The Elegant Sufficiency

My Brain is in India

Think I have a blogging block … struggling to turn my mind to ES … spent too many hours over the past few days at a computer … planning my India trip (there are frequent-flier points that must be used … after tossing balls in the air … Malaysia, Japan, Borneo, China … this time, India has landed in the palm of my hand), emailing contacts for ideas, endless web-surfing, agonising – should I take a group tour, easy, lazy, secure, herded around from one thing to another, unknown, possibly awful, travelling companions, or should I launch out on my own? Think I’m getting my head around the idea of the solo trip. (God I wish I was one of those bright happy people who say “hello” to anyone, chat about anything, fit in anywhere…)
So … maybe, a Singapore stopover to see friends, Mumbai to research article on Bollywood (I want to be an extra in a Bollywood film), then a flight to Kerala. Looking for cooking schools, food gurus, ayurvedic excellence, spice plantations, tea plantations, antiques, jungle (is there any in Kerala?). Any ideas?
As a result, the cooking spirit has been willing but the flesh has been weak and my kitchen has been rather neglected – unsalted butter and leatherwood honey on Dench grain bread the staple. (New hyped inner-city Melbourne Malaysian for dinner tonight with an old not-seen-for-ages friend that was EXTREMELY disappointing.)
So what else can I do but leave you with a fine new cake recipe discovery, baked for a fund-raising morning tea at work last week. It was good. Really good. Even if I had to pay $5 to taste it!
Now, back to the Lonely Planet, Taj Hotels, Times of India, etc websites…….

Raspberry and Lime Syrup Cake
(adapted from BBC Good Food)

225g softened butter
225 caster sugar
4 medium eggs
2 limes, grated zest and juice
250g self-raising flour, sifted with a pinch of salt
25g ground almonds
200g raspberries
Syrup:
8 tbsp lime juice (about four limes)
1 lime, grated zest
140g caster sugar

Line the base and sides of a round cake tin (NOT loose-based) with greaseproof paper. Butter the paper. Preheat oven to 180C.
Cream the butter and sugar until light. Gradually beat in the eggs. Beat in the lime zest, then fold in the flour and almonds. Fold in enough lime juice – about 3 tablespoons – to create a mix that will drop easily from a spoon.
Fold in three quarters of the raspberries and turn the mixture into the tin. Even out the surface then scatter the rest of the raspberries on top – they’ll sink deliciously as the cake cooks.
Bake for about an hour – if the cake starts to brown too much, cover with foil – until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean.
Make the syrup while the cake is baking: put lime juice, zest and sugar in a small saucepan and stir over gentle heat until the sugar dissolves. While the cake is still hot, prick it with a skewer all over and then pour over the syrup, which will seep through the cake creating a luscious sticky thing.

The Teatowel Affair

It’s not often that a teatowel speaks to you.
So, I've left the apartment for half an hour, set aside the tedious transcribing of five interview tapes – to visit the Pleasuredome that is Books for Cooks in Gertrude Street in search of inspiration for a one-year-old niece’s birthday cake, and then to pick up 250 grams of blanched almonds for a cold Spanish soup.
An hour later I’m home, a hundred bucks poorer, carrying one funky teatowel, two cookbooks, 500 grams of blanched almonds, a litre of organic full-cream milk, a bunch of chives and one mangosteen.
I got sidetracked you see, lured in by the quirky Asian-ish charms of Sylvia Tai’s Shop Sui (227 Gertrude Street) and by the hilarious Famous-Five-ish teatowel in Sylvia's window. A teatowel thrown across my path at a poignant moment perhaps, given my mission. And well, yes, now that you ask, it has crossed my mind, at least fleetingly.
And of course, I spent more dollars in the Pleasuredome. For a start, I’d had Ices: the Definitive Guide (by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir, Grub Street, 1995) on order. Then Tim, Books for Cooks’ gastrolit-maestro, weighed me down with a pile of children’s birthday cake books to flick through, including Anna von Marburg’s classic, Happy Birthday (too posh for this occasion). My head was momentarily turned by Debbie Brown’s Naughty Cakes and its big boobed numbers – the “Roly-Poly Stripogram” cake and its buxom madam bursting out of a box, “Jacuzzi Fun”, and “Pole Dancers” – but I doubt the one-year-old, or her parents, would appreciate them.
And so to the trusted Women's Weekly brand and its Kids’ Party Cakes – 120 recipes and patterns included. What should it be: Geraldine the Giraffe? Timothy Tigerrrrr? Castle of Darkness? Spaceship Scorpio? Spiky Echidna Ice-Cream Cake? With four days to go till baking day, I’m pondering my choice now. At this point, I can tell you this much: Marni’s First Birthday cake will be on the simpler side and a young-and-old crowd pleaser.
And it won’t have a loaded message like my new teatowel.

* Thanks to everyone for the cake tips; even with my Women’s Weekly recipes and patterns I’m going to plunder your suggestions for Saturday’s project. Mary-Helen… thanks for the link; RG and FL, your E. David tips have me thinking, but do you really think I’m going to making my own soft icing flowers and petals in multiple colours???; FL, I agree about the pleasure of the repetitive action, but oh my, there’s some room for error in there – I’m a total klutz; Jane… would you believe I’ve never made a sponge cake in my life, I’m ashamed to admit, and I think my family would lynch me if I bought a cake; John N.: gorgeous recipe, but I might save it for a grown-up affair; CAH… thanks for the offer of your heart-shaped tin… I might yet come calling for it!

Botanical and Bookish Riches

New Year's Eve bears down: the family, a veranda, a barbecue, a sea breeze and, most likely, the same inadvisable amount of wine that has been consumed most nights in the past week or so (this morning's recycling pile includes, among other things, empties of Pizzini's Arneis and Rosetta plus a nice little Spanish tempranillo). And probably lights out before midnight. Much nicer than the annual delusion about the interesting man I might stumble upon in a sea of drunks, the Auld Lang Synes with mumbled verses and raucous choruses, the cheap sparkling, and the forlorn, early-morning solo waits in caterpillar taxi queues. 
I'd not like to give the impression that the holiday has been all sunshine – the weather has been foul, the Sunshine Beach surf typically threatening for a weak and idle swimmer such as myself, plus I've had a walloping head cold and more than one altercation with my mother – but by and large, things have been suitable. The cold even gave me the chance to finish Kate Grenville’s Man Booker prize-shortlisted The Secret River. (Moving on now to Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, an old recommendation from a friend who works at the Nature Conservancy and, according to Amazon, an “exquisite book of natural history and travel [that evolves] into a grand, Buddhist-tinged parable of our search for meaning.”)
On the subject of brilliant books, it was with a totally selfish amount of reluctance that I gave this one to a friend as a Christmas gift. I'm no gardener, but I couldn’t keep my hands off it. Botanical Riches, Stories of Botanical Exploration, has the most tactile dust jacket – a spot-glossed poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) – and 244 pages of divine botanical plates. Aitken’s book explores in vivid detail the discovery of plants in far off lands, from the dawn of time and the riches of Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and the Silk Road, to “scientific imperialism” in New Holland, the South Pacific and Central and South America. Stunning plates are accessorised with wonderful information. So, you will learn:

“Dionysus apparently, discovered the culture of the vine while still a youth. Nourished into manhood by nymphs, and surrounded by satyrs, centaurs and bacchantes, Dionysus taught the art of winemaking wherever he travelled, revelling in the productive and intoxicating powers of the grape.”

I’ll be following Dionysus’s revelling lead tomorrow evening. The warbling, transparent geckos here will have to fill in for the satyrs.

Botanical Riches, Stories of Botanical Exploration, by Richard Aitken (The Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University, published in association with the State Library of Victoria, 2006)

Stormy Weather

Extraordinary clouds are spinning over Melbourne. Angry, purple nimbostratus numbers with malign tendrils unleashing viciously above as I type. Icier than winter, it is, like some harbinger of an apocalyptic ice-age, even though the calendar-month is evident in my thrusting tomato plants.
The spectral set-designer of my life has dropped down an appropriately theatrical and brooding backdrop to match my mood. For I feel ready to unleash viciously too.
A movie was planned with a girlfriend tonight. But the weather, a drought of decent movies (Russell Crowe in a romantic romp? I don’t think so), and my mood, conspired against the outing (Lucy, forgive me). So the mood just got darker. It came on as I chopped mint and parsley, crumbled feta, simmered lentils, roasted garlic and tomatoes, poached an egg. For dinner, a salad. A salad for one.
I’m not the only one to be in this place, at this time in my life: friends largely out of real action with baby-related sleep deprivation, babysitter dramas, nappies, kinder fundraising commitments, parent-teacher interviews, lives in the suburbs, endless rounds of children’s birthday parties, weekend sport; other dear friends moving to jobs-of-a-lifetime overseas; family interstate. It’s a good thing I like my own company; in fact I’m often reclusive by choice, and worryingly so. It’s a good thing I’m independent and bloody-minded about doing things on my own if there’s not a friend willing or able to join me. I’ve driven across France on my own. I’ve eaten at restaurants from London to New York on my own. Been to the opera in London, Paris, Munich and Melbourne on my own. (Equally, I’ve done those things and more with the wonderful company of friends.) There’s no pain, and almost always pleasure, in (sometimes) eating out on your own, going to classical concerts on your own, going to movies on your own, going to galleries on your own, travelling sometimes on your own.
But there are some things I just won’t do on my own.

I’m not going to go and see Cat Empire at the Forum on my own.
I’m not going to go to a delicious, sexy resort in the Maldives on my own.
I’m not going to go to WOMAD on my own.
I’m not going to roll out fresh pasta to eat on my own.
I’m not going to go to the flamenco bar in Johnston Street to drink sangria on my own.
I’m not going to see the Whitlams at the Corner Hotel on my own.
I’m not going to go to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival on my own.
I’m not going to explore off-the-beaten track Victorian country hiking tracks on my own.
I’m not going to go to the Night Cat on a Sunday night to listen to a 14-piece Afro-Brazilian band on my own.
I’m not going to move to a farmhouse in the country on my own.
I’m not going to go and hear Paul Kelly at the Spiegeltent on my own.
I’m not going to go to an eight-course degustation dinner on Friday on my own.
I’m not going to spend six weeks in a Tuscan farmhouse on my own.

I am going to scream now.

Email to New York

Dear M.

So pleased to hear you’re feeling brighter this week. Moving to a new city where you know no one has to be the toughest thing a single woman can do. How lucky was I in Hong Kong? … Most expats there seem to remember their own hard early days and so are open to embracing dazed new arrivals. Still, there were many pretty miserable days. And this was extraordinary: Causeway Bay, that crazy, packed, manic place where, at any one time, the entire populations of Hong Kong and Mainland China combined seem to be shopping, was often the loneliest place to be on the island.
I know the hours you’re working, and how limited your web-idling time must be, but you must, just must, check out this British writer I’ve discovered – Barbara Ellen … a columnist for The Guardian/The Observer who writes about life, family, celebrity, sex, women, men. She’s absolutely brilliant, witty, sharp, perceptive … the UK's version of Carrie Bradshaw/Candace Bushnell – except with talent. She’ll make you laugh, which you need to do!

Take a look at these:

From 'Sex Snack' (January 2006): “And all the time she was just a sex snack; the erotic equivalent of pork scratchings.”

From 'A Model Daughter' (May 2005): “Sometimes it all gets a little too experimental and she looks like she's been dressed by Leigh Bowery at gunpoint in a pitch-black room, but there are other times when I think she looks great, she's got a real sense of style, she really could be a model. All she needs is an eating disorder and a 55-year-old boyfriend and she'll be away.”

From 'It's All Down to Weight' (February 2006): “As it happens, I'm a bit of a bloater at the moment. … How else do you explain the waistband cutting into me like cheese-wire; the thighs rubbing together so much that when I run for a bus I send smoke signals to people in the next postcode?”

From 'Where the Wild Things Are' (June 2006): “For all the setbacks, there have been unexpected compensations to doing up the garden. One thing I didn't expect was the throwback sexiness of watching an urban professional male get stuck into some 'good honest toiling' just like real men did in the olden days.”

From 'Lingering Cultural Hangover' (February 2006): “I drink very rarely these days, sometimes only once an hour. Actually it's much less than that, owing to the arrival in my life of all-day hangovers that are a bit like experiencing a personal slow-motion Chernobyl, complete with radiation poisoning and Nurofen Plus. One day Hollywood will make a movie about one of my hangovers – the courage, the tears, the mindless eating of Wagon Wheels, though one can hardly expect Bright Young Things to understand.”

From 'Whatever Happened to the One' (May 2006): “And one of the first things she thinks when she wakes up the next day – hazy, hurting, her shoes still on and a cocktail parasol entangled in her hair – is that she was right: there really is no magical psychosexual webbing of body and soul, no human jigsaw to be completed only by the arrival of that significant other.”

And, from 'Don't Make a Meal of It' (April 2006): “Women screw up, too. … the top female offence seems to be ordering food in a manner that shows they are clearly on one of those 'low carb/no fun' diets, or even nursing a full-blown eating disorder ('Could you recommend something that would be easy to throw up later?').”

But it’s when Barbara Ellen starts to talk about ‘Second Bottle of Wine Woman’ that I start shifting uncomfortably in my seat. Ellen writes: “… three-quarters of the way through a meal, a new bottle of Pinot Grigio arrives, and the glamorous, interesting woman the man arrived with suddenly turns into 'Drunk Bird', jabbing fingers in faces to emphasise points, assuming a combative 'Is that right?' pose, kicking her shoes off under the table (not always the table she's sitting at), sobbing weirdly (over pet that died 15 years ago, man who betrayed her, ageing eggs, or all three), and ending the evening by flirtatiously nicking cigarettes off the waiter.”

Oh M…. she’s gone alarmingly close to the bone. I’ve slurped from that Second Bottle of Wine. It’s coming back to me now. … I’ve argued as though I were an over-achieving, Alpha-woman in a high-school debate; I’ve flirted with waiters when I’ve grown weary of the person on the other side of the table; and … oh, heavens how appalling … did I ever tell you about the dinner with the C-Grade actor? What was I thinking when, with my own theatrical flourish and thinking I might impress the lad with my soulful, deeply interesting personality, I started quoting Wordsworth – “I wandered lonely as a cloud ….” I'm squirming now at the memory and wondering why he dumped me at my front door and fled ... never to be heard from again?

Thank heavens I’ve grown up and now suffer mightily through the same hangovers that Barbara Ellen describes.

A Saturday that Ends in Tears

I blame the farmers' market. A woman alone with a camera at a farmers' market is a strange, alien creature. Children. Dogs. Families. SUV prams and strollers. Colourful gumboots. Babies. Baby Bjorns. Baby talk. Grubby faces. Tears.

What is it about farmers’ markets that I find so irksome and twee?
Then, a long-distance chat with my father. Struggling with radiotherapy side effects and emotion and mortality. I can do so little. Tears.
And then, how silly, Mary Poppins, the 1964 Walt Disney production, is the best thing on television. The things you come to understand when you’re grown up: As if a child would notice that, at the denouement of the film, Mrs Banks rips of her suffragette ribbon to tie to her children’s kite’s tail. I cried along with the song Feed the Birds when I was a child … the terrible loneliness and sadness of it. And now I’m crying about it at my age for heaven’s sake! The things you come to understand: The song isn’t about a few dirty pigeons; it’s about the old, poor, lonely woman selling the bird feed for “tuppence, tuppence a bag”… Tears. (But damn, have you ever noticed Julie Andrews’ great bone structure?)
Then, my new favourite CD, Songs of Jacques Brel by the Belgian songstress Micheline Van Hautem and Mich en Scène. If You Go Away. … “If you go away on this summer day; Then you might as well take the sun away” … Shirley Bassey, Frank Sinatra … they’ve all done it. But Van Hautem's, wrung-out version is extraordinary. Tears.
I bought two unripe avocadoes at the farmers’ market. If I had bought carrots with fluffy green tops instead, I might have made this wonderful salad, and maybe then there wouldn’t have been so many tears today.

Carote All’Olio, Aglio e Limone
(Carrot salad with garlic, oil and lemon)
Serves 4 as part of a meal

8 small carrots, peeled and steamed until lightly cooked
1 small clove garlic, finely chopped
2 tbsp parsley, finely chopped
1 tbsp mint leaves, finely chopped
juice of 1 lemon
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Place the carrots, garlic, parsley and mint in a salad bowl. Add the lemon juice, oil, salt and pepper to taste. Mix well. Set aside for at least 30 minutes before serving.