Nourish Me

2016

(11.12.16) 

2016 in a few lines:

exercise changed everything, forever (12wbt - bloody hard work for a 45 year old, but invaluable) 

met good people (sewing class (jude!), artists i admire, werk peeps, a new tree guy)

made this dress, these pants, these tops, a coat...a whole wardrobe of beautiful linen, cotton, wool and silk clothing  

grew a pretty awesome veg patch (flanders poppies (swoon),  mostly self-seeded). learned that gardening, for me, is about carefully curating the weeds. 

 

books of the year:

peacock and vine by a.s. byatt 

bicycling to the moon

the old ways by robert macfarlane (plus everything else he wrote, devoured over a few weeks, thanks ernie)

a hebridian notebook

the beauty chef by carla oates

bee journal by sean borodale

 

for 2017:

get some work in a garden nursery; a year all about plants is my wish. happy end-of-2016 to all

 

this, just in

I am aware that the picture above is a healthy stand of broad beans and NOT an asparagus bed but I've some asparagus-related news from the trenches, just in, that I kinda couldn't wait to share: you know how, at the shall we say bathroom visit end of the incredible human digestive tract, asparagus makes our wee smell funny? Well. If you harvest the stuff from your own garden then cook, and eat it straight away...no smell. NO SMELL! One never stops learning. 

 

isolated

We talked about isolation this long weekend. Peter thinks it's good, sees it as a strength rather than the weakness The Secret Language of Birthdays would have me believe the stars bestowed upon this little Leo. Me? Not so sure. I spent my 20's miserably isolated, exhausted from long days in bookshops and too slow at making plans for weekends to be socially connected. I saw it then as a weakness, one I couldn't claw my way up from. These days I find isolation absolutely necessary for clear creative thinking, and I also have a much richer social life, not full, but balanced, I would say, with the kind of good people I wanted so much twenty years ago. Isn't life interesting?

A few days on my own this week, alone (of human company) in the lush cool of my high-up-on-a-hill garden, an unexpected holiday offered by my boss in December. Frankly, it will do me the world of good right now to spend a few days alone. A friend and I spoke last year about how important it is to get away - from one's spouse, one's friends, the distractions we throw in our paths - and get things done. There are undoubtedly benefits to isolation, but here's what I decided in the car coming back to town this afternoon: I prefer the word solitude. It sits more comfortably, more creatively, and the ability to gain wonder from solitude, that's a true strength.  

 

a tin roof and pelting rain

Rain. Twelve hours on Friday night. Twelve drenching, soaking, tank-filling hours. A tin roof and pelting rain - there can be no better sound to boost one's wellbeing, surely. The soil, though, it remains dust bowl dry. I think, on Saturday afternoon, that I should worry about this lack of water, but there are kilos of blueberries to pick, tiny, sweet golden tomatoes and, best of all, milky baby zucchini and their blossoms. All surviving without me and my army of watering cans. Bliss.  

 

19th of August

 

Days are lengthening and the soil is warming, slowly but surely. Rows of radishes will go in in a couple of weeks and before you know it the entire garden will be going orf. Seems to be starting a little earlier each year. Sally-Anne and I talked about this early spring-ing over the counter a couple of weeks ago, me picking her brains about beekeeping, she picking mine about letting one's hair go grey. A perfect exchange. We'll be getting a hive soon enough thanks to that illuminating conversation. Bookshops are great places for information gathering. Long may they live.  

Winter, she is o-v-e-r. The work now begins.       

 

salade fatiguée

There is a necessary something about the salads of winter that makes them equally (yet differently) important as those of summer, as though mind and body crave freshness when the sky is grey and the crows are gathering, some greenery to balance all that comfort and warmth. The vegetables available in the cool months are more substantial, the leaves requiring finer shredding and more careful selection with an eye to tenderness than their fragile warmer weather counterparts. I like the salads of my winters very much; a box grater becomes the best of kitchen tools.  

Viana La Place includes a recipe in each of her books by a marvellous woman called Simonetta, a chic Parisian fashionista from the 60's who famously wrote a book titled A Snob In The Kitchen in 1967. The recipe La Place chose from that book for her own Unplugged Kitchen is Salade Fatiguée, described thus: "A salad must be fatigué, "tired" to be good; it must be mixed, beaten, and drunk with its dressing." 

I don't follow recipes much these days and 'though keen, come summer, to try bundling a cos lettuce into a tea towel and thwacking the bejesus out of it before leaving it to soak for an hour or so, it's the drunk with its dressing idea, i.e. marinated for some time, that makes winter salads among the best I make. Above was duck confit, torn with care and tossed with grated beetroot, shredded kale, leftover roast potatoes, walnuts, crumbled from on high, and lots of pickled ginger. Dressed in a sesame oil/rice wine vinegar/brown sugar/fish sauce/tamari combination for about an hour before we ate. All the better for being drunken and fatigué. It's an especially useful tip if you are the kind of cook who likes to do a bit now, a bit tomorrow and a bit later on. 

 

felt like spring

Felt like spring all weekend up my way, all sun-and-blue-sky days, despite Thursday's snow.

According to this, of course, it is spring. Which explains a few things, but also makes me realise that I've been shut up inside against the cold for too long. While successfully navigating my first proper shoulder stand last Wednesday night I actually felt Jupiter slip into Leo, just as I'd been told I would. Strangely comforting to feel something, long held, shift inside. Suddenly, it feels as though there's a lot to do, but that's Pre-Spring for you. I'm just about ready. 

Above is one of the arches that lead you into Sunday Reed's vegetable garden, recently restored to its original beauty. (Her cookbook is rather good, you know). Been thinking about art a lot more of late, of how I miss its presence in my daily vocab. Shifts, indeed.  

 

Looking up while walking, I realised that the treasures of autumn are all there to be had. The office is placed in an old area of Melbourne, a suburb of gardens graced by established trees and fruiting hedges, and I draw a mental map of where the free food lies. Persimmons glow in trees that arc over paling fences, there are lemons and olives and quinces, of course, but also oranges to be found in the cobbled back lanes. Poppy and I like those lanes best of all when we are missing the quiet of our country home. There are at least two feijoa hedges - a great garden idea - that we regularly pass, rosemary that thrives in the sandy soils around us, and a wonderful tall, dense hedge of bay that I always snap a leaf from, to crush and inhale deeply on our way back from wherever we've been. 

 

polenta, but easier

Good Polenta is one of those dishes any food-obsessive worth their weight should be slave to: a roiling, boiling, bubbling cauldron of canary yellow goodness that takes at least 30 minutes of your time, to say nothing of the repetitive strain injury constant stirring delivers. If it doesn't hurt, how can it be Good? I will admit that, in my twenties, and egged on by the elitism of the glossy food magazines I devoured at the time, I duly did just that. Then I read Tod Davies' joyful, life-affirming little book Jam Today. It's a book I've often thought about when in this now, as of last month, eight-years-young blog space, yet I've not raved enough about it - correcting that, right now. 

Look. Davies got this from no less than the illustrious Paula Wolfert, a woman who'd have you making your own couscous (oy), and if Wolfert thinks a shortcut is worthwhile here, it bloody well is. Let the oven do the work, and make your house smell irresistible at the same time. It's polenta, but easier. Genius! So simple it's hardly a recipe:

Take 1 cup of polenta and mix it, in a baking dish, with 5 cups of water/stock. Add some salt. Add a slice of butter/a generous spoonful of olive oil. Cover the dish tightly with foil and bake, at 180 C (375 F), for 1 hour. Foil lid off, check if the texture's what you want, adding more liquid if you want a looser mix, lid back and bake for a further 10 minutes if that's the case. Otherwise, you are good to go at the 1 hour mark. 

It's what you do next that makes it Tod Davies' own brand of genius and, most pleasingly, makes it a stunning vehicle for leftovers. While hot from the oven, and working quickly (but calmly) to avoid it setting, scrape about half of the polenta onto a plate. Add whatever you like* to the polenta in the baking dish, then scrape the plated polenta back on top, dribble over some oil or melted butter and bake for a further 20 mins or so.   

*literally, whatever you like. Keep it vaguely in the region of origin is my thinking, so nothing too geographically weird, if you get my drift. I recently made it with a combo of garlicky braised turnips and their luscious greens, along with some leftover tomato-y chickpea-y thingo, and goat cheese. Yet another blank canvas idea - the only kind of recipe one really needs these days.

    

april the first

Two older men - the word elderly confers a status neither deserves - in as many weeks have expressed appalling, bigoted attitudes toward powerful women while browsing in the shop, in conversation you see, and both times I have pulled them up and told them - calmly - that I will not tolerate those ideas. The first subsequently stole the book he was so proud of being a hateful part of, the other, just yesterday, backed right down and spent a good sum of money. Sensed he'd gone too far. The real shame, of course, is that neither of these men are likely to change their thinking any time soon. I tell the story to illustrate this simple point: the less we tolerate ideas so abhorent to our own, the more we open our hearts. Twenty years ago I'd've been too scared to say anything in response. These days? No fear. 

The equinox now behind us, my gaze shifts internally with the season. This new moon - the beginning of the astrological calender - has me thinking hard about some of the things unlocked of late. Truth be told, my gaze has been inward for some time; I will be 43 fairly soon and time feels precious in a way that it has not before. In dreams I search for keys to unlock some long held stuff, stuff that, annoyingly, is just as elusive in waking hours, but that's not stopping me. I'll get to the bottom of my creative-spiritual-sleeping isss-ewes when the time is right.

Sounds a bit heavy, but honestly, it's just the normal internal dialogue written out loud.

 

We've been renovating on the hill. That's contributing to bad sleep, I am sure, as well as a lack of rhythm. I had an hilarious conversation with another male customer, one who is delightful and au fait with the female of the species, who makes his living as an artist. Chatting at the back counter about Goya and other important things, I told him at one stage that I am embarrassed to be having middle class conversations about renovating. John kindly reminded me it's my sacred space up there, where creative work gets done and that it should be made into a bigger space - however modestly one is doing so. Letting Go is turning out to be the theme for this year. 

 

 

Wish I had some food to share, but apart from vats of hummus (beetroot hummus is the current fave) and 101 ways with zucchini and tomatoes, we're eating super simple food. Here's something interesting, though. I used to be addicted to potato chips (what the Brits call 'crisps') but of late, no longer desire them. At all. I do not know what happened, but I'll take it.      

 

A HUGE thank you to all involved in the International Court's decision on whaling. Made me cry with joy this morning. Hooray!