Share the sweetness …

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If you ask me whether I prefer sweet or savoury food, I always reply with “Oh savoury, definitely”. I don’t eat biscuits and I rarely eat cake. But something strange comes over me when I go away on holiday.

This time it started in Adelaide at Lenzerheide Restaurant …

Baileys & honey crème brulee with Ferrero Rocher ice cream
Baileys & honey crème brulee with Ferrero Rocher ice cream
Chocolate plate - aero mint mousse, bounty chocolate tart, cherry ripe ice cream & snickers tart
Chocolate plate – aero mint mousse, bounty chocolate tart, cherry ripe ice cream & snickers tart

and it continued at Stamps Restaurant …

Ricotta dumplings with roasted quince, rosewater honey & Turkish yoghurt
Chocolate soufflé with expresso ice cream
Lemon Verbena and passionfruit panna cotta

then culminated at the Bridgewater Mill  in the Adelaide Hills …

Lime parfait with mandarin & meringue
Chocolate mess with coconut ice cream and sour cherries

After which, I moved on to Sydney and the landmark Asian restaurant Longrain …
(And I ask you, how do they expect one to take food photos under a dim yellow light ??)

Taro pudding with sweet coconut sauce & praline cashew nut ice cream
Sago pearls, black sticky rice, pineapple sorbet & pandan foam

I swear on a foodie bible that I shared every single dish, nevertheless I am now back in Bellingen eating soup and brown rice cakes.  I’m so lucky I don’t have a sweet tooth !

Oh Well ...

 

My first Heliconia …

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Anyone who lives in the tropics will think this event is quite ho-hum, but for me it’s quite exciting.  For the past three weeks I’ve been watching the development of my very first sub-tropical heliconia flower.

I had begun to give up hope of mine ever flowering, but finally here it is, helped no doubt by the unusually long warm autumn we are having.

Resident insect
Resident Helicona insect

Last night the temperature dropped to 6C, so I don’t like my chances of seeing the remaining heliconias open, but I’m very happy with my very first flower.

More Heliconias to come?
More Heliconias to come?

And there are some other sub-tropical plants blooming at the moment – the Cat’s Whiskers, Brazilian Cloak, Champagne Ginger and the ever crazy Costa Rican Butterfly vine.  Not bad considering Winter officially starts in only six days!

Crazy Costa Ricans
Champagne Ginger
Cat’s Whiskers
Costa Rican Butterfly vine flowers
Brazilian Cloak flower

Badly behaving bamboo …

Published on by FJB4 Comments

Even the best behaved bamboo can get a bit out of control if you turn your back on it.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a “before” photo, so when I say that this is a Slender Weaver’s Bamboo after I cut down 56 monstrous canes ( yes, I counted) you’ll get an idea of just how enthusiastically it was growing.

More than 3 stories high!
More than 3 stories high!

Most of them were pruned with my trusty Fiskars loppers (the Finns certainly know how to make strong, quality cutting tools) but some of the internal canes were so compacted that I had to attack them with an electric grinder! This left the base looking somewhat unattractive.

The ugly result of pruning
The ugly result of pruning

I’ve mentioned before that I have become rather fond of bromeliads, and here’s another reason why …

Looking better with bromeliads
Happy Buddha ?
View from balcony

All I had to do was chop some bromeliads out of an overgrown clump and rescue a rather dejected looking Buddha from under a tree, and voila, no more ugly stumps.

Nowhere to hang my hat …

Published on by FJB4 Comments

My new found obsession is just a little bit out of control …

The rack by the back door where I used to hang my sunhats and gardening accessories is now loaded with eucalyptus leaves (and the occasional hitch hiker) waiting for a dyeing experiment.

No space for my hats
No space for my hats

 

Stick insect - coming or going
Stick insect – coming or going?

I’ve yet to organise a gas bottle for my barbeque so that I can simmer my cauldrons outside, hence my dyeing experiments are still taking place in my kitchen. Which makes it look somewhat like an amateurish meth lab (not that I’d know what one looked like!).

My amateur meth lab!
My amateur meth lab!

I’m forever stopping and staring at trees, trying to work out if the leaves hold any dyeing potential.  I’m keen to try some Eucalyptus citriodora leaves from a tree in my garden, but it poses a bit of a problem, as the lowest leaves are ever so slightly out of reach.

Slightly out of reach
Slightly out of reach

I’ll just have to wait for a storm to send a branch crashing to the ground. In the meantime I’ve been having fun with Lemon Myrtle leaves, and various unidentified eucalypts.

Lilly Pilly t-shirt
Detail from Lilly Pilly t-shirt

One experiment produced a colour akin to radioactive urine (not that I’d know what that looks like either!).

Radioactive urine.jpg

I was tempted to call it a disaster and throw it out, but the results on bamboo fabric and an op shop men’s singlet were really rather wonderful shades of soft smoky lemon.

Eucalyptus t-shirt and bamboo fabric
Detail Eucalyptus t-shirt

Anyway,  I need my kitchen back and I’m way behind on garden jobs, so today I dismantle the meth lab for a couple of weeks.  Watch this space for more alchemy.