Two competitive home cooks who originally hail from the Eastern Cape are about to don their coveted black My Kitchen Rules aprons, take up their positions at the stove and out-cook the opposition in season two of the M-Net reality cooking show which begins tomorrow at 6pm.
East London-born Luyanda Mafanya, 23, who has teamed up with food buddy Donald Chipumha, 28, and Maritsa Prinsloo, 35, who is married to Maradine Whitehorn-Prinsloo, 35, and grew up in a small town in the Dordrecht district, said their Eastern Cape roots had influenced their cooking style.
“My country background will definitely influence the kind of dishes that I cook during the show and I hope that people can see and feel the connection between what we present and where I grew up and the respect we have for our local produce,” said Prinsloo, an IT store operations manager who now lives in Bloemfontein with her wife, their four Pekinese dogs and a German shepherd.Having grown up in a small town called Rossouw, where her former policeman father was a farmer, Prinsloo also spent time making butter and sourdough breads with her granny on her grandparent’s farm, but her signature dish is crispy lamb ribs “just the way my gran used to make them”.
Food blogger Mafanya on the other hand, is a city girl, having spent her early years in East London before moving to Johannesburg with her mother after her parent’s divorce.
She still has strong ties with the city and visits her father’s Vincent Heights home regularly.
“One thing I can take from visiting East London and cooking during school holidays is that I can cook with limited ingredients and for a big group of people.”
Winning the R1-million is especially high on the agenda for Mafanya, who has her own YouTube channel, and has already figured out how she will spend it.
“The R1-million will allow me to finally get a car and I’d also put it back into my business and build a test kitchen from where I can work and build my business,” she said
Prinsloo’s plans for the coveted prize money would include a trip to France, where she and her wife would dine at the Michelin-starred Jan Restaurant in Nice, opened by South African chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen.