Saturday lunch, biker party and Sunday braai - how cool is that?

This past Saturday we were invited to the Gypsy Jokers Christmas Party at the Phoenix bar in Vredenburg, fairly recently opened the Phoenix is already making a name for itself as the local biker bar and we will be visiting a lot more often in the future, that's for sure.

Janet and I decided that Saturday was the ideal opportunity to have one of our favourite lunchtime meals at the nearby "Vlakvarkgat resort"; the offal potjie. For those of you who do not yet know what that is, offal is the stomach, intestines and yucky bits that normal people either throw away or feed to their pets. Some people eat tripe but tripe is too clean for us, I remember when my late Mum used to make tripe for the family and it involved washing the stomach lining something like three times, throwing the water away and then using a scrubbing brush on it until it had absolutely no flavour at all. The way we eat it is an acquired taste but we love it.

 After that wonderful lunch with a bottle of local wine we went back home for forty winks before heading off to the Phoenix bar. Old folks gotta get their afternoon nap you know!

We arrived at the Phoenix bar at about 17h45, there was a slight breeze but otherwise the weather was perfect and about half a dozen tents had been erected on the grass patch in front of the bar already.

Not many people there but lots of freinds already and we moved around meeting and greeting and making our way to the bar.

Inside the bar was pretty busy and Anna and the bar ladies were being run off their feet keeping the thirsty bikers satisfied.

We found Frank cosying up to (or molesting?) Miss Christmas!

We enjoyed the music, Enrico the DJ was playing proper biker rock that had the joint bouncing and the booze was cheap, it looked like it was going to develope into another good biker party.

By the time we decided to leave it was just after 19h00 and we said goodbye to our friends, Janet cuddled up to Alex on the way out and he said to me "Hey you're behaving yourself tonight, Oh the wife's here!" Yeah, yeah - I'm not that bad? I love these events but I've learned when it is time to leave, not like on a rally!

Sunday I put a different hat on;

we had some non-biker friends coming over for lunch, good friends who are leaving this week to go and live in the UK, we're going to miss them. Time to make a nice lunch for them so that they can see what they are going to be missing.

First, crunchy pork tasties and here you can see the pork rashers are balanced with the rinds. which I painted with cooking oil and then sprinkled with salt, directly over the coals to get them crispy.

Chopped into bite sized peices and sprinkled with salt my friends love these and they crunch on them while we get the main course ready.

 I de-bone a leg of lamb myself to save a few pennies and then liberally coat with olive oil and a good mixture of herbs and spices and let it marinate in the fridge for a while.

Hot coals, crunchy on the outside but medium rare on the inside and then I slice it into an enamel dish to carry on cooking and the resultant juices are incorporated into a gravy.

And here's the (first) plate with Janet's creamy potato and butternut bake, a bit of fetta and pickled peppadews and a ciabatta bread, rather good actually.

I forgot to mention that the weekend started on Friday afternoon with my usual pool competition with my buddy Frank so all in all another great weekend.