Raw

A couple of years back I did a 5 day raw food retreat at this place in northern Bali.  I am useless at these kinds of disciplines.  I dreamed of charcoal-y beef steaks and oven baked potatoes every night, and convinced myself that white wine was a raw food stuff because surely fermentation is not the same as cooking. 

And if you can't do raw food looking at this all day then one has no hope back in Melbourne.

(Massage hut at Puri Ganesha)

I do like the pristine clean feeling uncooked food gives me.   And if you like salads it is relatively easy to do quite often. 

Sunday night is raw food night.   It used to be omelette night.  Or noodles night. 

I recently bought this book by Kimberley Snyder.  She of the Green Smoothie I have mentioned before. 

Her eating plan is about beauty and skin health.  I am interested in it for overall health reasons.   Her eating plan is also vegan, which I struggle with.  I did vegan once, and lasted about 10 hours. I know.  Hopeless, right?

However, as bizarre as it sounds, her raw cold cauliflower soup is divine.
  

I won't show you the finished soup because frankly it's not that appetising looking.  But here are the ingredients and they look pretty nice before they are pureed.

Put in a vitamiser the following:

• juice of a lemon
• half or quarter of a cauliflower, chopped
• half an avocado
• good splash of tamari
• teaspoon of turmeric
• large pinch of sea salt
• a cup of water

Blend until smooth.  You can adjust the wateriness if you like.  Her recipe involves a teaspoon of miso but I don't have that so I left it out.  I also put in heaps of tamari.  You could also put in some dried chilli flakes. 

This makes a generous bowl for one or small bowls for two. It's not enough food for me so I also have some of her 'burritos' which consist of celery marinated in lemon juice, mustard and savoury yeast, avocado, sprouts and spinach wrapped in a nori sheet.  

Do you have any raw food treats I can try?  White wine counts as raw food.  So does red wine. 

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Good Luck Ganesha

How often, I wonder, do people return to the same place they have stayed before on their travels, even one they have really enjoyed?  Quite rarely,  I am guessing.  There are so many other wonderful places to visit, and who needs routine and the familiar on holiday.   However  I am sure that the return visit is, like a repeat shop visitor, what all hotel and resort owners aim for.

We have visited the same magical place in Bali three times now.  It is in northern Bali and getting there is an adventure in itself involving a 7 hour flight (which if you are flying Garuda could indeed be taking your life in your own hands - in fact I could do a whole post on Garuda stories I have heard), negotiating customs, confronting the heat and humidity, then a 6 hour drive from the bottom of the island to the top, through chaotic Kuta, dodging motorbikes and Spirit Day processions, across a volcano, through the misty mountain top and vegetable gardens, and down into the rice paddies outside Singaraja.  In our case it also unfortunately has involved numerous toilet and vomit breaks.

Having said that, Puri Ganesha has inspired us in so many ways and also help me to keep dreaming of new ideas for our house.  Thank you Diana...

These stone lights reinforced our love for stone walls, which I wrote about here:

This spice market made me appreciate freshly ground spices and now I always cook this way excepting of course when I just can't be bothered:

And these terraces made me realise the importance of a shady quiet place to read. I am still working on this one. 

Some ideas didn't work out.    We loved this bed so much we bought a queen size bed net to fit on a frame in Ubud and I got our carpenter to rig up a wooden contraption to hang it on.  Well was that a mistake.  You know how DIY can occasionally look embarassingly unfinished and basically, crap?  Well that was what this looked like.  It lasted only a few months over our bed.   (I do have an excuse which was that I had just had a baby and was obviously not thinking straight).   Clearly some holiday experiences are best left on holiday. 

And we still have a few 'still to be fulfilled' ideas.

An outside bathroom, like this one.   In Australia, I think an outside bathroom is quite sensible and practical.  Perhaps not in Melbourne but how wonderful to step out to this each morning....

A wooden door to replace the basic standard gate we have down the side of the house, so that the dark side of the house becomes a transformational adventure, rather than a dark spider dodge:

And,  perhaps not for our current house, a deep stone paved pool, which looks somewhat like it has been carved from rock:

Or this one from the Uma Ubud:

And finally, somewhere, somehow, by hook or by crook, I will one day have a pink painted outdoor wall, like this:

(Photos: 1, 4, 5, 8 and 10 Puri Ganesha, others by Jane)

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Spice World

I have been rereading Elizabeth David's eccentric little tome 'Spices Salt and Aromatics in the English kitchen'. It is a short book, which reviews spices in the English kitchen, their use for preserves and pickles, the Indian influence in England and includes lots of recipes for things like pickled onions and a 1950s style curry.

She quotes Sir Henry Luke from the Tenth Muse (1954):

'To turn to spices, mace - that aesthetically beautiful by-product of the nutmeg tree, a network husk of deep and brilliant lacquer red while it is still fresh on the nut - enriches thick soups and the stockpot generally with its singularly piquant aroma. Nutmeg itself, grated, is also a help in soups no less than in a bread sauce and a rum punch. Saffron is as indispensible to a good Milanese risotto as it is to a bouillabaisse and a paella. A touch of cardamom or coriander seed transforms a humdrum stew with the aroma of a Middle Eastern souk.

And what a rich evocative aroma they have, those ancient vaulted bazaars of Aleppo and Damascus and the Old City of Jerusalem, of Qazvin and Meshhed and Isfahan, as you approach the streets of the vendors of spices. Here you inhale an amalgam of all the aboriginal savours and smells of the Orient: the pepper and cloves; the cinnamon and turmeric and coriander.'

I cannot wander an Arabian souk today, and this is the closest I have ever been to a Middle Eastern Spice market:

(Market, Singaraja, Northern Bali, 2005)

Isn't it incredible how the scent of spice can evoke a long dormant memory. For me, cloves take me back to when I was 10 and we made pomanders for Christmas by sticking cloves into an orange. Cinnamon reminds me of the cinnamon and sugar mixture I ate sprinkled on buttery toast when I was a teenager. And the mixture of pepper, nutmeg, blachan, galangal and turmeric brings back many meals from Bali.

I may have written about the pointlessness of muffins. Well here is a wonderful Nigella Lawson muffin recipe which has some spices, and last for a few days in a sealed container. Your kitchen will be filled with a spicy Christmassy ginger glow.

Gingerbread muffins

Ingredients

250 g plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp ground ginder

1 tsp ground clinnamon

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 egg

50 g dark muscovado sugar

50 g light muscovado suger

150 ml milk

1/4 tsp balsamic vinegear

6 tbsp vegetable or corn oil

4 tbsp golden syrup

4 tbsp black treacle

Method

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celsius. Line a 12 bun muffin tin with muffin liners.

Combine the flour, bicarb of sada, baking powder and spices in a large bowl. Whisk the egg in a large measuring jug then add the sugards, breaking up any lumps. Add the milk and vinegar then measure in the oil with a trablespooon. Use the same oily spoon to add the syrup and treacle so they don't stick to it. Whisk the mixture to combine and add to the flour and spices.

Stir until mixed but still fairly lumpy - the mixutre may be quite runny but this is okay.

Spoon or pour the mixture ino the muffin papers and bake for 20 mins until the tops are browned - the muffins will still be squashy when you take them out to cool on a rack. Note you will not get the hump topped look of other muffins. This is a good thing.

And if you want to learn more of spice history, go no further than Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg in which (amongst other things) the farsighted English, following a little spat wih the Netherlands, traded the tiny island of Run (part of the Banda Island chain in southeast Asia) with a rather larger rocky island off the coast of north America called Manhattan.

The transation was considered to be fair largely because Run had scores of nutmeg trees, and Manhattan had none.

(Images: (1)(5) Taschen (3) Flickr (4) Jane (5) Point Click Home)

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Inspiration - how many stone walls does one garden need?

In our case, quite a few. Below is a light base which is dotted around the grounds of a wonderful place we have stayed (three times) in northern Bali (it's called Puri Ganesha).



I love open faced stone walls. I also love secret gardens, and this is what stone walls make me think of, even if they don't surround a locked up garden. This may be something to do with the fact that in Australia, mostly things are new, and we are not surrounded by stone as some are in Europe and the UK in particular.

We have three stone walls in our garden, two for sitting on and one which is over the pond and water runs down it (when we are allowed to use water, that is, which is mainly never, although the water regulations don't really talk about water walls, ponds and creeks, probably because noone is crazy enough to have them, so technically we can probably run it all the time).









Different stones were used for each wall.

The last one is a kind of reddish ochre, which is a little bit reminiscent of the amazing small tiled surface of the main part of Federation Square in Melbourne (below), where the stone came from the Kimberley in the Northern Territory.

Look at the amazing range of colours in this stone, ranging from grey to whitish to pink and all shades of red and umber. The space covered by these tiles is huge and it undulates, like a natural surface. One of the things which makes it so interesting is that the tiles are small, that is, about 20 cm square, rather than the more common large paver size.

I love Federation Square so much. I am not alone in this of course. For all the criticism at the time about the cost and how long it took to build, only an utterly obssessed and perfectionist architect and an excellent collaborative builder could have got this level of detail so right. Below are some images from the Fed Square website.

We went there recently for the Barbie exhibition (sorry Mattel, my skills don't permit the insertion of a little 'r' in a circle after her name) and even my daughter was impressed by the stone expanse.

I digress, but for the record, my favourite Barbie is the Superstar Barbie. The exhibition itself was fantastic although I suspect I enjoyed it more than my daughter. But something wierd - all the Ken dolls were in a separate room. What is that about?

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