Bring Back our Boys: for anyone with a TV, you should by now have heard about the 3 young Israeli boys who have been kidnapped.  #bringbackourboys. World wide there was a call for all Jewish women to light 3 extra candles in their honor. Jewish women light candles to bring in the Sabbath, in some homes the women light 2 candles and in others there is a custom to light 2 plus 1 for each of your children (this is a custom I follow).

As I said here is the recipe for the barbeque sauce for the roast.

1/2 cup tomato sauce/ ketchup
1/2 cup Mrs. Balls chutney (not sure if this is available easily, but you will definitely find it in South African stores) you could probably use HP sauce
mix it together and pour over anything!

Now for the cholent  recipe. (Cholent can be made with anything as it is basically a stew).Today we had beef. I tend to make up my spice mix differently every time.

1 onion sliced
1 butternut cut into large cubes
4 baby marrows (courgettes) sliced
1/4 cup pearl barley
water to cover
1.5kg meat cubed into large pieces
spices (this time I used, crushed garlic, turmeric, paprika, salt, black pepper, thyme, rosemary, basil, chili powder) depending on how spicy you like your food adjust your seasoning to taste.


Fry the sliced onion with all the spices till glazed then add the meat to brown, put all the ingredients in your slow cooker on auto or high for 2 hours and then low till you are ready to eat.

This is great if you work full time as you can prepare the night before and just turn it on when you go to work and when you come home, a nice warm meal.


I have decided to go back to making a style of jewelry that here in SA we call Pandora, the real Pandora is really expensive.  I started making this when my mom saw a bracelet in the Pandora store, she went in to get a price and discovered that the plain bracelet is R900 (+/- $90, 50 pounds) and each bead R400 (+/- $ 40, 22 pounds), slightly out of her budget, so she asked for a catalogue, she brought it to me and asked if it was possible to make this for her.
This has proved to be a popular range in my shop and at the one place that I was selling my jewelry at, my old job had a gift shop in the hospital and as there was a maternity unit we sold quite a few.
I sell the bracelets or bangles for R220 ($22, 12 pounds). I am thinking of people being able to design their own, the basic bracelet would be R20 ($2, 1.5 pounds?) and each bead would be around R11 ($, 0.61? the bangle and the necklace is about R25 ($2.50,1,38 pounds?) I cant find the pound sign on my keyboard sorry!

Red trinket bead bracelet

Pink trinket bead bangle

Purple trinket bead necklace

My mom's bracelet