You know, with the price of restaurant food, unless you’re earning big bucks—as many people do in South Africa—then you have to go to the supermarket and buy ingredients for making meals at home. Now, pity about supermarkets these days, because that retailer that is the most expensive, Woolworths, is in the news for all—okay, let’s say supermarkets nowadays are in the news for the wrong reasons.
Woolworths has had two bomb scares at its stores, one in Pretoria and the other in Bloemfontein. In fact, that shopping center in Bloemfontein, I was there towards the end of December 2025 and I marveled. What a lovely shopping center it was. Obviously, I didn’t go into Woolworths—I shop at Checkers—but we’ll get back to that.
Then the other supermarket that’s been in the news for the wrong reasons is Pick n Pay. I mean, they’re struggling sadly with their restructuring program, and I see this morning that they’ve also had a data breach with the old company Bottles, which was the forerunner to their ASAP delivery service. Then there’s SPAR. I mean, SPAR retailers have been up in arms about the service from the supply head office.
But thankfully, the one supermarket chain that has stayed out of the news for the wrong reasons is Shoprite and Checkers. Thank goodness. This is a very well-run organization, and when it was run by Whitey Basson, it was phenomenal—and it still continues to skyrocket. It’s a big business to run a supermarket these days with all sorts of variables, so it’s not to say they’re going to suddenly get into the news, or stay out of it forever.
Anyway, this brings me to buying ingredients from supermarkets to make comfort meals. Strangely enough, I always thought SPAR was the best at food, and I exclude Woolworths here, because I don’t buy from Woolworths—not only because of their price, but because I don’t find their food interesting at all. It’s bland, and I don’t know who eats that kind of stuff anyway.
But the surprising thing was Pick n Pay has some very delectable foods. I mean, one of the key ingredients for a lovely winter meal on a cold winter night is pasta. Pick n Pay has one of the top-tier Italian pasta brands in its store. When I found out, I nearly fell over backwards, because here we’ve got one rated by Italians—by the way, it’s one of the top-rated artisan pastas in Italy. If you take Barilla, that other pasta that I always thought was so good, and that Italians I knew in Johannesburg and Nigel swore by, it’s actually sort of fourth-tier by comparison. So aren’t we fortunate? And you might think this is a small thing. Well, try the new pasta that Pick n Pay is selling, and you’ll see the difference immediately. I’m not going to say the brand, because people will rush to my local Pick n Pay and buy them out anyway.
The point is, it’s a wonderful time, and especially, you know, being able to buy fresh tuna from the harbor market rather than using canned tuna. Look, there’s nothing wrong with canned tuna, but the thing is, fresh tuna really is the “chicken of the sea,” as the Spanish say. It is fantastic meat. Yes, for me, the best way is baking it with a little bit of olive oil, crushed coarse salt, and a bit of pepper. That’s all, because it’s so fantastic. Maybe serve it with a bit of parsley.
But it also makes a delicious pasta sauce—though then you need to know what you’re doing, and you need to have some anchovies, capers, fresh cream, and so on. Then you can get that tuna bringing out the best of what it is. Look, the problem is that fresh tuna is very expensive these days. I mean, 250 Rand a kilo puts it a bit above your usual beef, except, of course, for steaks. Steak nowadays goes up to over 300 Rand a kilo for fillet and rump.
But look here, I’m not here to give you recipes. In fact, I’ve always found that recipes are so convoluted, so detailed, that it puts you off even making the dish. You look at the recipe and you’re exhausted before you actually begin to cook. Our newspapers have recipes, but their recipes are also very, very detailed—you must have this ingredient, and you must have that ingredient, oh my goodness.
So, I’ve taken to watching short videos on social media. Because I’m more of a visual person, it really makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t often follow the recipes exactly, but I’ll take the essence or the gist of it, and then say, “Ah, I could do this, or I could do that.” And sometimes, of course, to make a nice comfort meal at home, you might just have to rely on what you’ve got in your grocery cabinet, on the shelf, or in the fridge.
Really, what is a comfort meal? Well, it could be anything. It’s comfort to you—one person’s comfort is different to another’s.
A lovely comfort meal, and I don’t know why I don’t eat it enough, is boerewors. I mean, it’s almost a national food here in this country, and there are so many ways that you can prepare boerewors. We had some the other night—boerewors with couscous, a lovely gravy, and some butternut. I mean, that’s a comfort meal if you’re a South African.
Anyway, enjoy your winter cooking.
