Almost a year ago now, on a blustery morning last autumn, my neighbour George stopped by to deliver 30 litres of fresh apple juice. He'd just crushed it himself, made from a ute load of golden delicious apples picked from a mate's old tree.
Showing posts with label good things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good things. Show all posts
Almost a year ago now, on a blustery morning last autumn, my neighbour George stopped by to deliver 30 litres of fresh apple juice. He'd just crushed it himself, made from a ute load of golden delicious apples picked from a mate's old tree.
Happy New Year to you!
No time for lazing around lately, but I've been doing the things I love. Working on a big summer project, styling delicious food for a cookbook with some of my favourite people. In the evenings, we've been scoffing peaches, spitting cherry pips and roasting plums in the oven. There's been picnics in paddocks and trips to the farm in rattly old Percy. Tents are pitched in the back yard and the house is full of props.
I've been having a play with my new camera lens - this one - which is a huge a proper photographers one, and the photos are amazing. Here's our weekend in pictures, the first ones using my new lens.
1. My favourite old shed, built right on the water. I would love to live here. It's like a giant houseboat.
2. Messy spring garden with lots of flowers, and a naughty chook that escaped from the pen.
3. It's finally warm enough to cook outside and we gave the campfire a good work out. Here are Elsa's vegetarian "sausages" also known as grilled asparagus. Sadly the other snags at the back cooked a bit too quickly.
4. I can't take enough photos of the lovely sage flowers growing by the back door, but this time I managed to capture a bee in flight!
5. A new mobile phone for the children, they made it themselves and to be honest the coverage is pretty good for around here.
6. Happy campers huddled around the barbie at Sunday's River's Table Event - the second in the series that was a bit of a wet and wild day but delicious nonetheless. More photos here
I hope your weekend was filled with good things too.
How to make strawberry shortcakes and a book too
cooking, dreams, good things, magic, oh my giddy aunt, recipes
Hello! Here are some strawberry shortcakes. And I am writing a book. Yes me! I am!
I can't believe I just wrote that but it's true.
Let me tell you how it happened....
Back in
March this year I signed up for Holly Becker's from Decor8 Blogging Your Way e-course.
It was wonderful and I learnt a lot. If you want some direction with your blog then I highly recommend you sign up right now.
One of the things Holly said that has stuck with me is "you never know who is reading your blog" and boy is that true.
One of the things Holly said that has stuck with me is "you never know who is reading your blog" and boy is that true.
Anyhoo,
one of the final homework assignments was to write what you wanted to get out
of your blog. So thinking big I
wrote, that one day, in my wildest dreams, I would like to write a book.
To be honest, that is a quiet dream I've had for many years, but one I chalked up with
other crazy dreams such as living in Provence for a year or buying an island.
You know, I never seriously thought it would ever happen. Crazy or
not, I shared that dream about wanting to write a book in my homework and it
felt good to get that dream out there, if only to my fellow e-class mates.
I
swear, it only took two weeks before I received an email from the publisher at
Random House asking me to call for a chat. Whoah Nelly that was fast!
Over
the next months, after quite a bit of work writing sample chapters,
nutting out concepts and ideas, along with lots of championing from many people
at Random House, that book dream became a reality.
And now I am writing
a book. And I feel truly astonished and incredibly humbled by this
opportunity.
The book will be part memoir, part recipes, with lots of photos, telling the story of our life in Tasmania. An expanded version of my blog really, with more details and more trials and tribulations on what it was like to pack up your city life and move to the countryside of a small southern island. Plus plenty of good things to eat.
It will be due for release early 2015, which seems
miles away but it's not really in the book publishing world.
I am so very
excited about this project, actually thrilled beyond measure, that a dream so
out there has actually come true. Now I just have to write it.
So I would like to thank you dear readers, for visiting my blog and for your kind comments
and emails. Believe me when I say without you, this wouldn’t be happening.
My only regret is..... that I didn't include spend a year in
Provence and buy an island on my blog homework back in March. Who knows
where I might have ended up.
And Holly was right, you never do know who is reading your blog.
To celebrate the season, and the
signing of the book deal, which I celebrate at any opportunity, yesterday the
first of the strawberries appeared, so we made strawberry shortcakes.
Just like this.....
Strawberry Shortcakes
makes 12 shortcakes
makes 12 shortcakes
for the shortcakes
325 grams plain flour
half a teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 tablespoons caster sugar
125 grams unsalted butter
1 large egg (beaten)
1/2 cup of Greek style yoghurt
1/2 cup of Greek style yoghurt
1/4 cup of milk
for the filling
250 grams strawberries, sliced
1 tablespoon caster sugar
250 ml double cream, whipped
Method
Preheat the oven to 220ºC
In a medium bowl, toss strawberries with sugar and let sit for 30 minutes to bring out their juices.
Whisk the flour, salt, baking powder the
sugar together in a bowl.
Rub the butter into the dry ingredients using
your fingertips to crumble the butter into the flour, until the butter is the
texture of course breadcrumbs with some pea size bits too.
Whisk the egg, yogurt and milk together in a small jug or bowl, then pour into the flour mixture a little at a time, using a fork to mix until it
comes together. (go easy, you may not need
all of the liquid)
Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured
surface, and roll gently to a thickness of about 2cm.
Dip a 5cm round cutter in flour and cut out
as many rounds as you can, then work the scraps back into a dough and re-roll to
finish cutting out
Place the shortcakes about 2 cm apart on a
lined baking tray
Bake for 10-15 minutes, until golden-brown,
and let them cool slightly on a wire rack.
Slice biscuits in half horizontally. Spoon strawberries and their liquid over bottom halves. Spoon whipped cream onto strawberries, and
replace top halves of biscuits. (I actually didn't whip the cream, as you can see by the photos, so it's a bit messy, but I really think you should!)
The temperature has been steadily dropping over these last days of autumn, and today the mercury didn't reach double figures, languishing around the eight degree mark. With winter on the doorstep, it's perfect weather for curling up in front of the fire. But the lure of one last fruit picking adventure was too hard to resist. Especially one as clandestine as scrumping, that is fruit looting, or ahem, stealing apples off the trees without permission from the owner.
Up into the hills and along an old dirt road stands an overgrown abandoned apple orchard. There were hundreds of kilos of apples rotting on the ground, with plenty more still stubbornly clinging to the gnarly, moss covered trees. Despite the steep hills, thick grass and lots of brambles we had to battle to get in there, the prize of biting into those cold apples in that fresh mountain air was utterly delightful.
We picked at least 20 kilos of granny smith's and tiny golden delicious, and would have picked more if we could reach the higher apples. We hauled our heavy baskets back down the road, whilst we stuffed our faces with crunchy sweet apples.
Tomorrow I'll make apple sauce, apple jelly and apple butter with the loot.
Apple scrumping, stealing perhaps, but a late autumn activity of the very best kind.
Always nice to have a clean kitchen. With floors scrubbed and benches cleared away, it's worth taking a photo or two. Although, it didn't look like this for very long. Because yesterday we worked on a photo shoot in the kitchen, and as you can see, it gets rather untidy during the process.
But working from home is always great, (I will show you the results when they're published in a few months) there is so much to learn, with the added bonus of a fridge filled with delicious things to eat.
Today the kitchen is back to normal, a bit messy and cluttered, but at least I can spend some time in the garden, instead of cooking dinner.
With a break for afternoon tea of course.
Today is another tomato story. The last for the season I should think. This morning, after a quick ride on my gorgeous new Mothers' Day present, we packed a picnic and headed to the coast. Our destination :: the gorgeous blueberry farm where our tomato patch was planted all those months ago. Our mission :: pick all the remaining green tomatoes.
Despite ambitions dreams, it wasn't a great crop this year, they got off to a slow start, and there wasn't nearly enough tomatoes to preserve. We kept hoping they would ripen, but today we called it, time to call it a day for those tomato plants.
First though, a delicious picnic that included rooster salad and rhubarb cake, sitting under the vibrant deep red blueberry bushes. Then we stripped the sad scraggly tomato plants and filled lots of buckets, about 20 kilos was the end tally, if only they were red! Work finished, we headed to the little beach across the road to enjoy the lingering late autumn sun.
We'll lay those hard green tomatoes out in a warm sunny spot and hope they will continue to ripen, those that don't will make green tomato jam or green tomato pickle.
Still a little work to do, so I guess it's not really the end of the tomato story at all.
Il dolce far niente. How could I have come so far in life and not heard such old Italian wisdom?
I have "the Milanese" to thank for enlightening me and sharing their common sense. Over the past few days we've had the pleasure of two delightful travellers from Italy staying at our place as part of the wwoofer program. Willing workers on organic farms is an international association that links up hosts with travellers who work for food and lodgings. It's an inspired program, and when we occasionally welcome people into our home, not only do a lot of chores in the garden get ticked off, but we get the added bonus of learning so much from our visitors. It's a mutual exchange of ideas, culture and inspiration.
For me, it's been such a pleasure to have good eaters to cook for everyday. And while I hope our Milanese guests might have learnt a little about gardening, it's me who has been grateful for the exposure to their Italian ways. Sharing buonissimo recipes, sitting down to proper meals every day, tips on serving pasta, arguments about the pope, loud joyous singing and the price of an espresso in Milan. Even just hearing those dulcet Italian conversations in the garden has almost felt like a holiday.
The garden is looking bellisimo and I've learnt like new words like "scarpetta" a term for mopping up the juices from the bottom of the pan with bread. I feel much less embarrassed by this greedy habit knowing that there is an actual word for it in Italian.
But really, it's il dolce far niente, that has captured my imagination. The sweetness of doing nothing. It's a lesson I could do well to learn. After a hard day's work, unplug, switch off, finish the chores, stop planning, stop thinking. To sit and be in the company of the ones you love. Why don't we do that? Everyday? What don't we value the importance of doing nothing, instead we seem to value busyness?
To enjoy the sweetness of doing nothing. Il Dolce Far Niente. I'm going to write it on the wall as a reminder to myself to make time for a little pleasant idleness everyday.
Why don't you enjoy doing a little nothing too?
Ciao Ciao!
I must admit I've
had quite a crush on the work of stylist, photographer and author Pia Jane
Bijerk for some time. There is something so dreamy and
ethereal about her work. Something intangible. It's beautiful.
This month I
couldn't believe Pia had listed my blog in her Country Style column. *faints* Oh
my! What a delightful surprise.
The least I could
do in return was contribute to Pia's new project, a self published book titled Little
Treasures :: Made by Hand.
It's such a sweet
concept. In Pia's words
Imagine if I
could create a book, photographing and cataloguing each unique object, writing
a little about each person who made and sent the gift, sharing links to their
websites so others could also buy their beautiful creations or find out more
about them. It would be a collection of little treasures, connecting creative
souls around the globe. I thought, Yes, this would be the most wonderful
way to say thank you…
Pia is using a
crowd funding site to raise money to publish her book, if you'd like to help
the details are here.
There are so many
sweet rewards for supporting the project for as little as $10.
I love crowd
funding and have supported many projects. It's so gratifying to see
creative people making their dreams come true and knowing you've played a small
part in making it happen.
There's been a lot going on around here lately. I seem to be running from one thing to the next. Some highs and some lows. Happy times and sad. My girl turned ten (!) We celebrated Christmas with good food and good friends. I felt like I ran a marathon prepping and working for a friend at the Taste Festival. And MoMa keeps going from strength to strength.
But for the most, it's hard to think about anything much than the devastation that has hit our island. So many homes lost to intense bush fires. So much devastation. Heartbreaking.
The flip side is the incredible show of community spirit as people come together to help those in need.
Humans are amazing.
Humans are amazing.
The camera sits forlornly on the table. Not used much lately. But then amidst all the goings one, there was a moment I photographed with Hugo. After a friend gave us a huge bucket of cherries from his tree. I took them and I sat with Hugo on the verandah and we ate those cherries. As the cherries stained his clothes, I taught him an important life skill. That is, to spit the pips over the railing.
I sat and looked down at what's left of my garden, at the shrivelled leaves on the fruit trees, the wilted berries and the dead brown grass. All decimated after 40 plus temperatures, crazy hot winds and no rain for weeks. Not a drop. I try to feel grateful that I still have a garden. Plenty don't. I do feel grateful but it is still hard nonetheless.
So I sit with my son, spit pips over the railing and life seems perfect for a moment. I forget about the bad stuff, breath in the moment, remember the good and finish that bucket of cherries.
Feeling incredibly lucky really.
Feeling incredibly lucky really.
Three of my favourite photos that Kate Berry took on her visit. I'm so in love with these photos. Kate is such a gifted photographer. I'm so thrilled Kate, you are so clever. Thank you so much. x
See more of Kate's gorgeousness here.
8 comments
cute,
dreams,
elsa,
family,
friends,
good things,
hugo,
love
Taking over the kitchen
cooking, friends, good things, holidays, Kitchen, markets, real food, tasmania
I love it when guests take over the kitchen. I really do. I love the sharing and talking, the tasting and the excitement of eating something new when people come in the kitchen and cook.
On the weekend there was plenty of that. Foraged mussels steamed with garlic from the garden, just-caught fish, steamed and stirred through just-picked garlic scape soup. Slow roasted juicy pork ribs from a friend's pig and fresh new pink eyes fried crispy in a pan, washed down with cider from down the road and gin from across the peninsula. Food we had grown, caught, foraged ourselves, or knew who did, was prepared, shared and eaten. It doesn't get any better than that. I love that.
There was also a dog named Henry, I think I loved him the most.
