It’s probably not right when your mum says to your best mate: If you don’t eat those vegetables, you’ll get bowel cancer and die. She was a difficult lady, yeah. Such casually cruel observations don’t make for pleasant dinner time chit chat, and so bringing friends home to share a meal was always a fraught experience. Best avoided. Candidly, the food wasn’t all that great anyway.
At the age of about twelve, in that single mother household, I found myself in the kitchen preparing family meals on a rotating roster with my two older sisters. Perhaps my mother took a sense of pride in her lack of domestic abilities? After all, she worked full time and studied University for a degree part time, and maybe had no desire to cook and clean – especially given that us kids were doing that work. My best friends parents both worked as well, and so we walked to and from primary school together. What a change a few decades makes, for in these enlightened times, parents allegedly get harassed by the police for such arrangements. Things sure were different back in the 70’s.
Anyway, people rarely visited the household, let alone stayed for shared meals. However, I did learn my way around the kitchen and how to cook from an early age. Not a bad skill to have, especially given we all more or less, eat three meals per day. It was obvious to me from those earlier experiences that browbeating your guests is a totally bad idea! But exactly how to manage a gathering, well, that was a skill which was never handed down. I had no idea how to handle such a thing. A dude therefore has to learn the hard way, by attempting to emulate better examples. It’s been remarked upon elsewhere, that it is a notable achievement to grow beyond your roots.
Some friends can host gatherings with an effortless ease which underlies the enormous amount of work it takes to effect that casual and relaxed vibe. It’s awesome to be a part of. And over the years whilst ostensibly enjoying myself at those occasions, meanwhile singing for my supper, as they used to say, the observational powers were quietly watching everything, and taking notes.
Nowadays, with more experience, I’d like to imagine that Sandra and I can host a small gathering of friends with the sort of casual ease which smoothes the sometimes muddy social waters. The ultimate test however, is whether the guests will happily return for future get togethers! And so far, so good.
We had a bunch of friends over for lunch during the weekend. What a fun time was had. And fortunately, there was enough tiramisu left over for a small chunk for each us after dinner – that meal also consisted of various left overs. Nothing goes to waste here! It’s worthwhile at this point in the story, mentioning my cunning dessert plan – feed up the guests on other tasty yummy treats, before the dessert was brought to the table. With already full guts, the guests may not have been able to polish off all of the tiramisu, despite doing their best trencherman efforts! The long dead master of war, Sun Tzu, would have approved of the crafty dessert stratagem. And it worked!
Whilst at table, the gathering quite happily and politely discussed various complicated topics, often from wildly different perspectives. In today’s polarised communication landscape, that’s a rare and precious thing.
If a person cares to, they can learn and implement good habits from observing poor examples. Over the long years I’ve been involved in groups which appeared to fall into the ‘dysfunctional’ category of social relations. Without going into too many details, one group fell apart due to the unusual demands from a person who was not even directly involved with the group. Like how was that even allowed to happen? But it sure did! Another group was like a scene out of a remote survivor disaster film where people got picked off, one by one. Truly, if you tolerate such things, you’ll be next. And sure enough I was!
The inability to discuss these sorts of difficult matters, warts and all, whilst maintaining a coherent group, suggests a dearth of good leadership in the wider community. It’s not comforting to observe this inability, least of all because the alert person realises that problems will never get resolved, until they escalate beyond any possibility of control. Oh well, and here we are today. My mother, if she were alive, might cheekily suggest that the ‘powers that be’ are ideologically constipated, and they may well suffer poor outcomes. It pains me to believe that the old virago may have been correct! You’d hope that as a society we can move past this moment in time and free up those ideological bowels.
It’s been an extraordinarily wet week. At times the rainfall, which had it’s origins in the tropical Indian Ocean far to the north west of the continent, dumped torrential quantities of water over the farm. It’s a good way to test the many drainage systems.
The rainfall which collects on the hard surfaces in front of the house, is directed into a drainage basin. The tree fern growing at the bottom of the basin enjoyed every minute of the heavy rainfall.
The house water tanks were half empty at the beginning of the week. Now, due to the tropical downpour, they are full to overflowing. All of the water storages are now full, and that’s a good position to be in on the first official day of summer.
With guests arriving for lunch on the weekend, we mowed the entire property and generally cleaned up the place. As a side note, it rained the entire time during the visit, and so we all mostly kept indoors.
The making of the tiramisu was filmed and will be released over the next three weeks. The first week will show how the mascarpone cheese was made. Next week will cover the lady finger biscuits. Then the third week will show how the super tasty dessert was put together. But for long term readers, I thought it might be interesting to peer behind the fourth wall, so to speak.
And here’s a sneak peek at the completed dessert. Glad we took a photo, because it’s all been consumed by now!
The other evening whilst out walking around, Ollie alerted me to a tiny little orphaned ring-tail possum. Sandra contacted the local wildlife rescue mob, and they now have the possum in their care. He’d have had zero chance of survival otherwise.
There’s a lot of wildlife living here. When the sun shines, reptiles warm themselves on the many rock walls. When walking around the place, sometimes the scuttling noises can be mildly alarming!
During warmer days, the air hums with insect life. Their collected actions can be quite loud. A few varieties of native bees live around here, and all of them do good work pollinating the annual plants.
Oh! I’d appreciate some help with identifying this mystery plant. When it was sold to me, the seeds were described as being the North American pawpaw, which clearly they aren’t. I’m guessing it may well be the North American chestnut, but aren’t really sure. Anyway, what the heck are they? If you know, please do drop a comment below:
The dogs suffered a bit of cabin fever during the rainiest of days. One evening I discovered that the cheeky Ruby had usurped Dame Plum’s usual position on the couch. The clever Plum was having none of that foolishness, and so plopped herself down on top of Ruby. A bold power move if you ask me! Ruby did her best to look nonplussed, but soon enough relocated.
In breaking produce news: The first ripe raspberries of the season were harvested. Yummo! The berries are collected, washed, then stored in the freezer. When the container becomes full, we make a batch of raspberry jam.
The blackberries are still probably a month or so away from being ready to harvest, but at this stage, the season promises to be decent. We also turn most of the blackberry harvest into jam, and during winter months on oven warmed freshly baked bread, it’s awesome.
Cherries are beginning to show some blush, but I’d reckon the birds are keeping a closer eye on these tasty fruits than I ever could.
With the heavy rainfall last week, the apples are putting on some decent size. Early in the new year, we hope to make some batches of cider.
The pears have likewise gotten bigger with the rain over the past week.
Alas, we weren’t quick enough to harvest all of the tasty Globe Artichokes, and some of the flowers have begun to open. With the multitude of spiky chunks when those flowers open, they’re poor eating. However, they’re quite pretty in their own way, and provide plenty of feed for the insects.
The potatoes, sugar beets and radishes have all revelled in the wet and warm conditions this week:
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 23’C (73’F). So far for last year there has been 896.8mm (35.3 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 799.0mm (31.5 inches)