Girl in Papatowai

One of my favourite places in the entire world is a place called Papatowai in the Catlins, south of Dunedin. We spent Easters there when I was a child, and I still love to visit whenever I go back to New Zealand.

This part of the South Island coast has rock pools and tide pools, an estuary that drains out at low tide, South Island Rata that hang low over the sand and old growth Totara. It’s one of those places that you go to stay and not leave. Just get out your map, drawn a circle around where you are staying and go out explore a very small part of the world – climb your way around rock pools, walk up and down the coast, wander across the estuary in zig zags like the spoon bills that live there, sit inside by the fire.  Eat good food, go to sleep and then get up and do it all again.

a year of reading

in which our heroine discovers romance novels and steampunk…

Tara (with butter)

One of my favourite reading finds this year was Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer.  It’s a Romance novel and an Action novel, but mostly it’s a novel about food.

Agnes is a curvy food writer who lives in an old plantation mansion in Georgia.   It’s her dream house, just like the house in Gone with the Wind, only better… because it comes ‘with butter’.  There is so much cooking and food in this book, mostly breakfasts and cakes.  I don’t know why Agnes has so much food in her fridge/pantry, and who does the washing up.  But she feeds everyone.   It certainly made me want to cook for a crowd.

And Tara (with butter) has become a bit of a mental touchstone for me.  Having a huge mortgage on a big old house is pretty stressful for Agnes (she’s about to default on her mortgage payments, has to host a wedding for inlaws from hell, oh, and everyone seems to want to kill her), but the essence of the idea of Tara (with butter) is, for me, having somewhere to settle, somewhere to call home, with enough produce and supplies on hand to be able to eat well.  Really well.

At the same time as I have that dream, I also dream about vagabonding and going on a long adventure (knitting in iceland, bicycling my way through tuscany, learning french in paris, hitting the chicago blues festival, walking the high line in nyc).  And you can certainly eat well on the road.  But I also carry that idea of this place with hummocky paddocks, higher hills in the distance, a bit of a house to bang around in, friends who come visit, a cat on the porch and a long narrow twighlight.

With butter.

water baby

Would you believe I’ve lived in Australia for 7 years and have never been swimming in this side of the Pacific?  This photo was taken by Dave one summer at Gordon’s Bay, and it’s probably the closest I’ve come.

This summer is going to be the summer I go swimming.  My reluctance to get in the water probably has something to do with the fact that I’m not a very strong swimmer, but I’ve been thinking about going to adult swim classes, and Gordon’s Bay is a very sheltered bay that is great for snorkling.  Maybe all I need is a snorkle and some flippers.

something every girl should know

How to accurately measure your insole

I have tried several times to buy shoes online.  The results are usually pretty disastrous.  The shoes always turn out to be too large.  I sometimes have equally terrible experiences buying shoes in person.  I know I’m not the only one to have squeezed my foot into a very snug shoe while saying ‘these will stretch, right?’   This moment of delusion is normally followed by weeks of hobbling around the house in thick woolly socks + new shoes -  a seriously great look.

no backsies

The Sydney Finders Keepers Markets are on tonight and tomorrow at Carriageworks.

I love that they start on the Friday evening, as I can’t think of a better way to start my weekend than by milling around a market filled with beautiful people and beautiful things. Carriageworks is a great space for it. I don’t think two of my favourite stall holders will be there this year, Publisher Textiles and Kareena Zerefos. But I am hoping to nab myself a Puddin’head teatowel.

I’m all about the red tea towels at the moment.

Girl in Dunedin

I went to New Zealand in February to visit my parents, who live just north of Dunedin in a small town called Waikouaiti.

I was actually a pretty illfated trip – we experienced both illness and earthquakes. But it was so wonderful being able to show Dave places that I love (like Waikouaiti, Papatowai in the Catlins and rural Canterbury). We toured giant early 20th century power stations, ate a delicious meal sourced locally in the Waitaki region, and at the end of our trip were able to check in on my best friend Kathryn who lives in Lyttelton and lost her house in the Christchurch earthquake.

Waikouaiti is a beautiful place. My parents moved there a few years ago, and now whenever I visit I get to explore the area in microcosm detail. You know I love a rural microcosm. This trip I discovered a new walk, from town to my parents place via a causeway over the estuary.

Friends came out to Waikouaiti and we ate a lot of food on a somewhat rainy day (picnic-style) in my parent’s living room, and then walked up to Matanaka. But there was also visiting a plenty – my friends Becs and John in Karitane, Kirstyn in her beautiful apartment overlooking the main street in Port Chalmers, and my oldest friend Amy at her family home in Abbotsford.

We had such a great time with Amy – eating onigiri (my new favourite Japanese snack), listening to the best music of the second half of the twentieth century (Amy made a musical compilation for her Dad for his 60th birthday, one song for every year he has been alive – such difficult and personal choices to make, but such a great musical conversation between father and daughter… I loved it!), and playing trivial pursuit until 2am. Amy’s family has a beautiful dog called Ignatius, who I now look forward to visiting every time I go back to Dunedin. He is one special dog. And Dunedin is one special place. I like that my first home is still such a wonderful place to visit.

balsamic strawberry ice cream

I hosted the party to end all parties in my wee house on the weekend. There were ice cream flavours a plenty: chilli chocolate, cinnamon, thai basil, white chocolate sorbet, and plum sorbet with grand marnier were my favourites.

And just as I think I don’t have it in me to make ice cream ever again, I find two almost too ripe punnets of leftover strawberries in the fridge.

The thought of a complex ice cream recipe with multiple steps and straining, and chilling etc was daunting, but then I found a recipe for Balsamic Strawberry Ice Cream in Stephanie Alexander’s A Cook’s Companion. Even as I was reading the recipe I could taste the tart caramel of the balsamic vinegar and the sweetness of the strawberries. So fresh and delicious, and so simple.

Easy Balsamic Vinegar and Strawberry Ice Cream (ratios significantly modified from the orginal recipe)

Wash, hull and quarter 1 1/2 punnets of ripe strawberries. Macerate strawberries in 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar for 20 minutes. Whizz strawberries and vinegar with 1/4 cup of pure icing sugar using an immersion blender. Chill this vinegar-strawberry-sugar mixture in the fridge for at least one hour. Whip 1 1/2 cups of cream and then fold through the strawberry mixture and churn in an ice cream maker for 20 minutes.

This black pepper panna cotta with balsamic strawberries looks amazing too.

the goriest of fruit

Since getting my ice cream maker at Christmas, my holy grail has been to find fresh Blood Oranges so that I can make David Lebovitz’s Blood Orange Sorbet. When my sister was up from Melbourne I scoured all the fancy markets hoping I’d find them, but no luck. Sydney was Blood Orange dry.

This week though I found them finally – the Blood Orange Mecca – in a small greengrocer in the predominantly middle eastern community I work in in Sydney’s West.

I bought a dozen and couldn’t wait to take them home and juice them. This is me really excited later that night when I was about to start juicin’

I wasn’t prepared for how dark they were (such a great colour!), or their complex flavour. Like the sweetst, most alcoholic of oranges. They taste like concentrated sunshine. A friend of mine told me a story the day I bought them about growing up in Tamworth eating blood oranges straight from the tree as she walked home, and they really taste like that childhood summer walking. Such a treat!

I made such a mess juicing them, because the juice splattered everywhere as I did them by hand with my trusty white porcelain maxwell williams citrus peeler. It probably didn’t help that I felt the need to suck the last bit of juice our of every juiced half, either. I walked away with two cups of juice, but looking like I had also just walked off the set of an episode of True Blood! Totally worth it, though. Juice is sitting chilled in the fridge and I am going to churn it tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know how it goes and will try and take photos. The colour is going to be intense!

In other fun news, I scored tickets to see Sufjan Stevens at the Opera House a few weeks ago. They were late release tickets, so I only knew we were going a few hours before the gig started and had to get there straight from work. Which made it all the more special when I realised what an amazing performance we had been invited into. When people got up from their seats in the middle of Impossible Soul and started dancing, I realised what a great thing we were part of — and then balloons and glitter came raining down. In the Sydney Opera House! It was like a giant dance party, and it was so nice to see everyone enjoying themselves so much. I love a happy concert. I’m going to learn to dance like those girls, I swear.

January was just the most amazing month for live music, and 2011 has barely started!

death by chocolate

That’s it. Christmas is off!

Who needs Christmas when you spend the week before cooking the most amazing food? Case in point: last night’s chocolate sorbet.

I guess I can’t decry Christmas completely, because it did bring me my amazing Cuisineart ICE-20. My sister Claire, Dave and I test ran it early last night with a chocolate dessert par excellence… David Lebovitz’s amazing Chocolate Sorbet. Why I would decide to make the most decadent chocolate ice cream in existence after two weeks of guzzling Christmas chocolate, I have no idea… but it was just heaven.

I can’t wait to try more flavours – we are thinking rhubarb ice cream for Christmas day; Claire wants to make blood orange sorbet; and I am drooling about the salted caramel ice cream filled with shards of white Belgian chocolate that I had at Love Coogee on Sunday night.