I’m spending a few days in Ballandean, near Stanthorpe, at my friends’ vineyard. They have gone to Italy for a joint 50th birthday celebration, and I’m teen-sitting. It’s a pretty easy gig, so I have had lots of time to explore, cook, read, reflect, listen to music and drink some beautiful wine. There are numerous…
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A lazy Sunday morning is not a regular feature of my week, but today was all that could be hoped for in that regard. After a gym workout I joined my husband and daughter at a local cafe for breakfast before discovering a treasure trove of new season fruits and vegetables at the Greengrocer’s Pantry next…
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“The air was fragrant with a thousand trodden aromatic herbs, with fields of lavender, and with the brightest roses blushing in tufts all over the meadows. . . .” William Cullen Bryant I gathered a bunch of lavender late one afternoon a couple of weeks ago for my friend Claire. This spring our lavender plants…
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“It is a very beautiful day. The woman looks around and thinks: ‘there cannot ever have been a spring more beautiful than this. I did not know until now that clouds could be like this. I did not know that the sky is the sea and that clouds are the souls of happy ships, sunk…
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There is something deeply satisfying in this super simple dish which enriches the anise flavoured fennel with butter and earthy thyme. It takes a surprisingly long time to cook, but the wait is worth it as the fennel melts in the mouth and the natural sugars caramelise beautifully in the butter, adding gentle charred notes. It…
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Patience is a conquering virtue. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales This is food at its most basic. Flour, water, salt, and time. The flour and water are mixed and then natural air-borne yeasts and good bacteria develop a culture, or starter, over several days. When combined with more flour and made into dough, this culture…
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I eat a lot of salad. A lot. It’s part of a significant change in my diet to improve my health and lose weight. And I really love salad, so it’s been an enjoyable refocus, and an opportunity to develop creativity with salad and dressing ingredients. This dressing is a riff on a Jamie Oliver…
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“Oh my dear. When has cake ever been for hunger? It’s for flavor, and, in this case, comfort.” Meena van Praag This cake is very dark and rich, spicy and sweet, and with a slight undercurrent of bitterness from the use of treacle and rapadura sugar, a dark brown, unrefined sugar from Sri Lanka. The blood…
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Pumpkin soup is ubiquitous as a winter time meal in my part of the world so I thought I’d mix it up a bit and try a sweet potato soup instead. Lots of spices and a bit of heat make this soup a little different and it would be a…
“The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes – nothing was as calming as creaming butter – and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking chocolate, she took final stock of where she’d been and where she was going. Everything was fine.” Jennifer Crusie It is…
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