Letting it all go...

Wildlife in suburbia!

Out there in the Twitterverse...

Image via Broadsheet



Dear little blog,



It's been a while since that last cuppa hasn't it? I've been waiting for that fabled day when you and I can spend some time together alone but just as I catch sight of it it slips away. When I have had any spare time it's been away from the computer with iPhone in hand and without really knowing it I've allowed myself to be seduced by the sexier, faster world of micro-blogging that is Twitter.

Now, I know what you're going to say, 'isn't Twitter that place where people let other people know they're thinking about maybe having a coffee'? No, that's Facebook. Yes, there are people who tweet about the minutae of their lives and people selling products, ideas and ideologies but there are also eminent cultural theorists, artists, authors, musicians, film-makers, publishers, journalists, critics, historians, archeologists, educationalists, designers, celebrity chefs, home cooks, crafters, digital mavericks and just about anyone else you can think of. You and I have been getting a bit complacent lately and I really think it's time we started seeing other people. I think it will be good for us and then we can come back together and share what we've found with our blog-friends. What do you say? Not convinced? Well, here's a couple of interesting blogs I'd like to introduce you to.

Look at this great post about an amazing art bombing project that captured the imagination of the people of Edinburgh last year. Throughout 2011 an anonymous artist left a series of 10 exquisite paper sculptures at various museums, libraries and cultural agencies around Edinburgh. There are still no clues as to the identity of the artist outside the notes they left with each work, a love-letter 'in support of libraries, books, words, ideas'. I found out all about it and saw all the wonderfully intricate paper sculptures on the Central Stn blog, you might like to start there.

Or what about Flavorwire :Cultural News and Critique ? I've found lots of really cool things there including Five Recipes Inspired by Your Favorite Novels.

Then there's Retronaut: The Past Is A Foreign Country. This Is Your Passport.
I don't even know where to start with this one. Such an incredible source of historical photogarphy and imagery, you'd love it there.

Looking for something easier to navigate? You could try Paper and Salt: 'part historical discussion, part food and recipe blog, part fangirl-ing'. It's a new blog that 'attempts to recreate and reinterpret the dishes that iconic authors discuss in their letters, diaries, essays and fiction'. Maybe we could make Elizabeth Bishop's Chocolate Brownies ?

And once you're really limbered up and feeling like some brain food why don't you head over to Brain Pickings where Maria Popova is 'curating eclectic interestingness from culture's collective brain'? You never know what you might find there, everything from Vintage Valentines to A Brief History of To-do Lists.

See there is life outside these pages and it's time we got out amongst it. Be brave little blog, be brave!

Fancy a cuppa?

Is it strange to have your recently deposed Prime Minister design a cup of tea for the nation? I'm not sure but I must say Mr Rudd makes a damn fine cuppa. Rudd was one of 40 prominent Australians asked by Twinnings to create an original Australian Afternoon Tea. Like many Australians I like a strong brew and this one certainly hits the spot with its blend of Irish Breakfast, Russian Caravan and Ceylon Orange Pekoe (although for me it's a bit more of a breakfast tea).

I do realise it's all a big marketing ploy and it won't tempt me back from my daily Dilmah tea but sometimes it's nice to try something new isn't it? What's your favourite tea for daily consumption? Do you make a distinction about what you drink morning, afternoon or evening?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Monkey Man!

Happy New Year everybody! Did you have a lovely festive season? We certainly did. Relaxing has the been the name of the game at our place, so much so that I've had trouble convincing the kids to leave the house! We've had several 'pajama days' and I've played more board games in the past few weeks that I've placed in my entire life leading up to this point. We've also been enjoying having the time to make things together including this fabulous Design Your Own Superhero Cape kit my sister sent Henry for Christmas.

The Seedling brand kit came with a ready-made cape and lots of great things to decorate it with including felt, foam and glitter-glue. Henry is already a bit of an eco-warrior so he quickly decided he wanted to be Monkey Man, a superhero who encourages people not to buy products that contain palm oil (which ruins the habitat of the South East Asian orangutans)! Quite a specific superhero I agree but he saw something on TV about the Melbourne Zoos Don't Palm Us Off campaign last year and ever since he has been my supermarket vigilante always asking if things have palm oil in them. Bless...

NB: If you're a bit of an eco warrior too you might like to watch this short video about the plight of the South African rhino.

Sweet treats...

One of the great benefits of finishing your Christmas shopping early is that it gives you time to make all those little sweet treats that make the festive season so special. Today I managed to make three different kinds of chocolate truffles (hazelnut, orange and peppermint); a batch of Rocky Road and two batches of Snowballs.

The first batch of Snowballs I made using cup measurements and I could tell they were spreading too much as soon as they had been in the oven for just a few minutes. So I made a second batch using weight measurements which resulted in a much stiffer paste and rounder 'snowballs'. If you like ameretti biscuits you'll love these. They are incedibly easy to make and if you use pure icing sugar rather than icing sugar mixture they're gluten-free to boot!

Snowballs

60 grams almond meal
60 grams hazelnut meal
120 grams pure icing sugar, sifted + extra to coat
1 egg white

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius and line a baking tray.
2. Add almond meal, hazelnut meal and sifted icing sugar to a large bowl.
3. Add egg white and stir until mixture forms a stiff paste.
4. Take teaspoons of mixture from the bowl and roll into approx. 18 small balls.
5. Roll each ball in icing sugar to cover thoroughly.
6. Place balls on baking tray and bake for 10 minutes.
7. Allow to cool on tray then store in an airtight container.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Return of the Christmas Spirit...

I'm feeling very Christmassy this year. I've finally found the right settings on my oven and have been baking every chance I get. I've been shopping locally and early to avoid any unnecessary present-buying anxiety and I've even given in to neighbourly pressure and installed some solar Christmas lights!

This resurgence of Christmas spirit has really bought home to me just how hard the past few Christmases without Mum and Dad have really been. When I look back now I've endured the last three Christmases rather than celebrated them. I've put on a brave face for the kids but in all honesty I've been relieved when the day itself is over and I've managed to hold it together. Things haven't been made any easier by having to spend parts of the past three Christmas/ New Year periods in the Emergency Department of the local hospital with Henry battling to breath after severe asthma attacks (a tradition I'm really not that keen to continue!).

So this year I'm hoping to start afresh. Rather than trying not to think about Christmases past I've leapt right in and bought a real Christmas tree for the first time in years. Surely nothing smells more like Christmas in Australia than a good old pine tree? Last year that smell would have reduced me to tears but this year it's helping me bridge the before and after grief gap. Decorating the tree with the kids is also balm for the soul. It's such a special time especially as we bring out each ornament and talk about where it came from, who made it or who gave it to us. I have a soft spot for two ornaments (a stocking and a bauble) that I made using a 'stained glass' craft kit when I was about eight but my favourite decorations are these funny little reindeer. The reindeer faces were made by tracing around the kids feet and the antlers by cutting around an outline of their hands or stamping them in paint. Henry's was made when he was only one year old so it is teensy tiny and it reminds me how important it is to grasp every moment of their childhood before it slips away.

So how are your Christmas preparations coming along? Do you have any favourite rituals to help kick-start the Christmas season? Any fabulous Christmas baking recipes I should know about?

You know Christmas is coming when...

:: the agapanthus burst into life...
:: you can finally put the hot water bottle away...
:: the first day of Total Fire Ban is announced...
:: there are butterflies just like this one all over the place...
:: you have an unstoppable urge to preserve things in jars...

Little Dancing Queens

I cannot tell you how many times my sisters and I listened to this album with when we little.

When I was about eight I used to 'choreograph' routines to my favourite ABBA songs then I'd rope my friends into performing them with me in front of the class (and any other class who'd let us in if I remember correctly!). Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that one day I'd have a daughter of my own who would be doing the same thing. Well, it seems some things never change. Today Bella is playing out the same scenario performing 'Dancing Queen' to her classmates with her her friends from the ABBA Club.

Bella and her friends started their own ABBA Club some time ago so they could write out lyrics at lunch time, talk about their favourite songs and do the odd performance. It intrigues me to think that ABBA still holds sway over little girls after all these years. What's really interesting is that it's all about the music. They don't seem to attach themselves to the personalities the way we did (I was definately a Frida girl) and I'm sure they must wonder why on earth they're dressed that way!

They love their Lady Gaga, Katie Perry and Adele too (I'm glad they're not writing down some of their more colourful lyrics!) but there is just something about ABBA that they all love. Is it the music, the lyrics, the harmonies? Perhaps I'll never know but it is a lovely link with the past for this aging ABBA fan who doesn't mind joining in when no-one is looking...

Books vs apps...

You may (or may not) have noticed that things have been a bit quiet here in Golden Seed Land. That's because I've been busy teaching one family member to read and spending seemingly endless hours setting up iPods and Kindles for the other two. It's been an interesting time caught between an old-fashioned school reader and navigating the e-reader world (which has so far failed to excite much enthusiasm!).

Do you remember a time when you couldn't read? I must say I really don't and I can't imagine looking at a page of English words and not being able to interpret their meaning. Ours is a reading family. We live in a house with books in every room and spend many hours a week reading, visiting bookshops and thinking and talking about books so you can imagine my excitement when the jumbled letters on the page suddenly started to make sense and Henry started reading.

Henry's favourite book to read is Book 1 of the Victorian School Reader (pictured above) which was used by all Victorian children from 1928 to 1950. It's not like we don't have any other books to read but there is something about the way the story builds with a mixture of familiar and new words that both Henry and Isabella have found irrestistable.

Sure you can teach your kids to read with any number of apps on an iPad but for me it just wouldn't be the same (KJ Dellantonia seems to get what I mean here and I wonder if the Silicon Valley moguls sending their kids to no-computer Waldorf schools do too). I love books as things as much as for what they contain and I want my kids to know about dust-covers, endpapers and fontispieces. That's why I love the idea of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Imagine getting a free book in the mail (personally addressed to you not your mum or dad) every month from birth until you turn 5 - bliss!

Obviously, we're aiming for the best of both worlds here. Isabella loves her new iPod Touch (which she saved for two years to buy) but even though she knows she can download books onto it she hasn't shown any interest in doing so and far from taking up reading time she has read more books in the past couple of weeks than ever before (thank you Roald Dahl , Jeff Kinney and Megan MacDonald.) Tom's Kindle, however, lies idle and yesterday we bought 6 new books between us so we're not there yet!

How about you? Book, e-reader, both or neither?

My new kitchen...

'On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it'.

(E.B White)

Welcome to my new kitchen! It's not quite finished as you can see (still needs painting and a bit of decorating) but I couldn't be happier with it especially the way the new bamboo floor contrasts with the all-white cabinetry and the way the oven is given prominence by doing away with any overhead cupboards. I'm not so convinced about my choice of a smaller pantry (what was I thinking?) as I didn't realise just how much room you lose with those nifty slide out shelves. Still, it has led to some pretty ruthless culling (way past its use-by-date fish sauce anyone?) which can't be a bad thing.

One of the things that used to really depress me about our kitchen was the view from the front door. You'd open the door ans see a blank paling fence out the window and a freestanding dishwasher with a basket on top that we used to put recycling in. You then had to shimmy past that dishwasher to get to the toilet (before we closed off the doorway as part of the bathroom renovation). All most unsatisfactory!

Now I see this when I come in the front door at night...

So much more satisfactory! Some of the best changes have been small ones . The view out the window is so much more welcoming now that it includes a burst of colour from a hanging basket and some little red window boxes. The window boxes are full of my favourite herbs which means I don't have to go out into the backyard in the dark anymore to pick those essential last minute herbs. I also love my new sink and tap (really!). Again it's not a big thing but the previous one had hot and a cold twist taps which always seemed to end up covered in cake batter or schnitzel crumbs especially when cooking with the kids. It also had a fixed faucet so you couldn't swing it out of the way when you were washing up (many a plate met its maker after accidently colliding with that damn faucet!). Now we have a mixer tap with a flick control and a double sink with strainer plugs and it's amazing how much more streamlined that little detail makes things.

I feel slightly embrassed about the size of my enormous new oven (900mm) in such a small kitchen but it's so much more efficient than the old one (so much so that I've already burnt my first batch of biscuits!) and I figure if you love cooking as much as I do (and increasingly the kids too) it's worth the investment.

There's still plenty of room for improvement - I haven't worked out where to put the recycling station yet and we have a space on one wall for a nice dresser/ sideboard or bookcase but for now I'm just going to enjoy getting to know my new oven and using up all that new bench space...