Pickled Gizzards

It’s Christmas Eve but only in the last couple of days have I started to feel ‘Christmassy’. To be fair, for the last two weeks we have endured construction noise and dust quite a bit later than we expected when we signed a contract a few months ago to install an elevator in the house. We thought it would be all finished and fully functioning by year’s end, but not so – and work resumes in the second week of January. It’s not so much ‘in’ the house as ‘added onto it’, beginning in the garage and going through the upper patio to the first floor with entry into my sewing room. With all that construction noise including prolonged jackhammering, angle grinding and drilling, plus workmen up and down stairs, and dust everywhere, inside and out, we just didn’t get round to putting up the usual tinsel and shiny glass balls out on the patio; and today it’s slightly raining, anyway. Tomorrow’s forecast looks similar, so we may not be spending the day out on the patio under the grape and kiwi fruit vines with our Aussie house guests (Graciela, Heaton and Leti) Anyway, here’s what outside looked like this time last year –

Tomorrow’s dinner menu is all cold dishes – chicken and matambrito de cerdo which is spanish for rolled pork belly (US) or pork flap (Australia) Stuffed with finely sliced apple, onion, and prunes, rolled and oven baked the day before, it also freezes fabulously well. Tomorrow we’ll serve some with salad greens, baby tomatoes and potato salad. Mike’s made a jellied dried fruits christmas pudding with spices and a touch of rum in the jelly (divine) to be topped with whipped cream. There’s plenty of cheese and crackers, fresh fruit and icecream around for anyone who’s still hungry.

Rolled And Stuffed Pork Flap, Pork Belly, or Matambrito de Cerdo

I’ve been making this recipe for decades, and as I don’t have it written down anywhere, I’m pretty sure that it came from watching it made by a Danish neighbour, Ingrid, who lived next door on the Great Boulder Mine in the Nickel Boom days, pre-1975. Her Danish cooking was was probably quite traditional, but I’ve never had the opportunity to go to Scandinavia. Graciela watched as I put the first of four together, and then she assembled a couple which included this piece that looked remarkably like the shape of Australia when taken from its package and spread out…

• Sprinkle with a little freshly ground pepper, finely sliced white onions, finely sliced apples (preferably Granny Smiths) and seedless prunes (people can add salt if they want at the table)
• Note that the size of the flap will determine how much apple, onion and prunes you’ll need. But for two large flaps (~30cm) and two small ones (~20cm) yesterday, we used about 3 cups seedless prunes, one medium white onion and 3 peeled and sliced Granny Smiths We each ate a piece of apple and a prune or two to finish those bits off.
• Roll the flap+fillings and secure with two or three large metal skewers to make it possible to tie string tightly around the meat roll, every ~3cm. Remove skewers and use on the next one.
• The ends tend to be untidy and loose,- so poke the escaping prune, apple and onion bits back inside, and fold down the edges of the flap, securing with tooth picks wherever you need to. These stay in during cooking and are removed before serving.
• Place rolls on a rack in an open baking dish in a medium oven until the coating is golden-medium brown (a lot of the fat drains out during cooking) Although it can be eaten hot with veggies or cold with salads, it is easier to slice when cold.
• Slice at least 1cm thick and serve with salad or veggies – or as an item on a charcuterie board.
• You could vary the filling – apple, fresh garlic and rosemary would be nice.
• Now that I’m writing about this, I’m thinking I want to try a beef flap, which is available here – I guess I’d look for matambrito de carned, or something. I’ve never eaten any beef prepared this way, and Mike says we’d be looking at something like 1-2m sq+ of ‘flap’ – but of course that could be cut in half or quarters, and different fillings tried. I’ve put in a purchase order, and I’ll let you know how it goes!

Today we take for granted being able to buy a large selection of different icecreams in cups, on sticks or in cones of individual serves and containers up to probably3-4 litres, and every size in between; and we can go to icecream shops and select a container size and which ever fresh icecream flavour(s) we’d like put into it. The other day we bought a litre of fresh icecream, half tiramisu and half choc mint which reminded me of how different it is today to have some icecream at home compared with when I was a child. And nearly everyone’s mothers, aunties and grandmothers made icecream at home. I really disliked Mum’s recipe, finding it too rich and creamy for my taste, but the Bertram girls all loved it! I preferred the more watery, gelato type recipe that Aunty Mary made, and still do.

Back then, in the 50s, at the corner shop you could buy either (1) an icecream called a dixie cup – a waxed, lidded cup with a little wooden spoon-shaped spatula that fitted within rims of that cup, and there was a tab to pull off the lid; or (2) a scoop or two of icecream in a single or double cone; or (3) a Cream-Between (I’m not sure of Peters’ spelling) along the lines of any of the sandwich type icecreams pictured here You bought the icecream wapped in foil, and two wafer biscuits the same size to put the icecream in when you unwrapped it from its foil wrapper. These were a bit special – we only ever got one of these perhaps 3-4 times a year. These were all before the days of icecreams of any kind on a stick, when icy poles and choc wedges began to appear around 1960.

The refrigerator in our kitchen was pretty typical – it had a small section inside just big enough to slide in the two icecream trays that came with the ‘frig (which had a little door on the front of it to protect the contents when the frig opened) Instead of making icecream you could fill these trays with water and with a removable divider rack with a handle to lift to turn out the iceblocks to cool drinks… and it was either iceblocks or Mum’s home made icecream, and ourfamily with three children, I don’t recall us having iceblocks in our drinks very often! From the corner shop you could buy a slab of iccream we called ‘a brick’ in a waxed cardboard container about half the horizontal size of a house brick, which would be wrapped in several sheets of newspaper and taken home as quickly as possible, and put in the ‘frig beside or just under the freezer to keep it from melting too fast before it was served.

I do remember at least one special childhood birthday or Christmas party (same time of year) with quite a few children seated around the dining table in the Trevallyn house, and possibly another early one in the Bifrons Court house – for which an icecream cake was bought over at the Peters icecream factory on Talbot Road. I don’t remember the logistics of keeping it cold etc, it might have been in a lent or rented container of dry ice – I don’t recall. I only remember the exquisite beauty of flowers and leaves in cream, pink and touches of green that decorated that icecream cake, something like this pic though I don’t remember them ever coming in a tin like this one.

That was a novelty until ‘frigs began to have larger freezer sections at the top of the interior cabinet; but today refrigerators usually have a separate freezer section of roughly around 1/4-1/3 the total storage capacity. This enables most people to have some iceblock trays along with a container or two of icecream or a bunch of individually wrapped icecreams.

Like most people I know, in ours we keep an iceblock tray or two, several packs of frozen vegetables, several cuts of meat and fish, perhaps a container of two of prepared homecooked meals, and sometimes a loaf of bread or a pack of sliced sandwich bread. But freezing draws moisture out of bread, so I only occasionally have some in there with a plan to use it within a few days – I find it wonderful for toasted sandwiches.

Favourite fillings for toasted sandwiches include

• 2C grated cheese+1/4C tomato sauce+ 2T of a slosh of Worcester sauce+an egg+ decent knob of butter. Combine all in a saucepan, and heat stirring constantly all ingredients have combined. Cool before using.
• finely sliced tasty cheese+butter+scrape of Vegemite (or scrape of Marmite – it’s a poor substitute imo)
• finely sliced tasty cheese+butter+sliced ham+sliced tomato
• finely sliced cheese+butter+sliced ham+hot mustard

Spread a little butter on each sandwich and brown on a buttered hot plate or the electric frypan, then cut into quarters or squares and eat!

Every few weeks my two sisters and I group call on WhatsApp or Skype and together explore our family and childhood memories of something that’s on someone’s mind. Ro’s the history buff, so she quite often sends us newspaper or tv items related to where we all grew up in Launceston, Tasmania. However, I haven’t lived there since I went off to Uni in Hobart at the age of 18, after which I married and went to live in Kalgoorlie-Boulder during the 1960s Nickel Exploration Boom – about which I’ve written elsewhere in this blog.

In her art statement, artist Naomi Middlemann wrote “I am interested in how we assemble and disassemble our memories depending on who we are talking to and the context in which we remember things. Remembering is not a process that gets us from point a to point z, but rather a process in which we imagine, we tell stories, we construct and deconstruct in order to make sense of who we are.”

Since I am the eldest sister, and left the state while the other two were still in Tasmania, at school, Uni or working, there are family memories they both have that I don’t. But as Ro was last to leave the state, she had some insights on some things that neither Sal nor I knew at the time. These memory sharing sessions are fun, fast paced and wide ranging.

Last night, we spent a little time wondering if our most colourful neighbour was really terrified of electricity?… she was on the phone for hours every day, so perhaps that was just an attention seeking thing.

At last I learned what caused one of my most vivid memories of our terrified sister Ro, aged barely 3, racing across the field towards our holiday bungalow, angrily pursued by a bunch of noisy turkeys flapping their wings, with wattles flopping back and forth! I’ve heard her say before that she doesn’t like turkeys much- but what I didn’t know until last night was that she had only wanted to pat one of their little fluffy babies…

And I’d never heard that she’d been kicked by an elephant on one of the occasions the Bullens’ Circus visited town. As that circus was owned by and run by one of Mum’s cousins, we had privileged ring side seats and visited the animals behind the scenes – that kick obviously wasn’t too bad, but clearly I wasn’t there that time. And, I’d totally forgotten our neighbours Kath and Jack had a black and while cocker spaniel named Johnny, and I’m sure I never heard he bit Sal on the arm…

I had known, but Sal didn’t that our mother had had to sack her cleaning lady of many years on the day she found some of the family silver wrapped in paper and tucked into that lady’s carry bag…. Ro had apparently always suspected the woman of taking her Mickey Mouse watch from a cupboard where she’d put it, although she never said anything, and of course nothing could have been proved. (That cupboard was a bit of a dumping ground 🙂 ) Around the same time I lost a very special little silver bracelet with blue enameled angels on it. I took off the fancy dress costume after a saturday afternoon party, folded it neatly on the table near my bedroom window, ready to return it whoever lent it. I put my beloved bracelet on top of that, meaning to put it away in a drawer. When the cleaning lady came the following monday it was warm and sunny and the windows were open – I thought I’d dropped it, and then just assumed that a magpie had been attacted to the shiny glittery thing near the window, hopped in and took it away…. I hope my bird theory’s the correct one, but we’ll never know.

Thank goodness for Wimbledon and The Olympics! These events really helped keep me entertained following a sudden medical crisis which struck in early June. In a televised match this crisis would be described as a medical time-out. I was already waiting for prosthesis surgery date when an unexpected development landed me in hospital. The hip surgery was immediately brought forward, but a complication was found requiring longer surgery followed by 4-weeks complete bedrest before I could put my weight on both feet on the floor just two weeks ago. Thanks to the wonderful physios’ help, I can now walk with the aid of a stick, get up and down the stairs and shower, so life has almost returned to normal, and I continue to work on fine tuning it all. I’m grateful to everyone around me, not least of whom is my dearly beloved Mike, carer Lian, close friends who visited, phoned or turned up to be present when needed, and the visiting professionals from the hospital staff who made it possible for me to be cared for at home – always a much safer place for anyone during the prime coughs and colds season! Of course the distant offsprings and siblings were very supportive as ever with phone calls etc.

As I see the surgeon tomorrow for what I’d expect is the final consultation, I’m now declaring this time-out officially over! … and I’m looking forward to returning to some of the ideas I was working on before I was so rudely interrupted!

When I posted of my experience on facebook in early June, some people’s reactions were interesting – for example, several textile artist friends saw the enforced 4 weeks’ bedrest as an ideal opportunity to start on a new art quilt 🙂 I really had to laugh, because while you’re in hospital there are only short periods of totally free time. Every day is punctuated frequently by people who need your attention requiring a response or access to some part of your body. Your surgeon visits daily, ditto the duty internist and physiotherapist. You’re asked for menu choices; medications arrrive at regular intervals (pills to be swallowed under supervision or IV liquids to be connected/disconnected) Someone needs to take blood or give a total bed bath and linen change, and there are questions about your bodily functions, how you feel and whether you’re eating or sleeping ok. (in hopsital? you’re joking!). Blood pressure, temperature and oxygen levels are recorded several times a day. Do you want ice? Would you like the newspaper? You don’t have an accompaniante today? Breakfast, lunch, merienda/afternoon tea and dinner all arrive at their appointed times, and sometimes inconveniently. Some of these happen several times per day, mostly individually and rarely concurrently. The very idea that I could focus on creating a new work in that environment was mindblowing – a hospital is not a spa resort! People who saw my situation that way, though, are probably the same people who with determination doggedly stitch on some project while crammed into a poorly lit economy class plane seat 🙂

A recent visit by one of my sisters gave us days of opportunity to talk our shared childhoods and very different adult lives, each of us having over seven decades behind us. Several times we found one of us had totally forgotten, or didn’t get the memo about, some family fact or shared event! It was unfortunate that our other sister was not here too, but our family including our various offsprings are geographically very scattered, and there are times when one or other of us is simply unable to travel, which will increasingly be the case as we continue to age, so thank goodness for zoom and whatsapp and all the other digital ways we are able to be in touch face to face these days.

I have a thing about plastic flowers. Mum had some plastic long stemmed roses she stuck in with other real flowers or leaves in the big vases during the winter when flowers were scarce in the garden. They were ‘ok’ when viewed from a distance, but I’m sure that Mum’s regular visitors and social crowd recognised them year after year – and probably many of them did the same thing! Sometimes they were ‘dusted’ by being run under the laundry tap, but she only got around to that when they were pretty dusty.

I still have a vivid memory of a small bright blue vase on top of the TV in the sunroom, holding a bunch of tiny plastic flowers, which I’m pretty sure were the little white forget-me-knots, complete with tiny dots of orange in the centre, thin brown stems and smallish green leaves. For years, whenever I turned up to visit they were there on a fringed creamy yellow mat, but neither of my sisters remembers them; and neither remembers our ceremonial dumping of those plastic flowers into the kitchen bin after Mum died. That dumping began the process of selecting the things we each took from the family home before everything else went to auction. As Mum and Dad had lived in that house for over 30 years, there was a lot of stuff!

Sal’s visit probably prompted our daughter, Anna, to actually complete a task she started years back. On one visit to Perth WA while we were living there (1994-8) she’d had several hundred photos in the family albums copied, and recently selected and distrubuted the best of them to everyone in our family, and here’s one –

She currently lives in NJ, but then would hve been visiting Perth from either Fort Collins or Greeley, Colorado. And we’ve all shifted around since then, too. Son chef Ivan now lives in MO (formerly MD) and we now live here in Uruguay. Sister Sal moved from NM to NZ a couple of years ago with her Kiwi husband, and their American born son now lives in Melbourne Australia. Our other sister Rose lives in the City of Gold Coast, Queensland, and down the years she and her family have had several major interstate relocations within Australia. All our children have lived in several places long distances from where they were born. Mike and one of his three brothers moved away from Tasmania when young and have never returned to live; and most of his nieces and nephews no longer live in the districts they were born, either.

This scenario is so different from our parents’ experiences, because with the exception of our mother Marie and Mike’s father Helmut, they all lived most of their lives right where they were born and grew up in northern Tasmania. Mum and Dad were in their mid 50’s before they did any overseas travel, but before that, by today’s standards they really hadn’t travelled much within Australia. Domestic travel was expensive, and the lure of ‘an overseas trip’ was irresistible (principally to UK and Europe) particularly as a post-retirement celebration event. By comparison, by our late 20s each of us three sisters had travelled internationally for both work and vacations; and Ivan and Anna were aged 10 and 5 when they got their first passports.

When I was young, way back in the 1960s, having your photo on a newspaper’s social pages was a big deal, and and probably still is, especially if you live in a major city. Today, of course, everyone with a smart phone is a photographer with a choice of social media platforms on which to post pics and footage.

The social pages of our local newspaper The Launceston Examiner (founded 1842) carried photos of people in the surrounding community as they celebrating weddings, significant birthdays and major anniversaries, as they probably still do. However, rather than being a cross section of the community, those photos tended to be of people with social, political and professional professional prominence, and anyone with pots of money, most of whom were the descendents of the earliest free settlers in the penal colony, founded in 1803. Other early settlers who eventually did well financially included some former convicts; and after the 1988 Bicentenary of European settlement, a convict or two in the family tree was no longer the barrier to upward social mobility as it had been in my youth.

Apart from early settlers and wool growers, larger orchardists and early industrialists, there was another group of people who, although no longer wealthy, had far reaching historical connections to the earliest colonial days, giving them some kind of socially agreed but unwritten cachet that saw them frequently included on ‘the best’ party lists, and their photos were taken every now and then as if to refresh that unspoken validation. In the social setting within that former colony, money and position spoke quite loudly, and probably still do, as they do here in Uruguay. I’ve often declared that growing up in Tasmania was good training for Uruguay. My father was an optometrist and Mum did lots of community good works, so they were well enough known in the city for her to be able to phone the social editor to ask for a photographer and reporter to turn up and take a pic of me and a couple of guests at the party. They would have turned up very early in the evening, taken the photo and jotted down our names before heading off to the next event they had to ‘cover’.

I don’t remember any particular feature about that evening, but it would have been really lovely even if much like other such 21st birthday parties we attended in those years. There would have been a band playing popular dance music in a mixture of ‘traditional’ ballrooom dances like the waltz and fox trot, mixed with the twist and other dances associated with whoever was on the hit prades, so we danced with great enthusiasm to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Procul Harem, and, well… you had to be there.

Besides Coke and other soft drinks, a big punch bowl (fruit juice, a good hit of white or red wine and floating fresh fruit with mint leaves) plus beer and wine would have been the main drinks. The city’s most prominent caterer was Mr. Keetley, who always did a fabulous job. Mum and her friends hired him for all such events, so I’m sure his team were there that night. If the evening began around 8pm, then supper was usually served around 11pm, followed by a bit more dancing until perhaps midnight or 12.30. Supper would have included party pies and sausage rolls, probably little red cocktail sausages on toothpicks, and probably asparagus rolls (canned stems rolled up in finely sliced bread) Desserts would almost have certainly included pavlova cakes, probably trifle, and maybe fruit salad.

When Anna sent me this photo a couple of weeks ago, because we haven’t lived in Launceston since our wedding in 1969, I just couldn’t remember that venue, Victoria League House (as per the above photo’s caption) However, sister Rosemary, the family’s historian, found this set of photos online in what is apparently a large data set about some of the most beautiful well preserved fairly grand houses (in the architectural style known as ‘Federation’) built in Australian cities and towns around the time of Federation, 1901. Launceston has a lot of them – as Tasmania was in the midst of a mining boom at the time. Take a minute to check out this one – Victoria League House It is just one of many houses that were built to last in that era. With high ceilinged, large rooms and large varandahs that could be enclosed, by our time many had been converted to event centres, professional offices, additions to schools and even hosptials, like St. Luke’s Hospital just in the next block down that street. Because of our beloved headmistress’s rivettingly boring teaching style, I had opted out of history at the earliest chance, thus augmenting my ignorance, so as a know-it-all teen, I saw these Federation and the Queen Anne style that followed, as just old fashioned and thought little more about them. I myself much preferred the modern, 60s-style flat or skillion roof numbers with floor to ceiling picture windows, angular wrought iron balustrades, hip height brick fences with similar height front gates that matched the railing on the front verandah. And even though I still prefer plain and uncluttered, today I really love those Federation buildings for their elegant style, quality of construction, but most of all for their owners’ expression of confidence in the young country’s future.

Daughter Anna recently posted a photo of a group of four of us at my 21st birthday party, back in 1967. Standing with Mike and myself are my close friend Heather and Mike’s mate Tony Munro, who would be best man at our wedding a year or so later.

Here I was wearing my very favourite rich emerald green satin, floor length dress, which the family dressmaker, Mrs. Lucas, fashioned into an elegant halter neck number. Straps crossed on the back, and a flat bow was at the front where the straps joined the dress front. The fabric had a band of heavy machined embroidery along one side featuring paisley motifs with little lacy cutouts, which was about 40cm wide, and there was enough of it left to make the 3/4 sleeve jacket which I’m wearing in that pic. I don’t know or remember what, if anything, happened to that outfit. I don’t remember seeing it since packing up to leave the Great Boulder Mine in 1977, but surely not … but anyway, it could be under a pile of blankets packed into a brown painted wooden crate still in storage (just one of the untidinesses of our lives.) The fabric was bought for me on a shopping day with Mum in some of her favourite Sydney shops, all of them quite upscale institutions which stocked high quality brands, many, perhaps even most of them imported from England or ‘the Continent’. (I mean, from her experience, where else would one buy real quality in 1960’s Australia?)

Our hectic university student social lives in those days required several long dresses, most of which we ran up ourselves, as styles were simple then, and our budgets were low. The young men required a dinner suit, and all this formal gear was worn probably at least two dozen times in most years, possibly more for those living halls of residence on campus. This green dress was such a favourite that I saw no need for a new one for this party, much to Mum’s disappointment.

She was 16 when WWII broke out and clothing coupons took effect in Australia. Her own post-school social life, courtship and wedding (1943) were all carried during that austere period of rationed clothing, which lasted until 1948. That helps explain why she often bought what was pretty expensive clothing which I now realise was in part a reaction to what she and all other Australians went through in her youth, a kind of revisiting her dreams through her daughter’s young life.

However, she always went for quality materials and manufacture in basic classic designs. Because such designs never dated, with proper care they lasted for many years. I’ve adopted that approach, too, along with another clothing ‘rule’ which was to always change out of her ‘going out’ shoes and clothes when she returned home. (I’ve always had certain clothes I never wear outside the front gate) Of course, her parents’ generation (my grandparents) survived the privations of the Great Depression, so it was little wonder that to my eyes she often went a bit overboard spending on quite expensive clothes, and my wedding was another occasion full of examples of Mum really ripping apart the purse strings. I was once in a Launceston women’s upscale clothing boutique, trying to decide whether to buy a very expensive Diane von Furstenberg 3 piece outfit – silk skirt, wool jumper and silk scarf, in jungle print and black, browns, golds and cream. It was gorgeous, looked terrific on me, but the price, AU$400, was a huge amount of money in 1984. I’d never spent that much on anything other than furniture. (my top of the range Bernina sewing machine had cost about $300 some 10? years before) Most of that money was a gift from Mum, to which I added a bit, but she seemed shocked when I told her her the outfit’s price. I think she’d expected I’d buy a new couch or something for our home, not something personal like an outfit!

What tipped me over the brink of my hesitation ? The sales woman said “Well, it’s really investment dressing, isn’t it?” … which I immediately recognised as another one of Mum’s underlying rules, and without further ado bought it. The silk skirt wore out many years ago; after some years I found the jumper didn’t fit me as well as it used to so I ‘lent it’ to my friend Kitty who’d always loved it; and I still wear the ~150cm x 60cm silk scarf many times a year, winter and summer. It’s a great wardrobe accessory which I never travel without. A quality investment indeed!

When we Padman girls were young, one of Mum’s aunts, Anne Weedon from Goulburn NSW, stayed with us several times in the 50s and early 60s. Mum’s mother, Libby Weedon, was one of the large family of Weedon girls, at least 11 possibly 12 , who mostly married and raised families out on the Western Plains around Yass, Goulburn and Orange. One, our ‘Grandma in Sydney’ married Ted Croan, and another whose name I don’t remember married and went to Victoria, Narre Warren I think. But really, the only one I recall actually meeting was Aunty Anne, who visited us several times at Bifrons Court in the 50s, when I was young. She did a lot of work for the Australian Red Cross I recall, and I have the impression she’d been involved for years. I remember seeing pictures of her in a Red Cross uniform, so I imagine that was for an active role during WWII, ambulance driving rings some kind of bell. She was a lovely lady, pretty elegant, not married, and I think possibly her life included a relationship with a young man who didn’t return from WWI which was a common, sad, story for many in her generation, born in the 1890s. She had beautiful skin, and I remember watching with some interest how at the end of the day she always cleaned off her makup with coldcream. (I tried that once – yuk) Our mother who also had beautiful skin washed her makeup off with soap and water, and I followed suit, with soap and water followed by a good moisuriser on account of living in the harsh dry Aussie Outback for over 20 years, always with the goal of not developing ‘crepey neck’… anyway, as a result my own skin’s not too bad considering the parched environments I’ve lived in.

Aunty Anne cooked lovely meals while she stayed, and the one thing that all three Padman girls all strongly associate with her is her cooked mayonnaise recipe, and which Mum made for ever more. Of it, Sal once said, “It was the only mayonaise we ever had as kids, and Mum used to make it by the gallon.” – a slight exaggeration perhaps, but there were often at least two big Fowler’s jars of it in the ‘fridge. It’s quick and easy enough to make, and we liked it better than anyone else’s mother’s mayonnaise or salad dressing-

Auntie Anne’s Mayonnnaise

• 2 cups milk
• 2 egg yolks (freeze the whites; use in a pavlova sometime)
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• level tablespoon flour
• teaspoon of mustard
• 1 cup vinegar
• piece of butter the size of an egg

Combine the yolks, sugar (next time I’m going to make it a scant 1/2cup), salt, mustard, flour and milk ( a minute or two in the liquidiser) Boil the vinegar and butter together, then add the other mixture to it, stirring constantly over the heat until it thickens. Remove from the heat and leave to cool before pouring/spooning all the mayonnaise into a lidded jar – it keeps for weeks in the ‘fridge. And Mum wrote somewhere in one of my cook books that adding finely chopped gherkins makes a nice tartare sauce – that’s true, though I’d add a little grated onion perhaps. Potato salad using the mayo with lots of finely chopped mint is great….

I don’t know why I ever stopped making it, as this lot I made yestereday took all of 5 minutes up to just setting it aside to cool…. There are a couple of commercial mayonnaises I like, but lately I’ve been finding that while they’re great for spreading to make sandwiches, they don’t seem to have much taste – and no, I don’t have covid!

Any mayonnaise, if diluted with some vinegar from the alcaparras/capers jar, white vinegar or lemon juice, plus a bit of sunflower oil, makes a nice more liquid dressing for the kind of all-into-the-one-bowl-chopped-tossed-salad I like to have for lunch several times a week. Perhaps you make a similar one?

There are no fixed ingredients or quantities for this – and it’s easily scaled up for two or more eaters: To a quantity of chopped lettuce in a bowl for each eater, I add diced tomato or a few halved cherry tomatoes, some finely chopped onion or spring onion, some cucumber chunks, croutons if I have them, perhaps a handful of unsalted toasted almonds, some diced fresh fruit, chopped celery, a few sultanas or raisins, some capers or a few bits of chopped jalapeno if there’s an open container already in the fridge … you get the idea, and don’t foget to add those little bits of left over cooked vegetables. For protein I add some diced left over cold meat or salami – even one cold sausage finely diced goes a long way. At this stage I add enough dressing to lightly coat most of the chunks in the salad, and toss well. Then, if I’m adding 1-2 chopped hard boiled eggs/person, or some diced avocado, I add these last and just stir in slightly.

It always reminds me of someone’s ‘garbage soup’ recipe – in which all the leftovers are tossed into a big pot of good home made soup base started from scratch – I’m sure we who don’t eat soup out of a can know this kind of hearty ‘soup recipe’ well!

Dear reader – I’m sooo sorry I’ve neglected you! I can’t believe how long it is since i wrote here…

First – this is not a recipe, sorry – but this is a food related tip that I myself devised a few hours ago while preparing veggies for stirfry, or as they call it here, ‘vegetales wok’

My children are probably ignorant of the term ‘threescore and ten’, but it was commonly used as a Biblical allusion referring to the length of a human life (“The days of our years are threescore years and ten;” Psalms 90:10, KJV). “Score” means twenty, so threescore (3×20) and ten would be seventy years. So, having lived well past that, my age group can look back over enough time to see some major historical events in the world, not all of which struck us as being very significant at the time. However, others we immediately identify as groundbreaking or catastrophic without measure. And no matter how grim things are just now, nothing stays the same for ever. I know, I know – I’m an optimist, the glass is half-full kind of person.

I read a lot, and much of of it is to keep up with news and current events on three continents – the one I come from, the one I’m living on, and the one all our offsprings are living on. TV’s great for that, but I do better reading analysis by the ‘experts’ lined up by the mainstream media I trust, or by listening to some of the excellent podcasts available.

The early October Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent escalation has taken a lot of attention away from the disastrous war in Ukraine, and I feel the world now is in it’s most dangerous condition since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (the 9/11 Twin Tower attack not withstanding) I was a teenager then, and nightly the tv news talk of the threat of a nuclear war was quite frightening, and some some days several girls came to school crying. Our parents were very worried, their generation having lived the experience of Australia fighting against the advancing Japanese in WWII.

At Broadland House, my Anglican girls school, our history teacher was Miss Rooney, the excellent school principal with an excellent academic record in history, the subject she loved.  However, like many brilliant people she asssumed we all had a natural inborn interest in her subject, and her very old fashioned teaching style, while possibly ok for university classes, was pretty boring to uncommitted teenage girls with all the distractions our lives were coping with at the age of 15-16. In history class she mostly read from our text book, but some days for a change in pace we had to copy notes from the blackboard. As a result, history did not come alive for me at that time, and  as soon as I could I opted out of her classes to take economics instead. At university I took political science for a year, and too late realised that those friends who survived Miss Rooney’s history course were justifiably absorbed in history at tertiary level. I’ve frequently regretted not having a stronger history background, but one way and another I’ve been filling in gaps ever since.  Despite the awful state of the world today, as measured against the length of history, it is all fascinating, and I frequently find myself thinking or saying out loud that nothing stays the same for ever.

In the couple of years that saw the onset and height of the Covid pandemic, I spent more time stitching, so listened more to recorded books and podcasts, and read very few actual books – perhaps 4 or 5 over that whole time! But because I belong to a private, subscription library/book club, I recently resolved to get back to reading more actual books for pleasure, because we have some great titles in our collection.

For an annual fee of US$150, the group orders and brings down here to Uruguay recently published books (in English) from both UK and USA. The club was formed about 40 years ago, with half the membership being Uruguay nationals, and the other part comprised of english speaking expats usually here for a few years as accompanying spouses of diplomats and executives of banks and major companies with branches here in Montevideo. Back then, books in english were difficult to find and very expensive. Accompanying wives needed social contact while their husbands worked, and not all were avid golfers, tennis players or keen to be involved in charity projects.

This demographic has changed however, as not only do some diplomatic wives have work within their country’s mission, but trailing spouses and partners often work or study remotely while they’re here; and computers, ipads and kindles have eliminated the book problem. Another change in the ~20 years since I’ve been a member, and is that on the Uruguayan side of the membership, the middle aged women with kids at school or studying who would have joined are now working themselves. Also during that time, sadly, several of the older members have passed away, so the group is very gradually dwindling – the old order changeth etc. However it continues to be a wonderful social group, and to make the most of my subscription, I’ve determined I should read 2-3 books per month from it, aiming for about 50 pages a night, perhaps a bit more on a miserable wet day! Now that I’ve resumed reading a bit of my book each night, that book on my bedside table beckons each evening, and I’ve found it really is a better way to wind down at the end of the day than doing a final check of whatever’s on my phone. In the past week I’ve really enjoyed Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadmnan, and tonight will start The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers.

For many years I’ve listened to recorded books while making my textile art, a habit that increased if anything during the pandemic, as I had much more time to put into stitching. I’ve just begun re-listenening to Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience… a book compiled by Shaun Usher, and which I enjoyed so much that I proposed it for discussion at the next online meeting of a book discussion group I belong to; and there’s a second volume I’ll listen to before the next discussion!