What things make you scramble bleary eyed from your bed with anticipation? What makes your blood rumble faster through your veins when you think about it even in the middle of a dreary, repetitive job? That’s not to infer that mine’s dreary or repetitive – in fact it’s far from it but I know that is not everyone’s reality.
For me, apart from my patient husband and creative son, my passions are travel, cooking, writing, reading, movies and interior design.
And that’s what this blog is all about but mainly the cooking because that is what I do the most consistently and it helps to find joy in our everyday activities.
COOKING
I was brought up on a fa
rm and cooked alongside my mother and grandmother from when I could totter about, pulling myself along the furniture to get a view of what smelt so good.
After getting a degree in languages, I went to live in Italy in my early twenties and my culinary education grew as I sampled and cooked some of the most exciting foods on the planet today because who can cook better than the Italians? No, not even the French. No other nation has the same passion for food. Whole conversations can rotate around food, especially while sitting at a table eating. The cheese is discussed, the wine is discussed, the curing of the salami is discussed, the flavour of the olives and so on. It is a science, a brilliant joyful science which must be analysed every day so the wonder of food stays alive.
After nine years, I packed up a dark, handsome Italian and exported him to New Zealand. We married and now I cook four nights a week and he fills in the gap. As rare as it is for an Italian man to know much about the actual cooking of food, he has proved a willing pupil and now cooks a mean curry (very un-Italian), as well as pasta and pizzas and has been known to fill the odd squid with something scrumptious.
TRAVEL
At a very young age, I used to pore over the slides my uncle sent back from exotic foreign countries and I grew up with a longing to follow in his footsteps. The reality of that fell far short but I have visited or lived in more than 40 countries and I have many more to explore yet. It still gives me a rush of joy every time I step on a plane for far pastures. Although a part of that is the fact that I don’t have to do anything, including think, for several hours – what bliss!
WRITING
In primary school, I wrote essays which impressed the teacher and now I have three published books which seem to impress the reviewers and readers so that’s another thread that has continued through my life.
INTERIOR DESIGN & MOVIES
As a teenager I decorated my bedroom in my own style which incongruously consisted of giant paper flowers and a wall collage of actors and actresses. After seeing The Sound of Music when nine or ten, I decided I wanted to be either an actress or a nun. The nun thing didn’t last though I do have an unexplained love of Gothic churches and crosses of all sorts. The actress thing never went anywhere either but I love movies of all genres except horror – all that adrenaline rushing about the body can’t be good for you – and I see at least one a week.
Anyway, back to interior design. Every abode I dwelt in had my unpredictable touch applied to it – from Bohemian cluster to quirky minimalism. As soon as I reached the responsible adult stage of my life and bought a house with my husband, something manic was born in me and I drove the poor man crazy moving house every time I had the last one renovated to perfection according to my personal aesthetic of the time. Then at a certain point, I got quite out of control and bought extra houses and did two at once and occasionally did up rooms for friends as well. I eventually burned myself out and decided I could never again look at another woe-begotten villa in need of help and we bought a yet-to-be-finished house at the frame-up stage. Even from the first rung of noggins, we could see a splendid sea view which stretched forever and ever and we fell in love. Even though we have moved again since then (don’t ask me for the reason or I might cry), I have never regressed to the masochism of my earlier days, much to the eternal gratitude of my husband. We currently live in an equally modern house, also overlooking the sea. I do like the overlooking-the-sea part and even our very first house, nestled in the bush on three sides, had a spectacular view of an inner harbour but needed heaps of vision to see that the view would hold the poor excuse of a dwelling in good stead once I had worked my magic on it. And that was the beginning …
SUMMARY
And so now I don’t do interior design any more but still love a stunning or quirky expression of someone’s inner imaginings and so will photograph any such rooms I find and post them here.
As for cooking, I will photograph my evening meals – the four that I cook weekly and let you know how to recreate them in the privacy of your own kitchens. I might even let my husband’s efforts have a mention once in a while.
I will let you know what I have read and give you my brief thoughts on it though I am aware that everyone has their own opinions when it comes to the writing creations of our fellow man, and so my words are only relevant in so much as they are mine. I might even put up my own books on a separate page – a little bit of extra publicity never goes amiss.
Ditto with the movies I see. I will let you know what I liked and didn’t like fresh after the viewing before time changes my immediate impressions or someone persuades me that my opinions stink and I get reticent about expressing them.
As for the travelling, that doesn’t happen often enough to do a weekly post on new countries visited so I shall go back over some of my favourite places and give you the heads up on why they are on my top-countries-visited list.
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