pictured
1. The sky one night of the heatwave. Oh, yes, the heatwave. For those of you lucky enough to have been anywhere else last week, we had the most diabolical (record-breaking) heatwave. On Thursday the temperature reached 47C and we were officially the hottest city on the planet. We had to close the shop for the week and I spent most of my time hiding form the heat and watching Homeland.
2. Celebrity head, because Sherlock and Watson were adorable when they played it in The Sign of Three. We spent Tuesday of the heatwave swimming, drinking gin and playing silly games with friends.
3. I finally bought a Kombucha SCOBY and my first batch should be ready in about five days!
4. Cashew Cheese from The Whole Pantry app.
5. The Life-Changing Loaf of Bread from My New Roots.

not pictured
1. Impromptu dinner date at Jack Ruby. The scallop cheviche is ah-maz-ing!
2. our first night(s) apart since moving in together. Tom went to Kangaroo Island with work (just for fun- entirely funded by tips!)
3. the cool change came in the form of a huge storm; Tom's parents dog was alone and terrified and somehow managed to make her way to our house. It's about a half hour walk, but we can't remember a time that she has actually been here before then. Clever girl.
4. a lovely gin-soaked evening with Josh.
5. setting up my studio in the detached bunglalow in the backyard. Excited to start using my new (to me) workbench.

I didn't mean to take so long to post again, but the heat was so all-consuming and those day so uneventful (I didn't think you wanted to hear my thoughts on Homeland or how our low temperatures were a normal week's highs) that time just ... passed. How have you all been?

Salted caramels with real ingredients

I wrote this post yesterday (as promised to anyone following me on instagram) but couldn't put it up for reasons unknown to sensible human beings. 

For Christmas this year, my two best friends and I decided to skip gifts and instead exchange delicious treats. This came in response to the incredible fudge Josh made last year that Claire and I desperately wanted to see feature again this Christmas.

I decided to make salted caramels because I'm crazy for anything with that flavour combination at the moment. An obsessive salty caramely lust has crept upon me in the last few months, so it felt necessary, nay, essential, that these flavours comprise my contribution to Orphan's Christmas celebrations. 

There are tons of salted caramel recipes on the internet; Pinterest overflows with delectable photos of the stuff (unlike the quick phone shot that I took). But candy is full of refined sugars and a myriad of other unholy ingredients and I wanted to try to find an alternative. I also wanted Tom to be able to enjoy a couple, and I may or may not have mentioned on here before that he has Type 1 Diabetes, so that added an extra challenge. Most artificial sweeteners have a metallic aftertaste and other natural alternatives such as stevia were not going to caramelise to the rich flavour that I wanted in my candies. Eventually I settled on organic coconut sugar, but since it is hard to find and exorbitantly  priced when you do, I wouldn't suggest the substitution to those who aren't concerned about a blood sugar spike. Stick with organic rapadura, which has a natural caramel hint to begin with and don't undergo the excessive processing of it's refined counterparts.

I used this recipe from Holistic Squid; apart from the coconut sugar, I made no changes and it turned out beautifully so I'll send you over there rather than steal the recipe and slap it up here.

Anyway, since in not a food blogger and I failed to take pictures of a quality better than my phone, I'll stop pretending I know anything about this. The caramels turned out really well. I had no idea it was this easy, but if I had I might have tried these much earlier. Twisting them into individual papers was painfully repetitive and monotonous work, but once Tom came to help me it was much more fun. I'd suggest you Shanghai someone into helping you simply because you'll have someone to chat with as you go.  

And for my next trick? Tomorrow I'll be nicking some rosemary from the hedge down the street and adapting the recipe from this lemon tart for the early Christmas celebrations with Tom's family that evening. Yet again I'm hoping to create something sweet without all of the crap that often goes into these types of foods. I make a great lemon curd, but with all the butter and sugar involved in it I thought I'd risk trying something a little bit different to my usual bent on the classic. Fingers crossed I don't have to make a last minute mad dash to a bakery to fix my mistake if it all goes south. 

Right now, however, I'm going to go and drink some cold beer in honour of a friend's birthday and forget all about the kitchen. His celebrations are supposed to involve watching the Test, but I strongly believe that cricket is as much a spectator sport as poker. Not. Even. Remotely. That said, we met some guys from the Barmy Army at the pub last week when the Test was here and causing me a headache induced by overproduction of coffee. They sang us a song and I developed an iota of love for cricket in that moment simply because these men would travel across the globe to follow the Test and sing roudy songs, so perhaps there's more to it than I know. 

The August Break [day one]

Breakfast

Black coffee & pesto on sourdough. The world wakes in dew and frost. I sit by the window and watch the garden. Every other day this week I've eaten before the sun has risen; this is a rare treat. 

At the very last minute, I've decided to participate in the August Break. The idea is that you have a simple photo prompt and you can decide to write or not. If you're organised enough to have an editorial schedule it would be a nice break from the pressure of blogging.

But not only do I fail to keep to any semblance of an editorial schedule, I've also failed to hit the Publish button on a number of posts I've got sitting in my drafts folder in the last month or so. I've lost the habit and I think I've also lost a bit of confidence. I keep editing and editing (something I never usually do a great deal) but I never put these posts up because eventually I've edited my own voice out of my writing.

So rather than treating this like a break, I'm going to take this month of prompts to get back into the habit of blogging. I miss it. I'll write a little or a lot, but each day I will have a post up on the blog and hopefully I will remember what it is that makes this process so cathartic and rewarding.

reassessing my relationship with food

I read this article the other day about the differences in eating habits between French and American cultures. The whole time I was reading it, I was nodding along to all of the French eating habits as if I, too, maintained a healthy relationship with food.

But then a couple of days later I was serving a lady at the cafe and she was umm-ing and ahh-ing about a slice of cake. Finally she decided that she 'deserved to be a little naughty' and I laughed and agreed, but in that same moment I was having a bit of a head-slapping moment. Something shifted and I realised that, like her, I was actually subscribing to a very western relationship with food.

As a teenager I was dreadfully skinny. I could eat anything I wanted and never gain a pound. But times passes and bodies change and as a result so too has my relationship with food. At least this is how I've explained things to myself. It doesn't all come down to this, necessarily. I certainly did gain more womanly hips the closer I came to leaving my teens behind, but I also lost something: a regular and predictable routine. With the blessed benefits of hindsight, I can see that what really happened at this time was that my eating habits changed. I was no longer made to wait until the scheduled class breaks to sate my hunger; I ate when I felt the very first twinge of hunger. And quickly this proved to be every two hours when left to my own devices.

I found myself more and more inclined to purchase my lunch rather than to make it in the morning and I always had access to more food if I so desired.
I had unwittingly adopted the more detrimental of eating habits of out Western culture.
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