2nd September 2009
I started my first diary on the 7th of July, 1979.
30 years ago!
On that day my Dad drove through a red light and we crossed the longest bridge in South Australia. From that auspicious start, I kept a diary on and off for the following 16 years. Of course, I was most prolific during my teenage years whinging and wining, fantasising about Simon Le Bon. You know how it goes.
The 9s must be important to me for starting large projects because in 1999 I started my blog and in 2009 I decided to write a novel – or was that 2008? Oh well, regardless. I like the 9s.
Somebody else who started a daily documentation of his life in 1979 was Jamie Livingston – he was a photographer, film maker and circus performer who took a polaroid of his life nearly every day until his death in 1997 (although friends stepped in and helped in those last few frames).
“‘Photo of the Day‘ is a work of light, color, laughter, pain, travel, beauty, wonton soup, afternoons, coffee, hanging out, love, life in its entirety,” – Livinston’s friend Risa Mickenberg.
Looking through these photos is thoroughly moving.
Some others doing simialar things:
- Noah K Everyday – do check this out. The gasp-enducing impact of the site will only take a moment.
- Buster Benson – at 8.36pm every day he takes a snap of whatever is happening right in front of him. He is urging others to join in. His inspiration and objectives of the project are here – and it’s all great reading. (ps. Buster is amazing and always has been).
“The spirit of this project is the long-story of life. The fact that life moves simultaneously on the day-to-day, highly detailed, highly dramatic, arch at the same time that it moves like the slow swell of the ocean. This project’s spirit is in the slow swell, about how, a slight snapshot of each day, when later taken in the context of decades, will tell a story that the participants aren’t currently aware of.” – Buster Benson
- And of course Kirsty’s My Creative Space project is not unlike this. A freezeframe in a creative life; what’s happening in the studio each week, on a Thursday.
So I’m going to start my own:
A while back I started taking photos of our dinners every night. I am interested in food and the way I find myself thinking about food – what it means to me, what it means to my family and to my ideas of parenthood – the good and the bad (and sometimes the ugly), the nourishing and the controlling. I think I am going to take it back up again and see how long I can keep it going.
Phil started a network for posting daily images in this spirit. Join us!
Visit Once Daily
10th March 2009
When I was little I went to a nice school in a leafy suburb in Adelaide. It was the 1970s so we wore roman sandals and my uniform was pink with a zip down the front. What a crazy uniform. I think they have changed it to something far more conservative now. Roman sandals? The toe-jam was insane in Summer. And that zip? Gawd. There was always the risk that some boy would grab the round ring at the top of the zipper and whip it down, right there in the playground. Honestly, whoever designed that uniform was not thinking.
I had a 1970s Mum – she wore very nice a-line skirts with big floral prints and cute t-shirts and roman sandals. She did 1970s things like, she worked at the university for a while, and she did batik and she had dinner parties. She was pretty cool. She also helped out at our school from time to time - she came and ran a batik session for the grade ones (all that hot wax and small children – wow – the 70s were out of hand!), and she helped with “Healthy Lunches” scheme.
Healthy Lunches were the bain of my existence. Healthy Lunches were the 1970s conchy Mum’s answer to tuck shop lunch orders. I know whole families of kids who got tuck shop orders with glee at least once a week and I would look on with enormous amounts of envy at their sausage rolls and cartons of milk. But a gaggle of 70s Mum’s came up with the funky alternative – Healthy Lunches. Hey kids! It’s fun because you can buy it at school! You could bring along a dollar (or maybe it was only 50 cents) and you could get a brown wholemeal role with thick butter and vegemite, a chunk of cheese and a plastic mug of Nippy’s orange juice. Nippy’s 1970s orange juice was really just pulp with a little bit of juice in the bottom. You know, I can still remember the taste of that plastic mug full of that foul pulpy, sugar free juice. Put me off pulp for life.
But now I am a mum and I appreciate what my Mum was trying to do. I appreciate her conchy 70s ways and I am proud to be following in her footsteps. Get those sweets OUT of the school canteen! Haven’t they seen anything Jamie Oliver has had on TV in the last five years? Geesh. That being said, I’m getting a bit … relaxed… about some things.
When I was a very new mum, food was my big thing. All organic, all home made, no McDonalds, not ever, no frozen food in a box from the supermarket, no sugar and so on. I bought enormous amounts of cookbooks chocablock full of nutritional meals especially designed for the wee kiddies. We ate well all the time. In the last couple of years I have become a lot more slack about it. We still eat well, and I still enjoy making yummy nutritious stuff, but there are days at a time when we might not make a salad, and there are times when we dash out for fish and chips, or whack a handful of potato smiles in the oven to go with the chops. I figure we are still going to be ok, because that’s all still an exception to the rule. I look back on my earlier (slightly uptight – or massively uptight if you ask some of my friends) ways and realise that food was the only thing I felt I could control. I didn’t have a clue if I was doing anything else right in the parenting department, and spent a lot of the time being completely freaked out about it; but at least the freshly stewed and pureed organic apple baby food that I was putting into my baby’s mouth was exactly the right thing to be doing. I was defining myself as a good mother by the food I made.
These days I’m a slightly shabby mum, with maybe a slightly better sense of humour and a box of frozen “fairy shapes” in the freezer.
The hugely healthy roll in the photo is one that I have in the cupboard for Amelia’s lunchbox tomorrow. Old habits die hard.
Thanks to Pip for hosting Words and Pictures! Why not join in too? We’ll make Anne Lamott proud!
25th October 2008
This is our ridiculously over priced Halloween pumpkin. This will be the last year I buy a ridiculously over priced pumpkin. I am going to save the seeds and attempt to grow my own. If that doesn’t work, next year we will carve into a completely affordable pumpkin, which we can also eat the insides of, and be done with it. Those with Canadian blood running in their veins will spend some time tomorrow carving this into something spooky. As in previous years, it will sit on our front verandah in the warmish weather and attract a bazillion little black flies for a truly hideous Halloween display.
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Congratulations to Aleece who was the lucky winner of this past week’s give away. She submitted a link to a delicious looking recipe for Mushroom Barley Bake which I am most definitely going to make the next time we do baked chicken. Thank you for all your comments – what a fabulous stash of good things. Just in case you were wondering, to keep it fair, I deleted any duplicate comments. Stay tuned for another give away next week.
31st July 2008
*** UPDATED to say it’s SELF RAISING FLOUR! Sorry! ***
After the day before yesterday’s cake baking revelations I meant to publish the revised recipe as part of that entry but I got distracted by proof reading etc., which is lucky because it would have still been wrong. Mum called me early yesterday morning to also admit that the recipe I have also calls for too much butter! Sabotage! I made another cake today and while it didn’t rock my world it’s slowly improving. I am thinking of moving on to another chocolate cake recipe which I can call my own. If anybody has any good recipes they feel keen to share, please do!
But due to popular demand, today I can provide for you the FULLY revised, spot-on chocolate cake recipe. Here it is:
Melt 85 grams (3 ounces) of butter.
Put in bowl (in order of appearance) with 1 cup of sifted self raising flour
1 cup of caster sugar
2 Tablespoons of cocoa (sifted) — not drinking chocolate, but real cocoa
2 cold eggs
dollop vanilla
pinch of salt
1/2 cup of whole cream milk
combine & beat 3 minutes
Cook for 45 minutes on 180°c
Clearly this is a very brief recipe… you will need to tip it out of the tin when it’s cooled a little and then ice it with something delicious.
Mum’s tips: If it’s a cold morning, warm the (preferably metal) mixing bowl with hot water and then dry before adding the butter. Use stale eggs. Use fresh self raising flour.
The cake recipe was given to my mum from Dad’s young cousin, who used to come and spend weekends away from boarding school with them back in the late 60s, early 70s. She used to cook this cake in Mum’s kitchen, cover it in cream and take it back for the school week. She told my mum “If you’ve got cake, girl, you’ve got friends.”
And just for fun, here are some photos from the family album of the cake in action.
This is my brother c. 1975 enjoying the cream on the top of the cake on a family picnic:
This is me, in our backyard in Adelaide, on my 10th birthday (showing off my new watch):
And here is Dad, Amelia and me in Mum and Dad’s kitchen on Amelia’s 1st birthday, almost five years ago – that must be a 1.5 sized cake because it sure looks huge:
It was Amelia’s first experience of cake! It looks as though she had about four bowls full.
And on that same occasion this is Mum pouring some kind of sparkling burgundy, probably saying “oh yes, definitely cook it for an hour, and definitely 3.5 grams of butter…” and I look very trusting (or drunk) but the cake was obviously good because we seem to have eaten it all.
And this is Lily from last month on her second birthday … just LOOK at that slice of cake! Sensational!
29th July 2008
Ahhhahaha!!
Let me say that again; AHAHAHHHHAHAHAH!
That’s ten years of pent-up baking angst.
We have had an ongoing cake drama, my mum and I – well actually, mostly just me. It’s been going on for nearly ten years. Mum has a fabulous chocolate cake recipe which she has cooked ever since I can remember. It’s light and moist and supposedly super easy; minimal ingredients, minimal fuss for maximum taste. It’s a simple little cake which will suit almost any occasion.
A long time ago I got the recipe from her and have tried to cook it many times with unvarying results – it always sucks. No matter how many different times I have tried, and how many different ways I wooed this little baby, it always came out resembling something more like a dried up slice than a cake. I know it’s just a tiny thing in the bigger life picture, but over a decade it has really bugged me that I can’t master this “simple” cake. How lame can I be?
I tried all sorts of tricks; new flour, warm eggs, cold eggs, old eggs, fresh eggs, sifted cocoa, unsifted expensive cocoa, small tins, big tins, and so on – finally we decided the difference in our success with this recipe must be the difference in our mixing bowls – we both had 1970s Kenwoods, but mum has a metal bowl and I had a plastic bowl. Because melted butter is the first ingredient added we theorised that perhaps it’s the hot butter hitting the cold metal bowl and the resulting cooling reaction that is the KEY step. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a Kitchen Aid with a metal bowl. Mum’s chocolate cake was my first test run of our new toy, but…
NO GOOD!
I don’t know if you can see it in this photo, but although the cake tasted ok, the crumb was dense and dry. The metal bowl seemed to make no difference at all. I stomped around the house cursing and shouting “Sabotage! GRRR!”. You see, it’s been my secret theory all these years that mum had deliberately altered something on the ingredients list she gave me back sometime in the 90s so I would never make as good a cake as she. This is a great theory which kind of ignores the fact that my mother is not a vindictive, petty minded person even in the slightest. But even so, this supposedly easy “never really fails” cake once again… well… sucked.
Once again I rang mum and tensely read the list of ingredients down the phone so that she could reconfirm (as she has done on numerous occasions over the years) that I had the right stuff. Yep, yep yep. So I suggested that mum could actually make the chocolate cake when she came over today, with my kitchen aid, in my oven while I watched… with beady, searching eyes… determined not to miss a beat.
So today we threw out my old self raising flour and opened a new bag just in case my flour was stale, we watched as the hot butter hit the cold (but not too cold) bowl, we mixed it thoroughly for three minutes and carefully poured it in the ring tin and placed it in a slightly cooler than previously tried oven, taking in to account that our old oven might be just a bit too hot. All this time I was studiously checking off the ingredients and the directions in my copy of the recipe. So far it all matched Mum’s moves.
3/4 of an hour later mum said “ok, let’s look at it.” We carefully opened the oven and mum peered into the blackness, she gently pulled it out and poked at it’s surface and showed me how it sprung back and then she said “Yes, I think it’s done.”
“Really?” I felt a little surprised, “because according to my instructions I would have left it for another 15 minutes. I always cook it for an hour.”
“Oh no! What? No… an hour?? Never! That’s way too long!”
“But it’s tiny! It hasn’t risen up over the edge of the tin yet!”
“But it never does, not if I’m making these proportions, but usually I’m making a 1 and a half times sized cake.”
Which explains the size of my cake! – I was always expecting my cake to match mum’s 1.5 cake.
“But my recipe says cook for 1 hour!”
“No! Not unless it’s for 1 and half sized cake! Didn’t you ever check to see if it was done?”
“Well no! Because I was scared that the rush of cold air from opening the oven door would make the cake sink! And any time I did look, hoping to find it rising over the edge of the tin, it was always so tiny that I thought I had made it sink by checking! So then I would always leave it to cook for the rest of the hour! Always!…
…BECAUSE, LOOK!”
I opened my recipe book and stabbed my finger on the “Cook for 1 hour at 180c”
“ahhh…”
“I knew it! Sabotage!”
No wonder my cakes have always looked like a little shriveled, dried up thing.
Much laughing ensued — and check out the guilty look on my mum’s face!
and here’s mum poking at the cake saying, “Oh, it’s a good one”.
So hooray! It’s not me! It was the recipe all along (and maybe the plastic bowl had a hand in it too)! I never thought that perhaps mum was altering the ingredients to make a bigger cake… and I never thought to read back to mum the amount of time it needed to cook for, not in all those years. Why it never occurred to me to cook it for less time even though my cakes always looked a bit crispy around the edges, I’m not sure… I think it’s because I’m not a terribly experimental cook, I am a bit of a stickler for instructions.
But I knew it! It was Mum! She sabotaged me! (Though she is claiming that she’s just a little vague – but just look at that evil smile…).
