There's a newborn in the house, take food
Blog posts have taken a back seat lately as we have been harvesting honey, fruit and vegetables and being part of the baby bubble following the birth of our grandson Lewis. Parents Isabelle and Ben are emerging out of the first three months of life with a newborn and it is beautiful to see them nurture their family, get to know Lewis, and learn all the things that come with caring for a baby. One of the ways we have been able to help from a distance is with food. Arriving with a hamper of Nundle's Crawney's Hills to Grills beef, pasta bake and casserole meal portions for the freezer, a cake, biscuits, favourite muesli, tea, or apples for the fruit bowl just might make life easier at some point of the 24-hour baby clock. A new-to-me postpartum snack is the lactation biscuit. I bought a box of lactation biscuits for Isabelle from our local health food store, and after her sister-in-law gave her a homemade batch Isabelle found the recipe online. We started making them during some of my visits, tag teaming between baking and caring for Lewis. Last week I made a batch to take down, and when I arrived Isabelle already had biscuit batter in the stand mixer - such is the popularity of this snack.
View full article →Christmas baking ritual connects with family
The Christmas baking urge kicked in on the 30th of November. Maybe it was the prospect of an afternoon out with girlfriends, the calendar flipping over to December, or the feeling of the year's responsibilities soon coming to a temporary close. There's nothing like the feeling of literally closing doors and switching off digitally for days, or maybe weeks! So I embarked on early morning baking with enthusiasm, trying a new-to-me recipe for Danish Honey Cakes.
View full article →Jade Miles' Huddle on our Nundle verandah
Our September gathering with author, podcaster and regenerative farmer Jade Miles, of Black Barn Farm, was four years in gestation. Jade and I started talking by direct message in 2021 on the back of the launch of Jade's first book Futuresteading. It was a definite yes when Jade approached us to be part of her 2025 lower Hunter and north west NSW tour, taking in Nundle, Somerton, Dungog and Singleton, to promote her second book Huddle. Jade had toured the book in Victoria, WA and the UK since its launch in May. Our shop verandah has hosted three author events, but this was the first post pandemic lockdown. Our last author event was with Fat Pig Farm's Matthew Evans on Sunday 15 March 2020. It felt significant to welcome our shop community to settle in on our verandah again, engaged in Jade's compelling storytelling.
View full article →Lamb Tagine with Prunes and Fresh Turmeric
Lamb Tagine with Prunes and Fresh Turmeric has been added to our regular recipe cycle this winter. The recipe, by Cornersmith, calls for diced lamb shoulder, but we use whatever diced homegrown, home butchered lamb is bagged and wrapped in butchers paper in the freezer. I enjoy the process of pounding and grinding the spice mix in a mortar and pestle, knowing that the mixture will make for a delicious meal. It's the kind of dish that cooks low and slow, and by the time it is on the plate the lamb is incredibly tender and flavoursome. It's also a recipe that makes use of many of our homegrown ingredients: honey, bay, parsley, and bottled tomatoes.
View full article →Renovation wrap-up
‘Why didn’t you just bulldoze it?’ is a question we’ve been asked more than once about the renovation of our 70-year-old timber house at Nundle, in the Upper Peel Valley of north west NSW. We did ask both our draftsman and builder, ‘Should we knock it down?’ Their advice was that the frame of the house was solid and we could work with what we had, rather than build new. Making use of existing available materials, and hopefully saving money made sense as well. It also appealed to history. Our family has memories in these walls where we’ve raised children, had family celebrations and nurtured daily routines. Knocking the house down seemed like an insult to those stories.
View full article →Pumpkin patch to plate
There is no shortage of pumpkins in our life. Pumpkin vines has been happily reaching their tendrils across our vegetable garden over the summer and autumn. Duncan consulted a 1989 edition of Peter Cundall's Seasonal Tasks for the Practical Australian Gardener for the best time to cut the pumpkins off the vine, covering the fruit with heavy hessian sacks until the frost started to blacken the leaves. Thanks to the obscuring kikuyu and shading leaves, when Duncan cut the pumpkins and stacked them on our verandah this month, even he was surprised by the bounty.
View full article →Race against the first frost to pick red and green tomatoes
We watch the Bureau of Meteorology app for warnings of frost and when the forecast is for minimum temperatures below 5 C that's close enough to strip the tomato vines of remaining red and green tomatoes. It's a repetitive task that I strangely enjoy, hunting for viable firm tomatoes that don't have insect or weather damage. If they are damaged they are tossed aside to be cleaned up by the chooks.
View full article →Making parmesan cheese biscuits for Nundle Book Group
Nundle Book Group's monthly gathering is motivation to make Sophie Hansen’s Parmesan cheese biscuits from Local is Lovely. With the sharpness of the parmesan and kick of cayenne pepper they are the perfect snack to have with drinks, add to a chatter platter, or package as a gift. Our book group enjoyed them eaten on their own, but you could experiment topping with more cheese or tapenade. Please give them a try and even follow Sophie's advice and make the dough well in advance so you just have to slice and cook when you need the biscuits. How appropriate that Sophie is an avid reader, co-hosting the podcast @somethingtoeat_somethingtoread with Germaine Leece.
View full article →Autumn's golden bounty in baked quinces topping Nadine Ingram's chocolate cake
We have celebrated three family birthdays in the last six weeks. As a result I've been getting back into cake making and enjoying exploring a Nadine Ingram rabbit hole. We gave Isabelle the Flour and Stone baker Nadine's book 'Love Crumbs' for her birthday and each recipe is a beautifully written story about the ingredients, flavours, textures, and processes. It is a next level recipe book that you can enjoy for the writing, photography and of course baking.
View full article →Locally made leatherwork by Thabo Alberts back in store
For decades Thabo Alberts has been crafting leather. Thabo cuts all the leather using a 28-year-old pocket knife and stitches it by hand in his workshop on the grazing property near Nundle where he lives. Some of the leather that Thabo uses is from recycled polo saddle flaps and has the worn patina and softness that only use and care can achieve.
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