New babies

Most Saturday mornings I’m up around 7, so I can get to the farmers’ market before it’s overrun. This past weekend, I set the alarm for 6, much to DP’s disgruntled surprise.

“Why are you getting up so early?” he grumbled.

“We’re going to see the new baby today,” I responded, in my best “duh” tones.

“Huh?” he said, but then fell back asleep before I could explain that I was getting up to implement my three rules for visiting new babies and their parents:

1. Bring presents for the baby. I aim for two: a practical one that the parents will like, and a fun one that the baby will like. (We brought two Australian standards: this Bonds Wondersuit to help Mum and Dad build the autumn wardrobe, and this instant classic to entertain the baby.)
   
   
2. Don’t stay too long. This one requires some judgment of whether the parents’ need for adult interaction outweighs their and the baby’s exhaustion, or vice versa. This visit we stayed for 90 minutes, which was on the long side for me, but then I have been known to depart after 15 minutes – usually because the mother looked ready to drop and I didn’t know her well enough to say, “Give me that baby and go take a nap!”
   
   
3. Bring food. Ideally food that can be pulled from the fridge and devoured with one hand when ravenous but still baby-wrangling. I brought:

-       a batch of my favorite pasta salad, with a few handfuls of shredded parmigiano Reggiano thrown in to add protein and make it a more complete meal; and

-       this Upside-Down Polenta Plum Cake from Melissa Clark’s Cook This Now – I substituted a mixture of cranberry and peach jam for the plums.

All of the above were well received, and I even got some baby-snuggling time, so that's a win-win in my book on etiquette and enjoyment.

Long weekend

It's a long weekend in Australia! (Have I mentioned before that I find it endlessly entertaining that the Queen's birthday is a public holiday here, but not in the UK? Because I do. Also I have to make the most of it because this is our last Monday public holiday until, I think, October. Yikes!)

Here's the latest news from around here:

DP's birthday was this past week - can you work out how old he is from the candles? Appropriately given his profession and interests (and name), his birthday falls on a major event in military history, and this year his seminar students found out and celebrated by giving him a running real-time recap of happenings throughout that fateful day 73 years ago. I took the easy route by making his favorite dinner (steak au poivre and mashed potatoes) and baking his favorite cake.

Also this past week - family friends of ours are dealing with some medical stuff and, like us, are far from their family support networks. So, on the day when one parent was in the hospital overnight and the other parent was wrangling everything else (including three kids), I volunteered to bring over dinner. Pasta bake to the rescue!

I didn't really use a recipe for this - just made a batch of Disruptive Bolognese in the slow cooker ahead of time, then boiled up 3 boxes (about 3 lbs/1.5 kg) of rigatoni. I mixed it all up together with lots of grated cheese and some baby spinach (vegetables makes it a nutritionally complete main course!), scooped it into a disposable baking tin, and wrapped it up. (I also made up a smaller pan for us to have for dinner that night, killing two birds with one stone.) With a loaf of bread and a batch of blondies, it made a complete meal and was a pretty low-stress way to lend a helping hand.

And a good reminder to be grateful for little things - like Sunday breakfast with my own family.

And flowers to cheer us - even on the gloomiest winter days.


 

Ten things

The waiting continues...and I've been working hard at practicing meticulous mindfulness. It's been going pretty well, aside from a couple of weeks where the US election combined with solo parenting to send me into an anxiety tailspin. (The election was one of the things I was waiting for, and to say I was not happy with the outcome would be an understatement on the order of describing Australia as a place with one or two possibly harmful critters.)

But. Life marches on, and I must focus on the things I can do even in the midst of feeling helpless and at the mercy of events over which I have no control. So in that spirit, here's an update of recent-ish happenings.

Going back to early September - a tiny birthday cake for a visiting colleague of DP's who has become a family friend. He made the long trek to Australia for the second year running to guest lecture in DP's program, and I found out that his first full day in town was his 66th birthday. So we surprised him when he came over for dinner.

In late September, we went to the US for our planned family visit; for me it was five cities in just under three weeks. One of the highlights of my trip (and my year) was a long-planned sisters' weekend in New York, with all of us together on our own on a trip for the first time in a very long time. It was a memorable and spectacular trip, in part because of visiting places like The Frick Collection.

Our final city in the US was a 36-hour stopover in Dallas to visit our good friends who live there. We really enjoyed visiting the Dallas Arboretum's Pumpkin Village - a clever and creative use of winter squash, and I couldn't stop giggling most of the time for thinking about this. (Warning: NSFW language!)

Then back to Canberra, swapping autumn color for spring in bloom and harvesting lemons and rosemary from the garden.

Two weeks after we got back from the US, I was off again - this time to Seoul for my organization's annual meeting. It was a productive and positive week overall, but it makes me a little sad that this is pretty much the only picture I managed to take outside of the conference (it's a little mall made up entirely of small shops run by local craftswomen and -men).

Back again for the tail end of October; settling in to nearly three months with no overseas trips scheduled, and starting to see some real signs of spring - encouraging enough that I have revived my cold brew coffee habit, making it in my French press and then storing in a repurposed Chianti bottle. (Classy, no?) My standard ratio for coffee (hot or cold) is 7g of coffee per 100ml of water; cold water for cold brew, and let it brew for at least a couple of hours. Chill in the fridge overnight, then serve over ice with a hefty splash of milk and a dollop of maple syrup to sweeten.

The end of October also means Halloween, and a sweet treat to celebrate it. This year I made ghost cakes for Miss B - basically a chocolate cupcake, topped with a gloopy pile of vanilla buttercream frosting and suitably decorated.

Moving into November and real spring weather - a good opportunity to host our first outdoor Sunday lunch of the season and invite a few friends over to share it with us.

And speaking of a few friends: this weekend we celebrated Thanksgiving in Australia, with a buffet turkey dinner for 60+ friends, colleagues, students and their families. An epic undertaking achieved with a lot of lists and a lot of help, and one to make me remember to be grateful for all the things I have.

Which today include the luxury of having to do not much of anything except eat pie, bask in the afterglow of yesterday, and figure out what the heck to do with all these leftovers.

January round-up

A bit later than planned...one of these days I'll go less than a month between posts and not have every one be a photo-filled epic. Until then, here are the latest happenings:

Two days after DP returned from his trip, and the very day of my last post, we headed off on our annual family vacation to the coast - not to Jervis Bay this year, but further down the New South Wales coast to Tuross Head, which we loved so much we may have to switch our allegiance permanently.

Then, less than 24 hours after we returned to Canberra, it was my turn to flit off - on my annual January work trip to England - all London this time, with no chance of jaunts to Oxford or elsewhere (woe) - and Germany.

For the second year running, I celebrated my birthday in England - this year with a fancy birthday tea at Fortnum & Mason and a swanky dinner as well.

After a jam-packed week of meetings, dinners, team-building activies, and more meetings, I flew to Germany to spend a weekend and a few days in the office with my friends and colleagues in Freiburg. There was snow for sledding...

...cheese for raclette...

...and this vegetable, which we thought was a parsnip - the German name for it is "parsley root", and it appears to be topped with...parsley. C and I were so struck by this - the possibility that parsley grows parsnips, and vice versa - that we went home and looked it up. Apparently parsley root is a different root vegetable, which looks like and is closely related to parsnip, but is much more widely available in central and eastern Europe than elsewhere (probably why I'd never encountered it before).

The other notable food milestone was my first time baking a cake in Germany: a lemon cake, made by special request (basically this recipe, with  a lemon apiece - zest and juice - in batter and frosting).

I really enjoyed my trip, but I was also very glad to get back to my regular routine in Canberra - including my first Saturday-morning farmers' market run (complete with coffee and planning) since before Christmas.

More cake! For my belated birthday celebration with DP and Miss B - vanilla cake (as above) and chocolate buttercream (but with double the chocolate shown there).

So, to sum up: travel, cake, travel, cake, travel, cake. And now it's February, and Miss B has started Year 6 (Year 6! Holy hell!). We're heading down the path of another year, and the first day of autumn is just around the corner.





I hope there is plenty of adventure (or not, as you prefer) and cake where you are. More to come soon, I hope.

Christmas 2015

I'm going to go on record here and say that Christmas 2015 is not going to make my lifetime Top 10 list of Christmases. What with the sinus infection beforehand, DP leaving on the 27th for a 10-day work trip that got rescheduled at the last minute, and the emergency dental work, it wasn't quite the relaxing family interlude I had been planning on all year. I rounded off the holiday week with having the one book I found in the library confiscated at the desk because someone else had reserved it, and ruining a batch of strawberry jam. So there was some fairly epic self-pity going on...at least until I had a conversation at the end of it that reminded me forcefully of how truly fortunate I am. And that there was some good stuff mixed in there too:

As usual, I made up goody bags for friends, neighbors, teachers, and DP's team. These ones include strawberry jam and chocolava cookies - Miss B requests these first every year when Christmas baking starts.

I finally broke out my mini-loaf pan to make some cranberry bread (like this but without the walnuts and with a dollop of maple syrup in place of some of the brown sugar).

Sugar cookies - for ease of preparation I made the dough in the food processor, formed into logs, rolled in colored sugar, and chilled overnight. Slice and bake in the morning and then all you have to do is assemble the bags. (As a side note, I finally found some cellophane goodie bags and I felt like they changed everything in terms of providing simple but elegant packaging. Highly recommended.)

Calabrian Christmas doughnuts - make the dough the night of the 23rd (a basic yeast dough, almost 1:1 flour and water with a teaspoon of yeast and a half-teaspoon of salt for every pound/half kilo); on the morning of Christmas Eve, fry in olive oil (the tradition is to try to make rings, but I usually just give up and fry blobs) and serve up hot with honey. I gave DP a box of these hot out of the frying pan to share with his Calabrian barbers - always nice to spread Christmas cheer to people you know will appreciate it!

Only the second year and it's already a tradition - the bûche de Noël. I didn't love the way the cake came out this year (I was rushing and I think I used the wrong recipe) but no one else seemed to care. Extremely decadent but in my opinion not as difficult as it looks - you can cover up your mistakes with chocolate buttercream icing or powdered sugar and it just looks more rustic and festive.

I didn't make this, but I have to share it because I thought it was so flawlessly beautiful and minimalist. It's a traditional Christmas fruitcake, made by one of DP's admin team. Since none of us are big Christmas cake fans (and neither were our two Christmas lunch guests), I left it pristine and brought it to my friend L's Boxing Day lunch to share, where it was devoured and raved over by a crowd - the proper fate for a lovingly made Christmas cake, I feel.

My lovely sisters always send care packages of goodies from the US - here's this year's haul from one of them. Note the Moscow mule mugs - specially designed just for my new favorite cocktail.

And of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without cookbooks - although when this arrived, I did wonder if it was some kind of cosmic sign that it was time to stop (despite the fact that I picked it out). Either that or living in the Midwest made more of an impression than I realized.

And that pretty much wraps up 2015 and kicks off 2016 - planning for which is under way, fuelled by coffee. Hope it is good to us all.

Visitors galore

Despite being the national capital of Australia, Canberra is a little off the beaten path. It’s unusual that we get visitors passing through because they’re here for a conference or are on their way to somewhere else, and even less likely that they come because of a burning desire to visit the city itself. (The very idea would make most Australians snort with derisive laughter.) Since DP and I aren’t even Australian to start with, family members or old friends make only semi-occasional appearances. And most of the colleagues with whom I work most closely are, geographically speaking, a very long way away.

All of that is to say that I am used to feeling far away from a lot of the key people in my life a lot of the time. Which made this past week feel like even more of an anomaly, when I was juggling my regular schedule to accommodate four sets of visitors to Canberra in the same five-day period – three of them from overseas. Four! To be fair, none of them were here to see me specifically, or staying with us, which made the pressure less than it could have been; but I did host dinners on two successive nights (and school nights, at that!). I also tentatively volunteered to host a third night – not, as you might think, because I’m a) a masochist or b) insane, but because I thought a restaurant outing with six kids ranging in age from 1-10 didn’t sound fun for anyone – but luckily another family stepped up and did the honors for a Friday-night barbeque. I was so happy to have a social engagement that I wasn’t hosting that I brought a jug of sangria and whipped up this cake.

smitten kitchen’s ‘I want chocolate cake’ cake

copied slavishly (and doubled) from smitten kitchen, right down to the sprinkles
This is a one-bowl recipe; just remember to scrape the sides of the bowl down between each step. (You can even wash the bowl once the cake batter is in the oven and use it again to make the frosting!)

cake

12 Tbsp/170 g unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 1/2 cups/290 g firmly packed brown sugar

4 Tbsp/50 g granulated sugar (I used raw sugar)

2 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

1 1/2 cups/350 ml buttermilk (I subbed plain Greek yogurt thinned with whole milk)

2 tsp/5 ml vanilla extract

1 cup/82 g Dutch cocoa powder

2 cups/250 g all-purpose/plain flour

1/2 tsp/3 g baking soda

1 tsp/5 g baking powder

1 tsp/5 g table or fine sea salt

frosting

4 oz/110 g unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled (I used Lindt 95% dark chocolate as the closest replacement – I can’t find unsweetened chocolate in Australia)

3 cups/360 g powdered sugar (sifted if lumpy)

1 cup/8 oz/230 g unsalted butter, at room temperature

pinch of fine sea salt (optional)

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 Tbsp cream or whole milk

to make cake

Heat oven to 350F/180C. Line a 9- x 13-inch (22x33 cm?) cake pan with parchment paper, then butter or spray the parchment and pan.

Beat butter and sugars until fluffy in a large bowl. Add the eggs, the yolks, and the vanilla, and beat again until combined. Add the buttermilk and mix again.

Sift flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into the batter and stir on low until just combined; scrape down bowl (preferably with a rubber spatula) a final time and give the batter a final stir.

Scrape/pour batter into prepared pan and smoothe flat. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool for 5 to 10 minutes in cake pan on cooling rack, then flip out onto rack or serving plate to finish cooling before frosting.

to make frosting

Place all frosting ingredients except cream/milk in a large bowl, then beat with a hand mixer until combined and fluffy. Add cream as necessary to achieve desired texture and fluffiness – you may not need all of it.

Scoop frosting onto the cooled chocolate cake and spread to cover evenly. Make swirls as tools and capabilities permit. Finish with rainbow sprinkles in obedience to Deb Perelman’s baking authority.