Monthly Archives: July 2012

When I Grow Up….

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Yesterday I gave a talk to a group of final year high school students. Even though it was a Home Economics class, and I was there to address the topic of healthy eating and fad dieting, I started thinking about what I felt like all those years ago when I was staring down the short end of the tunnel toward graduation.

I remember being asked over, and over again, ‘What do you want to do when you leave school?’, or ‘So, what are your plans for next year?’

I remember the hope that I held for what I would find once I left behind my (very) small school and ‘grew up’; the feeling of being both in the good company of my fellow graduands, and yet completely alone in my journey into the future; the fear that would take my breath at unexpected moments when I could do nothing but sit and stare until I was calm again; I remember it all too well.

That taste of my past sent me reeling back into ‘When I grow up…’ mode. I suppose this has been a recurring theme of the past few months since my twenty-fifth birthday. In the middle of last year I thought I knew where my life was heading, and then it all changed in an instant. Although I am not a ‘Type A’ personality, I do not deal well without having some sort of plan or goal to work towards. When everything changed I scrambled for any goal I could cling to, and decided to realise a passion that I had held for a long time – going back to uni to study writing, editing, and publishing.

The experience on Tuesday gave me a smoother reflective path to travel down, and a more gentle easing into thinking about what else I want from my life after I finish my master’s degree.

When I was a little girl of four I wanted to be a teacher.

When I was (still) a little girl of eight I wanted to be a stage actress.

When I was twelve I wanted to be archaeologist.

When I was thirteen I wanted to be an architect.

When I was fourteen I wanted forensic pathologist.

When I was seventeen I wanted to be a dietitian and exercise physiologist.

When I graduated university at twenty-three I realised that although I wouldn’t give back my five years of study for anything in the world, I actually didn’t really want to be a dietitian and exercise physiologist. I was lucky enough to find a job where I use my dietetic and fitness skills without having to be situated in a hospital, and get to help people without being overly clinical.

When I turned twenty-five I realised that I was finally living part of the start of the life I had always wanted to build. I was studying writing. Playing with words. Learning about how a book is made; from the seed that starts in a writer’s brain to the finally printed page, I was making my way down a path towards working with words in one capacity or another. I had the chance to imagine all over again what I wanted from my life. What I wanted to be ‘when I grow up’.

So now, when I think about what I want to be ‘when I grow up’, I know only this:

  • I want to be happy, and to make others around me happy
  • I want to be excited, challenged, and taught by every moment in my life
  • I want to climb mountains, swim in oceans, sleep under the stars of skies I have yet to see
  • I want to share my journey with someone, one day, maybe, if the universe sees fit
  • I want to make beautiful food and share it with my friends at a table that always has room for one more
  • I want to grow things, tend the earth, and taste the sweetness of my labours in what I harvest
  • I want to spread the message of a life well-lived, thoroughly nourished in body, mind, and soul
  • I want to live everyday as if this is heaven on earth

and, I never, ever, ever, want to ‘grow up’.

Tell me dear reader, what did you want to be when you ‘grew up’, or, what do you want to be now?

Blood Orange Poppyseed Cake (gluten free)

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Unexpected guests and unexpected gifts provided sweet seasoning to the flavour of last weekend. After visiting with some old family friends and passing some pleasant hours talking about travel, tea, and all other parts of life in between, a gift turned up unbidden in the middle of the week.

For me? I asked.

She wanted you to have it because she knows you will appreciate it, came the reply.

Carefully unwrapped and laid out on the table like the treasure that they are was an absolutely beautiful fine porcelain tea set for six. Complete with tea pot, sandwich plates, and a tea pot warmer powered by a tea light candle. Milky cream porcelain with a golden rim, this tea set has travelled from Germany, and been loved and used for nearly 50 years. Now it is mine. Mine to love, and make memories with. All in the company and comfort of those who have used this before.

I am humbled by such a wonderful gift.

In return, I had to make a little something for afternoon tea and share a pot of tea and a slice of cake. To say thanks, and enjoy the ritual of chatting and pouring on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Here is the thank you gift I brought in return. Naturally gluten free, made from buckwheat and brown rice flours, seasoned with deepest winter’s blood oranges, and served with love. This cake is an everyday afternoon sort of treat. Share it to say thanks, and indulge in a little winter treat.

Blood Orange Poppyseed Cake

I baked my cake in an 8-inch ring tin but you could easily make 12 cupcakes, or use a conventional 8-inch round tin. You will just end up with a flatter cake. If you don’t require this cake to be gluten-free simply 225g of plain flour in place of the buckwheat flour, rice flour, and almond meal.

Ingredients:

  • 125 grams buckwheat flour
  • 50 grams brown rice flour
  • 50 grams almond meal
  • 110 grams golden caster sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 145mL milk
  • 80mL blood orange juice (About one really juicy orange. Save the other for decoration and juice for the glaze.)
  • 2 large eggs
  • 80mL rice bran oil (or other lightly flavoured oil)
  • Grated zest 2 blood oranges
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup poppy seeds

Method:

  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Oil and line an 8-inch ring tin.
  2. Juice and zest oranges. Set aside.
  3. In a large bowl put buckwheat flour, brown rice flour, almond meal, salt, caster sugar, baking powder, poppy seeds, and grated orange zest. Stir together with a whisk – my version of sifting for a cake like this. Make sure there are no lumps of sugar or almond meal. Set this aside.
  4. In a jug mix together milk, juice, eggs, oil, and vanilla. Beat this mixture well.
  5. Add wet mixture to dry mixture and stir until just combined. Pour into the lined ring tin.
  6. Place in the oven and bake for about 15-20 minutes or until lightly golden on top and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
  7. Allow to cool in the pan for 5 minutes then turn out and cool completely.
  8. For the glaze: mix together 1 tablespoon blood orange juice and 1 cup of powdered sugar. Drizzle over cooled cake. Decorate with thinly sliced blood orange.

 

So tell me dear reader, have you ever had an unexpected gift?

TNL Lesson: Who beats back your ‘mean reds’?

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Holly Golightly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul Varjak: The mean reds. You mean like the blues?
Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
(source 1 + 2)

On Wednesday I woke up with the ‘mean reds’. I was off kilter because I had slept in past my alarm, missed my run, and the sky was boiling with storm clouds again. Sometimes these things all add up to nothing. They have no effect on what my Dad calls your ‘equilibrial balance’. Other days they tip you over the edge and your whole day, your whole life, becomes the Titanic post iceberg. That is what the ‘mean reds’ feels like to me.

I am so lucky to have a host of beautiful people around me to act as my lifeboats when I am sinking fast.

On Wednesday that was my Mum. If anyone can take my ‘mean reds’ and paint a rainbow over them, it is Mum.

She endured my grumbles, my indecision, and my reluctance to get out of the house. (When my ‘mean reds’ strike I can hole up in the house for days, refuse company, and do a wonderful impersonation of a modern-day hermit.) We made our way somewhere new, somewhere I had been wanting to explore for a long time but never made it to, and we set about having an adventure.

There is nothing to cure a case of my ‘mean reds’ than the promise, even the mere suggestion of, an adventure.

We fortified ourselves with coffee from a new coffee and creative space crush, put on our imaginary pith helmets, and wandered into the unknown. With Mum by my side, and an adventure in my sights, those ‘mean reds’ never stood a chance.

Mum was my White Rabbit and I gladly followed her down into the Wonderland of the Woolloongabba Antique Centre. We traipsed up and down the aisles of antique, vintage, and retro furniture, clothing, jewellery, books, and related (or unrelated) paraphernalia. There were bits and bobs that called to mind times in my childhood; parts of my mother’s past, and her mother’s past, that popped out and demanded that we share their stories with each other; porcelain cups and pots that had seen many ‘only over a cup of coffee’ conversations; books bearing inscriptions of love and friendship; dresses that were meant to be danced in – over and over again; jewellery whose worth lies not in carats but in the passage of years, and hope and tears, that it has witnessed; and, those pieces of life that at the time we do not realise the value of until we are staring at someone else’s past.

There is a comfort in holding a piece of the past, of a before-you-existed time, and knowing that surely someone else who is written into its unrecorded provenance has felt exactly what you are experiencing in that moment. Someone else has felt that lost, that anxious, that afraid of something unknown.

There is also a comfort in knowing that when you are having a ‘mean reds’ day you can call on someone to pull you out. Then down they come with their rainbow paint. They resist the storm clouds, and bundle you into the car. Buy you coffee and a chocolate meringue. Walk with you through the past. Talk about a future. Delight in a delicious lunch, and two massive pots of tea (English for her, Irish for me). Pretend to read your tea leaves and bring you to happy tears with the prediction of your dreams coming true in a decade. Then laugh with you when you decide that you really can’t leave without the 1933 edition of Pocahontas and the 1906 edition of Lady Baltimore. Even though your bookshelves are already stuffed to overspilling. Someone who knows your weakness for novelty salt and pepper shakers, and takes the trouble to show you the Idaho potato pair, and the dancing pineapples.

Thanks Mama. Your blue eyes bring blue skies that diminish any ‘mean reds’.

Here is to our next adventure. I promise no ‘mean reds’ will be invited.

So tell me, dear reader, who beats back your ‘mean reds’?

Do you have a cure for those days when you seem lost and anxious about something anonymous?

Soothing Spiced Lentil Stew

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Mist rose steadily in clouds from the storm water creek as we started the day with a morning walk. The crisp air reddened cheeks and numbed hands even as the sun rose bright and clear in the unclouded blue sky.

In the depths of midwinter we decided that it was time to clean. To purge the old, save that which is needed and useful, and shed the superfluous in favour of simmering down to essentials. From the sorting and shifting, the de-scaling of our lives, there arises a sense of rebirth, of purity, of the elemental needs of life that are exposed when we chose to lose the clutter. It can however be a little exhausting, a little exposing, and soul-wearying. At the end of a day like this a soothing spiced lentil stew studded with sweet potato and peppered with kale serves to warm and restore.

Soothing Spiced Lentil Stew

A blend of spices lends this stew depth of flavour. I owe a great debt to Nigel Slater as this is adapted from one of his wonderfully warming recipes.

Serves 2 but is easily doubled, or makes great leftovers for a single girl like me.

Ingredients:

  • 1 medium brown onion, diced
  • 1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
  • 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 150g dried Puy lentils
  • 500mL water
  • 1 tsp powdered vegetable stock
  • Few stems of kale
  • Natural yoghurt, to serve.

Method:

  1. In a large saucepan heat a dash of olive oil. Add the diced brown onion and sweet potato. Cover with lid and cook on a low heat until onion has softened.
  2. Add paprika, cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. Stir to distribute spices, and take a moment to revel in their fragrance.
  3. To this pot add Puy lentils, water, and powdered vegetable stock. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes. The lentils should still be firm and the sweet potato soft.
  4. While the lentils are simmering away add a splash of olive oil to another smaller pan. Keep on a low heat and add thinly sliced red onion. Cover and cook until onion is golden brown; then, add the remaining 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
  5. Remove stems from kale and roughly chop the curly leaves. Add to the cooked lentils and cover so that the kale wilts into the stew.
  6. Serve lentils topped with onions and a dollop of natural yoghurt.

Allow the stew to soothe you, and the spices to restore your soul. Then sit back and take in the night, and the new start that every dawn brings.

Silence, and so much to say

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My dearest readers,

Have you ever had so much to say that words simply escape you?

So many thoughts, ideas, and plans chasing each other around, searching to be expressed, that you cannot utter (or write) a word?

I am going to be honest with you all. At the moment this is exactly how I feel. It isn’t so much that I have writer’s block; rather, I have quality/clarity of writing block. I have plans for this blog, places I would like it to go, a message and service that I would like to disseminate through the posts here. At present I am struggling with how to express this in a consistent way. I want to use this space to inspire, discuss, and educate about, all that it takes to live a thoroughly nourished life. My goal is to find some structure in the way content is provided, and the topics I post about regularly. I would also love to share more recipes with you all. I seem to be doing a lot of cooking but not as much capturing and expressing of the meals on my table.

Although I might be struggling with what I write and share, I know one thing for sure.

I am grateful for everyone who comes to visit, and I hope that you will bear with me during this journey to a more uniform thoroughly nourished life.

Thank you friends, and I promise that I will get my thoughts in order soon.

xx Amy.

Friday is for dreaming

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The sunny blue winter sky could be any sunny sky I have had the fortune to see during my lifetime.

Today the clear cornflower dome is whisking me back to memories of spring in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Days spent wandering two of my favourite cities; taking photos of flowers, buildings, food, the endless horizon; new adventures to be found around every corner; and, the tingly-toes feeling of never knowing quite what is coming next.

Although it will be a while before my next long-distance holiday, I am already longing for the hills and sharp bay breezes of San Francisco and the craggy mountains and sage grass scents to be found on the city limits of Los Angeles.

This weekend, while I indulge in some California dreaming, I have a lot to look forward to under these gorgeous blue Brisbane skies.

I am planning on:

  • Some long walks with my darling sister, deep talks, high pitched laughter, and two pairs of sneakers
  • Baking bread with same sister (thinking of this recipe for the gluten-able, and this one for moi)
  • One (or two…) cups of my favourite coffee at the Saturday Farmer’s Market
  • Picking up the new Donna Hay magazine (it’s the annual children’s issue)
  • Finally making it to a hot yoga class (still haven’t used my seven day pass…oops!)

All of the photos above were taken during my spring visit to The Huntington Library last year. If you are ever close to Pasadena I truly recommend a visit, and remember to book in for a high tea.

My hands, and some cookies…

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Once, I had hands as soft as silk. They were pale, unlined, each finger was capped in a perfect shell-pink nail. Slowly these hands began to feel their idleness, to feel emptiness, and they longed to be of use.

Now my hands are still pale, but they are chapped, mottled with freckles, lined with fine scars, and embroidered with dots of calluses. They have lived, loved, provided. They have soothed, kneaded, mended.

They are chapped from early morning walks to greet the winter sun as it peeks over the pale horizon.

Freckles colour parts exposed to the sun on an afternoon in the garden, and on the drive to see a friend.

Scars map stories of dinner party desserts, mornings with an over-eager puppy, and the embroidery needles of long ago.

Calluses dot their palms where tightly-clutched yellow pencils rub while words are scribbled in the middle of the night, or a potato peeler’s weight rests comfortably doing the work needed for empty bellies to be filled.

These hands are not perfectly pretty.

But, these hands are perfectly mine. Each line, scratch, or scar tells a story. Each mark is a testament to my life.

These hands, they are my own.

Today, they stirred and rolled and served these White Chocolate Rolled Spelt Cookies. Please enjoy.

White Chocolate Rolled Spelt Cookies

Makes about 40-45 cookies

Ingredients:

  • 200 grams butter, softened
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 cup wholemeal plain flour
  • 1/2 cup white plain flour
  • 3 cups rolled spelt (you can substitute rolled oats if you don’t have spelt)
  • 1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

Method:

  1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius, and line three large cookie sheets with baking paper.
  2. Place softened butter, brown sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt into a large bowl. Using a hand mixer beat ingredients until creamed and fluffy.
  3. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until well combined.
  4. Mix in flours, and then add rolled spelt and white chocolate chips. Mix well.
  5. Roll large teaspoonfuls of the mixture into balls and place about two inches apart on the cookie sheets.
  6. Bake for 9-10 minutes; switching trays around halfway through cooking time. Keep a careful eye on the cookies as they are done as soon as they become golden on the edges.
  7. Remove trays from the oven and allow cookies to cool on the sheets for 5 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.