Nourish Me

tulum, mexico

And then, after the busybusy, werkwerk-ing in NYC, we put our feet up on a Mexican beach for 6 nights.

As you do.

You know how Mexican food is kinda hip at the moment? In Mexico, it's not hip, it's just absolutely farking fabulous. Especially with a Margarita in hand. Muchos absolutely farking fabulous.

We stayed in Tulum, about 1 and 1/2 hours from Cancun which, judging by the beautiful young Spaniards whose planes arrived at the same time as ours, is party central.

Tulum is not party central, just so you know.

The Mayan ruins in Tulum may not be the best in the country, but who cares? They were magic enough for me. (Get there early would be my tip.)

On the last night we decided to do nothing, which pretty much summed up what it was we wanted from a proper feet-up holiday. Our hotel's excellent restaurant looked after us beautifully as we listened to the Caribbean lapping only a few metres from our feet, sipping at pina coladas and knocking back a Negro Modelo or two. Maybe three. 

Miss the place already.

 

new york, 2013

eldridge street museum, lower east side 

eldridge street museum, lower east side

freeman's, lower east side

freeman's, lower east side

freeman's, lower east side

new york botanical garden, the bronx (it's excellent - go!)

new york botanical garden, ladies border, the bronx

new york botanical garden, ladies border, the bronx

wandering around the lower east side

washington square, greenwich village

It was so unexpected, this trip, it's timing caught me off guard. I never really think of myself as a traveller, even though we move house seemingly constantly, which, now I think about it, is probably why I enjoy being in my home so very much. I didn't take many photos and you know what? I actually think that was a good thing. Less is more, and it meant I looked and truly experienced. In the MoMA one afternoon I watched people snapping all these great, affecting, extraordinary works of modern art with their phone cameras, standing back and looking not at the painting but at the screen before quickly moving on. Each time I saw it my heart sank a little more and it made me wonder what's wrong, collectively, with us.

Met some fabulous people this trip. Gorgeous faces put to well-known names, but still managed, in typical form, to avoid taking photographs of humans in one of the busiest cities in the world. What can I say? I count it as a victory.       

The first two photographs in this post were taken in the Eldridge Street Museum - a synagogue, actually - in the Lower East Side. It was breathtaking and a source of santuary for the jetlagged. Lower East Side is great, guys, we adored the place, but the 'gogue...Mel's tour of that dark and light-filled place and his gentle, warm voice were in my dreams last night.      

 

stamp

Finally found a use for the stamp I had made in Hanoi: labels on jars of things to keep on the shelf.

Made a batch of Laurie Colwin's lemon chutney yesterday. A bit too salty, and maybe a touch too sweet, it was enough for 2 good-size jars, not the 4 she suggests, but the fault is partly mine I suspect and besides, it's a joy to read Colwin while stirring a pot of something that makes the house smell that good. I'm beginning to get things feeling a lot like home up in the hills, one year in. A shelf of jarred things in the pantry only feeds that cosy, domestic goddess notion. I can see why Molly of Orangette likes Colwin so much - a thread of charming domestic storytelling links the two and I am grateful for the introduction. Colwin's food writing is hugely enjoyable, fits like a comfortable old cardigan, all that breezy New York Jewish gorgeousness, near-perfect recipes and smart - very - writing.

tempeh

While away, I fell into something perhaps best described as a tempeh stupor. Any meal featuring the stuff got ordered because no two dishes arrived at any given table in quite the same way. Cut into paper-thin sheets, sometimes slightly thicker squares, often into tiny crunchy batons, but always deep-fried to a golden crisp, and always – always – it was good. Lots of ideas simmered away in the back of my holidaying mind, mostly how to introduce it all the blokes on my return. How you prepare your eaters matters almost as much as how you prepare the food itself at times, and to simply presume they would like tempeh any less than the tofu they now consume, happily, without a trace of suspicion, would be because I’d not done my usual bang-up job of selling it to them.

Tofu took some time. It’s only right that tempeh should, too.

The thing about tempeh is that, like its mellower cousin tofu, it is an acquired taste. Not acquired in that it has a strong flavour or fragrance like, say, a ripe stilton, but that its place in the kitchen takes a little time to sort out, to fit in with your style of cooking, to work around the constraints of what works taste-wise within your little group. Tofu is a great absorber, a real sponge, drinking in the flavours surrounding it, whereas tempeh is richer and fuller, a toothsome texture that, yes, will happily blend into a dish, but manages to somehow resist just a little, to command some attention. Tofu may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, but tempeh isn’t fooling a soul.

This, rather pleasingly, they loved. Sold.

palm sugar fried tempeh

Take a block of tempeh and cut it into short, thin batons (the pic above - ah, nasi campur, how I love thee - serves as a good guide). Heat a puddle of peanut oil - better still, coconut oil - in a wok and, when hot, fry the tempeh in small batches until golden. Drain on a crumpled paper bag (or kitchen paper if yours is a better-stocked home than mine).

Whisk up a little sauce of a couple of teaspoons of tamarind paste, a glug of ketcap manis, and 2 tablespoons of palm sugar with about 1/2 a cup of water. Drain the oil from the wok, set it over a low heat and chuck in the fried tempeh followed by the sauce. Let things simmer and bubble away for about 5, maybe 6 minutes, until all is coated and glazed and it all smells very good.

Serve with lots of sliced red chilli and fried shallots and, if you're brave, fried slivers of garlic.  

bali: the north, a market...

...and the end (thankfully, I hear the collective sigh) of Lucy's Slide Night. Yes, holidays are great, but you know how it is - you get home and life just keeps on keeping on, throwing things your way. If anyone's really, really keen, I've created a set of the photos on flickr which is best viewed on black. When you get there click on the first image in the set, press the L key on your keyboard et, voila. Noice. 

The north is beautiful - gorgeous sunrises, glorious sunsets and gardens that made the heart sing. It gets bonus points from me for being much, much quieter than Ubud and having unspoilt beaches. First stop was Pemaron, right on the ocean front, part of the area known collectively as Lovina.       

Our hotel had THE best shower. Ever.

I miss the bird. 

One of the most exciting things we did was visit the market in Singaraja, stage one of the cooking class we stumbled across. Going with a local - Putu was elegant, funny and thrilled about the blueberries I grow at home - allowed us to dive in deep, ask questions and stop to take photos that, ordinarily, I might not feel entirely comfortable taking.

My favourite photos of the trip.

(Does anyone know who that long-tailed fellow is?)

And then we spent the morning cooking rather wonderful vegetarian food. The food in Bali was outstanding. Breakfasts of nasi goreng, mee goreng and banana pancakes (not all at once, phew) were followed by plates of fruit, none cut so prettily as the plate served in Serririt. 

Serririt, where we stayed put for a week or so (me by the pool), was true tranquility. The gardeners introduced themselves to me and we would chat about their ongoing work each morning. I think that they sensed a fellow gardener. Gardens are incredibly important to the Balinese. I love them completely for that. You can use Serririt (in the north west) as a base for treks into the magic - seriously transforming - steep hills of rural Munduk. If you really want to get away from the tourists, where it's cool and misty up high, where things are achingly beautiful, then Munduk is THE place to be. We wound our way to Ubud over those hills having climbed some of them a few days earlier and watched it all unfold...just beautiful.  

Gill's written up Ubud and my feelings about the place are very much in line with hers. Ubud is all about the shopping these days...and shopping is not my favourite pastime, I can tell you, though the eating was excellent.

That said, I did come away with three noteworthy items. The shirt below, which I am head over heels for, came from Threads of Life, a fairtrade collective that you must visit       

and a shirt for Peter and a handbag (below) for me from a tailor called Manik Bali.

(The camellia is just a bit of frou frou)

Manik Bali do not have a website - too busy weaving and making exquisite clothing, I imagine - so here are their details:

Manik Bali

Jl. Raya Ubud (in front of - practically opposite  - Ubud Market)

Ph: +62 361 972 992

Go early, I say. We discovered them right at the very end...and I am still dreaming about their fabrics.

bali: the east

Having never desired the beaches of the south, skipping that part of Bali - the only part that some people see - made good sense. There would be other beaches, for you cannot escape beach life on an island and besides, who'd want to? Cooler nights up in the hills beckoned.

In 1963 the volcano Agung erupted, devastating the east. Looming over rice paddies, beaches, villages, hotel windows, you can't escape Agung's presence. That eruption is still having repercussions today. The east, you see, is only just now pulling itself out of poverty, but it's no less wonderful. More so, in fact.

Tirta Gangga was hard to leave, not least because of the frankly outstanding palm sugar-fried tempeh we'd become addicted to, but the beach was beginning to call. To Tulamben, near Amed, where bikini-clad French tourists gather, and where faded pastel-hued fishing boats rest in the late afternoon on black volcanic sand,

and you stumble across salt-making - something you really wanted to see - quite by accident.

Offerings are everywhere, and I never got tired of seeing them.

Worshipping nature. It's my Thing, but the Balinese people manage to wend it into their everyday lives.

There are plans here, afoot. 

If diving's not your cup of tea, there isn't much else to do in Tulamben, but this is no bad thing. Take a big, juicy book along and spend as much time as possible reading it by a pool. When we wanted more, we arranged for a driver to take us on a little trip, through the dusty, pot-holed (read, crater-sized) road between Amed and Ujung, to (yet another) Water Palace

and a much-touted, deliciously hidden White Sand Beach (Pasir Putih).

The water was perfection. Gill said I looked like a real Aussie girl when I jumped into the sea. I felt like one, but a tiny one. Stayed in for way too long - finger-wrinklingly-so - enjoying being tossed about, remembered how my dad, long ago, taught me to be brave in the sea. We always swam out further than anyone else, he swimming feet first, toes pointed skyward, squirting mini fountains of sea water, by the mouthful, between his teeth, either at you, or just for his own amusement. I loved that we did that - a lot - together when I was a kid. Peter does it too.     

The nasi goreng we had for lunch wasn't killer, but it was cheap and cheerful and did the trick.

We returned sun-kissed and salty, and ready for the next day's journey north.

That night, at our accommodation, Made offered fresh tempeh because we'd requested it the night before. That it came all the way from Singaraja - our next destination - boded well. It was, if I remember rightly, pretty damn good.   

bali: water

The sound of water - gushing, filling, dripping, pooling, spilling, ebbing, flowing - will stay with me for some time. I'm a Leo, the classic show-off Fire sign* yet my moon, astrological seat of the emotions, lies in the Water-lover Scorpio. I'm drawn to photographing water ordinarily, but in Bali it seemed miraculous, life-enhancing, treated with a certain spirituality, a reverence that here, we don't perhaps give the very thing we are (mostly) made of. I swam practically every day, came alive while immersed in the pools or the sea, felt it wash away things that needed washing away. 

The top photo is from the exquisite garden in our guest house, right by the dining area, and, in the quiet, it teamed with tiny frogs and fish. The bottom is of one of the waterways that line the streets of Tirta Gangga, feeding the rice paddies and more life besides, where young girls wash the family's clothes and boys, slightly older, lovingly wash their scooters. 

*this made me giggle at my own expense upon my return...

bali: tirta gangga

When Gill first suggested Bali I was, I must admit, a little sceptical, but I dismissed any misgivings I had and focused, instead, on fresh, golden-fried tempeh, sunshine and rice paddies, and the promise of time spent in parts of the island less travelled. Large crowds freak me out, man, as does sticky tropical heat; rural settings, on the other hand, well, those I love, so Tirta Gangga in the east was our first port of call.

The arrival drinks above pretty much set the tone. Sweet, non-acidic orange juice, squeezed from a mild green-skinned fruit, arranged with just-picked flowers from our guesthouse garden.      

Turns out I love rice paddies, especially when the sun breaks over the volcanic hills that surround Tirta Gangga, sending magic light into the clouds and bouncing pink off the fields of rice and kang kung below.

You need to get up early, but an all night chorus of roosters and full-moon festivities will do that, no problem.

These were all taken on our first (early) morning, just outside the walls of our accommodation. Gill called it a wonderfully soft landing. I call it paradise. 

There are lots of photos to come, so I apologize in advance, but the place, as you might be able to tell, got well and truly under my skin. Going away to tame my insanely spring-y farm today, but back next week with, I am sure, a LOT more to say. The food, of which there will be much to talk about, was gorgeous, the people warm and the landscape simply breathtaking. I mean, seriously breath-taking. Even the dusty, frantic bits.   

I know that people always say that their holiday has changed them, but this holiday really, really changed me, adjusted some deeper parts, shifted some creeping negativity, and I look forward to unravelling some of that here, as the weeks ahead go by.

home

The lobster red I crisped myself to on that last day by the pool softened upon waking to a deep golden brown, a shade I'd not seen my skin turn in 30 years. I knew it would be thus, it always is, but ordinarily when travelling I dig up every excuse possible to avoid exposing myself to that much sun. Not so this holiday. Perhaps turning 40 changed more than just my chronological age, for I am hooked - hooked, I tells ya - on doing Very Little, preferably by an infinity-edged pool, when planning the next.

Home to spring proper - sunny blue days, a chill still in the air and the wonder of new garden growth brought on by months of good rain. Saw ingenious methods of farming while away, took notes, and watched with quiet awe the way in which the Balinese approach and appreciate gardening.

Still on Balinese time, so waiting for the photos to return is, thankfully, hardly a wait at all.  

a little wilderness

Two road lead to the Blue Mountains. The Great Western Highway takes you through the vast, flat plain of suburban western Sydney, fast and furious, all a blur, straight to where the tourists want to be. The other is the Bells Line of Road, a slow wind upward to where it is misty and cool, bellbirds chiming clear from their hiding spots, high among the trees that line the hairpin turns. We always wind the windows down to hear them, hushed, waiting for that first heralding call.

We are bird lovers every one of us, in my little family.  

Bilpin, where the apples grow, was our destination, just me, mum, dad and Miki, a furry little ball of warmth pressed up against my thigh in the back seat on a grey Friday morning. Striped Fuji's (a glorious, butter-yellow flesh) were the mission, but we what we were really looking for was Autumn Proper.

Hard to avoid, really. A serious hedge is my next project, I swear.

On the way back, we took a right into Kurrajong, heading to Bowen Mountain, in search of a little wilderness. Blink and you'd miss it, so unassuming is the signage. Honeysuckle Cottage.

The kind of garden nursery I dream about. Romantic, yes, but not so prettypretty to be without purpose. I like a useful garden. Culinary herbs - bronze fennel, angelica - medicinal herbs, and heirloom vegetables meander among overgrown roses (old ones, not much in the way of frou-frou here) and salavias, flowers gracefully bending, seducing tiny, lightweight birds. Primroses in shades of butterscotch and gold. A place to explore, to get lost in. Heaven.

 

Just heaven.