Produce market trip and what I made

After my successful first attempt at making lemonade, I decided to hit the produce market so I could make some ginger lemonade. My plan was to just get pick up some lemons and blueberries, but I should know better. The selection at the market is just too good to be ignored.

$50 and a whole cart full later, DS & I left the store. Now this store often has clearance items. The clearance is usually still in good condition (sometimes a few blemishes, but they mainly pull whatever they feel isn't in perfect condition or when they have overstock). This I time I managed to score a big box of tomatoes for $2! There were a few rotten tomatoes, but the rest were still all good. So I decided to make some smoortije (not sure what you'd call it in English - relish maybe. I doubt there's even an English word for it, cause this is a truly South African dish. I grew up bilingual, but my first language is Afrikaans, which is a Dutch dialect with a hint of German and smoortjie is the only word both English & Afrikaans speaking South Africans use for this dish. Yep, it's not an African language). This dish is something that takes me back to my childhood. It's normally eaten with sausage, but you can really just add it to any meat.

Smoortjie recipe

Onions
Tomatoes
Peppers
Salt/Pepper
A little sugar

Just saute the onions until lightly browned. Then add tomatoes, pepper & seasoning and cook until tomatoes are soft. That's the basic recipe. Alternatively, you can add parley or cilantro. You can also add the sausage to this mix or you can place your sausage (like Italian or brats on a bun and add smoortjie on top). So good! I made a huge batch that I divided into 5 portions and froze.

The peppers I got on clearance a few weeks ago. They had about 6 peppers per bag for $1 a bag. So I grabbed a few bags. Washed, sliced and froze it all for future use. I like to prep all produce this way, so nothing gets wasted.

I also managed to make almost 3 bottles of lemonade. After washing and drying the lemons, I first zest them all and save the zest for baking. It was way too hot to bake last week, so I washed and threw a pint of blueberries in the freezer. Then later that evening, I crushed the blueberries, added some lemon zest and made lemon blueberry pancakes. Oh my stars! This was so good.

I always crush the blueberries, so that it gets spread evenly throughout the batter. Blueberries is my favorite berry, so I like getting it in every single bite. And yes, I bought 6 pints at the market...lol

The mangoes were 10 for $5.50. They were huge mangoes. So I got a box of 10 and made some mango salsa. I used some leftover chicken to make quesadillas (just chicken and munster cheese), then added some salsa and a salad. This was lunch, but it's actually big enough to be a dinner.

I don't like using the oven during summer, but yesterday I decided to make lasagna for dinner. So I figured I'd make some lemon blueberry muffins (I just got some zest from the freezer), since the oven was already on. I should've made 2 dozen muffins, cause we already ate half the muffins last night. Well, when the food gets eaten fast, you know it's good...lol


We still have lots of other produce left, so no trip to the market for another week or 2. I need to make some pickled beets (beetroot salad as we call it) later today.