Nourish Me

lost

 

This little one was lost for a large part of this weekend. Foxes have been stealing local chickens and a mob of roos has been hanging around our hill at nights. When Bruce and Holly next door met a roo in 2014, the marsupial fared way better than the staffys; Holly's missing eye had me, I must admit, worried at 2 am. I cried to myself this morning. Rather a lot, I'm embarrassed to say.

But here's the good bit: I've never really been one to espouse "community", by which I mean the vague, touchy-feely version I hear all too often, and yet, today, we met some people - lovely, helpful, amazing people - in our neighbourhood who genuinely cared. Nothing like a lost dog to unite, eh? Peter talked to neighbours, we dropped off leaflets, walked and walked and called and called and, in the end, she was brought back to us by a woman I hugged twice, and maybe a bit too tightly. 

Get active, stay calm and ask people for help. That, right there, is the opposite of lost. 

Puss licked Poppy's ear as they lay together on the doormat in the sun on her return. We all missed her.

 

another time

Had another post in mind today, but instead found my thoughts stuck on an upturned collar, just briefly, just long enough obliterate the path I'd carefully set out. That piece wasn't going anywhere in particular, so it's no great loss, but still. Funny how a good massage can release demons long held. Clarity swept through as I opened all doors when I got back, some slamming shut  - setting the dog right off - as the wind blew from one end of the house to the other. Doors open, doors close, yet clarity is worth seeking, always. Another time, I thought, largely because Rachel drew my attention to this and it's a really great piece. Yeah, so, what Lanchester, eloquently, said. (Thanks, darling Rachel. Your book's cover is perfect, so very you.)   

 

feral

11am. Changing trains at Richmond, heading down the tunnel that links platforms underground – built on a visually distracting angle, tiles an unnaturally lit shade of blue – I think about how out of place I feel in the urban world most days. Am reading Feral: Rewilding The Land, Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot. It seeps into my thinking and it is extraordinary. This mind feels very, very open. 

The past 18 months have taught me much. Old connections have been reforged through werk, all the better for my absence, to be sure. I needed to go away and grow up. Genuine new friendships as an adult are hard to come by, but I have been offered 2 in the past 6 months. The first a fellow cook, a beautiful and very female soul, the other a fledgling connection, an artist described by a critic in a catalogue of a recent-ish solo show of his as a poet of nature. A poet of nature. My heart feels full.   

The city's not so bad afterall, but I still long, most days, for the feral, for the wild places of my childhood. 

 

limitations

The challenge of specific dietary requirements makes a truly creative cook happy. Vegans for dinner? I'm your woman. Gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sugar baking? Come on over - there's a cake cooling on the sill and the kettle's just boiled. Feeling blue, like the world's come to an end? Chicken soup will help, but I'll come up with something equally healing if you can't/won't do poultry. Limitations and constraint. Those are my things.

But Oscar's beautiful girlfriend's requirements - the result of a crohn's diagnosis -  listed on his phone last Tuesday night, precluding her from the (admittedly boring) brown rice pilaf we'd made read like a Horror Story:

no raw vegetables

no raw fruit

no high fibre

no grains

no nuts

no wholemeal ANYthing

Which'd be pretty much everything I cook. Everything I like. Maybe not the grains so much anymore as I've been finding Athina Koullouros' reasoned arguments for their limitation fascinating, and yes, I love baked pears and poached peaches as much as anyone else, but no salad? NO salad?? G'ah. 

And yet. Limitations. I don't let those hold me back. Meat and dairy are on the menu, as is, of all things, pasta, so long as it's the kind of pasta I'd normally eshew...am thinking spaghetti bolognese or some sort of long, slowly cooked ragu. Anyway, open to suggestion, most especially vegetarian options - thoughts?

 

5th of august

A breathlessness has settled in my lungs of late, something I can explain but won't, nothing bad, just complicated. Yes, complicated. Deep sighs punctuated our walk today, out on familiar streets, picking off heads of lavender along the council strip, trying to mindfully take in the long, slow breaths my shoulders seem to need.    

Ran into Phoebe while buying bread earlier. Talked of our respective Leonine birthdays, of sun salutations, about this city/country divide thing. Unprompted, she reminded me - a gift of a teacher, is she - that slowing down the breath will slow down more than just breathing. Helped to fix a few wayward thoughts, pull me back together.    

Edward wrote a sweet message in my birthday card last week: "Thank you for making such delicious meals for us to eat. We are one of the few families we know who rarely eat the same meal twice." He's a vegetarian because I made them see how utterly satisfying vegetarian food could be. I doubt he'd have found his way there alone. Such beautiful, grown-up boys. They bring so much joy and light, and though not of my own making, at times, I know that really they are the adults they now are, in part, because of something I did that was very right. 

 

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!  

 

tall, graceful

For the first twelve months they are just plain old spring onions, a vegetable you head out automatically for when something fresh and bright is required on the plate, but give them another twelve months or so and they become these tall, graceful beauties. Gardening has taught me lessons I did not even know I needed to learn, has offered a deeper connection to, well, to life, I suppose. I often leave plants to live their full cycle now, allowing things to just be rather than rushing to use up every food plant we grow. All too easy to go mad. What's the rush, I tell myself, what lesson will I learn by simply looking?

It's cooler today, and we had enough rain yesterday to make the garden well again. Silence fell upon the hill as the rain poured down. Even the grass parrots waited until it passed before exploding into chatter and song. A reprieve for us all.

 

a sense of community

Back in the early days of this little old blog - days when I was certain it was only my mum reading - I wrote one of those grumpy posts one sometimes ended up spilling out in blog form before we had other, more transitory methods of having, well, a dummy spit. I have no intention of drawing your attention to said post, it's not reflective of my feelings at all these days, but it was drawn to mine today by a lovely - and you have no idea how - woman I have come to know, as you do through shared life experiences, as a friend. S., darling, you and your amazing little workplace are a source of many, many things to me, some quite hard for an Anglo-Celt like myself to put into exacting words at times, but all of them have added a sense of community to this funny little life of mine. Isn't it wonderful how we can change over time? Can grow? It blows my mind that anybody reads this ever-evolving site, and I'm so, so grateful for every single last one of you. x  

 

It's felt a bit quiet around here of late. There's been big changes going on deep within me, beyond the busy-ness and faster-than-light forgetfulness of the internet. The web has the kind of pace that, once you step off, makes dropping back into it difficult. I'm not entirely sure I want to keep up.  Not sure I even know how to anymore.

Feels as though there are more important things to attend to, and, for the most part, attend to them I have. 

I've gone back to work, to bookselling. For years I resisted because I viewed it as a kind of failure. In fact, I felt sure it was absolutely the wrong move when everything was so pointedly heading Onward and Upward. I was actually afraid - genuinely fearful - of going back to work because I thought it would mean that that work was the work that defined me, as it had for years before, but the truth is working without the safety net of a regular income is very hard, much more fear-inducing than I'd ever let on. There are also days, I'm not at all embarassed to say, when the only decent out loud conversation I've had is with the cat.

Which is not to say that puss doesn't have anything decent to contribute, but it was obviously Time. Being surrounded with books and talk about them all day, once or twice a week, makes my heart swell in a way that I can't quite put into words. The upshot is that I can make art and earn a wage. Who'd've thought? Thus far, I'm loving it - no responsibility, just good, old-fashioned bookselling. It suits me well.    

Then there was the horror of a summer we had which got me thinking about the garden, about what it's best for us to grow and when, and I think I've come up with a solid plan. Our dry, endless summer will be all about the no-fuss things that grow best without much attention (tomatoes, especially) and the cooler months, when there is rainfall up on the ranges, will be the real working months for us. I planted out some garlic this weekend, chicories and mustards, pak choy, that sort of thing. Much more doable, with the potential for an actual break when the holidays arrive.  

But for all my claims of not wanting to talk food much anymore, it's almost unavoidable. I'm seeing it in a new way. With a great deal of help from Lesh I've made significant changes to my diet and lifestyle, and slowly I'm losing some of that weight that accumulated while I sat down to write about food. Lesh is great, guys - she's done so much for me that, like returning to books, I can't quite put it into words. Lesh got me back into the kitchen, but in a significantly different way: I prep and plan meals now to free up my brain to think about other things.

I feel like a dunce saying it, but not cooking on the hop every night? Good god, it's completely life-changing.    

Cooking lots of things on one morning a week in preparation is revelatory, and I've a hunch that Deborah Madison's anise beets might just be the most brilliant addition to my cooking in years. You peel a few big beetroots, dice them up into 1cm chunks, toss them in oil and roast them until they are cooked and as golden as something so startlingly red can get. You then crush a clove of garlic with scrunchy salt, peppercorns and a good teaspoon of fennel seeds and pound to a paste. Pour in sherry vinegar and olive oil in a ratio of 1:1 and toss through the hot beetroot. Into the fridge it goes so you can dip into it for salads and breakfasts and who knows what else during the week. You should know that it's particularly nice with cooked quinoa, some chickpeas, chopped roasted almonds and some slices of fresh fennel.  

Anyway, that's me. You? 

 

 

 

borlottis: our growing edge

Pruned the orchard carefully one freezing winter's weekend last year, not a task I took lightly. I read book after book, practised in my head, on paper, then on an actual tree.

We took especial care of this particular apple, the one with the most delectable red fruit, dappled gold shoulders and crisp white flesh.

By October, things were looking gooood. Really good. 

Then it completely stopped raining. It's been a bit of a disaster, this summer.

Well, let's step back a little. It's been difficult, but not altogether a disaster. There's been no fruit for us, as we, once again, left the fruit to thirsty rosellas and grey currawongs. It's been brutally dry and I thought they deserved something.

The vegetable garden's had some incredible successes, though. Hello, tomato-fest! Hell-oo zucchini madness! Perfect conditions for a Mediterranean vegetable garden.   

I never have any trouble keeping up with zucchini. Gardeners often moan about the glut, but not me. No way. There's so much to do with them, a recipe for every stage of growth. Even those huge marrow-sized ones that lurk beneath the leaves.

My nemesis, however, remains the elusive borlotti bean. For the past three summers (and a few before that let me tell you) I have patiently pushed seed into pots of sifted compost, nursed seedlings through all sorts of conditions. Yet no matter what I do, no matter from whom I obtain seed, my dreams of freshly podded borlotti beans simmered with home-grown garlic and sage and thyme and lashings of good, green olive oil never quite come off. Until - ta-dah - the smallest but sweetest of victories this year.   

They are bush variety - I'd've preferred a climber, but beggers cannot be choosers - that I sowed into jiffy coir pellet-things and there's not a lot of pod action, but at last. Success! Enormously proud of self, and all grown with scant but carefully applied watering. Next year will be the true success I dream about.  

Genie's hosting a great little event called Our Growing Edge, and this little success story is my submission.