food waste

Tristam Stuarts book Waste is currently under review and living on my bedside table. I havenet read for months (you may have noticed my currently reading links have not been updated for a while!) as I have been busy with my business and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall during my normal reading hours! I was going to finish reading the book and write a review before I posted anything about it, but the pics on the Waste website i find are just so telling and interesting that I thought Id provide a link for those who are interested. Some of those displays look just like our weekly veg shop! Why food waste is so passionate a concept to me i have no idea. Food politics in general just gets my juices flowing. You?

afternoon delight

Sunday afternoon visitors are a great treat for me, especially during the winter months. It means a compulsory but welcomed stint in the kitchen and a fire on early. Pretty close to heaven. The kids love it too; a sense of ease and timelessness, everyone leisurely enjoying their own pace and interests together downstairs in the warmth. The Mad Gnomes dropped in, kindly proffering the prize i won, The Silver Spoon, in their Gnome competition (decorated with a homegrown head of garlic!)
What a prize! Described as Italy's best selling cookbook for over fifty years and the bible of authentic Italian cooking, I was pretty stoked at winning such a tome! Befitting a delicious biscuit to serve with drinks dont you think?

Chocolate Wheaties

90gm butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup coconut
1/4 cup wheatgerm
3/4 cup wholemeal plain flour
1/4 white self-raising flour
90g dark chocolate

Cream butter with sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg, beat well. Add coconut and wheatgerm and flours. Roll teaspoonfulls into balls and squash with a fork. Bake in a moderate oven for 15-20 minuites. Dip in melted chocolate. Refridgerate to set on a wire rack. Eat.

eat pray love

apparently its a no 1 best seller and everyone is talking about it - well,anyway that's what the jacket said. Im so yesterday. I love this style of writing; self deprecating, laconic, colloquial, ironic, and funny, very very funny. Its such an honest, naked piece of writing filled for me with moments of extreme identification as the writer takes us with her on her journey of clambering her way out of a messy and hard divorce through a process of self discovery of various means. She eats her way through Italy to find self acceptance, prays her way forward to self realisation in India and finds love in her consolidation journey in Indonesia. Dog eared pages fill my book where i have marked inspiring passages but there's just a few too many. Im going to have to read it again. Its one of those books where i nod my way through amidst the laughter. Not many books have me laughing out aloud but this ones irresistable, effortlessy swinging from the spiritual to the front bar. Not having any divorced friends, i found the book an affirming companion.

what i had waited for for so long was to have an actual conversation with my ex-husband, but this was obviously never going to happen What i had been craving was a resoloution, a peace summit, from which we could emerge with a united understanding of what had occourred in our marriage and a mutual forgiveness for the ugliness of our divorce. This obviously wasn't going to happen. How do survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business...you finish the business yourself. Its not only posible, its essential.

i swung that phantom limb of divorce around quite a bit after the amputation. It took a while to feel whole again.