A relevant Christmas

Three years on and I'm still getting used to steamy days and stormy nights when Christmas is on everyone's lips. On the one hand I quite like it: swims in the ocean and hose fights on the decking are the furthest thing from my mind when I think of Christmas, so I've been happy to ignore all the festive chaos and just go about our days. 

On the other hand, it feels a bit muddled. Café menus are decorated with snow flakes and songs sing of a white Christmas. I've been pondering this lately as creamy sweat drips down our faces. Of course, it's not muddled at all for Graeme who grew up in New Zealand: we weren't confused when we were kids. We knew Santa was slowly making his way from the snow.

Yes, there is that.

I've always said I prefer a cold Christmas, but I might be changing my mind, especially as this will be our first Christmas in this house. I like the bright days. I like talking about what meat we'll cook in the barbecue on Christmas Day and the prospect of plenty of room in the oven. I'm liking glasses of bubbly outside to the sound of our neighbour's Christmas music (even if it means rubbing bite cream when we come inside). It's different, but that doesn't mean it isn't equally joyous.

Still, now that we live here, I'd quite like the celebrations to be grounded in our season, to be about our here and now. To be relevant. Holly sprigs and log fires aren't so relevant.

I'm looking around me to see what this time of year means to me. Tomatoes, slowly ripening in our garden, hydrangea blooms and bursts of purple colour on every street. Stone fruit in my co-op box and big, bright yellow sunflowers.

Christmas sings colour. Just like this tomato wreath.

Graeme and I have a tradition of adding something new to the tree each year – one year it was a playgroup creation from Luca and last year was a vintage buy I couldn't resist. This year, Luca and I sat down and played with air-dry clay. He stamped with buttons and I experimented with the end of a rounded pencil. Hearts, stars, angels and flowers – I left the snowflake cutter in the tin!

Some were hung on the tree and some will be making their way as presents to family around Australia.

What about you? What does Christmas mean to you? Do you like it to reflect what goes on around you or couldn't you care less?





Hanging out for bruschetta

We're spending every afternoon in the garden at the moment. I'm loving it. With our tomato plants standing proud and next door's jacaranda in perfect purple bloom, it's where I rush to in-between meals.

Five plants aren't quite enough – not when I'm planning tarts, salads and plates of bruschetta for lunch, not to mention that a certain four-year-old round here ate half our crop last year straight off the vine. So I bought two more on Saturday and couldn't resist some purple basil to keep them company – all in the name of companion planting, of course.

The big boys shovelled homemade compost into a $3 fruit crate I found, while my little boy wanted to mulch. We staked and pinched, tied and watered.

Still no red ones, but plenty of green ones. Not long now.  

Meanwhile, as chilly as it was yesterday, we picked the first of our summer basil for pizza. A bit of purple and a lot of green. It went into the tomato sauce with a handful of fresh oregano, and the rest was piled on top at the table.

(And duly picked off by our two saucepots.)




Fritters, peas and glorious orange

I love the seasons dictating what we eat. We haven't had any tomatoes since last summer, so we're eagerly awaiting our next crop. The seedlings are coming along nicely. I think I may have added too many in the one patch, but there's plenty of basil in there too – a favourite companion in the garden and on the plate.

I can't wait for fresh basil again and warm tomatoes grown in my own soil. I thought I ate seasonally before, but not compared to now. Tending a garden and growing your own, even if it's only some herbs and a few vegetables, connects you in so many ways to nature and shows you a much simpler way to eat. What it also does is disconnect you from the trappings of supermarkets. Once you get used to all that year-round choice, it sucks you in, making you believe that choice is a good thing, when in fact choice is a whole lot of stress and it makes me dizzy.

I've always known this, but I still did buy the occasional tomato in winter. I still bought those over-priced over-sprayed wrapped bunches of herbs. Now I wait. If I haven't got the herb in the garden, I haven't got it.

We've waited all winter to plant our tomatoes, to sow our borlotti bean seeds and to see our peas get fat. We've watched our coriander show its first feathery leaves only to bolt and do that annoying thing that coriander does.

I've had a lot of coriander to use up – I'm cutting it in a bid to stop it going to seed. I won't stop it, of course, but I might delay it a bit this way.

So there it was sitting on my kitchen bench top narrowing the choice for dinner. Not only was this satisfying in itself, but having to wait for something to grow and then use it to make a meal is even more satisfying. It may not be everybody's idea of simple (not when you think about how easy it is to just go out and buy it versus building the beds, sourcing the materials to make soil, sowing the seeds and waiting... waiting... waiting...). But it's certainly mine. And it's satisfying beyond words.

I made corn, coriander and coconut fritters* with some spring onions I picked up at the co-op that morning. I think they might just be the tastiest corn fritters I've ever made. They certainly beat these ones.

After Luca feasted on all the fat peas hanging six feet above the garden beds, I had to pull the whole lot out. Powdery mildew got the better of them.

But sitting right there by the cabbages was one single nasturtium flower. That wild cutting worked.

So while my coriander plants just want to run away and flower, and while my peas have turned white and furry, it seems I know how to take a roadside nasturtium and make it flower in my own garden.






* Those tastiest corn fritters I've ever made: Mix 150g plain flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp ground coriander and 1 tsp ground cumin. Add 1 egg, 125ml coconut cream and 100ml water and mix well. Add 350g corn, 2 chopped spring onions and as much chopped coriander as you like (I like a lot) and stir through. Heat 2 tbsp coconut oil in a pan and cook dollops of the mixture until golden brown. 

Mini quiches and a roasted red pasta sauce

My food posts are few and far between. I know that. It's because my kitchen and I are not on very good terms at the moment. There's the fish tank, the new compost bucket, water cask, all the dirty dishes (yes, they certainly are a permanent feature around here) and everything else that gets dumped on the kitchen bench (if we don't know where something goes, or we just can't be bothered to put it away, guess where it ends up?).

So funnily enough, I don't feel inspired to cook there. I'm looking at it now and I can just about fit an A4 piece of paper in the space available. It drives me wild.

One day, I'll have a kitchen big enough so that when I'm rolling pastry out, half of it isn't dangling off the bench top. One day...

Anyway, I realised last night that I hadn't made any bread (see above for reason why), and the boys need a packed lunch today, so I decided to make some mini leek and cheese quiches in my A4-size workspace.

I whisked out some butter puff pastry sheets from the freezer and while they thawed, I softened a couple of leeks in some butter. No real recipe here. Sound familiar?

Three or four eggs in a bowl, beaten with a small tub of crème fraîche, a dash of milk, a sprinkling of nutmeg and salt and pepper. Plus a handful of grated cheese (I used a mixture of cheddar and parmesan). I probably didn't need the extra milk, but Mum always adds milk, so I do.


I pretended to leave the leeks to cool, then I mixed them into the eggy cheesy cream. Squares of the butter puff went into a muffin tray, followed by spoonfuls of the filling. I didn't half fill them, or put the tray in the oven and fill them to the top. Instead, because I think I know best, I wobbled over to the oven, and the mixture leaked out and caught some of the pastry.


Still, they look good. And I've just had one for morning tea.


I popped some cherry tomato quarters on top and baked them for around 15 mins at 180-200C. (Honestly, though, I just cooked them until they looked ready.)

Something else I did a while ago was a roasted red pepper (capsicum) and tomato sauce for pasta. I get so bored with Kian spitting things out and working out what he'll eat. He can't just survive on bananas and sultanas, so I often to resort to a good old purée.

I roasted whole garlic cloves (in their skin), red onion and red pepper (capsicum) with olive oil and a bit of seasoning for about 20 minutes in a hottish oven. (Don't you love how vague I am?!)**. I added the tomatoes towards the end, just so they soften and before they start to char.

Then I blitzed the whole lot with a stick blender (take the squishy garlic out of their skins first). A nice dollop of crème fraîche makes it deliciously creamy, and I know the flavours would be too intense without it for my little ones...

One more idea for your posse... I made some falafels for dinner one evening and served it with some tahini sauce, which I've never made for the boys before. Tahini made from unhulled sesame seeds is very good for you (yes, I know that's very erudite of me, but... well, I've never really been interested in how much calcium or magnesium something has.)

Anyway, it tastes good and it's rich in nutrients.

I made the tahini sauce by mixing a little tahini into some yoghurt along with a good squeeze of lemon. Add a little to start with and keep tasting. 

The boys loved it, especially for dipping their sweet potato wedges.

** I'm not being deliberately vague. This is largely how I cook. There are lots of badly written recipes out there; recipes that set out to give you all the information but end up letting you down somehow. I'm not setting out to give you precise measurements and timings. I'm just cooking for my family, and I'm telling you about it. It's meant to inspire. Because I like to be inspired too. 

Is this really a food blog?

I know my blog cites food as its main reason for being, but really, when was the last time I posted about food?

I wanted to create a space where I could share my passions and until very recently my biggest passion was food. Well, it still is. Just that a few things have got in the way.

Children for starters. Nothing gets in the way of creating something lovely in the kitchen like a one-year-old whinging and whining, koala-hugging your leg all day long. Nothing.

Yes, I've been completely uninspired where food's concerned, because Kian has decided to take this separation anxiety thing to its very limit. We're at the point where I can't bare to be at home between meals, because if he's not asleep and not eating, it's moan moan moan. As soon as we go out, he's OK.

Even Luca held his hands up to his ears yesterday and shouted 'Kian, stop being so noisy. Stop whinging!'. If nothing else, it made me laugh.

And then there's getting stuck in a rut, sticking to a very dependable repertoire of meal ideas. Kids, bless their little cotton socks, don't only sap you of time and energy, I've found, but creativity gets lost too. So needless to say, I've been feeling a bit flat about this.

Until last weekend.

Suddenly, I wanted to be in the kitchen again and I wanted to eat great food. So after a morning of taking the boys swimming and fishing, I made a sort of fruit salad. Peaches, nectarines, mango and passionfruit. And the thing that made my tongue do a little dance: lots of lime zest.

Then we went down to the garden and picked lots of tomatoes.

Graeme made me a tomato and caramelised onion tart tatin years ago and it was divine. So I made that, and we devoured the whole thing. The entire tart between two adults and two little kiddlywinks. Kian hasn't been fond of popping cherry tomatoes like his older brother, but I had a feeling he'd eat them like this, and I wasn't wrong. Sweet, roasted tomatoes with softened onion and rich, buttery thyme-scented pastry - who wouldn't?

As for dessert... I had a can of condensed milk in the cupboard (still haven't got round to making dulce de leche), so I quickly made a batch of no-churn strawberry ice cream. Very easy and rather delicious.

A swirl of strawberry puree 

If that wasn't enough for one day, I made a loaf of sultana, cinnamon and pecan bread in the breadmaker (have I mentioned how I'd be lost without my breadmaker?), so we'd have something exciting to wake up to.

Lunch the next day was a glorious concoction of haloumi, mint and tomato (our first tomato glut ever!) on flatbread. All roughly chopped and in the oven until the haloumi starts to take on a bit of colour. I loved it, but the boys weren't keen. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

It felt good to eat well, and to be inspired.

I'm going to try and make my food posts a bit more frequent than once in a blue moon. But it all depends if baby koala will ever let go...

P.S. Having a lot of trouble posting pictures lately, hence why they're floating all over the place!