So there we were, chatting away, when my best-est friend Moose called to arrange to go paddling together. Now let me quickly tell you about Moose - he is an awesome dude who makes award winning adventure movies. For sometime now, we’d been chatting about making a pilot for and adventure cooking series, together with another friend, Lucy. Anyhow, I told Moose that I couldn’t go paddling, ‘coz Mans and I were shooting Ceviche. Moose asked if it would be cool to film the process, as a test for our pilot.
So it was, that Moose joined us. I felt I needed help in front of the camera, so asked my mate Ian Ian to join us too.
As you know, missions like these develop their own momentum and direction. Instead of my ‘Regular Winter Salad’, we decided it would be more interesting to head off into the neighbourhood and forage for salad ingredients. This move was inspired by last weeks photo shoot of ‘The Spontaneous Pathway Salad’, which incidentally also was, Ceviche shoot 2.
Mans and Moose arrived with a whole bunch of cameras and a whole lot of fancy support gear. Ian Ian and I were radio-mic’ed up and felt like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay as we headed down the road towards the open fields where District 6 once was. Low and behold, the fields were speckled with those sour little yellow flowers we used to chomp as kids. And hiding in the grasses were the soft brushes of new fennel, both perfect for a neighbourhood salad. Walking up the hill towards my house and feeling rather proud of our pickings we noticed a generous patch of flowering nasturtiums. These would add a snap of pepperyness and a dazzle of orange to the salad. There was a problem though, they were on private property on the other side of a fence. Ian Ian’s rock crushed my scissors, so I had to climb the fence, while a suspicious resident checked us out.
It was then back to the house, to create the Ceviche and a salad soon to be known as ‘District 6 Salad’.
While the Long-fin Tuna was steeping in the lemon juice. We made our salad. It seemed obvious to use a soothing avo and a buttery lettuce to soften the strong flavours of the sour flowers (‘suuretjies’), the liquorice fennel and the peppery nasturtiums. We sprinkled olive oil and squeezed a lemon from the tree over the vibrant bowl of ‘District 6 Salad’.
The Ceviche was photographed and chomped together with the salad.
We all felt rather proud of our ‘successful’ day. That was until about 4am this morning when I realised that I had forgotten to put fine slices of red onion into the Ceviche.
I can’t wait for the Ceviche 4 shoot.
