefined Moving has forced me to deal with my life and my future with head on brutal honesty. In this “moving space” I have to answer for everything I own. It all needs to be justified and categorized and color coded (ok, not really… but if my friend Trish were here, she’d have different colored post-its all over the place).

    Sell it or give it away.
    Store it.
    Move it to Burundi.

    Sometimes this categorizing feels freeing, like a chance at a new pared down way of life. At other times it makes me mad. Mad that I have to categorize at all. Mad that I can’t just own something because it’s beautiful. I am tired of justifying the endless uses of a potato masher to myself before packing it in the “going to Burundi” box. I don’t get a moving truck, just the back of a vehicle and a couple of suitcases. There is simply no room for things that can’t prove their purpose to me. Which means you can usually find me following Ben around the house like a puppy with before mentioned potato masher in hand, waving it while yelling, “Do they have potatoes there?” “What about pasta, did you see any pasta?”

    My boys, like all tiny humans, grow like absolute weeds and today I confronted the growing pile of itsy bitsy baby clothes that no longer fit my rolly poly 16 month old. They have been sitting there, staring at me, for months. Do I place them in storage in the hopes of having another teeny tiny human someday? Or, do I part with them here and now. Buying new clothes for a perfectly similar baby boy (just assuming, considering my track record) seems like a waste with all these cute baby clothes staring up at me. So does storing them if there’s never going to be another little man. Then there’s the additional, but unthinkable, variable… what if it’s a girl. That’s when my brain went into a tailspin and I began following Ben around, not with a potato masher, but with one big question… “Hunny, do you think we are going to have more kids?” Poor Coffee Guy, he just gave me a look like I had stabbed him in the side. Ok, so maybe that was a little too much pressure, but what am I supposed to do about this teeny tiny clothing dilemma?

    You see, I already know what it’s like, opening those forgotten boxes. Staring at things you don’t remember ever owning and thinking to yourself, “Why on earth did I ever think this was worth keeping?” “How old IS this?” “Does this even work?” I’ve been there, I was the bride who stored her wedding gifts in her parents basement, never used, and took off for a faraway land. Is that kind of bride even in a category? Maybe like “Adventure Bride” or “Faraway Bride” or “Other Continent Bride.” Anyway, before I start coming up with even stranger bride categories, it’s here I stop, except to tell you that most of my little boy’s teeny tiny things now reside at the center for abandoned babies, Shepherd’s Keep, just two minutes from our house. I think they will be put to a much better, truer more beautiful use there. Letting go is a beautiful thing.

    Luv,

    Kristy (the mother of a toddler not a newborn)

  • Willie’s Cacao

    I love Willie’s Cacao. I love it so much that it makes me want to jump up and down and run around he garden shouting, “Free Willy!” Ok, that was a bit much, but you get the picture. Chocolate in it’s raw form, from a single origin, ready to be used in a million bah-zillion different ways. I am not sure that Willie sells his cacao in the USA yet, but I know that you can get his books here. They are full of recipes using cacao in both sweet and savory ways. I made Willie’s chicken mole one night and the hubs thought he had died and gone to heaven.

    We also love Willie’s story. He’s just a guy changing the way we think about chocolate. He bought a cacao farm in South America, and from there his journey to change the way people think about chocolate began. He spent weekend after weekend punting his chocolate to people at the local farmers markets in the UK, begging people to try it. From there he began a revolution of change. As a couple wanting to do the same in the coffee industry, his story makes our hearts beat just a little bit faster.

    Here’s a short video where Willie talks about a pet pig that ended up as supper. Willie is an amazing storyteller, but if you have no space in your brain for fact that pigs end up as bacon, you might not want to watch it.

    Luv,

    Kristy

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