Recent Releases

T h E GREEN GARDENING h ANDB oo K

Nancy Birtwhistle

Former Great British Bake Off winner Nancy Birtwhistle’s third book is a guide to gardening and growing at home, with a sustainable, ecofriendly outlook and plenty of passion, knowledge and warmth. No matter the size of your patch, this book will help you make the most of your space for growing. Divided into the four seasons, it is packed with advice on everything from planting, composting, and basic equipment to seasonal recipes and guides to preserving that will help save money and reduce waste.

h EALT hy GIRL KIT ch EN

Danielle Brown h/b, 256pp, Alpha, Penguin Books. Ph: 1800-338-836. Website: penguin. com.au. RRP: $49.99. h/b, 336pp, one Boat, Pan Macmillan. Ph: 02-9285-9100. www. panmacmillan.com.au. RRP: $36.99.

You won’t be able to resist plant-based eating with this mouth-watering cookbook by a popular vegan influencer. The dishes are colourful, easy to make, nourishing and satisfying. Recipes are also free of refined sugar and come with gluten-free options. Try spicy cosy ramen, hearty lentil bolognaise, holiday shepherds pie, sesame tofu and broccoli or glowing skin salad. On the sweet side, how about mango-mama chia pudding, apple cinnamon baked oatmeal, or the famous chickpea brownies.

DIRT y LAUNDR y

Richard Pink & Roxanne Emery

Adults with ADHD can find it hard to manage aspects of everylife like finances, cleaning and time management, and become overwhelmed with shame. This book embraces ADHD diversity with love, humour and self-acceptance, and shares simple tips to managing life that actually work with ADHD brains. It shares 10 characteristics of ADHD, such as losing things, task avoidance, time-blindness, impulsivity and hyperfocus and provides common sense suggestions and strategies. Helpful for people in an ADHD person’s life as well as those with ADHD themselves, this is a positive and uplifting book.

P/b, 160pp, Square Peg, Penguin Books. Ph: 1800-338-836. Website: penguin.com.au. RRP: $36.99.

BU zz

A Book of happiness for Bee Lovers

Adam Langstroth h/b, 160pp, Exisle Publishing.

This is an attractive hardcover gift book with lavish photos of bees in action accompanied by quotes on bees throughout history, from Aristotle to Alfred Lord Tennyson and even Ray Bradbury. The photos are truly stunning.

Website: www.exislepublishing. com. Ph: 02-4998-3327. RRP: $32.99.

We are in the depths of winter down here in Victoria, although I’m not sure we actually got an autumn this year, or much of a summer either. No doubt next year will be peak heat and I will be looking back nostalgically to these days of mist, rain and hail. And I can’t complain when the rain washes all the chook poo off the deck.

The winter garden is happy with the weather. I have reduced my headed brassicas down to one bed of broc as after years of poor harvests I have faced the fact that I am rubbish at growing them. Instead, I have gone hard on kale, silverbeet and spinach, three crops that don’t need attentive midwinter watering and so are good doers here. Hopefully I will be close to self-sufficient for winter leaves and we should be able to make the full gamut of green smoothies, which will please one teenager. The chooks will love keeping the vegie beds neat, any greens that poke through the protective wire fence are fair game. I’m not sure how enthusiastic the blokes of the house will be with the festival of hoary greens, but you never know.

We had an exciting dietary adventure recently. David often drops us some frozen meat after he has had the travelling butcher to the farm to attend to excess cattle. We don’t eat much meat and some of us are vegetarian so the freezer started to clog up. I was inspired by a trip to my friend Julia’s house where she made a beef brisket that Marcel enjoyed. Many American style recipes are full of hidden sugar, but Julia is sugar-free and invented her own sauce, which she shared. I decided it would be a perfect base to slow cook David’s beef parts in.

Marcel loves a freezer declutter, got excited and defrosted three mysterious packages for me in prep for this. Needless to say I expected them all to be from the same beast so I could slow cook them together, providing family and friends with a few meals over the weekend.

As I defrosted them, it became apparent that this was not the case.

The first package of meat looked like the leg of beef I was anticipating, and was slated for browning and then being slowly cooked in wine, tomato and herbs.

The second package of meat looked very different and had some kind of skin on one side. It turned out to be a pork belly. Only Marcel eats pork, and David didn’t keep pigs last time I looked, so this was a left fielder. Maybe a budget buy from David’s butcher? I sent him a text inquiry and put on the oven to roast the pork. The slow cooker was going nicely, we were cooking all the meats here.

I turned to the final package. Teo had recently done biology, including dissection. I called him in for an expert opinion. ‘Does this look like a heart and lungs to you?’

‘Yep definitely,’ he said, going green.

Offal was not on my bingo list for the year. I had already pushed myself out of my cooking comfort zone handling the pork belly, and I didn’t think Marcel was going to eat lights as well as all the other meats I was cooking for him. It was a hard pass from Teo. Further texts to David ensued, was he trolling me with this grisly parcel?

‘I thought you might put it in the bolognaise,’ he said.

No. No I will not.

Since Julia had been very helpful with the cooking advice, Sparky her dog got a lovely treat that night, while Marcel enjoyed a weekend of organic farm-grown pastured meats.

I made vegie patties for the girls in the family and tried a new recipe; I processed the raw vegies to small chunks in a blender, part cooked these in the oven spread out on a tray along with the beans, which dried them, then mixed everything together with egg and cheese to create patties that weren’t overly wet, but contained buckets of veg. I had been feeling I’d failed my self-sufficiency heritage by not finding a way to prepare the lungs, so watching my elder child fang into vast quantities of vegies was balm to the soul.

Pippi had a birthday recently, big 17. After the lockdown years she felt in party debt, and suggested we could take some friends out to din- ner. Sounded expensive. Dear me no, I mused, that’s not how we roll! We are DIY type people who have our parties at home and make everything ourselves! We are far too frugal to buy kids dinner out when we can cook something much nicer and healthier, using wholemeal ingredients!

What was I thinking?

Once Pippi had invited all her girlfriends, there seemed more than I’d thought, then she reckoned she had better invite some boys for them to talk to. Suddenly we had a fullblown teen party on our hands. I started to fret. What if 200 unknowns turned up? Or the kids got drunk and vomited into the brassicas? Tripped over the garden stakes? Or put the chooks off the lay?

I hid the contents of the wine cupboard in my wardrobe beforehand, cleared out most of the furniture for a dance floor, and reminded myself I knew their mums if the night ended badly.

Well, it turned out to be the easiest party I have ever held. Pippi was a great host and kept all the platters replenished. The teens chatted and danced and entertained themselves. They respected our stipulation of no alcohol and there was no drunken behaviour. They loved the homemade pizza and reminisced over the honey joys, and when it was time to go home, a couple of the girls picked up all the rubbish and swept the floor on the way out.

It was much simpler than looking after a party of fractious five year olds I can tell you. I’m not sure it was frugal though, they snacked on a lot of pizza! I might just keep my mouth shut about my DIY chops next time.

Pippi is enjoying her part time job in a gluten-free cafe, which has allowed her some all important pocket money for budgeting practice and occasional fun purchases. I have sometimes wondered if I have brought the kids up to be too frugal. I’ll never forget Pippi watching Grand Designs with me at primary school age. The family building their dream home ran out of the ready halfway though the process and were bemoaning their finances while at the park with the kids. ‘No wonder they don’t have any money left, they’ve wasted a fortune right there buying ice creams,’ little Pippi said, shaking her head. ‘They could pay a quarter of the price for a pack of icy poles from the supermarket. Or some bananas. They’re just throwing money away.’ She is still a remarkably sensible girl, so it’s nice for her to be able to occasionally buy herself an acai bowl with friends or a frivolous piece of clothing.

I myself had a rush of blood to the head, and wallet, recently. We moved all our succulents off the deck for their own safety for Pippi’s party, and moving them back gave me a good opportunity to check them all over, do some re-potting and generally take stock. Consequently, heading off to the Melbourne Flower and Garden Show for my annual outing with my friends, I didn’t even pack a bag. I had enough plants.

I was so good all day, even when Emma bought a three pronged rake thing that looked like a lot of fun and nearly caused multiple head traumas as we walked it through the crowds. I even controlled myself at those stalls of cheap cuttings. I was bemused by the floral displays in the great hall, many of which had spray painted all the leaves with silver and gold or bright colours. Why don’t they just incorporate flowers into the display? Flowers literally come in bright colours. Anyway, it was on the way out, I was waiting for Emma, and we paused at the unique succulents. I caved! I came out with two adorable and most unusual little plants which I feel sure I could never find anywhere else. Of course, I had to juggle one in each hand all the way home on the tram looking like an oddbod and tipping gravel into Emma’s lap every time we lurched around the corner, but she was busy stopping her spiky rake from bobbing around and penetrating someone’s eye and didn’t notice, luckily. As always it was a great day out; we love bemoaning the sterile show gardens and yearning over the organic and abundant looking ones and generally being overly opinionated.

One sad piece of news was that our dear old ginger cat died. Juan was at least 18 and had a good innings, although he was looking a little skinny at the end, and became known as the zombie cat by my friends. He was a lovely pet to the kids, affectionate and with endless patience. I used to lay baby Teo on the floor and the cat would flop down next to him despite my warning it not to. The baby would invariably grab a handful of cat, but Juan just gently edged away, leaving Teo with a fistful of fur. He always came back for another cuddle; an optimist. We will miss him greatly, especially the children, who have had him all their lives. We were lucky to have him. T