BLOG: White Enamel Pie Dish

Curing and marinating olives

We are in the middle of two weeks of preserving olives. It's a process we followed last year after I visited Derek and Kirrily Blomfield's 987-hectare property Colorado, at Caroona on the Liverpool Plains of NSW researching a story for Country Style magazine (September 2016). Back then, Derek's father Sandy Blomfield was picking olives, rehydrated by record winter rainfall. We picked a bag and I returned home to work out what to do with them. Preserving them was a great success and kept us in olives for months. This year I visited the Colorado olive grove with our sons during the autumn school holidays to pick olives, ripening from lime green to deep purple and black. As I was leaving home, Duncan gave me instruction to "Pick more this time" so I took a few calico bags to fill with olives. Kirrily generously helped me pick manzanillo olives, while our sons played on a swing under a peppercorn tree. The olive grove, made up of hundreds of trees, also has frantoio (or paragon), and correggiola varieties. Kirrily and I imagined the olive grove as a location for a long lunch at a shared table. The shade of the trees invites lounging.

Bushwalking with children

We feel the school holidays coming to a close and want to make the most of the days we have left and arrange to explore our friends' new property in the hills behind our house. It is the western fall of the Great Dividing Range and a drive to the top corner of the farm reveals extraordinary views of the Peel Valley below. We drive further down the slope and leave the truck to walk with our sons, 11, and eight. It's steep country and we feel the microclimate change, the temperature dropping as we descend thigh high clumps of grass into a gully with a creek running through it. Along the way we find remnants of sheep fleece and start to ponder the fate of its owner. There is flattened grass ahead and it looks like the sheep has been dragged. As we reach the creek we're distracted by a rustle and movement in the trees. A pig. But we don't see it. Duncan walks quietly and teases the boys and I about being more bush stompers than bush walkers. The pig is long gone.

Baking homemake bread and hot cross buns

Perhaps it is the muscle memory linking me with generations past that evokes such enjoyment at the primitive movement of forming and kneading a dough. It is still a delight to feel the simple ingredients of flour, water, sugar, yeast and salt turn silky smooth under my hands, patiently wait for the dough to rise, punching the air out of the temporary dough pillow, and waiting for the second rise before baking. Then there's the smell wafting through the house as the loaf begins to turn golden and the dough transforms into its cake consistency.

Two pecks of Granny Smith, Jonathon and wild apples

Preserving fruit and vegetables was an undercurrent of my teenage years, when Mum and Dad realised their dream to have a couple of acres past Camden on the outskirts of Sydney. Dad loved to strip a tree of its ripe fruit and deposit bucket loads of peaches, apricots, pears...whatever was in season, on the potential ankle-twisting, uneven, sandstone back steps to the kitchen for Mum to preserve. Her reaction was always mock annoyance at the need to drop everything and deal with it, while being truly grateful for the end product - a wall-to-wall pantry full of preserved fruit, and homemade jam, relishes, chutneys and pickles to eat year-round. As a teenager I had little interest in Mum and Dad's self-sufficiency leanings, although I did go to an agricultural high school and made a cracker apricot jam. Like my friends I was more interested in listening to LPs of The Smiths, The Jam and Bill Bragg, reading Dolly magazine or exercising to video recordings of Aerobics Oz Style or Jane Fonda! It was the 80's. Fast forward 30 years and preserving is second nature to me. You tend to absorb these things by osmosis and now when the season delivers a bumper harvest it's time to roll the sleeves up, string on the apron, and preserve.

Spoon carving the new knitting

“Mum says I have sawdust in my veins,” says Tamworth man Jack Massey about his chance start making timber furniture and kitchenware. Jack gives a tour of the Massey family home of 18 years, on 100 acres outside Tamworth in northern inland NSW, proudly pointing out dining tables, side tables and marquetry made by master craftsmen Jack’s father Steve, and grandfather, John. A short walk from the house is a corrugated iron shed with a timber dining table in progress, and Jack’s latest work displayed, a range of hand carved spoons and knives in various lengths and timbers; American Walnut, English Oak, Camphor Laurel, Cherry, Blackwood, Red Mahogany, and Myrtle. Jack holds and turns his creations in his hands with great care and affection, each spoon hand carved chip by chip from a block of wood.

Connecting through the lens

We connected with Katoomba-based photographers Ben and Cerisse Urquhart of Kings and Thiev.es through Instagram when they posted images from an engagement shoot at nearby Hanging Rock. I asked if I could share the images on our Nundle community social media. When I read that Ben and Cerisse were back in the neighbourhood for a family wedding we asked whether they could swing by the shop and take some new photographs to freshen up our website. It turns our Ben grew up at Moonbi, near Tamworth, and is the nephew of our Nundle copper Ken Flemming. Yep, small world. We are blown away by Ben and Cerisse's images. I particularly love that Ben described our shop as an "enamelware nightclub". They completely overdelivered, even shooting a bonus video, and we are grateful. We hope you enjoy this insight into Odgers and McClelland Exchange Stores.

Dog walk figs

Summer of my sweet ferment

I've been dabbling in fermenting and pickling for a couple of years now, mainly out of a desire to preserve excess vegetables (Milkwood Permaculture was excellent inspiration for fermented beans and curing olives, along with Brenda Fawden's recipe for Warm Cracked Manzanillo Olives in Eat Local). I may have mentioned elsewhere that my autumn green tomato pickle has a following of two! Meanwhile, winter kimchi is an excellent way to keep the kale crop in check. This year the interest in pickling and fermenting dug a little deeper to understand the benefits of fermented foods on gut health.

Gillian Bell homemade Christmas mince pies

When I began thinking about sharing a Christmas cooking recipe my Brisbane-based friend Gillian Bell of Gillian Bell Cake came to mind. I thought, "I bet Gillian has some great Christmas recipes." When I approached her to share one of her favourite recipes, her response had me laughing, 'I’d love to contribute to your blog with a recipe, and an interview. I make Christmas cakes, Christmas pudding and mince pies every year (I’m a bit of a traditionalist and a Christmasophile). For my mince pies, I make my own mincemeat and pastry as well, and always bake them on the evening of Christmas Eve after I’ve been to carol service.' I knew Gillian would be perfect.

Delicious rhubarb, orange and almond cake

Have you added ruby red stems of beetroot to your shopping basket lately? I bought some rhubarb this week and I was determined to overcome my procrastination, which too often leads to rhubarb wilting, growing mould and ending up as chook food. A terrible waste.  I hit my favourite recipe books and Sophie Hansen's Local is Lovely Rhubarb, orange and almond cake had the mouth watering elements of baked rhubarb, orange zest and nutty almond crunch that I love. In Sophie's book she states, "most people only cook around three recipes from every cookbook they buy. If that's true, then please let this cake be one of those three recipes." Well, I have definitely cooked more than three recipes from Sophie's book, and I am so glad that I added this cake to my repertoir.