Home...I guess I'm already there

It's Refugee Week and a lovely meme is circulating the globe. Beginning in Scotland, Wendy via Johanna ask for three photos that represent “home”.

“Home” rouses complex emotions for me. I was born and raised in the same house til I left at 18 and began the semi-nomadic existence of a student/traveller/housemate. After living in Wellington, Sydney and London, on a third visit to Melbourne it was anointed as my home. Though oddly I can be "home" in New Zealand or Australia, yet homesick for something quite intangible. I often catch myself singing the melancholy lyrics of a Talking Heads song:

Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there

When you move to a different country on your own and live in a new place with no family, the concept of “home” changes. I am lucky; I did this through my own volition. What is more, I am free to go back to my birthplace and revisit my old life as well as the people in it, whenever I choose.

I have been privileged to get to know a number of political refugees - their lives threatened by brutal regimes, perilous journeys, not being welcome in a foreign land, finally gaining entry to another country with odd customs and an even stranger language, starting from scratch. I salute you! May Australia grow more tolerant and understanding, for it is a better country with you all in it.

What does home mean to me?


Wellington, New Zealand

These misty hills of green are my true home. I may kick against it sometimes but this is the landscape, the people and the culture that shaped who I am.


bricks and mortar

The roof and walls that create my own tiny home. I love this table best surrounded by people talking, laughing, eating soup.


loving creatures

A home is an empty shell without living creatures. The Significant Eater, our friends and the community provide the heart.

But lets be honest, it’s the cats that really welcome me home at the end of the day!


Please feel free to do this meme if it inspires you - three photos on the theme "what does home mean to you?" - check out Wendy's link above for more details.

The Omnivore’s Hundred

Always a sucker for these big list style memes, it seems before meat and cheese left my plate I made a decent stab at being an omnivore. However, those items are off the list now - but I think I can live without eating horse or intestines from now on.

What to do
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at Very Good Taste linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes banana wine and beetroot wine being the most memorable
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes even grown my own
22. Fresh wild berries I’ll never forget the small wild strawberries I found in Oregon
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans_
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper Ouch!
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo Though I doubt it was authentic
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects unintentionally!
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel I’m a one woman eel appreciation society
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone Pau fritter is a national icon
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini Can’t stand gin, vodka’s another story though
58. Beer above 8%
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores that holiday in Oregon has a lot to answer for
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian I don’t mind it at all!
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare still had some pellets in it too
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

time to take a break with a meme

While many lovely food related posts sit in the wings (or in this case knocking around my head), it is a long weekend here in Melbourne, rather grey and wintery. Over at Other Rants I've have wasted a precious hour doing a meme. As much of it is about food, excuse the laziness but I though you'd enjoy it here as well.

All about me!

What was I doing 10 years ago?

A stunned, hard working, newly single, numb kind of year. It began with having to relocate my business at short notice at Christmas, segued into a serious relationship ending (we’d bought the house, planned the kids and learnt as best we could how to co-exist) and left me moving into the communally owned house temporarily. It took a year to resolve the property issue, leaving me feeling vulnerable and rootless through those twelve months. In the meantime I was working in my business and had my teaching load doubled. I remember enjoying the solitude of the house and garden, the friendship of my cat waiting for me at the end of the day and working bloody hard. Oh and celibacy!

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

1. My mum’s chocolate mousse.
2. French pastries, especially Filou’s apple slice.
3. Black & Green’s peppermint chocolate.
4. Perfectly crispy, hot potato chips with mayonnaise.
5. Rich, fruity cocktails.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

1. Lindt 85% chocolate.
2. Raw almonds
3. Fresh fruit, feijoas at the moment but I’m craving mango season already.
4. Smoky babaganoush from Tiba’s with plain rice crackers.
5. Kalamata olives.


Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Finish my house and pay it off.
2. Travel more, at the moment New York (have just turned down a trip later in the year due to being sensible about finances), Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Mexico are whispering my name.
3. Get a writing coach, pilates instructor, massage therapist and tailor.
4. Continue working in my business 2-3 days a week, take on an apprentice – basically do what I do but with greater flexibility.
5. The clincher is I’ve always dreamed of setting up a philanthropic trust. My vision is to provide seeding grants for small projects that encourage wellbeing and personal empowerment, plus some study grants. Actually I’m looking at doing this on a smaller scale with my sister in our post-mortgage-pre-death years as we are the last branches on our family tree.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Data inputting Swedish childrens’ dental records, 1986 on a home PC (you had to do a back up every 5 minutes or you lost the lot).
2. Actor/entertainer in summer festival – I don’t remember much except it was hinted very loudly that taking drugs at the big public party that opened the festival was encouraged in order to look like we were all having a good time.
3. Creating online communities for a sadly short lived site for women at the height of the dot.com boom. Basically creative writing as different characters on the forums we were setting up. I’d wished for a job that paid me to play on the internet and I got exactly that.
4. The above new media also paid me approximately $2 per word to write articles relevant to my real day job as a resident expert (life has never been so good!)
5. Cleaned a private hospital as a summer job at high school. The percentage of old men who used the hand basin in their room as a urinal, instead of going to the en suite bathroom, was remarkably high.


Three of my habits:

1. Nitpicking. Awful I know but I have a pedant streak that the Significant Eater is seriously trying to liberate me from.
2. Talking to cats, not just mine but any feline that crosses my path.
3. Spending too much time on the internet and not enough on the pursuit of exercise.

Five places I have lived:

1. Wellington, New Zealand.
2. Stoke Newington, London, UK.
3. Cremorne, Sydney, Australia
4. Out of my backpack in Europe – beaches, hostels, hitch hiking.
5. Melbourne, Australia.

Feel free to share the meme.

the vegetable meme

Cindy from 'Where's the beef?' tagged me for this meme.

1. Is there a vegetable you hated as a child, but came to love as you got older?

I have always been a fussy eater and there was a plethora of veg I didn’t eat as a child (though even if I lived on cabbage, cauliflower, carrots and potatoes most of the time – I did eat vegetables every day.) Now I like them all except cooked peas. Probably two of the childhood strong dislikes I enjoy most now are pumpkin and spinach. Heck – I’ll even eat silverbeet (chard) now as long as its cooked with lots of garlic, onion and lemon.

2. Most underrated vegetable?

Parsnips. We never ate them at home but I have a strong memory of the neighbours dishing me up mashed carrot and parsnip and thinking it was the most delicious vegetable I had ever eaten. In London my housemates got me onto parsnip chips – finely sliced longitudinally, brushed with oil and sea salt, then baked in the oven.

3. Name one favourite summer vegetable dish.

I like Thai salads, flavoured with lime, fish sauce and a little sugar. The recent Green Mango salad was delish. (I know it’s a fruit, though green its much more like a veg, there were other salad ingredients in it too!).


4. And one for winter?

Vegetable pies or curries. Or a vegetable curry with lots of root vegetables and turning the leftovers into pies the next day!

Winter is a good excuse to eat lots of spuds. Last year I started making my own version of colcannon, which can be a bit addictive. It's cold weather comfort food at its best.

5. What vegetables are in your fridge and freezer right now?

Fennel, mixed lettuces, zucchini, carrots, sweet potato, onion, potato, eggplants, corn on the cob, brocolli, Lebanese cucumbers, shitake mushrooms…There are tomatoes and parsley too but they aren’t strictly veg.

None in the freezer, that’s for vodka, ice, fish stock and the cats’ meat!

6. Is there a vegetable you really like but don't make much yourself?

Beetroot – especially baked. There is an apple-like sweetness when it is cooked this way, nothing like the earthy rawness of raw beetroot. In London the local market in Dalston sold beetroot freshly cooked. I can still see the steam coming off it on a cold morning. Why don't I cook it that often now? I just don’t like having red hands!

If you haven't done the vegetable meme yet and it tickles your fancy, consider yourself tagged :)

meme

I guess I asked for it with a blog title like this, but I have been called on to confess!

Mellie has tagged me with the Confession Meme.

5 items in my freezer
1. Vodka (Stoli and Absolut Citrus)
2. Ice cubes (for the vodka)
3. Gyoza wrappers
4. Homemade stock (fish and now vegetable)
5. A few slices of Natural Tucker bread – because I eat so little of the stuff, but when I do it’s got to be the best

(There is also about 5 kg of meat for the cat who is currently the only resident carnivore)

5 items in my closet
Which closet? I have 2 and as I am currently at the beginning of Operation Paint Job (phase 2 of renovations) they are chock full of miscellany. Linen, crockery, stationery, photos – even clothes.

5 items in my car
I am like the proverbial little old lady who only drives her car to church on Sunday (in this case it is a slightly different form of worship – Victoria Market on Thursday). As I walk or tram it most places my car is rather bare of personal stuff.
1. Melways – essential map book for when I stray further than the 3 kms to the market.
2. A roll of sticky lint remover – try as I may, within a few days of owning a new car enough cat hair had migrated from my clothes to permanently imbed on the upholstery.
3. Reusable green bags for the supermarket
4. Meter money
5. Picnic rug in the boot.

5 items in my purse
Typically, I don’t have one bag I carry around with me all the time so these are in my wallet
1. Drivers licence
2. Stamps (though I can’t remember the last time I posted a letter outside of work)
3. My cell phone number (I can never remember)
4. 10 trip tram tickets
5. At least 13 plastic cards – credit, library, loyalty, ambulance, frequent flyer…

Perhaps a more suitable meme for a food blog would be “50 things in my fridge”

Olive oil, sesame oil, tamari, mirin, maple syrup, Thomy mayonnaise, sauvignon blanc, sparkling wine, mineral water, batteries, tahini, butter, soy milk….

Consider yourself tagged!