No Bull

I’m not a cafe person. Eating out should be exotic, not mundane. If I want a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, I’ll make it myself. Why spend $9 on one? I don’t drink coffee either, so that’s two strikes. My antipathy may also be driven by working in a cafe – at Garden City – when I was 16. I can’t quite remember its name (help me out here Mon/Megz … I’d ask Mum, but she’s on yet another cruise). I recall little about the job, other than scraping squashed chips off my shoes with a stick after my shift, doing the washing up in a soupy sink, not mastering cappucino foam and the owner’s horror when I couldn’t operate a vacuum cleaner. You’d think that’d be enough to make me realise I’m not cut out for the food industry (in addition to the supermarket industry), but I still fantasised about opening a cafe when I was in my early 30s. The menu was vegetarian and the name was No Bull. I’m not vegetarian, but pre-Sprogs I had a repertoire of vego dishes that I thought would go gangbusters. Many of the dishes owed their tastiness to chicken stock, which would have raised a few ethical dilemmas. I’m not sure No Bull But Some Chicken Stock has quite the same ring to it. No Bull eventually went the way of the B&B and the indoor beach idea … Anyway … I went to a cafe with some school mums yesterday. I ordered that cafe staple, quiche. Not bad, nice side salad. But it was the company I enjoyed most. Lots of laughter, lots of chatting. And it made me think that going to a cafe isn’t about the food or the coffee, it’s a place to gather with friends. (Awww, feel all warm and fuzzy now?) I’m going to miss the cafe camaraderie if/when I get a job. I never thought I’d miss going to a cafe. Go figure.

LAST NIGHT’S MENU: I had some leftover Woolies organic lamb sausages, the tahini dip from Monday and a Herbies Berbere spice mix in the cupboard, so I made African Sausages with cous cous and grilled eggplant with tahini dressing. A little unconventional, quite but well-received.