Feijoa smoothie

It's feijoa season! The feijioa – sometimes nicknamed pineapple guava due to its pineapple-y flavour and guava-ish texture – is well known and easy to find in New Zealand but not so common here in Australia. I have two feijoa trees but, sadly, they've never produced fruit. Our neighbour has a large tree that presses up against our fence, though, and I gratefully receive any fruit that falls over the fence or rolls underneath it :-)

Mostly I eat the feijoas simply by halving them and scooping out the flesh, but today I experimented and made a smoothie. Four small feijoas, a couple of tablespoons of coconut yoghurt, and some iced water. Delicious!

We're off to New Zealand in two weeks and I'm hoping feijoas will still be available there. NZ feijoas are gigantic and plentiful. Fingers crossed ...

A sunflower maze in Canberra!

This blog has mainly become my online recipe book. I barely post anymore, though I often pop by for recipes. Just lately it's been pumpkin bread, rice paper rolls, peacamole and carrot and coriander soup.

Anyway … we recently spotted a story on Canberra's news blog, The Riotact, about a local sunflower maze. It's only open for two weeks (closing on 16 March) so Andrew and I bought some tickets, grabbed a picnic lunch, and headed out there today. Delightful.

Thanks to Andrew for the photos.

Recipes for (temporarily) abandoned blokes

The spring Lifeline Bookfair was held over the weekend and, to my delight, conversation in my boot camp group today was about what books people had bought! The bookfair is a Canberra institution and raises money for an excellent cause so it's always great to hear people have enjoyed it. Particularly as Andrew and I have volunteered behind the scenes for 17 years or so. 

Anyway, one of the guys in the group described a cookbook he'd purchased. It sounded awesome. Dinner party recipes in categories such as 'recipes for dull people' and 'recipes for abandoned men'. Oh my goodness. I didn't find out if the recipes for abandoned men were for the permanently abandoned or those whose partners might eventually return. (More details please, Michael.)

The discussion inspired this blog post. Andrew and I have been together for about 32 years and (to my shame) I've never really let him spread his wings in the kitchen. I like cooking and tend to take over. However, I'm off to Sri Lanka for 2.5 weeks in November – the country has been at the top of my bucket list since I was seven – and will be leaving Andrew at home. It's not the first time I've gone somewhere exotic and left him behind – Timor-Leste in 2018 was amazing – but maybe he'd like some recipe ideas for when I'm away? Just in case, here goes …

Chunky avocado salsa

Curries (with a little help from the good folk of Byron Bay)

Lots of salad ideas

Pea and tofu soup

Ratatouille

Simple pizza from scratch

Seasonal stir fry

Shakshuka

Spanish omelette

Teriyaki tofu and veges

Enjoy!

P.S. my apricot tree has blossoms :-)

My desert island food

About a month ago, while sitting in a tiny, suburban Indian restaurant in Christchurch, New Zealand, I had a revelation. A eureka moment, if you will. I realised that, if I could only eat one dish for the rest of my life, I would want it to be palak paneer. It's vegetarian, delicious, creamy, spicy and contains plenty of fibre and vitamins and protein. Possibly the perfect food. I almost invariably order palak paneer when I go to an Indian restaurant (is this boring of me? perhaps ...) and have never been disappointed. It's also easy to make at home. My recipe is here, and if you'd prefer it to be vegan rather than vegetarian you could replace the paneer with cubes of tofu.

This is the palak paneer we ate that night at Pepper Bridge Indian Restaurant. 

That's all. Just wanted to share the news.

The upside of La Niña

Canberra is usually a bit of a desert. Some plants won't grow here at all; others only grow when you apply massive quantities of water. Many of the plants/shrubs/trees in my garden are native species as they're more likely to survive and thrive than exotics. Anyway, we've had a couple of years of greater than average rainfall, which – while very sad in wetter parts of the country that have suffered floods – has made my garden bloom. I wanted to take a few photos before the La Niña effect disappears and the desert comes back …

Blueberry, boysenberry and gooseberry bushes

Raspberry, loganberry and marionberry bushes

The pomegranate tree that came back from the dead

Ferns are unfurling!

Lavender and daisies

Oregano

Mint plants keep appearing amongst the seaside daisies

 Last but not least … the beginnings of next year's yam crop :-)

Jazz up your scrambled eggs with some avocado salsa

For years I've been making avocado salsa wraps for dinners and picnic lunches. The salsa is quite damp so if you do decide to take this recipe to a picnic, it's best to carry the salsa and wraps separately and assemble at your destination.

Anyway! Recently, Andrew and I went to brekkie at a local café. The menu and faces appeared to have changed so we suspect it's under new management. I tried something off the specials board and it was delicious. It turned out to be a new twist on my old favourite avocado recipe. I tried replicating it at home a few days later and it worked well:

For the salsa (adjust quantities to fit your needs and tastes)

avocados
spring onions
tomatoes
fresh lime juice
fresh coriander (optional)
garlic (optional)
chilli (optional)

Chop ingredients roughly, combine and refrigerate till the flavours have mingled. 

For the scrambled eggs (this quantity worked for two people for dinner)

6 eggs
1 tablespoon butter
pepper and salt, to taste

Scramble eggs in your preferred way. (I use the microwave but others may prefer a saucepan.)

Spoon scrambled eggs onto plates and top with avocado salsa. You wouldn't think eggs and lime juice would work together, but they do …

Things I wish I'd known earlier

This month I'm turning 55. Fifty-five! Fun fact about getting older … you don't really notice it. Not yet, anyway. I always thought I'd feel different, somehow, but seem to be the same person as before. Just with a few more strands of silver in my hair. The upcoming birthday has prompted me to reflect on what I know and when I knew it. Not so much what I would have done differently (what's the point of regrets?) but wisdom that took a while to crystallise.

Exercise. It's good for you and FUN. My family was inert. No one voluntarily exercised, no one participated in any sport, and being a pudgy, four-eyed, pigeon-toed little critter, I embraced the inertia. Why move when you could curl up with a good mystery novel? I was academically able but wildly out of touch with mainstream New Zealand, which (in the 1970s and '80s, at least) revered sportspeople and reviled education. My first tentative experiences with exercise, apart from the hideous PE classes at school, were as a teenager when I did a little competitive cycling (using a borrowed bike) and jogging. Forty years later, exercise is one of my great joys in life. It's good for the body, it's good for the mind, and it's also a handy way of getting from A to B and back again.

Asking for help. I've had some fabulous, if accidental, mentors over my life. In 1980 a teacher at my high school taught me the flute, free of charge, for a year when my parents were unwilling and unable to pay for lessons. In 1983 my high school psychology teacher helped me through a rough year. In 1993 a university academic hired me as a temporary research assistant then offered to supervise my master's degree research. In 2007, my boss asked me to edit his writing, leading to a whole new career path. I'm grateful to all these people (and have told them so). I wish, though, that I'd known earlier in life that it's okay to ask for help. I didn't ask for help when a gang of older girls tormented me in the school grounds. I didn't ask for help when a kid on the school bus assaulted me. I didn't ask for help as I assumed I'd be blamed or punished rather than helped. Even now, I'm pretty uncomfortable asking for any kind of assistance, but I'm working on it.

The world of work. When I was thrust into my first full-time office job, at the wildly immature age of 16, I'd never set foot in an office before. Nor had anyone else in my very working-class household. So I was ignorant of office etiquette and business communication and made all sorts of errors. Less than three years later I was promoted to my first supervisory role and, having barely mastered office etiquette as an underling, made all sorts of new bloopers! These days I'm addicted to Alison Green's wonderful blog, Ask a Manager, but back then there was no internet and no one to ask for advice on how to behave, whether as a worker or a boss. It doesn't matter anymore as I'm happily self-employed and rarely face office etiquette issues (yaaaay) but I still cringe when I recall those early stumbles.

Job satisfaction. When I was young I had no idea that work could be enjoyable or satisfying. My parents appeared to hate their jobs, seeing them simply as a source of much-needed income rather than having potential for pleasure. I, too, assumed that I'd spend forty years doing work I detested. It wasn't till I was about 27 that I first had a job I enjoyed, and I fell into my dream job at 40 (and haven't looked back). Work is awesome. It's been a joy to finally find an occupation that's so much fun.

Gender. Gender was an absolute binary when I grew up … or so it seemed. The female gender (to which I was instantly assigned at birth) was clearly inferior in the society I grew up in, i.e. 1960s, '70s, '80s New Zealand. It's hard to disentangle how much of that feeling came from the wider culture and how much came from my family but, either way, my entire life has been affected by the label. The toys I played with, the clothes I was allowed to wear, the subjects I studied, the housework tasks I was trained to do, the career ambitions that were automatically ruled out. All for the misfortune of being labelled female. It's only been in the past five years or so that I've become aware of the non-binary gender option and I'm sure I would have readily embraced that, had it been available fifty years ago. No idea how my life might have panned out, in such a parallel universe, but I do wonder …

Little things that make a big difference. If you wash delicates and favourite clothes in wash bags they'll last much longer. A well-stocked freezer is handy for busy times and unexpected pandemics. How to cut an onion (weirdly, I first saw this method in the French movie Délicieux. It was a revelation!) Use an electric toothbrush and floss regularly. Be polite and respectful. Refuse, reduce, repair, repurpose, reuse, recycle. Don't accumulate clutter. Try not to overeat. Educate yourself. Gardening soothes the soul.

That's it. Wisdom that's taken a long time to distil!

NZ yams in Canberra. At last!

It's been an adventure. Ever since moving to Australia from New Zealand, more than thirty years ago, I've missed yams. While yam is often used as a generic word for sweet potatoes, here I mean oca or Oxalis tuberosa. It's a small, pinkish, finger-shaped sweet potato that melts in the mouth when added to a roast dinner. While it's possible to buy many NZ groceries in Australia (at the supermarket or via mail order) I craved, and couldn't find, NZ yams for a long time. 

In 2018, I discovered that an online garden store in Queensland was selling yam plants by mail order so I ordered three (very expensive) plants, which arrived safely but died soon after. Later in 2018 I ordered ten yam tubers from an online garden store in Victoria. They produced foliage but the plants didn't survive the Canberra summer. After a year off to ponder my failures, I bought yet more tubers (nine, this time) from Queensland in 2020. Once again, they sprouted foliage but produced no yams. 

What was I doing wrong?

When, in 2021, I found that Feijoa Addiction in Brisbane was selling 5 kg boxes of yams by mail order, I bought 5 kg. Then another 5 kg! They were delicious. Given all my failures in growing them, I intended to eat rather than plant the whole 10 kg. But a couple of green-thumbed friends suggested we should each plant a few at our respective houses and see if anyone could successfully grow yams in and around Canberra. So I shared little bags of yams with five friends and also put some tubers aside to plant at my place. Here's a rough timeline:

August 2021: purchased yams

October 2021: planted yams in pots

November 2021: foliage appeared

December 2021: planted the yam plants in four different locations

(with different exposure to the elements) around the house

(above and below) June 2022: success! We have yams

The yam plants in shady spots on the southern side of the house produced tubers (1.2 kg in total) whereas the plants in sunnier places on the western and northern sides of the house produced none. My guess is that the reason those plants failed (and previous years' plants failed) was that I planted them in full sun and they cooked in the ground. D'oh. It also seems important to plant them in mounds of soil so there's plenty of room for the wee tubers to develop.

Delighted to finally have some home grown yams. Last night I made a vego roast dinner with pumpkin, onions, yams and broccoli. Yum.

Purple rice pudding and an autumn week in Canberra

It's been a gorgeous autumn week in Canberra. Cool but not cold. I planted about sixty flower bulbs and corms in the garden and am crossing fingers for a colourful display in the spring. We also had a very social week (some friends were sans children for the first time in ~16 years so we met up for two dinners and an AFL game) and walked up a hill (possibly to burn off the excess calories).

Chocolate-themed high tea at the Hotel Kurrajong

Delicious Malaysian dinner at Abell's Kopi Tiam

The view from atop Mount Taylor

 

Purple rice pudding … the home made version

Anyway, to the recipe! Andrew ordered Bubor Pulut Hitam (black wild rice pudding with coconut milk and palm sugar) when we ate at Abell's Kopi Tiam, which reminded me that I used to make this dish often, so I made some today for dessert tonight and to put in the freezer. While the rice is called 'black' when you buy it, it turns a lovely purple colour when cooked.

1 cup glutinous black rice
800 ml water
piece of pandan leaf
1 tbsp palm sugar
coconut milk
small pinch of salt

Wash the rice and place in a saucepan. Add the water and bring to the boil, then simmer gently with the pandan leaf, covered, for 40 to 60 minutes. Stir occasionally, and more frequently as the mixture thickens. After about 30 minutes, start testing for softness. Add extra water if necessary. When the rice is pleasantly soft (it will still be a little chewy) add the sugar and continue cooking for about five minutes. Remove the pandan leaf, pour into small bowls and leave to cool. Serve warm or at room temperature with lightly salted coconut milk, or ice cream. Slivers of fresh coconut add flavour and texture.

Notes: glutinous black rice, pandan leaves and palm sugar are available from many Southeast Asian grocers. This freezes well. Despite the name, glutinous rice does not contain gluten.

Crunching the numbers, 2021/22 edition

I've been using a weekly menu for many years and recording meals I've cooked in an Excel spreadsheet since 2009. (Nerds! I know.) Every year, on the arbitrarily chosen 20 April, I crunch the numbers and analyse what we ate. Admittedly, the menu has featured a lot of comfort food over the past three years. Partly due to the pandemic and partly because since I've had a garden to potter in, cooking has fallen down in my list of priorities and interests. Ah, well. Here's what we ate most over the past year:

vege burger wraps (18 times)
pasta and sauce (18 times)
oven-fried fish with veges (15 times)
roast pork and veges (14 times)
creamy tuna pasta (12 times)
pulled pork and coleslaw burgers (11 times)
macaroni cheese (9 times)
Greek meatballs and Greek salad (8 times)
leek, potato, bacon, bean and cream soup (8 times)
vegetable samosas (8 times)

I did try a few new recipes over the year, for example:

potato latkes
Keralan fried cauliflower
French goat cheese salad

and have managed to produce a variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs in the garden.

Not making any rash promises about diversifying ... but we have been eating more vegetarian (or vegan) meals than non-veg ones for a while now, and I'm keen to continue that trend.

Happy New Year! (Let's hope so, anyway ...)

Almost forty years ago I spent two summers working at a berry farm about 10 km from my parents' place. I would wake up around 6 am, jump on my bike, pedal furiously till I reached the farm, and spend all day standing in the hot sun picking (and, ahem, eating) raspberries. We were paid piece rates – around 24 cents per pound (why wasn't it kilos?) if I remember correctly – and in my best week EVER I took home $45. I did eat an awful lot of the berries I picked. People said I'd grow to hate berries but I didn't. Now that I'm fifty-something and lucky enough to have a backyard, berries feature heavily.

Currently eating: raspberries, boysenberries,

blackberries and gooseberries

Happy new year. Let's hope 2022 is kind to us all.

Scenes from a garden

Summertime in Kaleen! Five years ago our friend Jen helped us plan our garden. When we bought the house it was weed-infested chaos; happily, we've made lots of progress since then.

Berry bushes

Pomegranate tree

Baby plums

Lime tree

Daisies and herbs alongside the house

Shrubs along the driveway

Front garden, featuring flowers, fruit and herbs

Feijoa flowers

Yam foliage

 ... and the critter that lives under the watering can!

Three-minute gooseberry jam

We have a magnificent collection of berry bushes at the moment. 2021 has been an unusually wet year in Canberra and EVERYTHING in the garden is looking cheerful.

Gooseberries, blueberries and blackberries

Raspberries, blackberries, and mystery

berries (I've forgotten what they're called)

Gooseberry bush up close

Anyway, this is the first year I've had a decent crop of gooseberries. Last year there were none and the previous year I think I had two berries. This year there are heaps, though they're hidden among some pretty ferocious spikes.

So, today I made some really easy jam:

I picked and washed about two dozen gooseberries, then microwaved them on full power for three minutes, stirring every minute.

The resulting jam (about two tablespoons)

That's it! I spread it on hot buttered toast and ate it for lunch. The jam was unsweetened (so wouldn't be suitable for bottling) but was quick and delicious. You could probably add some sugar or honey if you wanted it to be sweeter.

Nine weeks of lockdown, but who's counting?

Well! Nine weeks ago today the Australian Capital Territory (i.e. Canberra) was plunged into COVID lockdown. It was initially supposed to last for two weeks but the cases kept happening and are still happening. We've barely left our suburb in the past nine weeks and are forever grateful that we decided to upgrade from a townhouse to a free-standing house in 2016, as the garden is a delight if we must be trapped at home. So, what have I been doing lately …?

Reading books

So many books! I've barely bought any paper books in the almost ten years since I first got a Kindle. Whenever I want to read a book, I first check whether our wonderful local library service has a copy (and order it online if it does), then consider whether to buy it on Kindle if it doesn't. I usually have a massive pile of library books on my bedside table, and read vigorously to finish them all before they're due back. Of course, that plan has gone pear-shaped since the lockdown was announced as the library is locked down too. So, I've been reading the backlog of books I'd accumulated on my Kindle. It's been great. Some recent reads include Ladyparts: A Memoir by Deborah Copaken, Redhanded: An Exploration of Criminals, Cannibals, Cults, and What Makes a Killer Tick by Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire, Men Who Hate Women: From incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all by Laura Bates, Weird English by Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien, Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose, and All About Yves: Notes from a transition by Yves Rees. Oh. My. Goodness. That's a lot of books. All of them have been excellent. I may get a rude shock when the library reopens, too, as my reservation list is up to 20 books. Fingers crossed they don't all arrive at once.

Listening to podcasts

So many podcasts! So little time. Some current favourites include Bad Blood: The Final Chapter, Catfish, Cautionary Tales, Hunting Ghislaine, Killer Psyche, Ms Represented and The Trap. I really only listen to podcasts when I'm doing housework (washing dishes, gardening, walking to the shops) and the time available for podcasts tends to vary depending how much editing work I have.

Watching movies

When we're allowed to go out I usually try to watch at least one film, at the cinema, each week. While the cinema's been unavailable, Andrew and I have been watching old movies at home each Sunday afternoon. He even makes popcorn. Woo hoo.

Gathering and cooking and eating food 

When I'm feeling anxious (and, y'know, there's a pandemic on) I tend to hoard food. Not to the point that any gets wasted, but our cupboards and freezer are pretty full at the moment. Not to mention that I spend even more time than usual dreaming of food and planning meals. Aaaargh. I have tried a couple of new recipes lately: chana aloo (chickpea and potato curry) and warm French goat's cheese salad. Both were delicious. Oh, and I've discovered you can use a stovetop jaffle maker to cook mini pies, using defrosted pastry sheets. And that if you stud the top of a chocolate mud cake with chopped up Mars bars, it's even more fun. Yep. Terrible photo but yummy cake.

Gardening

Last but not least. The garden is, and will always be, a work in progress. Here are some of our spring flowers this year.

I don't grow many vegetables, as we have an amazing organic shop nearby, but I do have a lovely crop of garlic at the moment and recently planted some yams from the (ahem) 10 kg I bought via mail order. We've also built up a collection of young fruit trees over the past five years: feijoa, plum, apricot, pomegranate, lemon and lime. Oh, and the many berry bushes are flourishing.

Yams and other lockdown delights

Today is day seven of an (at least) 21-day lockdown here in Canberra. We had more than a year go by with no local cases of COVID-19, then it all kicked off again. My partner and I – being fifty-plus and the antithesis of anti-vaxxers – are fully vaccinated, but know we need to take the restrictions seriously. Only venturing outside of the house for approved reasons and wearing face masks when we do. Very grateful that we can still earn a living from home. So, anyway …! If we can't go out we look for things we can enjoy at home.

Yams! I've written before about my ongoing craving for NZ yams and my repeated unsuccessful attempts to grow them in Canberra. Sigh. I recently discovered that a Brisbane company sells big boxes of yams, in season, by mail order, so I bought (ahem) five kilograms. Bliss. We're gorging on them.

Gardening. Spring flowers are starting to appear :-)

Boot camp. My boot camp instructor has been providing video workouts we can do at home. Yaaaay! It's especially fun when his dog Daisy and cat Bella join in too.

Books. As always, I have numerous books on the go. Just finished the gorgeous novel China Room by Sunjeev Sahota, and currently reading the beautiful but harrowing memoir No Matter Our Wreckage by Gemma Carey. (Both borrowed from our wonderful local library.) I'm also wading through a whole bunch of books on my Kindle right now: Spoon-Fed (food science) by Tim Spector, Limbo (sociology) by Alfred Lubrano, River of the Dead (murder mystery) by Barbara Nadel, The Human Tide (demography) by Paul Morland … and more. I tend to read a chapter of one book, then switch to another book and read a chapter of that, and so on. Oh, and I'm receiving a steady stream of editing work (economics, environmental science, social work, law and history, this month alone) so if I'm not reading for pleasure I'm reading for profit. Nice.

Last but not least, podcasts. Current favourites include China, If You're Listening; The Trap; Big Mood, Little Mood; Dark Poutine; RedHanded; Democracy Sausage; Dr Death and Killer Psyche.

Sending warm fuzzy thoughts to everyone in lockdown.

A fruity sponge-top pudding

Earlier this year we had some building work done. There's now a lovely new 'dream shed' in our back yard! No pics yet as we're still painting it (and Canberra has been oddly rainy so that has reduced the opportunities to paint). Anyway, the builders were … sometimes a bit flaky. They'd do some building work then disappear, with no explanation, for a few days. Overall we were happy with their work but it was weird at the time. Anyway. I think the building foreman could tell I was getting irritated with his disappearing act as one time he showed up, presented me with about a kilo of fresh blackberries, and called it a peace offering. I froze the berries in several portions and they've been delicious. Tonight we ate the final few berries, which I mixed with cooked apple chunks, covered with a spongy topping, and served with whipped cream. Yum.

Here's how to make a super easy sponge topping for a warm dessert on a cool day:

125 grams butter
0.5 cup sugar
2 eggs
1.5 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
milk to mix (~0.5 to 0.75 cup)

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs then flour and baking powder, and lastly milk. Pour over hot fruit in a largish baking dish. Bake at 200 degrees Celsius for about 30 minutes.