Lifestyle

Industrially generated “home-made” soup is filled with promises, seldom kept. Distance yourself from this never-ending disappointment with real and genuine home-made beefy vegetable soup with herbs. This recipe – a classic, family favourite – lends itself to enhancement, modification and customising, requiring only your creative talents. Just as good out of a thermos as it is in a mug or a bowl, this soup is a powerful addition to your personal repertoire of good food.

Say “today’s meal is a salad” to any red-blooded, hungry individual and a nasty tone of defiance is sure to consume the conversation. But, just before things get out of hand, add the mystic words “Thai chicken” and all sorts of transformations in mood and food desire start to kick in. Salad alone is a punitive and unnatural thing, but the high octane enhancements of the Thai sauce, coupled with the protein slam-dunk that comes with the chicken, makes this meal as real as food can get.

Shiela require assistance from Jonno to design a double-storey farmhouse with two bedrooms.

Jonno transforms a home into a beautiful castle.

Girls should not be deprived of interacting with nature and being exposed to fieldsports, writes Abré J Steyn.

I guess there are 10 million versions of this national dish. This one gives you the basis to experiment while simultaneously amazing your friends with your Thai-flavoured expertise.

I received a call from a previous client to come on site and see what I could suggest to make their holiday home more user-friendly and generally improve the look of the house.

So this family holds a major braai with food of limitless quality and abundance. Somewhere around midnight, the well-fed masses went home, leaving this writer with the singular task of cleaning up.

In 2004 Adriaan Badenhorst and Angela Metcalf quit their jobs as guides on the Orange River and moved to an abandoned trading station near Maclear in the Eastern Cape to start their own adventure company – The Falls Backpackers and Adventures. Mike Burgess recently visited the now-married couple to find out why kayaking the unique rivers of the north-eastern Cape has captivated them.

I got a call from Makwati in Serowe, Botswana. He said that he regularly bought the Farmer’s Weekly to see Hillbilly Homes, but that it mostly featured large, expensive-to-build homes.

Cutting tools, especially knives, are mankind’s ultimate tool, writes Abré J Steyn. This week he looks at various folding knives, including one of his favourites – Leatherman’s Klamath.

This week Jonno designs a two-bedroom double storey flat and a townhouse of three bedrooms for regular reader Herold.