princess-spotting

Posted by trish on May 31, 2011 in Shoot | 2 comments

My good friend Anne has booked herself a ticket to Copenhagen.  I’m full of envy.  Copenhagen is an absolutely beautiful city, and I really wish I’d had more than the 40 or so hours I had to spend there.  I wasted one of them standing underneath this balcony, waiting for Prince Frederick and Princess Mary to come out and wave to the crowds (they didn’t).  I hope Anne sees more of Copenhagen than I did, whether or not that includes members of the royal family.  I want to go back there.

veg on the side

Posted by trish on May 30, 2011 in Eat | 3 comments

Our evening meal often consists of ‘meat and three veg’.  The meat might be salmon, or a bbq’d butterflied leg of lamb, or a roast chicken (we never have lamb chops, and I rarely buy steak) and then the three vegetables will be potatoes (mashed or steamed or baked in their skins), carrots/peas (microwaved), or if we’re having a roast I’ll add pumpkin, sweet potato and onions to the baking dish.  If I’m in a good mood, I’ll steam some brocolli and/or cauliflower and then bake it in a shallow dish with a white cheese sauce over the top like my mum used to.

I very rarely prepare any extra vegetable as a “side dish” like you might see in a restaurant:  Green beans with slivered toasted almonds, Baby chat potatoes with rock salt and rosemary, Dutch carrots with parsley butter, and so on.  I just cook them in the simplest way possible and stick them on the plate. Fairly boring.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to add some extra flavour to the evening meal and so from now on I’m going to try to do that.  Tonight’s roast chicken will be served with roasted cauliflower with lemon and mustard sauce… and microwaved broccoli and peas.

Baby steps.

Mmm… butter:

ROAST CAULIFLOWER

Take a whole cauliflower, trim the leaves off, and then slice it in 3cm slices as though it were a round loaf of bread.  Place the slices in a baking dish, something wide and shallow.  Add about 1/4 cup of water, then drizzle the cauliflower with olive oil and add salt and pepper.  Place in an oven at 200C for about 20 minutes or until it’s looking nice and golden-brown.

Toss a small handful of slivered almonds around in a dry, hot frying pan.  Don’t let them burn, you just want them toasted.  Remove from the heat and tip them into a bowl to cool.

Melt an unhealthy amount of butter (80g) in the same frying pan and add one clove of garlic, crushed.  Stir, let the butter start to foam, and the garlic start to cook.  Add to the frying pan the juice of half a lemon, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a couple of tablespoons of hot water and whisk until combined.  Add the toasted almonds, stir again, keep warm.

When the cauliflower is done, drizzle with the lemony buttery almondy sauce.

(I didn’t take a photo – sorry).

rant 2.0

Posted by trish on May 29, 2011 in Blog | 6 comments

Do you remember that post I wrote a few weeks ago about being asked to prepare gluten-free food for a group of kids at my daughter’s extra-curricular activity?  And I spent a small fortune on gluten-free brownie mix only to have the entire thing returned, uneaten?  Let alone the time spent preparing all this allergy-free food?

Well, it was my turn again this week, and at the last minute I decided to ignore the instructions AND to not make anything from scratch.  I went to Woolworths and bought a packet of Lamington fingers, a couple of dozen mini croissants (I split them open and spread them with nutella), one packet of gluten free crackers (they were on special, so I relented) and a tub of hummus.

I took the plates into the kitchen and chatted with the woman who authored the email and who supervises the morning tea break.  I told her that I didn’t bother making gluten free brownies this time because last time they had come back, untouched.  And do you know what she said?

“Yes, well, sometimes she’s naughty and she just eats the regular food.”

WTF.

Did you think, when you read that, that perhaps the “naughty” girl was HER daughter?

Yeah, me too.

Fantasy Response:

“So, you have a kid who is not actually critically allergic to gluten and coconut and nuts and preservative number 200, but you have all the other parents run around making allergy-free foods for her because, what, it makes you feel special to be the parent of a child who requires that much extra attention from everybody else?  Why don’t you just dye her hair blue and we can pay her some attention that doesn’t actually cost us anything in time and money?”

Actual Response:

“So there’s just one kid with allergies?” (I looked as incredulous and annoyed as I possibly could.  Which is VERY.)  She was quite flustered.  “Oh, no, well, there are a couple of kids with allergies, in the other groups, so when they all get together for morning tea, well, we like to have a variety of allergy-free foods for them.”

I don’t actually give a flying f*ck about the kids in the other groups.  I was asked to provide morning tea for the kids in my daughter’s group who have allergies, and it would appear that there is actually just one child, and I would bet ten packets of gluten-free brownie mix that the child in question is hers.

hello, lover

Posted by trish on May 28, 2011 in Shoot | 6 comments

My new bicycle has arrived.  I cannot tell you how much I have been looking forward to getting my bike.  When PJ and I drove into town today to pick it up, I was jumping about in my seat like a kid on the way to Disneyland.

It’s a beautiful bike to ride – it’s very comfortable, feels nice and solid, and coasts along very smoothly with not too much effort from me.  But who are we kidding?  I didn’t choose this bike for its ride-ability.

I chose it for its good looks.

Same reason I picked my husband, funnily enough.

Debate rages over what I should call her.  She’s an Electra Amsterdam Royal 8i.  I googled Dutch Queens and came up with Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix.  I’m leaning towards Wilhelmina, or Willa for short.

What do you think?

basics

Posted by trish on May 27, 2011 in Eat | 0 comments

Ella made dinner tonight.  That kid is never happier than when she’s in the kitchen, chopping or stirring something.  And when she’s not, you can find her on the couch watching Nigella.

She made this with chicken that I roasted the other day.  While the chook was still warm I donned some latex gloves and gleefully tore the meat from the bones.  And managed not to eat handfuls of delicious, crispy skin.  I put the carcass into a pot with an onion, a carrot, two celery sticks, an old mushroom and some garlic, covered it with water and simmered for about an hour.  I strained the liquid into a container, put it in the fridge, and today I skimmed the solidified fat off the top.  Diet Chicken Stock.

CHICKEN AND SWEET CORN SOUP (adapted from www.taste.com.au)

400g tin creamed corn

300g tin corn kernels, drained and rinsed

1 litre good quality chicken stock

400g cooked chicken, shredded

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 teaspoons grated ginger

1 tablespoon cornflour

1/4 cup water

2 egg whites

1 teaspoon sesame oil

4 spring onions, thinly sliced

salt and pepper to taste

In a large saucepan, bring the chicken stock to boil over high heat then reduce the head to low and simmer.  Add the soy sauce and ginger.  In a small bowl, whisk the cornflour and water, being careful to break up lumps.  Gradually stir the cornflour mixture into the stock, and stir for a couple of minutes.  Add the chicken and corn and stir until it is heated through.

In a small jug, beat the egg whites lightly with a fork to break them up.  Pour the egg whites in a thin stream into the soup, stirring as you go.   Add the sesame oil and half the spring onions, then stir.

Taste for seasoning, add salt and pepper if necessary.

Serve in bowls, sprinkled with remaining spring onions.

on blogs and blogging

Posted by trish on May 26, 2011 in Blog | 11 comments

[Warning: stream-of-conscious, un-edited navel gazing ahead!]

I had one of those poor-me moments last night.  Just one of your garden variety battles with pre-pubescent daughters, something I can usually handle, but last night I didn’t.  We were out, running errands when it all erupted, and when I reached my limit I dropped them at home (where PJ was, working inside) and drove off in search of something to calm me down.  I’m partly ashamed to confess that I went to a pub.  I had one glass of very lovely New Zealand Sauv Blanc and some deep fried zucchini balls, the combination of which lowered my blood pressure almost instantly.  After that, I went home, talked it over with my ever-patient husband, apologised to the kids, and got on with it.

The impulse to blog about it was restricted to 140 characters and even just that made me feel like a bit of a dill after I’d hit ‘tweet!’  Who the hell cares if I’m sitting alone in a pub, contemplating my parental ineptitude and feeling sorry for myself?

It’s finally happened…  I’m over being a mummy blogger.

I used to read a lot of ‘mommy-bloggers’ who would write about the constant struggles they were having with their kids, and for a while they were very helpful to me, especially if I was having a bad day, too.  It wasn’t so long ago that it was taboo, to talk about how you were failing miserably as a parent, so it was a relief to find understanding and compassion online.  But over the past few years I have seen that ‘confessing-is-taboo’ attitude change dramatically and now it’s like a contest to see who has the saddest, most pathetic story to tell.  As though we mums weren’t in competition enough, now we were in a race to see who could suck the most!  Me!  I’m the Worst Mother In The World!  Me!  Me!

That’s a fun game to play with your girlfriends from time to time but to be honest I’ve lost interest in reading other people’s sad stories.  They just trigger bad memories for me and I start to develop hives.

At the risk of sounding as though I’m pulling statistics out of my ass, the proliferation of “I’m a mummy and I’m not coping” blogs seemed to be matched with an increase in the number of “You’ll never hear me complain about the sacred gift of motherhood” blogs.  If you were doing it tough and looking for empathy, you could find it it spades, along with handy hints for getting your child to sleep and recipes for 4pm cocktails.  If you couldn’t stand to hear yet another hapless mother’s whinging about how bad things were, you could load your RSS feed with blogs written by the Pollyanna-types who could find nothing but unadulterated joy and ecstasy in being a new parent.

The clue was in the taglines…

“Hello Baby! – Pass The Vodka”

“My Bonnie Baby Boy – How Motherhood Has Released My Inner Earth-Mother-Goddess”

I’ve been blogging and contributing to online parenting forums since before Madeleine was born, and I reckon I have seen and read everything there is to read about parenting.  As a parent I’ve experienced the full gamut of emotions myself and although I’ve not always felt compelled to blog about it my archives are littered with tales from the frontline, some of them not particularly flattering.

I’ve subscribed and unsubscribed to mummy blogs over the years, depending on how well I can relate to the experiences of the writer or how sincere I find them; when I stumble across a blogger whose voice is particularly high-pitched or preachy I tend to keep moving.  I’m no more interested in reading about somebody’s no-warts-AT ALL- love letter to their doodle-bug of a baby than I am to read about somebody who seems to be blogging purely for the sympathy or the notoriety at being a self-confessed Epic Parenting Failure.  And I stay well away from those bloggers who manage to brag and martyr themselves in equal parts, lest I lose my lunch:

“Just Trying To Keep My Head Above Water – Daily Lessons In Gratitude and Meditations on Motherhood As Told By One Mother During Her Journey to Meet the Constant Demands of Her Extraordinarily Talented and Uncommonly Gifted High-Achieveing Golden Indigo Child Who Came To Her After 48 Blissful Hours of Drug Free Labour During Which She Was Still Able To Raise Money For Darfur”.

These days, I eschew the blogs written by mothers who complain constantly (hives) and by mothers who talk about how grateful and lucky they are (vomit) and instead read the blogs of women like myself, who manage to balance their good days and bad days, whose blogs are not focussed on their adventures and misadventures in parenting, and who are genuinely blogging for themselves and not for comment-love.  Also, I love bloggers who have a skill to share, whether it’s writing poetry, taking photographs, creating websites, knitting cardigans, building a garden from scratch, inspiring thousands of others or cooking up a storm.  These women inspire me every day.

When I write about days that end like yesterday ended, I hope that someone will read it and feel for a moment that they’re not alone in their propensity to self-medicate with the odd deep fried zucchini ball (whatever their emotional trigger – kids, work, mortgage repayments or Karl Sandilands) before quickly clicking on ‘next post’ to find a recipe for chocolate cake or a photograph of autumn leaves.

I’ll be turning 40 in a month and it feels good to have “arrived at a place” (ugh) where I no longer feel the need to be focussed on my children 100% of the time.  Now I can spread myself equally between my husband, my children and all my other ‘interests’.  I want my blog to reflect that, and also to reflect that even if I do have a lousy day, the other 364 are usually pretty terrific and the only tangible thing I achieve with whinging about it on my blog is putting words out there that might give someone else hives.

Today I finally took delivery of my new bike, and in the same morning I was offered a job, a few hours each week, working in a gourmet food store.  I have more interesting things to write about now.  My days are filled with lots of other things and I am grateful that I never allowed my bad days to make me cynical or my good days to make me smug.  I guess I’m comfortably, appropriately grateful.  Finding that balance, Oprah, has required constant tweaking and readjusting, but I’m there now, and I never want to feel overwhelmed – or write overwhelmingly – about just one thing, least of all being a mummy.

tiny planet

Posted by trish on May 25, 2011 in Shoot | 1 comment

This is what this photo looked like before I put it through the Tiny Planet app (above) and this is the same photo after:

Hours and hours of photography fun It works best with landscapes.

not lamb tajine

Posted by trish on May 24, 2011 in Eat | 0 comments

Tajine?

Tagine?

Either spelling is correct, apparently.  I think ‘tajine’ is French.

I intended to make a lamb tajine in my new tajine* but Tuesday afternoons are busy with extra-curricular activities and so instead I used my slow cooker.  And left out most of the fancy ingredients (prunes, quinces, almond flakes, preserved lemon etc).   So what I’ve done is more accurately called Slow Cooked Slightly Morrocan Lamb and it’s dead easy.

SLOW COOKED MORROCAN LAMB

About 1kg diced lamb shoulder (you could also use lamb shanks if you want a cheaper option).

1 brown onion, finely diced

1 clove of garlic, crushed

splash of olive oil

1 tablespoon good quality Morrocan spice mix

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tin crushed tomatoes

pumpkin, sweet potato or potato – cut into large dice, enough to cover the base of the slow cooker (I used one whole butternut pumpkin and two medium potatoes)

one cinnamon stick

a cup of chicken stock (I used – shock horror – a stock cube!)

1 400g tin chick peas, drained and rinsed.

Handful of coriander, roughly chopped.

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and take your time cooking the lamb in batches until all the pieces are browned all over.  Add them to the slow cooker as you go.  (same goes for shanks – nice and brown all over).

Add a splash more olive oil to the pan and fry the onion and garlic until soft.  Add the Morrocan spices and stir until it smells amazing in the kitchen.  Add the tomato paste and stir (add a splash of water to thin it out if you like).  Spread the onion mixture over the top of the lamb, then add all the other ingredients to the slow cooker.  There should be plenty of liquid but not so much that it covers the lamb.  Put the lid on and cook for 2-3 hours on high, or 4-6 on low.  Lamb shanks will obviously take longer than diced lamb.Serve with rice or couscous and coriander sprinkled generously over the top.

*The tajine I have is currently half price at Victoria’s Basement… PJ was really pleased to hear this.

wonderings

Posted by trish on May 21, 2011 in Blog | 3 comments

Here’s a thought.

Information is valuable, right?  Those who have the information, have the power.  But those who have the information also have some control over the value of the information, and in this age of social media and instant feedback it’s easier to put a figure on that value.

If you’re a gossip, do you believe that the information you have is more valuable if you share it with fewer people, or more valuable if you share it with lots of people?  If everyone knows, does it lose its value?

But what if you have sent around a little tidbit of information and it gets blogged and facebooked and retweeted a million times?  Does that mean it’s more valuable because everyone now knows, or are you more valuable because you disseminated it to so many?   There will be an e-paper trail back to you as the Source of the gossip, and all of a sudden your value has gone up.  People will start listening to you more, because you’re a good Source.

But people might start talking to you less, because you are indiscreet.

I have no idea where this thought came from.

It came to me when I was sitting in my favourite coffee shop and all around me people were focussed on their iPads and iPhones and laptops.

(When did it become normal to go to a cafe and sit opposite another human being but not actually engage in a conversation with them?  Why come to a coffee shop with a friend if you’re both going to sit at a table for two and ignore each other in favour of a small screen?)

And it occurred to me that the cafe, despite being choc-full of people, was almost devoid of conversation.  Most people were not talking; they were reading the newspapers or their iThings.  A few people in the queue were talking amongst themselves, and the baristas were chatting, so it wasn’t completely silent.  But there were a lot of people NOT talking to each other and that seemed wierd.

Also, why is it that so many people, when backing their cars out of car spaces in carparks, have no sense of how big their cars are?  Do they not remember how much room they had when they were driving INTO the space, and therefore how much they would have when they backed out?  Why is it that reversing out of a car space suddenly gives them the sense that they are driving a stretch limousine and they have perform a three point turn in order to back out of the space?

Why?

Kiara again.

Posted by trish on May 20, 2011 in Shoot | 2 comments

I love my job

tajine

Posted by trish on May 19, 2011 in Eat | 7 comments

This is my new favourite thing.  This is a tajine, and this is what the girls bought me for Mother’s Day.

I’ve always wanted one.  I bought one once, for my Mum.  I don’t know if she uses it very much.  I bought it for her because I thought she would like it, and because it was the one kitchen item she didn’t already own.

I’m particularly pleased they got me a red one!  And this is a fancy schmancy one, too, which can sit directly onto the gas flame.  But they also got me one of those heat diffusing things so it sits on top of that, on top of the flame.  But if we should ever decide to go camping, I could totally take this along.

I searched online for a recipe and came up with one based on several that I looked at, based on the ingredients I had on hand, and based on one chef’s advice which was to just chuck everything in and cross your fingers.  Apparently that’s what they do in Morocco.

(all photos taken with trusty iPhone)

CHICKEN TAJINE

Chicken pieces (thighs and drumsticks are recommended, but I used chicken thigh fillets, about 750g, chopped in half)

2 teaspoons Morrocan spice mix (I bought some from Essential Ingredient)

Splash of olive oil

Half a bunch of coriander – leaves, stems and roots – finely chopped (reserve some for garnish)

One onion, chopped

One tomato, chopped (I used about 20 cherry tomatoes from the garden)

Two potatoes, cut into wedges and tossed in 1 tablespoon olive oil and 1 tablespoon of Morrocan spice mix.

One preserved lemon, cut into thin strips.

Couscous

Marinate the chicken pieces in the coriander, spice mix and olive oil for at least two hours, or overnight if possible.

Cover the base of the tajine with the onion and tomato, then pile the chicken on top, like a pyramid.  The onion and tomato prevents the chicken from burning onto the tajine.

Tuck the potato wedges around the edge, place the preserved lemon strips on top, and pour one cup of cold water into the tajine.  Place the lid on top.

I used the simmer mat over a slightly-higher-than-low flame on my gas stove.  Cook for 45 minutes, and never open the lid during the cooking time.

With five minutes to go, make the cous cous according to the directions on the packet.

Put a generous spoonful of couscous into each bowl and top with the chicken and potatoes and sprinkle with coriander.

Lots of steam…

This was incredibly easy to cook.  I didn’t have to stir anything, I just had to pile it all up in the middle of the tajine.  It cooks the food by steaming, so the chicken was incredibly moist and tender.  Some steam and bubbles escaped from one side of the tajine a few times during cooking but otherwise it was well-sealed.  I didn’t know what to expect – the steam escaping surprised me a bit – but I asked the Twitterverse and somebody told me it was normal for some to escape.  So I just left it to sizzle and spit and after about 50 minutes we dished it up with some couscous (one of the Ainsley Harriot packets, just because).  The kids LOVED this which was another bonus.

Next week: Lamb tajine.

UPDATE: I cooked ten organic chicken thigh cutlets (ie on the bone, and they were big) in this tagine, with five large, quartered potatoes and everything else.  The thighs had their skin on so I fried them all over in a frying pan which crisped up the skins really nicely, gave them a lovely brown colour, and also got rid of a LOT of the fat.  They were nowhere near cooked through when I piled them into the tagine and onto the stove.  I was a little concerned at the quantity of chicken – there was probably about 1.75kg – but it all did brilliantly.  A reminder though – it all tastes a LOT better if you marinate the chicken for a few hours first, that REALLY makes a difference.

when stars align

Posted by trish on May 18, 2011 in Blog | 11 comments

I hardly ever read my horoscope and when I do I rarely take any notice of it unless it makes immediate and complete sense to me.  This weekend I bought a newspaper that I never buy (they’re running  a mini cookbook promotion, and you can never have too many mini cookbooks) and for some reason I read my stars.  This is what it said:

One morning, so the story goes, Paul McCartney woke with a tune in his head.  It had come to him in his sleep and he couldn’t ignore it.  The tune was ‘Yesterday’.  It went on to become one of the best-selling Beatles songs.  Who knows how many other great ideas come to our minds at night?  If we could only remember them, could we all become millionaires?  You have had a “big dream” several times lately.  You suspect it is unrealistic or unattainable.  Within it, though, is a message that could prove to be good for your heart and your purse.  Now, as we approach a powerful full moon, your future can be revealed.” 

(There’s a full moon this week: I took this with my iPhone on Monday night)

The funny thing is, I do have an idea, and a dream for that idea.  It came to me just after the Easter long weekend, when I was wide awake and paying attention to things that were happening around me.  I’ve been thinking about it since then and on Monday morning I took the first, tangible step in making it come true.  I registered a Trade Mark.  I wonder how many other Cancerians read the same horoscope and got inspired to get going on their big dream, their big idea?  And how many said naah, that’s rubbish, that’ll never happen?

(The moon on Tuesday at dusk, taken outside Canberra at Madeleine’s horseriding school, hence the windmill.)

The lyrics to Yesterday are totally bleak, so instead I’ll insert something inspirational…

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. 

(William Hutchinson Murray, and Goethe, according to this source)

I definitely agree that things start to fall into place when you make your mind up to do something.  Providence, serendipity, fate, coincidence… whatever, it happens.  The trick is to keep that momentum and not doubt that you’re doing the right thing.

I’ll tell you more when there’s more to tell.

bagels

Posted by trish on May 17, 2011 in Shoot | 0 comments

This post is going under “Shoot” – I can photograph them.  I just can’t eat them.

Damn you Dr Joshi.  And damn you, wheat-intolerance.

Frittata de Tox

Posted by trish on May 16, 2011 in Eat | 0 comments

My parents have half a dozen chickens but not the appetite for six eggs a day.  As a result, we are often given a couple of dozen eggs and with these we get to make fabulously yellow scrambled eggs or my personal favourite, the Hot Egg Sandwich (a fried egg sandwich… simple but delicious).

Friday nights are sometimes Take-Away nights or Left-Overs nights, because it’s the night before I go to the Farmers’ Markets and pick up the following week’s fruit and veg and meat and the fridge is mostly bare.  A quick check of the fridge this afternoon revealed the following:  two dozen eggs, three leeks, two bunches of English spinach, 200g Danish fetta, and some parsley.  I can eat all of these on the Dr Joshi Detox so I decided to mix them all together and make the perfect clean-out-the-fridge meal, a frittata.

FRITTATA DE TOX

20g / 1 Tbsp butter

10 eggs, lightly beaten.

Two bunches English spinach, washed and roughly chopped

Three leeks, thinly sliced

200g Danish fetta, crumbled or chopped into small pieces

Handful of parsley, finely chopped

Salt & Pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 180 C.

You’ll need a large, preferably non-stick, oven-proof pan, with a lid.  I used my paella pan.  If you don’t have such a thing, use a frying pan to prepare the veggies before tipping into an oven-proof dish, such as a pie dish, or a quiche dish, or a wide shallow casserole dish.

Melt the butter in the pan over a medium heat, add the leeks and saute until the leeks are lovely and soft.  Add the spinach to the pan and stick the lid on, allowing the steam to wilt the spinach.

(If you don’t have a lid, just toss the spinach around until it has wilted.  If you’ve just washed the spinach then there will be enough water clinging to the leaves to steam it, otherwise you could add a small amount of water to create a bit of steam.)

When the spinach has cooked, flatten it down a little so that it is evenly spread over the base of the pan.  Turn off the heat.  (If your pan is not oven proof, transfer the spinach/leek mixture to your oven proof dish, and flatten it out as above).

Sprinkle the parsley over the spinach, then scatter the fetta evenly on top, add some salt and pepper to taste (the cheese might be salty enough).  Gently pour the eggs over the whole thing, transfer it to the oven, and bake for about 30 minutes or until all brown and golden on top.  It should look nice and fluffy, not like the frittata in my picture which was taken about an hour after I took it out of the oven.  It still tasted yummy, but was a bit dry.  It may have been improved with some cream but that stuff is banned in our house for the time being (add 200ml to the eggs).

noise

Posted by trish on May 15, 2011 in Blog | 7 comments

A few weeks ago I was searching for a recipe online and stumbled across a blog whose sole purpose was to criticise and attack another blogger.  The target of all this contempt and hatred is a woman who has accidentally stumbled upon the perfect recipe for a very, very successful blog, and she has become an international sensation, a global brand, a best-selling author and will soon have her own TV show.  You know who I’m talking about.

The writer of the hateful blog is a woman whose life seems to be fairly unremarkable. I only spent a few minutes reading her most recent posts but she doesn’t seem to have anything particularly interesting to say about herself.  She is literally just sitting at her computer, presumably for hours on end, spouting hatred and encouraging others to do the same.  It’s e-pollution.  It’s i-noise.

How can that be healthy?  I felt bad just reading it.

I am trying very hard to live a positive, joyful life.  It’s not always easy, of course, and some days I’m downright grumpy.  But as a general rule I try each day to be positive, encouraging, optimistic, hopeful, fair, considerate, compassionate, helpful, generous… and pray for world peace.

Not so long ago I could get myself very angry and frustrated about a situation, and spend a lot of time and energy feeding that outrage and manufacturing that angst.  It was a relief to one day realise that I was responsible for my own feelings and if I wanted to stop feeling bad I had the power to do that.

I try not to get stressed in the morning traffic, or angry at the kids when they’re fighting, or frustrated in a queue at the supermarket.  And I especially try not to think badly about other people.  It doesn’t always happen, and it often doesn’t happen easily, but I am making a conscious effort because I don’t want to be one of those people who never has anything nice to say.

Resenting somebody else’s success seems to be to be a complete and utter waste of time.  Sure, you can be slightly envious about somebody’s achievements, but to start a blog just so you have somewhere to vent your frustrations about another human being?  Why would you deliberately engage in an activity that requires you to be constantly angry, aggressive, jealous, nasty, sarcastic and flat-out mean?

And… I’m sorry…. but why is it that women are so frequently behind these sorts of things?

I guess the pay-off she is getting from writing her blog (and actively encouraging her readers to engage in the same kind of nastiness) is that it makes her feel bigger to belittle somebody else, and it makes her feel powerful to have people who follow her and do what she asks them to do.  Which just makes her a bully, really, doesn’t it?  It’s the kind of behaviour you expect from eight year old girls, not grown, civilised women.

I wanted to write a comment on that blog, to ask her why she felt compelled to send out all this negativity into the world.  I wanted to say something wise and profound that would make her look at herself and her actions in a different light, so that she might cease and desist.   And then I realised that, like many negative people, she doesn’t have the capacity for that kind of self-reflection.  She truly believes that what she is doing is actually a positive thing!

I used to think it was worthwhile confronting someone who was hurting you, calling them out on their attitude and asking them to stop doing it.  And that can work, if the person is able to see themselves through your eyes and is willing to change their behaviour.  But for some people the negativity is so ingrained that the best thing you can do is step away, turn off the computer, and leave them to it.  Not getting involved in a discussion with a negative person is the easiest way to protect yourself from it, and you can both carry on with your lives, blissfully ignorant as to how the other person is living theirs.

Kiara + Mitzi

Posted by trish on May 14, 2011 in Shoot | 1 comment

I photographed this gorgeous 10 month old, Kiara, on Tuesday morning.  Her parents are equally photogenic so this was a very easy and enjoyable shoot.  Can’t wait to show them the rest of the images.

Post-processing by PJ.

basics

Posted by trish on May 13, 2011 in Eat | 1 comment

The Dr Joshi Detox Lifestyle Plan* has been relatively easy to follow but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t crave bread.  Especially this bread – pane casa from the Farmers’ Markets.  Soft but chewy crust on the outside, very soft but nicely dense on the inside.  The perfect loaf, really.

I always buy two loaves; one for lunches over the weekend, and one for cutting up and toasting throughout the following week.

Amanda asked me what I can eat on the diet.  I cannot tell a lie – I am in fact eating a lot of cardboard.

As well as bread, I can’t eat sugar, red meat, pasta, wheat noodles, cheese, milk and some vegetables and fruits.  And this is where I cheat a little – I’m not being 100% strict on the fruits and vegetables.  For example, I’m not supposed to have tomatoes but we had butter chicken for dinner the other night and it’s a tomato-based curry.  So, minus ten points for me.

To answer Amanda’s question, here’s a list of some of the things I’ve been eating:

Salmon with leafy greens

Stir-fry chicken & vegies with rice noodles

Roast chicken with vegies

Vegetable soup.  Lots of vegetable soup.

Gluten-free pasta with vegies

Avocado on rice cakes with smoked salmon (snacks)

Popcorn (snacks)

Miso soup

Cardboard

Last night my dear friend Ann-wth-an-e came around for dinner and I made penne with fennel, red capsicum and chorizo.  I didn’t get myself organised to make anything Dr Joshi-friendly so I tucked into the pasta and thought damn the expense.   That first bite of chorizo was like being punched in the face with a lump of rock salt.  I wondered if I’d just got a particularly salty batch of chorizo, but everyone else said it was fine.  So, clearly this is a low-salt diet too.  And I had a sore tummy afterwards.  Actually, I felt pretty crappy.

I did make an enormous pot of minestrone and that has been seeing me through these chilly Canberra days.  Minestrone is fantastic.  There are a zillion variations which basically means you can’t get it wrong.  This is my version.  I hope Dr Joshi approves.

* I’m trying not to say “diet” because that implies I’m trying to lose weight which I’m not and  I don’t want my daughters to grow up believing their mother thought she was overweight because, well, you know about girls and eating disorders and I don’t want to be responsible for body image issues.

MINESTRONE

The night before, put 1 cup ‘soup mix’ (dried lentils, split peas etc) in a bowl or large jug, cover with water and soak.  If you can’t do this, substitute with a tin of cooked lentils and a tin of red kidney beans.

1 medium brown onion, finely diced

1 stick celery, finely diced

2 medium carrots, finely diced

2 medium potatoes, diced (not peeled)

1/2 butternut pumpkin, diced

A handful of green beans, cut into 2cm pieces

Pretty much any vegetable lurking in the bottom of the vegetable crisper.

1L of chicken or vegetable stock

optional: one 400g tin crushed tomatoes

optional: add a bunch of chopped English spinach with two minutes’ cooking time to go.

A couple of handfuls of [gluten-free] pasta (any will do, but small pasta like macaroni is best)

Continental Parsley (flat-leaf/Italian) or Basil, finely choppedSaute the onion, celery and carrot in a saucepan over medium heat for about ten minutes until it’s getting nice and soft.  Toss in everything else, and bring to the boil.  Then turn down the heat and simmer for about ten minutes.  Finally, add the pasta and keep simmering until the pasta is al dente.Serve in bowls topped with parsely or basil, parmesan cheese and thick slices of bread on the side.

new me

Posted by trish on May 11, 2011 in Blog | 6 comments

Two weeks into the Dr Joshi diet and I’m feeling really positive.  I’m sleeping more soundly than I have before.  I’m not sure what that statement means, exactly.  It’s not like I was tossing and turning all night before I attempted the detox, but I am certainly waking up feeling a bit ‘fresher.’  This may be due to the complete absence of caffeine in my life.  And alcohol.

Speaking of alcohol, something inspired me to pour myself a half-glass of pinot noir just now – something about the end of a long day, dinner bubbling away on the stove, the cooler evenings.  But it’s sitting here on my desk, and I’ve taken one sip, and I can feel it, like I’ve had a sip of something that isn’t good for me.  I can’t believe I just said that about pinot noir.  What’s happening to me?

The other day I made a cup of weak, milky tea for one of the kids, and the cup was a bit full so I took a couple of mouthfulls off the top of it and I could feel the milk – it was heavy and rich.  For afternoon tea today the girls had choc-chip muffins and even though I was quite hungry I could feel my body saying ‘I really don’t fancy a choc-chip muffin right now.’   I had no desire whatsoever to stuff my face with chocolate.

Two weeks on this detox and my body is telling me things, quite clearly.  I don’t need coffee.  I don’t need processed sugary fatty cakes with chocolate in them.  Wine tastes nice, but if I finish this half-glass I’m going to feel pretty crappy in the morning.

I went to my first ‘boot camp’ on Friday morning and it was fantastic.  The next morning at 8am I was down at the lake learning how to run according to the principles of ‘barefoot running.’  That felt amazing, too.  The rest of the weekend I was quite sore (very tight calf muscles and sore arches) but I’ve been walking this week and I can feel the muscles recalibrating themselves, ready for the next session.

Wow – I’ve seriously had two sips of that wine and my head is swimming.

Today I bought a pair of running pants – you know the kind, they’re skin-tight, ‘compression’ pants, worn by a lot of runners in this city because it’s so chilly, and because we all have such hilariously pasty white legs.  At boot camp and then at barefoot I was wearing regular tracky-daks and they kept falling down.  These new fancy pants cost $125 which means I need to go for a run every other day for the next eight months to get the cost-per-wear down to a respectable level.  But at least they’ll stay up.

And I know that this detox was never about trying to lose weight – it still isn’t – but I have to say I’m pretty chuffed to have dropped a couple of kilos.  My jeans fit better and I’ve lost half a chin.

Yep, I’m not having any more of that wine.  PJ can finish it off for me.

mini mud cakes

Posted by trish on May 8, 2011 in Eat | 5 comments

After making four and a half sheet cakes, I used a small round cookie-cutter (might actually have been a Scone Cutter) to cut as many little round cakes as I could.  Ella was helping me count them and there were either 189 or 208, we can’t remember.  I had five large square platters, on loan from the catering company that was making the canapes, and I put 25 little cakes on each tray, then put the rest on baking trays for the catering staff to top-up the serving trays during the evening.

Some were iced, some were iced and sprinkled with shredded coconut, and some were not iced but were dusted with icing sugar.  Here’s how it all looked, photos courtesy of Ella with my iPhone camera.  I was COATED in chocolate icing so not game to get the DSLR out.

All the cakes, prior to icing.  Their little tops were varying degrees of fudginess – the cakes cut from the centre of the sheet cake were a bit gooey-er than the ones on the edges.

I made the icing in this saucepan.  I melted an insane amount of butter, mixed in some cocoa, then a 1kg bag of icing sugar.

I thought about putting the icing into a jug and just pouring over the whole lot.  But in the end, sanity prevailed and I spooned about a dessert spoon of icing on top of each cake and allowed the excess to run down the sides and drip onto the Sydney Morning Herald Motoring Section underneath.

Sprinkling on the coconut while the icing was still soft and sticky.

Aren’t they pretty?

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted the one big cake in the background of one of the shots; this is the cake that came out with candles on it for the Birthday Boy to blow out.  I iced it and sprinkled it with coconut, so the little cakes were miniature replicas of that one.  Because I want to be Martha Stewart when I grow up.

Autumn

Posted by trish on May 8, 2011 in Shoot | 2 comments

Sheet Cake

Posted by trish on May 5, 2011 in Eat | 4 comments

I had no idea what a Sheet Cake was before I came across The Pioneer Woman.

She posted a recipe called The Best Chocolate Sheet Cake. Ever. on her blog in 2007 and I looked at it and decided I couldn’t make it because I didn’t have a Sheet Cake Pan. I had no idea what one of those even was.  She posted a picture but it didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen in a shop here.

But this weekend I’m making little bite-sized chocolate cakes for a friend’s  50th Birthday Cocktail Partyand I have decided that a Sheet Cake is required. So I rode my bike from my house over to Kingston and bought two sheet cake pans at The Essential Ingredient.  Where they’re also known as Jam Roll Pans.

I’m going to use a round cookie cutter to cut out circles of cake that will be easily managed by party guests who are also juggling cocktails.  Which will include me.  I was going to make enormous and wonderful coconut cupcakes with a towering pile of cream cheese frosting on top but common sense prevailed and we’re going for this ‘petit fours’ style.

(Do you like how I nonchalantly told you that I rode my bike?  That’s an 18km round trip.  Oh, and it’s not my bike, it’s Libby’s, I’m just borrowing it until mine arrives.  Sometime next century, apparently.)

That reminds me.  When I was working as a waitress at the Hyatt Hotel Canberra I used to take trays of Petit Fours up to the Tea Lounge and sometimes I would pop one into my mouth when nobody was looking.  They were so delicious.  But the Pastry Chef was a very small but very scary woman from one of those Eastern Bloc countries with the sinister accent, and she stopped me in the corridor one day as I was pushing a trolley loaded with petit fours and she noticed one was missing.  She started getting quite upset about the fact that people kept stealing her petit fours, and nobody around here had any respect, and if she ever caught the little thief, and so on.  I was frozen with fear, and absolutely speechless… because I was really scared I was going to choke on my mouthfull of teeny tiny lemon custard tart.

So here’s The Pioneer Woman’s recipe, and later today I’ll post pictures of my first ever sheet cake.  And when I’ve made the 180-odd little bite-sized cakes, I’ll post a picture of those, too.

THE PIONEER WOMAN’S BEST CHOCOLATE SHEET CAKE. EVER.

FOR THE CAKE:

2 cups Flour

2 cups Sugar

¼ teaspoons Salt

4 Tablespoons (heaping) Cocoa

2 sticks Butter

1 cup Boiling Water

½ cups Buttermilk

2 whole Beaten Eggs

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

1 teaspoon Vanilla extract

FOR FROSTING:

½ cups Finely Chopped Pecans

1-¾ stick Butter

4 Tablespoons (heaping) Cocoa

6 Tablespoons Milk

1 teaspoon Vanilla

1 pound (minus 1/2 Cup) Powdered Sugar

Note: I use an 18×13 sheet cake pan.

In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt.

In a saucepan, melt butter. Add cocoa. Stir together.

Add boiling water, allow mixture to boil for 30 seconds, then turn off heat. Pour over flour mixture, and stir lightly to cool.In a measuring cup, pour the buttermilk and add beaten eggs, baking soda, and vanilla. Stir buttermilk mixture into butter/chocolate mixture. Pour into sheet cake pan and bake at 350-degrees for 20 minutes.

While cake is baking, make the icing. Chop pecans finely. Melt butter in a saucepan. Add cocoa, stir to combine, then turn off heat. Add the milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar. Stir together. Add the pecans, stir together, and pour over warm cake.

Cut into squares, eat, and totally wig out over the fact that you’ve just made the best chocolate sheet cake. Ever.

Week One Report

Posted by trish on May 3, 2011 in Blog | 5 comments

So you already know I’ve failed to manage the blog-per-day.  And there have been no new chapters in the novel.  And I haven’t made it to a Pilates class yet.

BUT!

I have stuck to the Dr Joshi diet – no alcohol, no sugar, no wheat, no dairy and no coffee for eight days so far.  I had a killer headache on days three and four but this passed.  I have eaten a lot of fish and chicken and leafy greens.

I have been doing the Pilates “hundred” every night before going to bed and, dare I say it, my tummy muscles are starting to wake up.

I have been to the chiropractor and he has fixed my big toe.  Tracey was right, it was dislocated.  One of PJ’s friends, Pete, is a Chiropractor, and I went to see him on Monday afternoon.  He showed me the foot on the one-eyed skeleton he has in his office and pointed out the bones in the big toe, and told me how they slip out of alignment quite easily when you put the wrong kind of pressure on the joint, and how mine now have scar tissue around them which would need to be broken down.  I kept expecting him to just yank on the toe and click it back into place, and that this action would KILL ME.  So I was very nervous as he massaged and twisted and applied pressure.  And I totally believed him when he told me I’d need to put my foot inside a Spanish Inquisition-style wooden vice-like contraption because, you know, I was still waiting for the inevitable moment where something would need to be cracked, and that sucker looked like it could crack skulls let alone metatarsals.  Chiropractor humour.  Funny, haha.

He had a thing called a Buffalo Horn Gua Sha Board (I love the internet) and he rubbed this along the top of my foot, which was reasonably uncomfortable.  Right at the start Pete told me that he is immune to his patients’ cries of pain and misery.  I already knew this, in fact I had heard that if you start wimpering that just encourages him.  So I tried to ignore the feeling of having this sharp edge run up and down the top of my foot, grinding the scar tissue away.

But when I say “reasonably uncomfortable” I mean “remarkably unpleasant”.

I was all set to go for a long walk this afternoon when I got a phone call from a friend in dire need so I abandoned the Lake and went to see her instead.  I’ll go for a walk tomorrow, I promise.

On Saturday morning I’m joining Pete the Chiropractor’s Learn to Run (Barefoot) Clinic, and in another month he’s going to start a weekly running session.  If my foot really is healed, I should be all set for serious training, which I’m really excited about.  I want to run!

So that’s Week One.  By the end of Week Two I hope to notice a bit more of an improvement in my general feeling of well-being; at the moment I’m still perpetually hungry, which makes me a bit grumpy.  But I’m optimistic that the worst of the Detox is behind me.