Marco's Cube

It is Marco's birthday on the Wednesday coming up and so we had a birthday espetadas braai in celebration. It was supposed o start at 12 noon but our tenant gave us short notice and a potential lessee wanted to come see the cottage at 3pm and knowing that Marco's braais start at least 3 hours after the due start time, I volunteered to wait and so the lessee around. I finally got to Marco and Robynne's home about 3:30pm only to find Marco still preparing the espetadas.

After a lovely evening of espatadas and salads, a Rubic Cube shape birthday cake was brought out for Marco. 

Woolworths' Levels

Woolworths is a retail store that built itself on good quality but in the last few years Woolworths have become a big corporate ogre plagiarising on small local businesses.  From Frankies soft drinks, Hummingbird prints, to Ubuntu Baba saga, what is next. Anyway I stopped at my local Woolies to buy some meat and coolies for a braai that we were invited to, and we found that the gingerbeer that I wanted to buy were at different levels. Surely this would have being picked up by Woolworths quality control. 

I had to forget about Woolies levels for now because I was looking forward to some awesome espetadas. 

How do you make an Espetada?

John came up from Bethlehem; no not place where Jesus was born but a similar town in the Free State that you could ask if any good thing is able to come out of Bethlehem. But John, a Madeiran from Bethlehem is family and he makes awesome espetadas. So how do you make an espetada?

First you need the right kind of beef which is cut into large cubes.

Once the meat is all cut up into good sized chunks, garlic is chopped up.

Since John doesn’t have bay leaf sticks, but these large skewers, he crushes bay leaves with the garlic.

Course salt is poured onto the garlic bay leaves and is mixed together.

The meat is then skewered onto the large skewers that John carries around with him. I don't think John goes anywhere without his large skewers although I don't think he would have been allowed to take them when he visited Madeira last year.

Once the beef are all loaded, the salt mixture is then rubbed onto the meat.

The espetadas are then placed onto a hot grill and in no time juicy cubes of meat are ready to eat. The not too over done espetadas are scrumptious. A little on the salty side for me but I love putting the hot meat on a freshly buttered roll and uhmmm... mouth watering yummies.