BLOG: White Enamel Pie Dish

Carrot cakes on a snowy day

It started snowing a week ago. Our ears prick up when there is talk on the radio about snow down to 600 metres elevation. That's Nundle. Snow at nearby Hanging Rock is not unusual. At 1200m there are snow falls at Hanging Rock several times a year. But snow like we've had the past week - 10cm deep, widespread, on the ground for consecutive days, and visible on the hill tops from our house - is rare. The snow on the hills and rain in the valley make for freezing temperatures, below zero every night this week. It feels like the cold has leeched into the ground and is refrigerating the soil. As we make breakfast and look out the kitchen window Duncan and I notice there is snow on the hill across the road...and it is actually snowing at our house. The distinctive white flakes gently drift to the ground, bringing with them a quiet stillness, but it is not cold enough for them to linger and they quickly turn to water.

Cardamom coffee for a crowd

Just the words ‘cardamom coffee’ on Sophie Hansen’s Local is Lovely blog here intrigue me enough to ask Sophie for the recipe. She warmly obliges and now it is my go-to solution for making coffee for a crowd. Who wants to wait for half a dozen stove top espressos or one stovetop espresso working overtime? And plunger coffee just doesn’t cut it for me. I am making coffee now on my conventional electric stove, and remembering mornings of the weekend just passed with Annabelle Hickson of The Dailys, photographer Luisa Brimble and new friends The Slow Diaries, Lean and Meadow, Caitlin Melling, Liveability, Hunting_and_gathering,Hannahmacmedia, Rae Fallon and Julia Harpham. We warm espresso coffee infused with cardamom, vanilla bean and brown sugar in a saucepan on a campfire or the wood fuelled stove of the shearers’ quarters kitchen of Moorabinda Station at Mingoola in the Dumaresq Valley of northern inland NSW. We serve the cardamom coffee in 125ml Falcon enamelware mini mugs to make the coffee go further and it feels like an exquisite gift.

Pumpkin soup for one

Our friend Peter Wheeler gives us the gift of two pumpkins from his garden at Hangng Rock, just 10km from us, but at 1200m elevation, 600m higher than Nundle. Pumpkins are a contentious issue for our eldest son. If there is a hint of pumpkin on his plate, even a smudge of pumpkin flesh on a fork or knife, dinner can start with tears. Consequently while we used to grow about 50 pumpkins a year, now the only pumpkins we grow are self seeded and the frequency that we eat pumpkin has dropped off. You can understand. I miss it. How good is roast pumpkin?

Hankering for nutmeg

Comfort food with zing

Our boys like a piece of cake in their lunch box for afternoon tea and, considering how much running around they do and that they have fruit and a wrap packed as well, I figure it's a little bit of comfort from home. So with lemons in abundance it is time to use them in as many dishes as possible. I have a real thing for citrus at the moment. It is a nice zingy contrast to some of the heavier slow cooked tomato based stews and roasts we are drawn to in the cooler months. Adding lemon peel to a stew is a good move too. Here's a lovely recipe for Lemon Yoghurt Syrup Cake, torn from The Sydney Morning Herald's Good Living (October 19, 2010). And it reminds me to plant a lemon and orange tree. What cheer and colour their foliage and fruit bring to winter gardens, and what zing they bring to our cooking.

Taste the love

It is an unexpected request when Derek and Kirrily Blomfield of The Conscious Farmer Grassfed Beef, at Caroona on the Liverpool Plains, propose I cook and photograph their beef. I am keen to improve my photography and with a couple of courses and an entry level DSLR under my belt, I am up for the challenge. Derek personally delivers our boxes of beef, an eigth of a beast. The cuts are portioned and labelled so it is easy to reach into the freezer and plan the evening meal.

Discovering Turkish coffee

How is it that you can go through life not knowing something exists and then, wham, it pops up in your life consecutively and becomes a permanent presence in your day. Such is my experience with discovering Turkish coffee. Stylist Stephanie Stematis (aka Stephanie Somebody) introduced me to Turkish coffee while demonstrating making Turkish coffee at Sophie Hansen's Local is Lovely Photography Workshop in November last year. As part of a photography exercise Stephanie lit the cast iron enamelled gas cooker and brewed Turkish coffee in a copper cezve (Turkish coffee pot). She described how as a child she would make Turkish coffee for her grandfather, patiently waiting for the ring of bubbles to form crema around the surface of the brew before removing it from the heat and allowing the grounds to settle and pouring the coffee into espresso glasses.

Best tomato sauce ever

We wake to a beautifully cool and drizzly autumn morning, golden acer leaves cluster on the garden bench and wicker armchair. The first frost is on my mind and I am keen to make the most of our vegetables still on the plant or vine in the vegetable garden. Today I have tomatoes in my sights. Inspired by Lunch Lady Kate Berry's Lunch Lady versus The World challenges where she puts home cooking up against a commercial mass produced product, I want to make real tomato sauce from scratch for my boys.

She'll be apples

I feared the heat of summer so much that I tore a Michael Leunig cartoon from the newspaper, expressing my dread with a prayer for "no mental cruelty". Well that cartoon has been flapping away on our fridge for two-and-a-half months and it has been the most pleasant summer I can remember. We've had "nights of soft rain", "days of sweet sunshine and weather perfect for lolling about", "Ideal days for harvest, for swimming, walking, snoozing, reading" and "conversing over lovely meals" just as the prayer requested. The unexpected rainfall and gentle heat nurtured an abundance of apples; wild apples along the roadside near our front gate and non-varietal apples growing beside our garage on a wild tree that Duncan transplanted more than ten years ago. After my walk I'd pick a roadside apple and test its flavour. Every day as I stepped out of my car I'd check the size and colour of the apples, watching them blush from the sun and drip dry after a shower as the summer progressed. Eventually after so much waiting it was time to pick.

Rekindling an old love

This year I set myself a goal of improving my photography. Through journalism I am privileged to work with some of the best photographers in the country. Among my favourite Australian photographers are the lovely John Fryz, Sam McAdam, Sharyn Cairns, Mark Roper, Nick Watt, and Michael Wee. So I have been lazy when it comes to learning how to use our camera, even though I’ve had a lot of training in photography over the years at high school, university and on the job. Year 11 Photography with Mr Wakeling at Hurlstone Agricultural High School was more about hanging out with friends and gaining a foot in the door of a news room. First year university photography was terribly try-hard artistic. As a cadet journalist at The Highlands Post, Bowral, NSW, I had to take nearly all my own photographs with varying degrees of success. We were rostered to develop and print the film early Monday mornings so the photograph prints could be sent by the midday train to Goulburn for the newspaper to be layed out and printed (we are talking 1988-1989). After a Southern Highlands winter of Mondays in the freezing dark room it was a relief to move onto The Land newspaper and Country Style magazine where photography is the realm of professional photographers, not journalists.

Since then I have dabbled in photography, with a particular interest in recording our children growing up. Now I photograph goods for our store and our life at Nundle, but I’ve been aware there is something missing from the shots. I asked local photographer and teacher Digby Brown of Ufocus, Tamworth what it might be and we lined up some post production training in Lightroom software and I bought an entry level Digital SLR camera (Nikon D5300). That started ramping up the quality. Then I took up an online photography course, The Photo School, by photographers Peta Mazey and Kate Berry. This introduced concepts of composition, pattern, pretty light, shadow and the manual setting on the camera. Thanks ladies.

The third game changer was the first of Sophie Hansen’s Local is Lovely workshops, this one on photography and food styling, with Luisa Brimble and Stephanie Stamatis (Stephanie Somebody). I’ve been a fan of all three women for some time, so it was a wonderful opportunity to finally meet and learn from them. The workshop was so much more than I anticipated. Held on Sophie’s parents’ farm Kimbri, at Rydal, it is a creative and rural utopia. Big country landscapes, rustic farm buildings, romantic garden, delicious home cooked meals and warm hospitality. Even though I live in the country, this Central West landscape was refreshingly different and invigorating.

Stephanie and Luisa taught our inspired group how to introduce an element of drama to our photographs through our choice of props, background, photograph composition, context, and the important human element. A surprising part of the workshop was meeting so many women with similar interests and being encouraged by their creativity, enthusiasm and motivation. Memories of the workshop keep surfacing, bringing a smile to my face; Sophie and Willa’s cooking and graceful natures, Amelia’s The Flower Era thoughtful floristry, our excursion to Fabrice’s First Farm Organic’s market garden in the Kanimbla Valley, which included introducing Hong Kong resident Beverly to circle work and a wild kangaroo, sleeping in Clarice the vintage plywood caravan, early morning breakfast in the paddock against a backdrop of mist, and art lessons with Annie Herron. Luisa’s and Stephanie’s (styling below) words are with me when I am shooting. My pics are still hit and miss, but I hope I am hitting more than I am missing these days. I don’t want to be a professional photographer. I do love the mindfulness and appreciation that comes with carrying a camera and recording moments of beauty every day.

(Many of Sophie’s scrumptious recipes cooked throughout the two days are from her book and blog Local is Lovely are here and here.) I’ve enjoyed reading other’s records of the workshop including The Dailys, and Kulinary Adventures of Kath.