Honest Chocolate

What do a juicer, a vacuum cleaner, rotisserie oven, a pressure cooker and a hairdryer have in common? They're all used to make Honest Chocolate at the Woodstock Exchange! I spent a delightful morning in a "bon-bon making" workshop yesterday learning to not be afraid of the dark - dark chocolate, that is. It was more about the journey of chocolate rather than actually making the chocolate but what fun!

Anthony and Michael started their chocolate-making journey at the same time, but in different countries and then joined forces. Michael sounds like a bit of a MacGyver, hence all the unorthodox gadgets to produce the chocolate. Beans are dried in the adapted rotisserie oven:

Then crushed in the juicer to remove the husks, which are sucked up by the vacuum cleaner:

Other tools of the trade:

                            

The warm chocolate is hand-tempered in a hypnotic display of handwork:

The chocolate is made from cacao paste, cacao butter and sweetened with agave; it is free from preservatives and artificial flavourings. The finished products are finally packaged in eco-friendly paper decorated with designs from local artists. I loved that the chocolate is made by hand and sourced straight from the farms in Ecuador and soon from Tanzania.  

As a little extra, we got to dip dried naartjie slices in the chocolate and garnish with a sprinkling of buchu leaves...which reminded me of my grandmother's koeksusters made with dried citrus peel and the buchu she boiled up for us to drink whenever we had a sniffle. Standing in the tiny kitchen, with the electricity tripping every now and again, watching Anele the chocolate-maker flick his wrists back and forth rhythmically, it all felt, well, honest.

Go check it out here: Honest Chocolate 

Looking for a Magazine that Grace and Frankie will enjoy

My brain has been rather over-taxed by academic reading and I long for something that I can get lost in, switch off and float along on the words and maybe doze off ... without constantly reading between the lines for hidden references to my subject matter. See previous blog on reading for pleasure...

I decided yesterday that a magazine might do the trick when I popped into the supermarket for an overdue replenishment of stocks. Rows of magazines were on display - home and garden, parenting, fashion and travel...I scrolled through the selection but nothing popped out at me. I didn't want a whole magazine on any of those topics but a maybe little bit of everything. My children have finished school, my home is pretty comfortable (besides I am subscribing to an old piece of advice from my new mother days - let your home be dirty enough to be happy and clean enough to be healthy), and I have been fortunate to travel a good part of the world.

There were magazines for "iconic black women", business entrepreneurs, and health nuts all half my age. I picked up a magazine that had a blurb about menopause and found the article - I swear that the woman used to illustrate that article isn't going to experience a hot flush for another 10 years at least.

Where are the people who look like me? Who aren't baring their all figuratively or literally, who aren't looking like slightly weathered versions of their teenage daughters? Where are the ones who are exploring new freedoms from their empty nests, going back to study, getting involved in their communities, reinventing themselves? The ones having real hot flushes or forgetting whether they actually did take the omegas which are supposed to improve memory? 

Does anyone do yoga in comfortable tops and pants, rather than sweating it out in figure-hugging designer gear, in rooms heated to above normal body temperature? I want to see women who like to look smart but are not looking for labels, who aren't afraid to try something new even if they fail and look silly. Where is the magazine that someone who rolls about laughing at the adventures of proper Grace and eccentric Frankie  will enjoy? Please feel free to recommend any!

Offerings at the local supermarket

Women Surviving Lavender Hill

Kimdendhri Pillay-Constant (facilitator) with
authors Veronica Kroukamp and Naema Moses

Aunty Veronica is one of the many women living behind the headlines of:

LAVENDER HILL COMMUNITY 'LIVING IN FEAR' AMID GANG VIOLENCE

LAVENDER HILL TEACHERS CRY FOR HELP

WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY? LAVENDER HILL’S DERELICT FACILITIES

LAVENDER HILL SCHOOLS REOPEN AFTER GANG GUN BATTLE CLAMPDOWN

Aunty Veronica remembers crying when she moved into Constitution Court No. 48 in 1981, because she had “always heard and seen what happens in this place”. Her children were afraid to play outside, they witnessed a gang killing, when she came home from work at night, neighbours would have eaten the food she had left out for her children. Through it all she was determined to make sure that her children would not be brought up “like the neighbours”. She speaks proudly about her children overcoming challenges to find a way to earn a living. 

In spite of this, her story is punctuated with headings like, Facing Danger and Change in the Community, The Life and Death of My Son, Tough Times with My Daughter Sonia, and My Daughter Roundel Who We Almost Lost a Few Times. The story is a rollercoaster of suicide attempts, battles with drugs, abuse and violence but a determination to overcome shines through and she ends her story with the words:

I will come out on top. I will achieve the things I want in life even if I must do the subjects over, I will do it because I still believe that I will get my grade 12 certificate before I am going to be 60 years old.

Aunty Veronica was one of the speakers at a meeting of the Non-Violence Vocal I attended recently.  She is one of the authors of a book, Women Surviving Lavender Hill, which emerged from a two-year writing project facilitated by New World Foundation. The project was started a healing process for women to address the trauma and abuse they have endured through living in a community such as Lavender Hill, a community of gang violence, drug and alcohol addiction and domestic violence. 

Places like Lavender Hill are the scars we bear from the apartheid legacy of forced removals when culturally diverse communities from District Six in the city centre to Claremont, Harfield and Bishopscourt, in the southern suburbs, to Simon’s town along the False Bay coast, were disrupted and the lives of ordinary people destroyed in the classificatory madness of the National Party. 

These depressing headlines immediately pop up on a cursory search on the internet, but I feel that I owe it to Aunty Veronica to share some of the good news stories that defy any ideas that we may have of the real people who live in communities like Lavender Hill. Like the Waves for Change surfing project, the Lavender in Lavender Hill job creation project, and the story of  Lavender Hill resident, Riaan Cedras ,who went from cutting grass to graduating with a PhD in Marine Science this year. 

The book is self-published and reflects the stories of the women in their authentic voices, is available from New World Foundation: admin@newworldfoundation.org.za.