a visit from my mother-in-law

It doesn't happen often, as she has an enviable life of endless parties, weekends in Sydney and travel to faraway places, but when my mother-in-law does visit, it's always really nice and it's a perfect excuse to bake.  Here's our attempt at the London Cheesecake, by Nigella, topped with raspberries because even I need a bit of freshness on all that cake.

It was good and all, pretty damn good for a first attempt and even now, at 7am I could eat a slice, but I'm still on the search for that smooth, velvety, sweet, light slice of perfect cheesecake.

dots on new year's eve

On New Year's Eve, we made another trip to the GoMA.  I love it there.  This time to see the Look Now, See Forever exhibit by Yayoi Kusama, not that we knew that's what we were going to see, we just got the train there (mainly to entertain the boys) and walked over to the gallery in the rain, to find some awesome stuff.

Like this exhibit, The Obliteration Room.  It's a totally white room, white everything, couches, dining table, coffee tables complete with cups and saucers, computers, bookshelves, even a working white piano.  As you went in, each child was given a sheet of stickers to stick anywhere, ANYWHERE!  So much fun.  As you left, you had to check the soles of your shoes for little stickers to make sure you didn't trample them all over the rest of the gallery.  The GoMA.  It's a seriously cool place.

the year in review

I went back to work after giving birth to my littlest boy and to my surprise, loved it, I joined a gym and kept it up, we had visitors from England, we broke a fridge, we bought a new camera and took a million photographs, we edited our photos and backed them up responsibly, we realised we need a holiday but didn't have the time to take one, we escaped the floods but friends weren't so lucky, I baked a cheesecake and made a pavlova, both for the first time, we lost a baby and cried and cried, we learned our son is crazy for puzzles and our other son is a cheeky little devil with a naughty streak that is adorable, we watched movies, so many movies, I watched my husband become an actual architect, I used my KitchenAid way more than I thought I would, I Skyped my parents every week, sometimes twice, I missed them terribly, we didn't always try a new recipe every week but we always ate good food, I loved watching the royal wedding, missed England and her countryside, visited the GoMA at least twice, we still haven't managed to get out to dinner but we had an awesome party for Will's birthday, we decorated our garden with 800 fairy lights, we said goodbye to Sue, but hello to Emma and Clasein, I had the most awesome birthday week EVER and ate at my favourite restaurant with my favourite person, we visited a zoo, our house was a zoo, I discovered patience, then lost it again, I became a little more like my mum, we ate McDonalds for the first time in years and regretted it, I got to know my sister as my friend and lamented the years we spent apart but realised it's better late than never, our boys' birthday parties were awesome and it didn't rain, we didn't send Christmas cards this year, but I've been good at keeping in touch with those I love, we became really good at doing the kids' packed lunches in about 10 minutes, and kept on top of keeping house, I worried about how I'm doing at work but found out they think I'm ok, I playdoughed, painted, tidied, read to my sons, our boys started sharing a room together, we only broke a few baubles this year, I wished I had read more books and had more haircuts, we had Christmas at our house with my friend Kate, I learned the names of lots of vehicles, we repaired our lawn and now our garden looks fabulous, I got cross with my boys more often than I would have liked but always ended the day with kiss and a cuddle, I started and ended the year very tired.  But so happy.

Come on 2012.   I know you are going to be great.

bhajia

I am quite a good cook.  I don't say that in a conceited way, because it wasn't that long ago that I didn't know how to do much more than boil an egg, but over the last 15 or so years, I've learned to cook reasonably well, and I know what goes with what in order to make a meal that most of the time, tastes good.  I think it's an intuition thing, and I realise now that it's just inexperience that has let me down in the past, and now that I cook all the time, it's mostly good.  Except, that is, for Indian food.

And that's a bit odd because my mother and her mum, my nonni are great cooks.  I know most people say that about their mothers but I have my husband to vouch for my mother's obsession with making things just right and knowing how to turn a simple main ingredient into something so delectable.  She hasn't ever followed a recipe (except for the odd cake, and even then she thinks she knows better) and if I ask her how to make something I know she does well, her response is usually 'well, you just throw everything into the pot'.  She's not trying to be difficult, it's just how she cooks.  And she cooks the most sublime Indian food that I find myself daydreaming about.  Thing is, while I've learned most of what I know about western food from watching cookery shows and reading books, I never spent any time in the kitchen watching my mum - she always insisted school work was more important, and I suppose it was pretty important and has stood me in very good stead but it's not that useful when there's an aubergine and an onion in the fridge and I can't remember how to make them taste the way she does by just 'throwing it all into a pot'.

When mum came to stay just after Max was born last year, she cooked almost every day.  Wait no, she cooked almost every meal, and I was determined, even though I was exhausted from the new baby fug, to learn how to cook Indian food, at least a couple of dishes, so that I could expand our repertoire and satisfy our cravings for home-cooked Indian food.  I watched her cook and wrote down exactly what she was doing in order to elaborate on her rather loose instructions.  I think she thought I was a bit crazy, who needs to write this stuff down?  Everybody knows what to do!  I wish I'd done it sooner as we've been able to enjoy some fantastic food since she was here, almost as good as she'd produce herself.

This dish is one I decided to try without having really observed the master in action, just rang her one day and accepted her instructions were never going to be that helpful, but broadly worked out what to do in order to come up with a version that I think is arguably better than hers.  I mean I wouldn't say that to her outright.  Well, ok, I probably would.  But only because I'd be so proud to feed it to her.  It's bhajia, or pakoras, or bhajis as they are known in balti houses... except in balti houses they are over-battered, soggy oniony balls of grease, so to give them the same name would be wrong.

Anyway, I'm sharing the recipe as it goes in my head.  Unlike it's restaurant counterpart, it's wholesome, full of vegetables, totally kid friendly (in our house, anyway) and snacktastically moreish.  It's also crispy, a feature I often look for in food.  I have no qualms with serving it with ketchup, although the kids prefer it with plain yoghurt (also good).  Try it.  It seems a hassle to do all that deep frying, but I love that my children eat it happily, and that Will always says 'this is great' when I cook it.  But as I said, I'm quite a good cook so that happens all the time.  Hah!

Bhajia (these quantities make a lot, and as it's best fresh, it may be best to halve these quantities unless you are feeding lots of very hungry people.)

3-4 medium potatoes, thinly sliced
1/2-1 whole cauliflower, depending on how big and how gassy this makes you, cut into small florets
250g (or a big bag) of spinach, shredded
a tablespoon or so of minced ginger (I add a little more as I love it)
about 3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed
a green chilli, minced (as much as you want - I often use none because the kids don't like it)
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 heaped tsp ground cumin
a couple or three good handfuls of chickpea (gram) flour
a couple or three tablespoons of natural yoghurt
lemon juice - from maybe 1-2 lemons
1 tsp of baking powder
sunflower oil

Put everything into a big bowl (I don't have one big enough so I use the biggest saucepan I have), and mix together with your hands.  Add more chickpea flour if needed to bind everything together, but I think less is more as you want to eat crunchy vegetables, not soggy batter.  You may need a splash or two of water as the yoghurt and lemon juice might not be enough to moisten the chickpea flour into a batter.  You don't want the batter too loose, it needs to be thick enough to keep the vegetables together but then you also don't need much of it.

Heat a large pan of sunflower oil.  Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the oil (I do this, like my mum, with my hands so you can make sure you get a good mix of all the vegetables in each piece but it's hazardous) and fry until golden brown.  Serve hot, with ketchup, or natural yoghurt, or a minty chutney.  Ring your mum and tell her how great she is.

christmas food

Christmas food.  It's arguably the thing I look forward to most of all.  Will's family has tended to do the roast turkey thing but it's not the same for me without stuffing, sprouts, bread sauce and cranberries.

This year though, we didn't roast a turkey.  It was just me, the boys and Kate, so we glazed a ham (essential - Jamie's jerked), cooked a beautiful piece of ocean trout (tahini dressing), breaded and roasted some pumpkin (a la Ottolenghi) and prepared a nice, fresh green bean and tomato salad.  Finished with a fresh cherry pavlova (my first).  No fancy seafood but no traditional spread either.

It was spectacular, but even after eight holiday seasons here, I miss the real tree, the freezing cold, the traditional roast, the bottles of red wine, the Queen's speech and pudding with brandy custard.  Still, it was all so delicious, the kids joined in, we had home made crackers and party hats and a couple of tantrums.  It wouldn't be the same without.

And in other news, Kate left yesterday for the next phase of her enviable world tour.  After almost four weeks of experiencing life as it is for us, things are almost back to normal.  The space that was Max's room is now an empty spare room, but apart from that, we're picking up where we left off.  Having Kate here was pretty awesome, like having a live-in best friend/nanny/home-help.  Incredible how quickly the four weeks went by and in the middle there it did get tricky, juggling work, life and our guest... but on balance it was ace.  (That's a word she'd use.)  And now that I have time to reflect a little, having Kate here has now forced me to think about how we do things, and how we might be able to do things better.  But that's a story for another day.

So the holidays are almost over.  There has been no turkey and I ache for the company of my parents and proper roast potatoes.  Maybe next year, we'll have Christmas at home.

a walk around the houses

Yesterday, we went for a long walk with the boys and pups around the houses where we live.  Here's what we saw.

advent

Much as I would have liked to have done so, I didn't make advent calendars this year.  I saved up the toilet roll inners that I thought I would need and asked my friends to do the same when it became apparent I wouldn't have enough but they are sitting where I left them a fortnight ago, untouched.  It's not that I didn't want to, it's more that of the hundred things I wanted to do this year, it wasn't top of my list to make something that Ollie would barely understand let alone show the patience for (no, you can't open another one), so I decided to let it go, and do it next year, when he and Max will be a little older and I will definitely be more organised.  Hah!

But we have done a cracker of a job on the tree, which we decorated with our visitor Kate, who is more that just a visitor, she is somewhat of a sister to me, and therefore auntie to the boys, and I do love that they call her Auntie Kate.  I love that.

Not only does the tree look splendid, but so do the 800 or so fairy lights that are adorning our back garden in preparation for this weekend's birthday celebrations, during which we will mark my sweet husband's 32nd birthday with friends.  I have everything crossed for good weather, because we are due a hot sunny birthday after the last two were so very rainy and very grey.  Is it really a year since the floods?

And apart from that, there are holidays to come.  This season is such a wonderful time.  Despite the obvious chaos, it's one time of year I feel still and peaceful, the time of year I think about everyone I know, the time of year I decorate the tree and love the way it looks and makes the house feel so warm and centred.  It's that time of year that I miss England, the snow, the frost, the rain, the dark winter days.  Crazy I know, but it's what I grew up with and it will always feel like home.  But actually this year, for the first year, I'm actually hoping for sun, for seafood and for the beach.  It could be the influence of having Kate here, knowing we need to make this, her first southern hemisphere holiday a memorable one, or it could be that this time next year, I want to be back home and there's a pressure to make the most of this summer... or maybe it's just that I'm finally turning Aussie.

(Not a chance.)

together

Last weekend, we made the bold step of asking our boys to share a room for the first time in their little lives.  Both boys have always had their own rooms, right from the very first day we brought them home from the hospital, their only experiences of sharing have been limited to the three and then four of us crammed into a little room at Straddie or similar.  Not always successful and not always (if ever) enjoyable.

But, with the arrival of a dear friend who's staying for almost four weeks imminent, we thought it was an opportune time to take a step we've been talking about taking for some time.

So far (four nights in) so good.  Their little room which is little more than 3mx3m is a bit crammed full of their beds, toys, clothes and books but it's definitely cute and cosy (not so appealing when it's 29c at 6am) and it's freed up a whole room that Max did little more than sleep in.  They have always played together in Ollie's room and all the toys have lived in there, we really only had to work out how to cram Max's cot and his change table in there.  They have been going to bed reasonably well, although we still put Max down first while Ollie reads on his own for a bit and then gets another story or two or three before he tip-toes into Max's room and clambers into bed before very quietly stalling for the usual 45 minutes or so, asking for more water, to go to the toilet, for another Tigger, another hug...

And so, we now have space for Kate who arrives this weekend.  It's a mess right now but every evening this week we are embarking on 'Project Arrival' which involves moving furniture, setting up a bed (if we can find all the bits) and making things pretty so by Saturday, we should have a comfortable room for Kate and some semblance of calm.

I'm so excited but nervous too.  It's been a long time since we've played host to anyone, I don't think we have since mum visited 20 months ago, just after Max was born.  She stayed for three weeks and we were so preoccupied with looking after the boys and getting to know Max, it was a bit of a blur.  Kate's staying for almost 4 weeks, which is longer than anyone has stayed with us and I'm a little worried about the chaos that she will be contending with when she's here and how well we will be able to make her stay memorable and for the right reasons.  We've known each other for 17 years, but in that time, my life has changed dramatically, and it's been some time since we've spent more than a fleeting evening together, let alone four weeks.  Sometimes I think I can't really remember what's it's like to be myself, the person I was before I became a mum and my life became a list of endless tasks and chores.  What will I say and do when she is here?

But more than anything, I'm excited.  I'm excited that she will be here to make Christmas with us, help us adorn the tree, cook delicious food, share hot, humid summer evenings together on our back deck, talking about where we are in life, her incredible experiences seeing this world, and the trivialities of life.  She'll be here when we celebrate Will's birthday (weather permitting with an afternoon of drinks, fairy lights and music in our back garden) and she'll be here on Christmas morning when Ollie is going bananas over presents and Santa.  She'll be here when he's throwing tantrums, she'll be here when we are too exhausted to do anything after the kids are in bed but sit very still, she'll be here when we are folding piles and piles of laundry and she'll be here when I am thinking about her.  She won't be 10,000 miles away, or asleep when I'm awake, or working when I'm dreaming.

She'll be right here, in our home.  And we'll be together.

jumping on the bandwagon

Yes, I too love Instagram but no, I'm not going to turn this into a blog of all my Instagram shots because (a) I love our real camera too much and (b) most of my Instagrams are a bit naff.

But the occasional badly exposed and wonkily framed Instagram is sweet, isn't it?

new banana bread

I made banana bread, to use up the very black bananas that have appeared since our kids decided they don't like bananas after all and thank goodness, because who wants to pay $8 for three bananas?  It feels a little extravagant to be using bananas in a cake when we should be savouring them in the monkey style but let's face it, we all like cake way more than we pretend to like the bananas.

I have posted a recipe for banana bread before, and it's a good one, but I think I've found one better, lighter, more flavoursome.  Here it is, based on a recipe from the good old Beeb. I added the milk choc chips, and beat the dickens out of the butter and the sugar so it was fluffy light and white in the KitchenAid before plonking in the rest of the ingredients.


Ingredients
285g/10oz plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
110g/4oz very soft unsalted butter
225g/8oz caster sugar
2 free-range eggs
4-5 ripe bananas, mashed (I used 5 quite big ones)
85ml/3fl oz buttermilk (or normal milk mixed with 1½ tsp lemon juice or vinegar)
1 tsp vanilla extract
A couple of handfuls of chocolate chips (milk or dark, but milk was good)


Method
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a large mixing bowl.
In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.  REALLY light and REALLY fluffy.
Add the eggs, mashed bananas, buttermilk and vanilla extract to the butter and sugar mixture and mix well. Fold in the flour mixture.
Grease a 20cm x 12.5cm/8in x 5in loaf tin and pour the cake mixture into the tin.
Transfer to the oven and bake for about an hour, or until well-risen and golden-brown.  (Ours took about 65 mins.)
Remove from the oven and cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before serving.

Very nice indeed.