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.)




My mum used to...

Isn't it funny the things we remember from our childhoods? I remember mum making bread, pizza dough and pastry without any scales. I remember her hands smelling of wet rubber from her washing-up gloves.

She'd be in the kitchen at 6am making our egg and basturma (air-dried cured beef) sandwiches before she waved us off at 6.30am onto the hour-long school bus ride across Cairo. I remember rich spinach flans, crisp potatoes in the pan and waffles filled with icing sugar.

I remember her knee getting infected from washing the parquet floors on all fours. I loved how she let us watch Knots Landing late in the evening with her, looking out all the time for Dad to come home so we'd have enough time to run back to our bedrooms and feign sleep. Mum was always on our side.

This afternoon as Kian helped me shred newspaper in the garden, I wondered what things the boys will say about me. Will they remember that I called them little pickles and little saucepots... When they're older and talking to friends, will they say Mum was always buying bags of crap from the side of the road and you should have seen how ridiculous she was whenever she saw a cockroach... and the way she chased flies around the house with that green swat (didn't we call it a splat?). 

Or will they look back fondly and say Mum let us stir and chop in the kitchen, and she always gave us the cake spoon to lick. She said 'goodness gracious me' an awful lot and sometimes she'd yell 'ssshhhhhhh' and say 'sugar'. 

There are images I hope will always stay with them. Images of stories read over and over and songs sung over and over at bedtime. Our sushi and a show ritual and squares of dark chocolate in the top cupboard.

Except maybe what will stick is this one thought: Mummy always had better things to do than clean.

What will yours say about you? What are your lovely childhood snippets? 





Pausing in the Hunter Valley

It doesn't feel like we went away. How can it? It was only really a pause in the mayhem of family life. A very brief pause from thinking, planning, wiping, making, doing.

But a lovely pause.

When we booked our guest room on Hermitage Road, we had no idea we'd be walking distance from most of the Pokolbin wineries, not to mention the second best meal we've had in Australia.

The hour-and-a-half drive made us realise even more that we live in such a wonderful part of the country. A short drive to bigger open spaces and even bigger skies. Hotter too, I might add.

Patchworks of vineyards flanked by the Brokenback Ranges were a real sight especially the rows of green against the dusty brown of the land. It hasn't rained here since February. The horses in the neighbouring property came to us for food and we picked the last bunch of green grass we could find for them.

Even the kangaroos were desperate and at sunset we walked along a dirt road towards dozens of Eastern Greys gathered around a nearby billabong. We watched them for a few moments before my red dress scared them away.

We had dips in the pool and read to the sound of very excited birds above our heads. Pink galahs were the only ones I recognised.

We walked to Restaurant Botanica on the first night. Every once in a while, something magical comes along when you least expect it. I wasn't expecting to find somewhere to eat that grows its own heirloom vegetables or somewhere that believes in organic gardening. I certainly wasn't expecting to find Black Berkshire pigs in the backyard. And yet this is what we found when we popped by earlier in the day to have a look at the menu. A beautiful kitchen garden and three very friendly muddy pigs – Chop Chop, Salami 2 and Crackle – who all loved a good scratch. Coming across it in that moment brought tears to my eyes. 'This is where we're eating tonight', I said to Graeme.

It was perfect. All of it. We oohed and oh-myed over the duck and the pork belly. The brioche-crumbed pork rillettes came from Salami number 1 and their marinated fetta was the same amazing fetta we tasted at Binnorie Dairy that afternoon. We even tasted beautiful artisan sourdough made from the same flour these guys use.

If that wasn't enough, we had a lovely lunch at Panino in Wollombi. A simple organic chicken burger and pizza is all we wanted that day. I loved seeing glass bottles of Udder Farm milk for sale inside the café.

We were wise to visit just a few cellar doors and not go over the top with expensive all-day wine tours. It's what most people do when they visit but I hated the thought of being a captive audience. So we went at our own pace and fell in love with a bottle or two (not surprising with floor-to-ceiling views, Ella Fitzgerald's voice and tasting notes that read like poetry). 

I know the Hunter Valley is all about the wine. It's what everyone goes for. But it was all about the food for me. Always the food.




Food Artisan: La Tartine

I love to shout about people who do good, especially when it comes to food. I knew when I visited La Tartine that I wanted to do a lot of shouting. I hope everyone can hear me...

Nick Anthony and his French wife, Laurence, opened La Tartine, Australia's first certified organic sourdough bakery, almost 15 years ago. They moved over from France where they made traditional pain au levain – proper heavenly sourdough with nothing but organic stoneground flour, spring water and Brittany sea salt. This beautiful bread with its distinctive sourness, chewy open crumb and sweet, crackling crust is the reason they set up their own bakery on Wisemans Ferry Road, Somersby here in NSW.

Instead of French ingredients, these Central Coast-made loaves use organic flour from Gunnedah, filtered tap water ("there was no way we were using tap water after our daughters complained their bath water stunk like a swimming pool!") and Murray River salt.

So what is sourdough? Well, it's bread raised using natural yeasts – wild yeasts that are all around us. The sourdough process starts off with a natural leaven made up of flour and water that's left to ferment with the help of these airborne yeasts. This leaven is mixed with more flour and water to make a dough, then it's cut, weighed and shaped into loaves – all by hand at La Tartine. It's the long proving, though, that makes a great loaf.

Jan Hackenberg, one of Nick's bakers, and one of those infinitely charming people who draw you in with talk about their craft, did just that. He talked to me about bread. He told me that a properly fermented sourdough is much easier for the body to digest. It's how we should eat bread.

And have you wondered about those cheap loaves with a sourdough label? Well, that's all they are. Commercial yeasted breads made sour with added vinegar. Sourdough, as Nick pointed out to me, is more than just a sour bread. It's all about the fermentation and the proving; the sourness is simply the end result. You can always tell a slow-fermented loaf by the air bubbles all over the crust.

The stoneground flour they use is creamy and coarse. It's beautiful. Modern powdery roller-milled flour, on the other hand, is stripped of its nutrient-rich wheatgerm and bran.

But here's why they scared me. They work really hard; they lug back-breaking bags of flour and cut loaves from early morning till late at night. Slow food is always really hard on the people behind it. It's passion that drives them. But they can't get dedicated folk who share the same passion to work as hard as they do. They never last.

It's so hard on them they don't even want their children doing what they do.

What happens in years to come when Nick and Laurence want to retire from 14-hour days at the bakery? Who will take over and sell us sourdough at the markets?

Will there always be someone like Jan who cares enough about slow food to work this hard, or will traditions eventually die out because the appeal to earn quick money making cheap food is too great?

People nowadays don't want to make bread this way, or cheese... They don't want to age their meat and they don't want to properly cure their bacon. Slow food is becoming a rare thing.

It's there if we look for it. I'm always looking for it. Writing about it. I know that helps.

If you live near me, look out for La Tartine loaves – they're sold in most good grocers around Sydney and the Central Coast (or head to the bakery on a Friday after 3pm and meet them in person). If you live in London, read the piece I wrote for Homes & Gardens on London Bakeries – it was always a good day when Graeme walked through our front door with a St John's loaf. If you'd like to try and make your own, then come back here. I'll be making my own sourdough very soon. My pat, pat, rub, rub rhythm is working well...

What's your idea of slow food? Do you wish it was the norm? Do you live near lots of wonderful artisans?

Follow me on Facebook or here on Blogger and you'll know when I get it together to start sourdough at home. 



Another artisan: Cocopure

Guest post by Nicola Chatham: finding Flow in your veggie patch

"So, what do you do?"

Don't you love that ques­tion?!! I never know how to answer. I've been prac­tis­ing being more con­cise and inter­est­ing, but what I usu­ally say is…

"Well, I do two things. I'm an artist and I exhibit my work in Mel­bourne and Bris­bane. And I help peo­ple grow organic food with a blog and online train­ing course."

What I really do though, is chase 'Flow'.

When I was 18, I began prepar­ing my port­fo­lio for art school. The trou­ble was, I was ter­ri­fied of mak­ing marks on a page. I'd pretty much lost my cre­ativ­ity when my par­ents divorced three years ear­lier. It just fell away, prob­a­bly some­where with my joy and sense of safety. Return­ing to art was like court­ing a lover who'd rejected me. Painful. Full of doubt. Fear I'd be rejected again. "You're not good enough, you can't do this," I heard whis­pered over and over in my mind.

So I found a men­tor. He was an older artist. Worldly. Way­ward. Mys­te­ri­ous. Fun. Temperamental. He showed me how to put my ego aside and just dive in. Exper­i­ment. See what hap­pened. Don't take it per­son­ally. But do show up. Make marks. Put the time in. Don't run in fear of fail­ure. And don't take it so seri­ously – like my life depended on it. Because it felt like it did.

Sur­pris­ingly, I found an amaz­ing thing. When I did as he said (had a glass of wine and sat down to draw), I touched on an expe­ri­ence that has woven its way through my life ever since.

Flow :: Pres­ence :: Bliss :: Groove

"When­ever there is enthu­si­asm, there is a cre­ative empow­er­ment that goes far beyond what a mere per­son is capa­ble of." – Eck­hart Tolle, A New Earth

Pro­fes­sor Mihaly Csík­szent­mi­há­lyi calls it Flow. Bud­dhists call it Mind­ful­ness. Eck­hart Tolle calls it Awak­ened Doing. Joseph Camp­bell calls it Bliss.

Twyla Tharp calls it Groove. In her book The Cre­ative Habit (which I love, and highly rec­om­mend, by the way), she says:
"A groove is the best place in the world. It's where I strive to be, because when you're in it you have the free­dom to explore, where every­thing you ques­tion leads you to new avenues and new routes, every­thing you touch mirac­u­lously touches some­thing else and trans­forms it for the better."

Ever since those days prepar­ing my port­fo­lio, I've wanted more flow in my life. For me, flow is when time takes on another qual­ity. You're so absorbed in the task at hand, it feels like time doesn't exist.
But flow doesn't just hap­pen in the fine arts. Flow exists in prepar­ing a gar­den bed. Trans­form­ing lawn into abun­dance. It can be found in a well-stocked gar­den shed. And a box of your favourite seeds.

Flow vis­ited me this week­end in the veg­gie patch.

Time flew. The world didn't exist out­side of my imme­di­ate environment. I didn’t have a plan. Instead, one action led to the next. I pulled down the old Mada­gas­car bean, like shed­ding an old self image. The abrupt naked­ness of the bam­boo teepee shocked and excited me. I pre­pared the ring of soil around the base with nitrogen-rich green leaves and weeds, then lay­ered com­post, and finally hay soaked in molasses and water. Then I parted the hay like a skirt and planted snow peas.

It was all good. I went out­side to check my hand­i­work at 9pm and the naked teepee, with her new upside-down skirt, glowed in the full moon.

Flow.

It can catch you unawares. But only if you are pre­pared and show up.

• Put on your gloves.
• Get into the habit of com­post­ing (so it’s ready, when you are).
• Find your­self some seeds to play with.
• Go out­side.

Nicola Chatham is an organic gardening teacher, permaculture designer and contemporary artist. Her Grow Organic Food in Pots course starts next week and enrolment closes in just over three days. I'm happy to promote and recommend Nicola's online courses because her first course, the Abundant Veggie Patch System, which I paid for, has transformed my garden and my way of thinking. I love her approach. I've enrolled on Grow Organic Food in Pots (especially as Nicola is covering worm farming this time) and would love for more people to join me! If you want to read more about Nicola's online course, pop your email address here and Nicola will send you all the details.

Joining in with Rachael's Garden Journal.




Finding home

We're bringing up our children the way we want to. We're growing, catching, making and trying to do it all slowly and calmly away from all the madness.

It's not always easy. But it feels right.

I can't imagine living anywhere else now. And to think that over a year ago it was a stormy mess. It hasn't all fitted into place yet, but those clicks are happening all the time. We're living purposefully.

We're in the right place now.

And if it wasn't for Graeme suggesting we move here, I probably wouldn't be writing these words. So I'm very grateful to my husband for moving us here at a time when I'd almost given up.

I'm happy. 

(I wonder if this has anything to do with Graeme and I going away for three nights next week. On. Our. Own! What do you think? Or maybe it's because mum's coming for Christmas and spending all of January with us.)

Linking up with one of my favourite bloggers Maxabella loves...




Growing up

I knew he wouldn't nap forever, but after over four and a half years I couldn't imagine how he'd ever get through the day without a sleep. My days for as long as I can remember have been split into a morning and an afternoon with a nap in the middle. Kian (eventually) slotted nicely into how Luca had carved our days. Whatever we do in the morning, he'd start showing those signs around lunchtime and he'd say he's tired and take himself off to bed. On preschool days when he doesn't nap, he comes home and does very little. He's snoring by 6.30pm.

My life as a mother would have looked very different had I not had those two hours to myself every day. To be able to split the day in two and know there is a break in the middle has saved me on countless days. It's when I eat in peace, read in peace, and write here in my little space. In peace.

It's when I also nap myself, stealing twenty minutes or so to rest on the sofa with my feet up and stare at the sky and trees all around the house. Oh, I love it when quiet reins after lunch.

But quiet reins no longer. He doesn't desperately head for his bedroom as soon as his tummy's full. I still insist on quiet time (for both our sakes), so he reads on his bed until he can't keep away from his craft table any more.

He draws and writes, paints and cuts. And with Kian asleep and not at his elbow knocking over his tools and screwing up his paper, he realises that this is his golden hour.

It will be our golden hour too (eventually), because once I've reorganised my time and kicked my four-year habit I will spend one-on-one time with him and enjoy it.

But right now, I'm trying to kick the habit. Of being on my own, falling asleep without being prodded, and relishing two hours without questions and demands.

It's the end of an era.

Except I'm not really lamenting the end of my quiet time – I've had it good, I know. What makes me a touch sad is it's the end of Luca being little. He's growing up.

I know every parent sees more in their children's art than anybody else, but will you look at that kookaburra? We had to frame it. Every morning while everyone still sleeps, Luca creeps out and draws from books. Plants, wildlife, anything. Lately, he's started painting with watercolours. I wonder how much all this will shape the school decision...