Hey Plain Jane

I may be the last person on planet Earth who is not yet switched on to muffins.  Although I’ve been known to quaff the odd Double Choc Mocha chip or Banana Maple Pecan number, I’ve never thought ‘oh yeah…muffins’ in the same way I might think ‘oh yeah…cheesecake’ or indeed ‘oh yeah…fudge’.  I’ve always been slightly of the opinion that one should hold off on the muffins entirely until a really good cupcake comes along. There seemed to me to be no sense in settling. I feel the same way about bagels when perfectly soft and flavorsome rye rolls exist. 

But I have changed. A bit.

I’ve come across Gloria Ambrosia’s The Complete Book of Muffins; a terrific little book that modestly sets out recipe after recipe of the most extravagant and superior muffin recipes I’ve ever read. There is not a single photograph in sight, and yet this book completely grabbed my sensory imagination. I suppose that is a mark of how good the flavour choices are. I note that Gloria Ambrosia (what a great name, incidentally) is among other things a practising Buddhist, and her bent is partly focusing on the nutritional value of her recipes. Muffins and nutrition; now there’s a thought combination not often spoken of.  Even in Australia muffins are more often associated with coffee, being decadent lumps of  mostly sugar-plumped treats.

The book has soooooo many good recipes. The flours chosen are often wholegrain or non-gluten, the sugar content is mostly delivered in fruit puree or concentrate (more fibre, vitamin and lower GI than plain sugar), and the emphasis is on the wholesomely adventurous, exploring all these very lovely new super-foods commonly available here. So far I’ve tried the “Roasted Red Pepper, Rosemary and Herbed Cream-cheese Muffins”, the “Easy Living Southern Pecan Muffins”, the “Double Choc Chip Muffins”, which is made with whole wheat flours Jack never suspected were there and the “Thanks to the Tropical Sun Muffins”, which features fresh mango puree and chopped papaya. Lordie! I am stunned. And I’m dying to make the Chai Tea Spice Muffins and the Carribean Sweet Potato Gingerbread Muffins and the Spanakopita Muffins and the Almond Cardamom and Fig Muffins and the….sigh.

My Roasted Red Pepper, Rosemary and Herbed Cream Cheese Muffins

One day, possibly one day this year, I am determined to stage a Winter Christmas. I’m not asking for snow, it  just needs to be cooler….it is too much in this tropical swamp pit to expect a cold Christmas.

The reasons are myriad for me wanting to do this, and some you perhaps would not suspect. For a start, Christmas here is hung on the humid air. Humidity of upwards of 90% most days. Try to bake a cookie in this cloud of moist air and see how long before your cookies go limp. Gingerbread house? Very much a lean-to to after a hour or so. Chocolate is also pretty useless; a beautiful chocolate Christmas truffle  will melt before you get it to your lips. Eating hot food like turkey roast or flambe plum pud with brandy custard or drinking lovely warmed spice wine? All basically uncomfortable pursuits.

No, this year, I want to send out four to six Christmas cards as invites for a midyear get together. We shall have mulled wine and toasty fireside muses beside our tiny outside brazier that people laugh at because nobody else in Cairns has braziers, we shall gaze at a twinkling Christmas tree and sit on lovely snuggling quilts, we shall eat our fill of crisp Christmas cookies, and we shall even frollick in fake snow if it so takes our fancy.

June 21 this year is the Winter Solstice. It is a Sunday. Looking good.

Piggy bread 2

Originally uploaded by luckysundae

Oh, now please! This Piggy Bread is so impossibly cute. The woman in charge of this and other outrageous culinary fare, Lucky Sundae, should be given a medal for kitchen tolerance above and beyond the call of duty. She makes many of her creations (like the bento box one I looked at a few posts ago) for her children.

Just how appreciative her children are of her efforts remains moot. Some children do dig this sort of attention being lavished on their food. Others…meh. My own son falls in the ‘meh’ group more often than not.

In working on Cake, the latest play of mine, more recently I have been exploring what it is to want to give your children extremely beautiful memories of their mother’s food. It’s like a chronic deep-seated need in many women I know; the need to lavish. It’s really ridiculously primal. I’ve been know to hurriedly whip up an entire chocolate cake at 3pm, having it iced and waiting for Jack for his return from day care. He has a slice, then runs off, thanks Mum.

It’s not just food either. The urge runs to making clothes memories, toy memories, book memories, the lot. I’m making a quilt for Jack made up of fabric he chose. I’m hand sewing this quilt on time that I don’t have. We live in the tropics and we certainly do not require a quilt any more than one week a year or the odd sick day. But it is the thought, the look, the memory that I am chasing on his behalf. Madness.

But don’t get me wrong. It is a wonderful madness. It is a pleasing one to me. Perhaps 10% of what I do in this regard will seep through to his long-term memory. That 10%, how precious!

I’ve seen several books lately, it seems, that run along the lines of “On my Table” or “So and So’s Table in Tuscany” or “Gee, My Table is Better than Your Table, Isn’t it?”.  What’s on my table, then? At the risk of sounding far too organic and posey, I seriously do have a fantastic spread of food on my table at the minute.

I owe it all to our local market place, Rusty’s, that has been keenly filmed and envied over and over again by visiting chef celeb types like Rick Stein and Neil Perry. It just has to be seen to be believed. About twenty huge fruit and veg stalls under a massive tin roof, stacked high with the most exotic and the most bountiful displays.

There are rows and rows of Chinese greens you ain’t never heard of, enough to blow your smug oh-bok-choy-steamed-in-bamboo mind. The long tressle tables are bulging with all the very best of the normal fruits and vegetables at crazy prices, but also you’ll find fun items like durian, jack fruit, kohlrabi, rambutan, custard apple, plantain, mangosteen, sunflower sprouts, for crying out.

This is all before you even mention the peripheral stalls selling organic dairy, Yamagishi Happy (free range) eggs, fresh Indian spices, coconut juice from the coconut, homemade soap, non-wheat pasta, organic bread, Middle-eastern baked goods, Shiastsu and reflexology massages, mango wine, flavoured oils, flower stalls selling crazy-beautiful heliconias and ginger plants. Rusty’s is insane.

I always, always spend too much money there. What do I expect? They are selling things like 5 avocados for two dollars. Of course I’m going to take that up. I gave three to my neighbour because I’m never going to have that much avocado in one week.

Today I also bought Kohlrabi, because I could.

Kohlrabi looks like an alien cousin of the turnip. It has white flesh, a texture like a radish, but not peppery. I had it raw sliced up in a coleslaw type salad with miso dressing I made last night. Yum.

I bought a bunch of so-called monkey bananas, because they are about the size of your thumb and too devilishly monkey-sized to resist. When they are ripe they taste like little sticks of solid cream. 

I bought a weird fruit called Dragon fruit (above left). Outside it has a gnarly thick flesh of pink and pale yellow and green. Inside…..oh, my!

Blindingly bright pink flesh and masses of small slippery black seeds! The texture of the fruit is so light, the flavour is like a fluffy sweet sorbet or sweet pink jelly. Man!!

And the long and very short of this is that I have gone vego. Not strictly so, because I’m still having salmon and tuna, and once in a long while, some organic chicken. Not because I have any great bee in my bonnet about red meat. I have cut out bread and red meat because maybe, just maybe, it will shift some of my weight.

If there was any town in the world to go vego, this is it.

Every once in a while Better Homes and Gardens manages to rise above its suburban mediocrity and its creative rigor mortis to cough up a recipe that’s a keeper. I have in the past found exactly four such recipes amid the thousands of editions of this quite charmless magazine I’ve purchased over the years; the pistachio and ginger cream biscuits, the Earl Grey Tea biscuits, the polenta corn bread, and the Walnut and Beer Bread (pictured above).

Ridiculously simple….mix 3 and a half cups of SR Flour, half a cup of full cream powdered milk, a teaspoon of salt, and one and a half cups of chopped walnuts. Make a well in the centre, pour in a 375ml bottle of room temperature beer. Stir it together with a knife. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, knead it until it’s smooth, flatten it into a rectangle, roll up the rectangle, brush it with milk, sprinkle on some sunflower seeds or pepitas, bung it into a medium sized loaf tin that’s been lined with baking paper, brush it with milk, sprinkle on some sunflower seeds or pepitas, chuck it in the oven at 200 degrees C and in 35 minutes you will have a lovely unsweetened nut bread to call your own. Whacko the didley-o.

The problem is that I am the only one in my house hold who would be interested in a slice of this healthy and attractive repast. And lately I’ve sworn off bread a bit. I no longer eat sandwiches for lunch, just a plate of what-nots and salad. 

I had a bit of a foray into super-mad health food today too, which ended better than expected; Adzuki Bean and pumpkin casserole. I ate it for lunch; it was delish.

A couple of books came in the post for me yesterday; Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes, a wonderfully exotic cookbook to go with the author’s sojourn through the spicier locals of Europe, and the book seen above, an utterly delicious quilting book by two Australian women who own their own quilting business Material Obsession. I’ve already made one of their designs, a king single quilt called Annie’s Garden. I’m twitching to make this one of theirs:

known as Holiday Morning. Oh yes, just what I need! More projects! Please, more projects, because I’m so bereft of things to do here.

One day. I swear.

The linen stacked under the Material Obsession book is a small haul I took this morning at a thrift store in a country suburb, Freshwater. This particular store, which is tiny I will add, was having a linen bonanza sale. I was going to leave it until this afternoon because I am up to my tiny nostrils with a serious play writing commitment, but thank goodness I didn’t. I shot out there as soon as Jack was ensconced in his day care. The shop was chockas full of hunters, all rummaging madly. Alas, even at 10am, we were all a bit late. The store had sold out of most of its very beautiful old linen by 9 o’clock. I managed to scrimp a few tablecloths, a couple of embroidered tea towels and a doily or two. Oh..and a small crocheted lap rug:

When my mother comes to stay this Winter, I’m going to have to insist she teach me how to crochet. I adore this fuddy-duddy crocheted squares look. My mother is ace at it.

On top of the rug is a picture of the chocolate slice I made this afternoon for Jack’s Oyatsu. Oyatsu is a special Japanese word that means an after-school snack for children. I never fail to think Oyatsu instead of the phrase ‘afterschool snack’. Weird. Chocolate slice -this version of it anyhow- has special meaning for me historically; my sister Carmel and I always made it to cheer ourselves up on cold dull afternoons.

I popped into our local Asian food store this morning. It’s run by a Filipina woman, who informed me that tonight was the monthly Filipino get together, church service and feast in the city. I’ve known about this event for ages but have never been organised enough to make it. Long time ago now but I was invited to come to it by a Filipina baxter* who owns a bakery and restaurant in the middle of town. Her lovely name is Milla, and she bakes the most superb Pinoy doughnuts imaginable.

So tonight we fronted up to the Catholic church service at St.Joseph’s, a modest crowd of Filipinos, singing a combination of Tagalog and English hymns. As the only Anglo-Australians there were conspicuous as all get out. Jack was jumping for joy at it all at first. Surprise, surprise, Jack is a spiritual soul, and at the tender age of four comes out with statements and questions about God, heaven, hell, life and death that would make the hairs on the back of your neck rise up. He has taken to Bible stories, speaks often of God, and loves the Lord’s Prayer as I’ve been teaching him this week.

More than this enthusiasm for Biblical stories and prayer wordage, Jack is seriously and keenly a seeker of religious doctrine.  A couple of weeks ago, just as we were in a hurry out the door, running late for something, he asked  Mum? Who’s the devil? I told him I’d explain later, but he put his little foot down. No! I need to know now!!! he pressed with all the urgency of a boy headed for the seminary. A brief history of Beelzebub and his indecorous fall from Grace, ensued. Jack was slack-jawed with fascination.

Just where he’s come up with this soteriological gene, we are unsure. Well no, scratch that, I’m very sure he got it from me. I used to be the missionary.

But as the hymns and the prayers went on in this evening’s service, Jack got more than just fidgety. It was like he swallowed some worms or something. I’m sure my mum never let me get away with wiggling about the church pews. The second the service was finished Milla came over to us and invited us to stay for supper. She immediately fascinated Jack, revving him up about the noodles and the chicken she’d made, and how he would be eating like a prince. Jack thought this was all good. He ate several of Milla’s sumptuous Adobe chicken drumsticks, licking his chops and glowing with multiculturalism.  Jack never has seen fit to eat chicken drumsticks in his life. Suddenly it’s manna. He was so unusually excited at it all, and declared Milla was wonderful and that we should come back to this church again. Upon leaving he threw his arms around her waist and hugged so long I was obliged to prize him off.

In any case it was a fun introduction to the local Pinoy community. They were all so open and welcoming, just like every other Filipino crowd I’ve come across. We have been invited to the June 20 Philippine Independence Day celebration. Jack is beside himself. There may be more chicken.

* Not often I get to use this archaic word, baxter, meaning a female baker.

A pleasant Easter has passed us by. Some lovely friends, mountains of chocolate, and a very well behaved boy despite the inevitable chocolate rushes. I cooked Jewish Simnel Cake again seeing it was such a huge hit last year. We iced biscuits, we invited Susan’s daughter and boyfriend over to brunch, we had a egg hunt, we watched TV marathons….the usual fare.

My mind turns to business even though it is officially still holiday time. I have determined that I will make just ten toys for the gallery to see how they go. They are not a huge time investment, nor are the materials involved such a huge investment either. I have nothing to lose. If they sell well, okay, I’ll put in more. Today I sketched out some designs and developed a few patterns. Dolls, cats, wolves, squid, a Robot Cop, and things such as that. So, it’s not Art with a high capital A, but it’s creative pursuit and mildly entertaining. I long to have the money and wherewithall to print onto my own fabric because that would make the toys have more gallery credentials than what I’m about to do.

There’s been an interesting and heated debate online recently about the general credentials of contemporary craft as opposed to value of (capital L) Learned (capital C) Craft. Shoddy craftsmanship is one thing, but calling a stuffed toy craft or even Art is perhaps a grey area. For me, it depends largely on the materials and how they are employed, whether it is with some wit or originality.

I’ve been sliding about the web, a slippery and sticky place, gazing fondly at lovely things. It’s wonderful to just plunge in and click and keep clicking. It’s sort of like feasting at a large table, wantonly taking a bite of everything and throwing it down, moving on to the next dish of goodies while I’m still chewing a mouthful from the next. Some lovely things:

Whack on the kaftans, spin A Taste Of Honey on the record player, and paint us retro, we accidentally had a Margaret Fulton homage last night.  John has a habit of winning prawn trays at the pub on a Thursday night, and so we had a tray of lux cooked prawns just mooching about our fridge. We also (incredibly) also happened to have had an avocado, some mint, some tabasco, mayonaise, tomato sauce and lettuce. There was nothing else for it; we whipped up some very fine prawn cocktails as an impromptu starter to our Good Friday dinner party.  And you know what, it was mighty tasty stuff. 

We had Susan and a few other mates over for dinner. Later we had tempura fish and chips, which actually was pretty tasty but paled in comparison to the delight of just cobbling together the macabre combination that is an iconic 1970’s prawn cocktail. 

I have been working on gathering some embellishment-type motifs around me. The small suede buttons above are a quick treat for the eye. I make them out of all that free, yes free, suede samples I scored the other day from an interior designer’s shop. She literally has a mountain of old samples…..sneaky crafty person’s paradise, so it is.

The suede flowers will come in handy-dandy for various scarves, purses and pillows I’m making.

I have two friends, Danielle and Tia, who have been acquaintances for years but more recently we three have come together to form a bit of a crafty group.  We are all three actors and theatre-makers. We are all also mums of small kids, and theatre and motherhood is an awkward mix, so all three of us find ourselves at a certain idle-minded moment.

Why exactly we have come together is unclear to any of us, and although we meet every fortnight, we have yet to actually do any craft in each other’s presence. Our three hour meetings so far consist of elaborate show and tells, cups of tea and home made baked treats. We met today. One of the first items on the agenda for discussion as we stood about in my kitchen waiting for water to boil in the cauldron, no wait, the jug, was how much we all appreciate certain styles of packaging. Danielle noticed my Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin and Treacle Tin displayed on the shelf. She confessed that she will buy certain food items based entirely on their packaging, and Lyle’s Golden Syrup was one of them.

The tins are exquisitely shiny, and the design speaks of old-time grandeur, something of the British Raj perhaps. I have only rare occasions to use Golden Syrup, the odd Anzac biscuit or pancake topping, but I adore the tins so much I’ll buy them when ever I see them. At the moment in Australia I think they are only available from The British Lolly Shop.

I confessed I also only bought the Lyle tins for their beauty because honestly golden syrup always tastes the same no matter which brand you buy. I often buy supermarket items for their look, not their price or function even. Tia chimed in that she was a style over content shopper as well. Oh dear. Not exactly practical…. The point very much is that I thought I was seriously one of the only people in my circle of knowns who does this. Obviously no. Which brings me to this…..at New Year’s I despaired that I just didn’t have any friends who appreciated the kind of detail and art that I treasured. I got so upset that I closed my eyes and wished for such a person. Now, it seems, here they come.