The thrill of green tomatoes and a pink hotel

We cooked three jars of jam from green tomatoes growing in a strip of soil in our new courtyard. This is an astonishing first for us. Not so much the cooking of jam; my Frenchman and resident chef used to do a lot of that when we lived in a big house with an even bigger garden where we planted a variety of fruit trees. And we foraged from wild trees growing in the fields and woods around us, plums and peaches, figs and mulberries, and hedges of thorny blackberries.

But we never had any luck with vegetables. Not for lack of trying. Year after year we would try to grow tomatoes, beans, radishes, salads, carrots and other stuff in raised vegetable beds. The raised beds were a futile attempt to protect the young plants from snails and insects, which would devour our meagre harvest in a single night. Year after year.

We tried every ecologically-friendly trick in the book to keep our edible flora safe from the ravenous fauna – to no avail. We should probably have been thankful that the fauna didn´t include rabbits or other four-legged creatures, but the snails were enough to drive us to ungrateful despair. We would surround the vegetable beds with crushed egg shells that would (in theory) make it impossible for the snails to reach the tender young leaves. Or we would attempt to inebriate the snails with beer (or drown them in the beer, whichever happened first) but the snails always outnumbered our efforts. They just kept coming until the vegetable patch was stripped as bare as the Sahara desert.

And talking of deserts, whatever bit of greenery that was spared by the snails and the insects would be destroyed by regular droughts and water restrictions. We simply didn´t have enough energy to keep fighting this losing battle, so we hoisted the white flag, abandoned the vegetable patch and gave all our attention to the trees. They needed very little attention, thank heavens. They generously gifted us with small green apples, sweet purple figs, bright red cherries, almonds and olives.

By the time we moved to a much smaller house in another region, and converted the ruin attached to the house into a courtyard for outside eating, we had given up all hope of ever growing vegetables. Or planting trees, for that matter. We designed four long, shallow plant beds next to the ancient stone walls, far too shallow to plant trees, simply to grow some colourful flowers and shrubs to soften the starkness of the stone courtyard.

But the building project lasted much longer than we´d hoped, as building projects invariably do, and was completed not by Christmas as promised by the builders, not in early spring (another broken promise) or late spring (ditto) or even early summer (by which time we didn´t believe any promises anymore). When we could finally start using our courtyard, it was already high summer, with record-breaking temperatures - too late for most of the flowers we´d been hoping to plant. We hastily improvised with some drought-resistant shrubs in three of the long plant beds, while keeping one empty until autumn when we could plant bulbs that would flower next year.

Well, that was the plan. But once again life happened, haphazardly, around our careful plans. At some stage, while preparing a meal outside, we must have tossed some leftover vegetable pips on this strip of rich soil, because by the end of summer we had a forest of green leaves in that corner of the courtyard. On closer inspection this turned out to be the leaves of tomatoes and courgettes (or maybe cucumbers) and peppers, green or red, we don´t know because it was too late in the season for these vegetables to grow. Only the tomatoes were growing, in profusion, with small green tomatoes playing hide and seek among the leaves spread out over the concrete floor of our courtyard.

Whenever I hung washing on the retractable washing line between two stone walls, I would step on tiny tomatoes. (One of the many joys of the courtyard is that I can hang washing outside again, after almost two years of draping damp clothes and huge sheets all over the house.) By now there is barely enough sunlight left to dry the washing in a single day, though, and definitely not enough to ripen the tomatoes. We had to accept that they wouldn´t become red and plump and juicy, but we thought of that old saying about making lemonade when life gives you lemons.

Here life was giving us green tomatoes, completely unasked for, and we had to do something with them. I would probably have attempted that mythical southern American dish of fried green tomatoes, which I´d dreamed of ever since I saw the movie Fried Green Tomatoes decades ago. But meanwhile, during a road trip through the American south, I´d tasted this dish in Memphis, Tennessee. In a bar on the famous Beale Street, not far from the equally famous wide-legged statue of Elvis, I was delighted to spot it on a menu.

And what a disappointment it turned out to be.

In My Year of Fear and Freedom I wrote: Maybe I expected too much, maybe I´m just not a big enough fan of food that´s been fried in oil, but the blanket of flour and crumbs that coats the tomatoes is much too thick for my taste. I end up peeling it off and only eating the green tomatoes.

It´s probably as senseless as buying a pie and only eating the filling. But to each their own, and the oily dishes of the southern American states just don´t do it for me. The further south we travel and the more oily dishes I try – because I remain curious enough to want to try everything – the more I am convinced of this.

I suppose I could have tried to fry my own green tomatoes in a thinner coat of crumbs. But I was too scared of being disappointed again. I preferred to cling to my naïve idea of a mysterious dish that was also the title of a feel-good movie. And since I´d tasted green-tomato jam before, and remembered liking it, I decided to rather stick to the devil I knew. So the Frenchman cooked jam, adding a spicy kick of ginger because he believes that absolutely everything tastes better with ginger, and we felt ridiculously proud when we tasted the jam produced from our very own tomatoes in our very own courtyard.

After all those years of unsuccessfully trying to grow tomatoes in a huge garden, we now have tomatoes growing wild in an untended strip of soil in what used to be the ruins of a house until very recently. The moral of the story probably has something to do with trying too hard, but I´m still figuring it out. Sometimes, it seems, you simply have to let nature run its course.

Breakfast of the week: This might actually be my breakfast of the year - or even the best breakfast I´ve ever had in my life. It happened last week in the venerable Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town, not a joint I can afford to hang out in regularly, but the Afrikaans version of My Year of Fear and Freedom was shortlisted for a major non-fiction award and the prize-giving event was held at The Nellie and the shortlisted candidates plus their partners were offered a night in this posh pink hotel that is often listed among the great hotels of the world. With the fabulous breakfast included.

Niksgewoond, meaning `not used to anything´, is a word my mother could use like a weapon. Ag nee, moenie so niksgewoond wees nie, she would say when you wanted to wear a new dress as soon as it was bought instead of waiting for the special occassion it was bought for. I´d like to believe I´m not niksgewoond when it comes to accommodation. I´m often invited to book festivals and literary events, and my publishers or the organisers usually put me up in excellent hotels or luxurious guest houses.

But the Mount Nelson is in a league of its own, more a monument than a mere hotel, its guest list over the past century including presidents and politicians, world-renowned authors like Agatha Christie and rock stars like John Lennon. Imagine, as a fellow writer said during the prize-giving ceremony, you might be sleeping in the same room Lennon had slept in.

So I was niksgewoond enough to overcome my embarrassment and pose for a picture in front of The Pink Lady, the colonial building looking considerably more stately than me and my amused partner.

Spoiler alert: I did not win the prize, but I still loved the breakfast. I mean, starting a Sunday morning with fresh oysters and sparkling wine, what´s not to like? And good, strong, freshly brewed coffee, and croissants as crispy and buttery as any I´d ever tasted in France, and many other irresistible pastries and breads, and a whole counter full of beautiful fruits and cereals and nuts and seeds as a healthy option. (I had some of those too, just to soothe my conscience before the decadence of slurping oysters and licking pistachio cream from a pastry.) And a mouth-watering selection of cheeses, and charcuterie, and, and, and. Oh, there were countless other delights, but I turned my head away. A woman can only eat so much for breakfast, even if she spreads the meal out over two hours.

Niksgewoond, neh!

I did, however, order the Eggs Benedictine from the menu of warm dishes. It´s a classic that I love but rarely make at home because I can´t poach eggs decently and I´m too lazy to stir up that tricky sauce hollandaise - and The Nellie´s version was perfection on a plate. Do you remember that old proverb about eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper? After this royal breakfast that lasted almost until lunch, I was content to spend the rest of the day as a pauper.

Sounds of the week: Certain sounds are such an integral part of certain cities that you can´t imagine one without the other. The peeling bells of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Big Ben striking the hour in London, the Mouille Point fog horn moaning on misty mornings and the blast of the Signal Hill canon at noon in Cape Town. Last week I spent a few chilly days close to the Mouille Point lighthouse and listened to the lament of the fog horn with a deep sense of belonging. And one bright day in a house on the slopes of Table Mountain I heard the boom of the canon shattering the silence with such force that I felt as if I was standing right next to it. Followed by the fluttering of pigeons settling down again, as they´ve been doing every day at noon for as long as I can remember, and will hopefully continue doing long after I´m gone.

Sight of the week: Back in France I was surprised by a single brown leaf on the wide window sill next to my bed, looking like a little upturned boat on a deserted beach at low tide. It was a warning that the seasons are turning, like the tides, that autumn is rolling in like a wave, and soon it will be cold and dark on this beach.