Kombuis — Recipe boxes & pantry kits 164

What we packed this week

Recipe boxes

Weeknight Chicken Potjie Box

Free-range thighs from the Craighall butcher, baby potatoes, a bunch of thyme and the stock already reduced down into a jar, so the pot is on the heat within ten minutes of you unpacking the bag. The card gives you the layering order and, more usefully, tells you when to stop lifting the lid to look. It wants a heavy pot with a lid — a number three potjie, or any cast-iron casserole — and about eighty minutes it mostly spends on its own.

R385.00Choose a size

Recipe boxes

Cape Malay Curry Kit

Whole spices roasted and ground the week you order and never before, with dried Montagu apricots, a bay leaf and the roti flour weighed into its own bag. You bring the lamb or the butternut and everything else is accounted for down to the last cardamom pod. The card runs the roti separately, because they are better made while the pot sits, and because the people who get this wrong get the resting wrong.

R310.00Choose a size

Recipe boxes

Two-Person Braai Board Box

Boerewors from a butcher outside Beaufort West, a jar of green chilli relish we cook here, a slaw kit cut on the Wednesday and pap measured out for a small pot. Built for a Friday fire when nobody wants to stop at a shop on the way home. Coals only — there is no oven version of this box and I would not write one.

R465.00Choose a size

Recipe boxes

Slow Sunday Lamb Neck Box

Bone-in neck cut into thick rounds, a whole head of garlic, tinned tomato, a small bottle of red for the braise and rosemary cut that morning. Four hours in a low oven with one stir at the halfway mark and nothing else asked of you. It is better on the Monday than it is on the Sunday, so the six-serve size is not really six servings — it is four and a supper.

R520.00Choose a size

Meat-free

Chakalaka and Pap Box

Peppers, carrots, onions, a tin of baked beans and our own curry blend for a chakalaka that tastes like one, with white maize meal for stiff pap alongside. Nothing in the box came off an animal and nothing in it needs a substitution to work. Forty minutes start to finish, and it is the box we send most often to people cooking for a mixed table.

R275.00Choose a size

Pantry kits

Sourdough Starter and Flour Kit

A live starter fed the morning it goes into the van, stone-ground bread flour from a Swartland mill, and coarse salt. The card covers the first four feeds, what the jar should smell like on day three, and what a sluggish starter looks like in a Highveld winter when the kitchen drops to twelve degrees overnight. If it dies on you inside the first fortnight, say so and I will send another one.

R240.00Choose a size

Baking kits

Milk Tart and Koeksister Kit

Cake flour, cinnamon sticks, a vanilla pod and the syrup sugar weighed out for both bakes in one afternoon. The pastry method is written for a hot kitchen, which is where koeksisters usually go wrong — the syrup has to be properly cold and the dough properly not. You will need eggs, milk, butter and oil for frying, and none of those come in the box.

R295.00Choose a size

Pantry kits

Rooibos-Cured Trout Kit

A cure of coarse salt, sugar, crushed rooibos and juniper, with a side of Franschhoek trout packed on ice for the drive up. Three days in the fridge under something heavy, turned once a day, and then you slice it thin at the table and everyone assumes you bought it that way. It keeps about a week wrapped tight after that, and it does not freeze — eat it.

R430.00Choose a size