One hundred

If my Nana was still alive, she would have turned 100 years old today.

I would loved to have been able to make her a sponge cake, lathered with sweetened whipped cream and piled high with strawberries, her favourite birthday cake. I would have loved for her to sit with my children and I and eat it for afternoon tea. We would have used her good teapot as she always did on her birthdays.

Tonight I am cooking a roast chicken, just the way Nana used to make it. It will be just us, but wouldn't it have been nice to have had all of our family for dinner: my cousins, my aunts and my uncles, around the table once again. Wouldn't it have been nice to be able to share this meal, as we did on so many Sunday's of my childhood.

But no matter where we are or what we are eating, Nana lives on in all of our hearts.

Someone else was also born on this day. A special girl will be turning 13 today. 

Happy birthday Jessica. xo

I'm grateful for...

Today I am grateful for my ability to cook and also so for my great love of cooking.

During the week, I was chatting to a friend who told me that she can't cook. Of course she can get by, she has a small family to feed. But while I spent my formidable, teenage years, learning the basics in home economic class, her teenage years were spent globetrotting around the world with other goals in mind. Homemaking, as it was taught in my country high school, was far from her mind. Until this conversation, I think I took this life skill for granted, doesn't everybody know how to cook?

Far from the school kitchens, my Mother and my Nana were, and still are, my greatest influences in how and why I cook.

Apparently, my Mum couldn't cook either, when she was first married, but with the help of the Women's Weekly Cookbooks, she soon learned. I grew up during the dinner party era. Dinner parties were hosted and exciting, new recipes were tried. As for me, I am a recipe addict and rarely cook anything twice. My Nana would call herself a good plain cook. And that's what she was. Perhaps she tried new dishes in her early cooking life, but when I knew her, as a grandmother, she had only a small and simple repertoire of recipes. We wouldn't have had it any other way. She taught me how food and cooking nurtures a family.

And in my husband's words, "food is love", Yes indeed, it is.

Go over to 'maxabella loves' for more gratitude posts.

Dreams for sale

Don't ask me why I was looking on this website at 6:20am this morning, I just was and this what I found.

This property for sale. This property is the farm where my mother grew up and where my some of happiest memories were formed. It is the farm that I have often referred too, and I know that I will do so again in the future.



I was not looking for this farm, so when the images came unexpectedly onto the screen, I cried and cried. Why? I'm not sure. For a lost time perhaps, for something that is gone forever. And for my Nana, who, at times, I miss desperately. The last time I saw these houses and this farm, was well over 20 years ago.

My Nana often passed this house as a girl, when she would go along with her parents, in a horse drawn buggy, to take their butter into town. She would look up at this house on the hill and tell her mother: "One day I'm going to live in that house". She made her dreams come true. She did it. Her and my grandfather, along with two of Nana's brothers bought the farm sometime during the 1950's. Eventually as the children came along my Nana and Grandad bought them out.

She then lived there for the next 40 years of her life.

The house in the top picture is the main farmhouse. Oh, the love between those walls. That house has such a hold over my heart, I can't even explain it. But Nana only lived there until I was about three years old. When my grandfather got sick, they moved up the hill to the cottage. That is the house in the second picture.

The cottage was actually where I spent all of my school holidays and where my our whole family came together every Sunday night for Nana's roast chicken dinner. It was here that I watched old movies and put on concerts with my cousins. Our cubbie houses were out the back of the cottage, ours (the three younger cousins) had a cubbie in the old dunnie and the boys (the two older cousins) had a cubbie in the old chicken coop. How Nana put up with all five of us at once, I'll never know. We laughed, we cried, we fought. We played a lot of cards and a lot of matchbox cars. There was often a green frog in the toilet and we had to reuse all of the wash water for Nana's rose garden. We are all very lucky to have experienced this kind of childhood.

Yes, those time are gone, and the house remains, but what I am looking for is no longer at that farm, it's in me.