Breakfast Matters...

Does breakfast matter? For us at the Oude Leeskamer Guest House it definitely does - a good breakfast sets you up for the day; a bad one leaves the tummy rumbling and the customer grumbling!

We look forward to serving our guests a hearty breakfast and offer a choice of three delicious options. We choose our ingredients with care and try to find local, small businesses to add to our cast of suppliers that make us proud of the great quality of food and drinks we serve to our guests!

No self-respecting breakfast can start without a great cup of coffee or tea, and we like to think that we don’t disappoint:

Our coffee is a blend sourced from the Beaver Creek and Izolwana farms in KwaZulu-Natal, two of the very few coffee producing farms in South Africa.  Called Transkei Gold (not to be confused with one of South Africa’s most well-known marijuana varieties!), the blend is full bodied with hints of cocoa. But this coffee is really special, as the Transkei Coffee Company and Beaver Creek farm have joined forces to create a unique community development project - a Coffee Co-operative. Twenty-five hectares of land surrounding the Port St. Johns area is being prepared for planting, and the sale of this coffee is the key source of funding for this project. This means that whilst you are savoring the coffee’s taste, you are also contributing towards the sustainable development of one of South Africa’s poorest communities. So – by this stage its barely 8am and already you have done a little bit to make someone’s life a little easier!

When it comes to tea we complement our selection of ceylon, earl grey, lady grey, vanilla and mixed fruit teas offer a choice of local organic rooibos. The amazing health benefits of rooibos tea are now widely known, but few realize that rooibos is actually brewed from the leaves of the Rooibos shrub (Aspalathus linearis), indigenous to the Cedarberg mountain region in the Cape. But not only is rooibos a local produce, but the specific rooibos that we serve is sourced, blended, flavoured and packaged by SA Rooibos Tea Supplies, which is based just down the road from us in Gordons Bay!

Of course all great breakfasts need to be accompanied by a great fresh fruit juice – and when it comes to fruit juice there is no room for was-once-real-fruit-but-has-now-been-processed-preserved-flavoured-and-sugared-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life. We only serve the real deal and are very proud to source our Orange and Spring Blend Juices come from Timberlea farm just outside Stellenbosch. Six years ago the third generation to live and work on this family farm started pressing the fruit grown on the farm to turn them into great tasting, natural juices, and so so blueJay juice was born. Their juices undergo no form of extending their natural lifespan, no chemicals are added and all the fruit used to make the juice is grown in a sustainable way to ensure that the land is kept in top form for producing great fruit year after year.

Moving onto the actual breakfast – our first option is the full fry-up (a.k.a. the ‘I know I probably shouldn’t but will anyway’ breakfast, consisting of eggs (fried, scrambled, boiled, poached…), bacon, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms and toast.

Our free-range eggs come from happy, organic chickens that while their days away on Klipfontein Farm near Malmesbury, foraging for their own food. These eggs have a higher nutritional quality, less cholesterol and fats and several times higher vitamins and omega 3 fatty acid content than standard factory eggs!

The farms hosts a stall at the weekly Stellenbosch Slowfood market at Oude Libertas (where they also sell free-range chickens), so every Saturday one of us has to undertake the arduous chore of meandering through the warren of stalls (teasing the onlooker with the smell of slow roasted coffee beans and wood fired artisan breads, the sight of mounds of dark decadent chocolates, mouth-watering quiches and bucketfuls of giant, juicy olives, not to mention the beautiful sounds of the offer of a glass of local bubbly) to collect our tray of eggs!

Our “capestyle” bacon comes from farm-reared pigs that share the Klein Joostenberg farm with the extended Myburgh clan. Philip Senior has farmed with pigs for over four decades, so knows what he’s talking about when it comes to bringing home some good bacon. The Myburgh;s pride themselves on delivering fresh meat that is MSG free, with no added preservatives, medication, steroids, growth stimulants or other evils  – this ensure that their produce is not only as close to organic as possible, but also very tasty!

Our second brekkie option is the health breakfast – often referred to as the ‘I’ve already indulged a little too much, so should probably go healthy’ option by our guests. The centerpiece of this breakfast is a beautiful selection of seasonal fruit – at the height of summer we were serving a medley of sweet nectarines, juicy plums and refreshing watermelon, and now in autumn the fruit platters contain slices of crisp apple, juicy oranges and wedges of newly picked pears.  

The fruit platters are accompanied by a jug of unsweetened Bulgarian yoghurt, a dollop of citrus honey collected by a local farmer and a bowl of home-made muesli bursting with rolled oats, coconut, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, cashew nuts, pecan nuts and dried fruit.

This is served alongside a home-made bran muffin. Anyone who knows anything about baking knows that the quality of flour used is directly related to the outcome of your bread, cake or whatever it is that emits those heavenly just-baked aromas from your oven. It is for this reason that our housekeeper Hilda Magadla only uses Eureka stone-ground flour in our muffins and breads – and all of them are baked according to recipes developed by my grandmother and which have since served three generations of Lombards! Eureka’s flour contains no malt, no additives, no preservative and no bleaches. Just wheat…

The final one is the Continental, - the ‘nothing fried, nothing fruity’ option often favoured by our European guests. This breakfast consists of a platter of selected local chesses and meats, accompanied by a basket of bread and muffins.

Our traditional and peppercorn ‘boerenkaas’ is sourced from the ‘curd nerds’ at Truckles Traditional cheeses - a distributor, refiner, maturer and co-producer of locally made farmhouse cheeses based in Franschhoek. The Camembert is produced on Dalewood Cheese Estate on the picturesque Franschhoek-Simondium Road. This farm-style cheesery is a passion-driven family business, dedicated to producing quality Estate cheese from the ground up! The focus is largely on organics and Dalewood cows never receive growth or milk production-increasing hormones, and as a result these happy cows produce valuable, delicious milk, which in turn makes good cheese. Our 9-month matured traditional style Farmhouse Cheddar is produced from Friesland milk on the beautiful, historic Zevenwacht farm sprawling over the Bottelary Hills between Stellenbosch and Kuilsriver.

We think we've put together a yummy spread - but why not try it for yourself!