Home Books Recipe Stash Cooking Tips Blog About Julie Appearances Newsletter Connections

Archive for the ‘Life of a Peach’ Category

I’m on my way!

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Yippee! I’m on my way to the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. Grotty day in Auckland – another good reason for leaving. Looking forward to dining with Massimo Bottura this evening (he’s from Osteria Francescana restaurant in Modena, Italy). And tomorrow, a day of FIRE. Described as ‘an EXTREME one-off, off-site, outdoor and on-the-move twilight MasterClass that focuses on food inspired by fire. See Momofuku’s David Chang sizzle and Rockpool’s Neil Perry go for the burn. From North Carolina pit-master Ed Mitchell to Argentinian asador boys Ben and Elvis from Porteno, we’re going the whole hog.’ Now you’re jealous….

Life of a Peach

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

My washing debacle continues…

Life of a peach

Oh help! Son discovered his pink shirt – the one I turned a yucky mauve by washing it with something blue. When he found his new blue singlet last week he was curious, even bemused, but now he’s put two and two together… I hid the shirt before fleeing to Australia. But he found it yesterday and texted to say he was ‘really not impressed with the change of colour’. I replied ‘Eek! Twas an accident. Your blue jumper did it. Very sorry. Luv u.’ Then he replied, ‘Caught out. DISCOVERED. Haha. Love you too. Ya deeeek.’ I suppose my son calling me a dick is small price to pay. I had imagined worse.

But I had a conversation yesterday with a young thin blonde thing who berated me for still doing my son’s washing. You’ll make it hard for his girlfriend or future wife, she grizzled. Maybe, I said, but I like doing washing. In truth, even though I have a reputation for causing shrinkage and discoloration from time to time, washing, hanging it out to dry and bringing it in smelling of sunshine is one of those household tasks I enjoy. Son, for his part, loads and unloads the dishwasher, cooks great meals, puts the rubbish out, and, being 6ft 2”, is very handy at removing spiders from the ceiling and getting suitcases down from the top cupboard. I think the most important thing to teach is to SHARE the load.

That’s how I see it anyway.

Life of a peach

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

My breadboard

I knew there was something wrong with it as soon as I saw it. It looked pale and wan, like a bleached piece of driftwood which had spent its recent life washed by a relentless mountain of sea. Its layers of life had been stripped away leaving it unappealingly characterless. My breadboard. My lovely, much-loved and lovingly looked after breadboard. A breadboard we had rescued from under the old house we lived in 28 years ago in St Mary’s Bay. There it lay, a slab of nondescript wood in a cobwebby dusty pile of rubble. It was filthy and much unloved, I would have thought. I took it inside, scrubbed it to billy-oh, sprayed it with vinegar, washed it again, then dried it in the sun and rubbed it with mineral oil, and then restored to splendor, it started its new life, with the Biuso family. Sometime after we moved out of the house, the owners (we were renting the house) called to ask whether we had inadvertently taken a breadboard with us when we left. I replied no, we’d taken nothing from the kitchen and I didn’t ever recall there being a breadboard in the house. Later, it occurred to me that they could mean the piece of wood I’d found under the house, but technically, I didn’t lie, it was just a misunderstanding. I couldn’t give it up, couldn’t and wouldn’t. We were in love with it, the cute shape, the smoothness. It was the perfect breadboard – not too heavy, but not flimsy either, and it quickly obtained the battle scars of life from gentle and sometimes vigorous choppings, sawings and hackings. Stains from melting butter had seeped in and darkened part of the wood, and mashed bits of avocado, drizzles of maple syrup, spots of oil… a 28 year-old patina which told the story of our life, of hurried breakfasts, school lunches and rustic stacks of bruschetta. The breadboard had seen it all, fights, kid scraps, midnight snacks. It had been transported to picnics and used as a mini table. It’s underside had held fruit cakes, been graced by lady fingers, serviced school camps and proffered up elegant bread based snacks. It had worked its arse off in other words.

Some people are ridiculously protective of their breadboards, allowing only bread and toast atop them. We’re a little more relaxed, although we draw the line at garlic and chili sauce (I hate that heady whiff of garlic that steams up to the nose from hot toast as it lifts up the remnants of last night’s chopped garlic). But we always wash the board by hand. We scrub it. We never put it in the dishwasher.

I’d been to Portland, Oregon for less than 5 days and I returned to find the kitchen a tad messier than I had left it though there was nothing really to complain about (the kids had cooked for themselves). Eyes darting, taking in everything, you know how it is once you come back to reclaim your throne…and then I spied it.

What, eyebrows rising slowly, I asked daughter, happened to the breadboard??? Oh, she said sheepishly, he (he, being the French boyfriend, owner of enlarged sweater) put it in the dishwasher. Steely eyes meet soft apologetic ones. Oh, I said, eyebrows now risen higher than any botox could ever achieve. I grabbed the board, caressed its battle scars, smoothed its protruding hairy little fibery bits, then, without further ado, I removed a loaf of sour dough bread from its brown paper bag, put it on the breadboard and called out, ‘Who wants lunch?’.

Life of a peach

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Does size matter?

Oh help! This has got nothing to do with my usual rants or raves, nor anything to do with the life of a peach, or a life without peaches for that matter. It’s to do with my daughter’s French boyfriend and my son. Daughter and boyfriend went away for three days. They hired a campervan – this is a van equipped with sleeping and cooking facilities, like a mobile home. The hire company where they got the van upgraded them to a super deluxe campervan for no apparent reason (young love does have an affect on people!), and off they went up north visiting New Zealand’s beautiful coastline and beaches. I thought I’d have some quiet time, but the husband was in residence and the son hung around a lot of the weekend. Oh well. Next weekend, perhaps. The young couple returned none the worse for wear, having eaten in cafes and vineyards, and one night, they cooked potatoes in the embers of a fire. Scrumptious she told me, simple but scrumptious. Just like Norman makes but better because we did onions, too, she said. Norman’s recipe for these spuds is in my book Sizzle Sensational Barbecue Food, should you feel the need to read about it (how nice to be able to give my book a genuine plug). There was lots of activity when they arrived, with things flung hither and yon, but the campervan was thoroughly cleaned and returned to the hire company on time. Daughter and French boyfriend returned home, ate like they hadn’t seen food for a week, showered using a week’s worth of water then, all pink and scrubbed and feeling the chill of the autumn air, rugged up in the same clothes they had wrapped themselves in when they were cooking the potatoes in the embers. Oh dear. They smelled of smoke. Off they came, replaced by fresh-smelling clothes. I offered to wash the French boyfriend’s sweater, a beautiful looking creamy-beige thing, with buttons, and therein started my panic.

I have an, um, penchant, shall we say, for turning full-size woollen things into miniature replicas of themselves. Yes, I mean that horrible word shrinkage! I don’t want to type it too big because it frightens me. However, I washed the sweater with great care in cold water and I was very relieved that when I lay it out to dry draped over a towel it still resembled the sweater I had been handed by the French boyfriend. Good. Then I got on to the rest of the washing, I wouldn’t say feeling smug, but feeling very much more la bonne maman.

Though there is one other little problem area I have in the washing department, and that is to do with colour. Mmm. Things start out white and emerge out of the machine in shades of grey, mauve, pale saffron even slimey green. I don’t know how it happens. I sort things into piles, putting like with like. I wash the clothes in cold water. I take them out of the machine as soon as the machine starts it stupid incessant repetitious beeping. And I dry them outside in the fresh air. But I still get caught out.

Today I turned my sons expensive black and white patterned shirt with turn-down buttoned collar and lovely pressed cuffs a sort of murky blue. If you didn’t know that it used to be white and gray, you’d probably find it quite acceptable. But he knows. A white teatowel is now tie-dyed and has been retired to the barbecue as a cleaning rag. Daughter’s tangerine pants are now a yucky greeny-brown like minced up fermented grass clippings, but strangely the white stripe down the side has remained white. Labels, too, remain white. My son has a new blue singlet to wear. My daughter a pale blue scarf (actually, I think this is an improvement – at least I will try and sell it to her that way), but the worse thing is my son’s stripey pink shirt. It is now a vile shade of pale mauve with pukey burgundy coloured stripes.

Everything is now hidden, either dried and bundled up out of sight, or soaking in buckets waiting for a never-to-arrive miracle. The French boyfriend’s sweater is smelling sweet and fresh – that glorious smell of air-dried wool – but now I’ve folded it up it somehow seems a little LARGER than it was this morning.