About Rainbow Cooking

What is Rainbow Cooking?

Rainbow Cooking is a collection of mostly South African recipes, for our New Zealand and expat friends that like the tastes and flavours of migrant cooking.

Why South African recipes in English for Kiwis?

South African dishes seem to go down well at Kiwi pot-luck meals and we are frequently asked for the recipe for this or that dish. Because the majority of our recipes are in Afrikaans, this requires constant translation. We also adapt them a bit, using ingredients that are easy to find in New Zealand, and we give measurements in New Zealand cups and teaspoons.

The history of South African cuisine

South African cuisine reflects a very wide variety of culinary traditions, fusing together the best of Dutch, African, Asian, English, French, German, Indian, Indonesian, Malaysian and Portuguese cuisine. As can be expected from a cuisine that developed over a period of 350 years, the history of South African cuisine is a very interesting one.

What about recipes from other countries?

On this website we focus on our favourite "boerekos" dishes that we grew up with. However, we will include a few recipes that were inspired by the food from other parts of the world, such as New Zealand, Italy, France, Morocco, Mexico and Texas, China and Tailand. Don't expect them to be original though: our cooking is influenced by our South African taste buds, and we use ingredients that is available in New Zealand!

Contributions and feedback

We welcome feedback, suggestions on how to improve a specific recipe, requests for recipes, and new recipes that you want to contribute.

To contact us, please send email to hello@rainbowcooking.co.nz, in Afrikaans or English.

About the authors of Rainbow Cooking

We are Jaco and Marietjie Swart. We are not professional cooks at all, we simply believe that home cooking can be pretty good if you spend a wee bit more time, planning and care on it than has become the norm in modern-day society.

Our home language is Afrikaans. The Afrikaans language and culture developed among the early settlers in the Cape of Good Hope where South-Africa started, from Dutch, German and French origin, as well as the Malay who were brought to South-Africa in the 17th century.

We like the Kiwi way of living and working, and we think of our new country as Home.

With migrants from so many nationalities that live and cook here, all that Christchurchers need to do to go on an international food journey, is to visit the different restaurants and deli's in town.

In this spirit, we love sharing our South African recipes with our fellow Kiwis.