Needless to say we setup home in a place called Kathu. Where? It is in the Northern Cape, far from anything, to make matters worse when we lived there, the only grocer store and shop was run by the mine.
There was a petrol station and that was pretty much everything in the town. There were obviously the schools, churches and homes, but not shops at this stage.
Well the point of this story was you were either employed by Iscor or SA Railways. The nice part was we were lucky enough to have a lovely house, not much furniture yet, and we had a boarder who moved in with us.
He was young man who came from a large family and had a mother that could cook. He came from a fishing village on the West Coast and was a lovely Afrikaans lad, Koos.
He had been missing home, and was saying that his mom had made him his favorite dish to spoil him and he was missing his mom real bad.
Needless to say his favorite dish was "Melkkos", I had never heard of this. But not one to back down from a good deed. I thought I would surprise him and make his favorite dish.
Well, out came the trusty "Cook and Enjoy" , recipe book, filled with lots of South African recipes. Koos had left for work. I had some time on my hands.
It was a Friday and those were the days of petrol restrictions. Petrol pumps closed on Friday evenings and reopened on Monday mornings. Kathu was a good 10 hours drive from the West Coast.
So I decided to get started with project surprise. The recipe was read and re-read. All the ingredients we had in the pantry so no issues there. I had to make a dough, I was so excited it sounded easy enough. Make a dough, cut some strips, make a custard (thin), cook the dough strips in the custard.
How hard could this be, it was brilliant my dough came out fantastically, I rolled it out and cut finger sized strips as per instruction. These flat long snakes were good looking. I was feeling really proud of myself. I had done everything right according to me.
These long strips were quite thick now, they seemed to have risen quite nicely and all I had to do was pop them into the custard mixture to cook.
This was working out so well, these thick snakes in the custard. Well Koos came home and I could not wait to tell him, I had a surprise, he had, had a particularly bad day at work so I was really pleased that I would be making him feel better.
I called the guys for supper and dished up the meal in these big porridge bowls. Just imagine a bowl of really thick Cobras in a bowl of custard. Koos sat and stared at his bowl of food and asked what it was, I told him it was "Melkkos", he was not impressed. He excused himself from the table went to his room, packed his bags and said goodbye. He left to go home to the Coast, but what he forgot was that he could not get petrol.
He sat at he petrol station for hours making a terrible racket on his hooter, trying to get someone to open up the petrol station. He did not come back to our home. Instead he slept over at someone else and left Kathu and his job on the Monday morning. Moral of the story, don't let me cook "Melkkos"
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