Doris Brett is my homegirl

First, a disclaimer.
This is not a cooking blog. There are too many of them as is, and, as previous misadventures demonstrate, I do not possess the culinary chops to hitch my wagon to that particular horse.
But it does involve bread, good food writing and schoolmistress copperplate.

Doris Brett's Australian Bread Book, published 1984.

Let’s go back a few days. Last Thursday I received a parcel from my grandmother, containing a beautifully written note and Doris Brett’s Australian Bread Book. I was delighted to hear that you are into bread making, the note read. This was news to me. I think I became briefly enamoured with the idea while reading Nigella Lawson’s thoughts on the subject, but that woman makes everything sound seductive. I wasn’t aware I’d disclosed this urge to anyone else.
I love the idea of bread-making in the same way I love the idea of living from produce grown in the home garden and pre-soaking chickpeas to make hummus – it’s a rosy ideal never to be fulfilled. But my grandmother is nothing if not an eminently sensible master of household skills, and it was her book, so I was prepared to give it a go.
It is a common mistake when selecting cookbooks to gravitate toward those with the highest quantity of high-gloss photographs. We flick through them like magazines and, like magazines, discard them after two days and never turn a page again. What a cookbook really needs is great writing. Doris has this in spades.
Her introduction reads:

“Over the years breadmaking has achieved a skilful publicity trick. Everyone has been seduced into believing that it is a difficult and painstaking art (comparable to silencing encyclopaedia salespeople at 70 paces, or something like that).
For those of us in the know, this makes life very pleasant. Production of a loaf of homemade bread is usually greeted with ecstatic cries of – `Ohh, you are clever!’, `How do you do it?’, `Marry me’. As far as I can tell, cookery books tend to propagate this myth by craftily giving misleading instructions. And as we have been taught to believe that the printed word equals the truth, most of us attempt these recipes, fail miserably, throw the bread at the nearest cat or handy receptacle, and decide that breadmaking is not for us – it is just too difficult…’’

I read the book cover to cover. I learned that “Yeasts are the martyrs of the breadmaking world’’ and “luckily, bread is much more controllable than teenage children’’. It was like having a learned aunty in the kitchen, clothed in sensible flour-dusted gingham and naughty in that well-married way. And you know what? The bread worked. It was really quite easy. Look, I took a picture:

Le Bread. For proof of it's edibility refer to Mr @AlexDruce1987, who ate a whole slice and to my knowledge remains alive and reasonably healthy.

My grandmother first came across Doris as a textbook in a breadmaking class at Mudgee TAFE. I can see why it was so favoured. Even her section for explaining common baking mistakes calls to mind a kindly friend pouring a glass of wine and telling you to Keep Calm and Carry On. After first explaining that no-one who has read the rest of her book will need the chapter on What To Do In Case Of Cock-Ups, but may use it to dish out advice to their less-informed friends, she suggests this course of action:

“You can look wise, excuse yourself for a minute, check up in this section and return with a gracious, if not slightly condescending, explanation of what went wrong.’’

So I think I’ll be making bread again. And it’s not just because I now have the appropriate tin and half a tonne of flour, or because yeast only comes in packets of 12. It’s because I want to read Doris, learn from Doris and come to rely on her as an old friend. Just as my grandmother does.

My new BFF.

Back in my day, children read books

I’ve been restraining myself from tweeting lines from Howard Jacobson’s Whatever it is, I don’t like it all day.

The book, an anthology of 13 years of columns for The Independent, was my Christmas gift to me. It’s proving much more enjoyable than that other self-gift, a new pair of running shoes, which give back only self-loathing and blisters.

The problem (and what a glorious problem!) is there are too many lines to tweet. I’d end up delivering all 343 pages in 140 character bursts, to which the good folk at Bloomsbury may take issue.

But I’m uneasy about leaving these lines untweeted. These days it seems enjoyment can only be actioned if its occurrence, and the thing that prompted it, is shared with the world. Or at least the 207 people of the world who follow me on Twitter and aren’t just desperate to give me an iPad.

I felt the same way on my first trip to Tasmania armed with half a day to find a flat and a shiny new DSLR camera on the laughable assumption there’d be time to sight see. I thought it would look cool to walk through the airport with a camera bag slung over one arm until I realised only 0.002 per cent of the population look cool carrying a camera bag and the rest look rather a dick. Later I found an hour to drive up the East Tamar Highway and watch the river in flood. I didn’t take a photo. How could I? How could my blurry picture convey the quiet excitement of: I’ve just accepted a job in a place I’d never been before and surprisingly I quite like it here?

And what would Facebook care?

So no, I won’t tweet Howard Jacobson. You’ll have to read it yourself and succumb to the joyful indulgence of great writing.

In fact, that will be my new year’s resolution. Gym shoes and aspirational veganism be damned. I’m going to read good books. No more excuses about being time-poor. Anyone who finds time to read the full Twilight on a university study break can bloody well make time to read Waugh after work.

As the man himself said (I know I said I wouldn’t, but you knew that was a lie, didn’t you?):

“The dichotomy between great works of literature and books we ‘secretly’ enjoy is a false one… The greater the book the more pleasure it gives.”

State-hopping with extra duct-tape

Tomorrow, men in trucks will arrive to cart my life away, or at least those bits of it currently encased in cardboard and duct tape.

They will knock at my door at some ungodly hour known only to shift workers, street sweepers and me on a Monday or Tuesday. And with sack truck in hand they will make off with seven big boxes, ten small boxes and an assortment of newly-cleaned whitegoods. Then, in two weeks, different men will heap it back upon me in my new house in Tasmania, where I have accepted a job.

At least someone enjoys having all these boxes about the place.

My sister and her fiancé drove down in an exceedingly expensive hire car (your resource industry at work) on Sunday to help me pack the place up. I really wasn’t organised, and was forced to invent little jobs for brother-in-law-in-two-weeks to do to prevent him from manically packing everything he could get his hands to into the nearest box. Tomorrow I will strip the bed, put the sheets in the final box and seal it up.

And once the stuff is gone? I will do nothing.

Not by choice, but because there will be nothing in my flat to do anything with. Just me, the cat and a butchered couch which will not be making the journey back east. Nothing for a whole week.

I should be used to this moving lark by now. I didn’t realise how often I’d done it until I was filling out a credit check form to secure my new house in Launceston.

Since going to university in 2006, I have moved once a year. First to a residential hall at Monash, with my clothes neatly sorted into “uni” and “home” piles since the letter of offer arrived on January 11. Then home again, defrosting and cleaning a fridge while drunk at 3am. Then back to Farrer Hall four months later, then to a two bedroom flat in Caulfield South. From thence to a rambling, beautiful art deco house in Caulfield North, a move so close I joked about piling all my worldly possessions on the centre of my bed and pushing it down the tram tracks. Then the big one – Caulfield to Bunbury. And now I’m doing the return journey, with an ocean crossing thrown in for good measure.

So it seems amazing that I should still receive a caustic burn every time I put oven cleaner to the off-the-box use of sparkling up the 12-year-old microwave.

At least one person in my house has been enjoying the move. Climbing in and out of boxes, sleeping on bubble wrap and sitting casually on the crisper while the fridge defrosts – packing has been a three-day theme park for my cat. I hope her chipper attitude to the change carries on until we are settled in our new home. Before I have to, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, butter her paws on the presumption that skidding wildly into the walls will take her mind off the change of scenery.

Now there is nothing left to do but find hitherto forgotten items hidden away in dark recesses of my flat, which will be discovered 20 minutes after the removalists have left tomorrow.

I still think moving house is tremendous fun. But once these seven big boxes, ten small boxes and assorted white goods are unpacked at the other end, I think I’ll try something new. I think I’ll stay put a while.

This is what love looks like

Love is a vintage pink leather skirt.

Damn you Derulo, being solo’s just not fun any more

It’s ten to eight on Friday night and I have run out of things to do.

No, I haven’t just completed my to do list – the house is dirty, there is still a pile dishes to wash, and a teetering stack of poorly written shorthand notes sit guiltily astride a sheath of pages to proof for work.

But in terms of enjoyable leisure occupations I’m fresh out.

I fact, as my fun Friday night activities were eating smoked salmon for dinner and watching the latest episode of Glee, it may be more accurate to say I was never in.

I’m just going on fourteen months of living my life’s goal. Not to be a journalist (a last minute decision made during year 12 subject selection so my mother would let me study literature instead of physics), but to be independent. Well, I’m there. Very much so. You’ve heard people describe themselves as “extremely single”? I’m extremely independent. But facing another night of altering 1980s dresses to the soundtrack of Empire Records; it strikes me that a healthy dash of co-dependence might make Friday night more interesting.

I’ve always kind of stuck on my own. I have, and have had since I was five, a bunch of close friends, a net of acquaintances who are only friends in certain pubs and a few love interests thrown in for good measure. But all my favourite pursuits are solo – I read, draw, sew and write; I prefer to walk alone than with a friend; and I forwent team sports for horse riding. As a child I played alone because having someone else there meant I had to explain the story line. I loved nights when my parents, and later flatmates, were out of the house so I could – well, do exactly what I would have done otherwise, but in an empty house. And possibly in my underwear. Now I live alone, a dream since 16, and mostly it’s awesome. I have mastered cooking for one, I’m not subjected to reality TV and it’s no one’s business if the stereo plays Bob Dylan for three weeks straight.

Just recently I have questioned if my life would be different with a little neediness thrown in. I really don’t care if I have no one to talk to, in fact after a busy week I prefer it. Invites to go out for a drink were sighed at and cast aside; social interaction avoided rather than sought out. I don’t even like talking to people at the supermarket. I am what all those experts have warned about – the egocentric professional, living in a community with roots so shallow you could knock them over with a feather.

Leaving Melbourne was hard, is still hard, but since then it seems my life has become entirely transportable. Sure, there are people I’ll miss if I leave Bunbury. Right now there are people I miss all over Australia. It has become a necessary part of adulthood. But like all firsts, nothing will ever be as hard again as that first move west. I could move across the world and never be as far from my roots as I was that first night in Bunbury, sleeping in my boyfriend’s hoody on the floor of an empty flat.

A little co-dependence might have made me reach out more to the people I’ve met since, and call a few numbers that I instead threw away. It might mean I was a less efficient networker, and made friends instead of contacts. It might even mean I had more to do on a Friday night than hemming polyester and an episode of Glee.

Top five discography life lessons

Handy facts learnt on a quiet Friday night:

1)      I buy more music when I’m happy.

2)      Nick Hornby was on to something.

I’m having a bit of a High Fidelity moment. This may be because I fell asleep with the paperback under my pillow last night and absorbed the character, or it may be Holly Throsby’s fault. I fell asleep on the book because I’d had a few quiet drinks while watching the charming Miss Throsby sing over a rowdy Bunbury crowd. I searched through my albums twice trying to find hers, to no avail, then gave up and started surveying CDs at random.

So it’s Holly who can rightly claim catalyst to the carefully tiled CDs that now adorn my living room.

With CDs all over the floor, there was nothing for it but to get my autobiographical classification on.

My autobiograhical discography.

I have never consciously used music as a barometer or determinate in my personal life, so I settled for stacking it in years of purchase and let the exact sequence go hang.

Lesson 3). Do not attempt any neat organisational task in the same room as a cat; they will not be able to resist the urge to fuck it up.

There’s a lot of Australian indi-rock (Dallas Crane, 67 Special, Sleepy Jackson) in the early years and plenty of Australian hip-hop (The Herd, Astronomy Class, Hilltop Hoods) in the middle. The last two years have been more mellow (Nick Cave, Gypsy and the Cat, Laura Marling).

Some trends are pretty bloody obvious. I bought the most albums in year 12; the optimum point of good tip money and no financial responsibilities.

My influences were, unfortunately, equally obvious. The 2004 Big Day Out line-up features pretty heavily in my year 11 purchases.

There’s not much before year 10 (music-mad sister at home, stole her music where required) and it tapers off in 2006, when I started university. Of course file sharing is illegal and piracy is wrong, though calling someone a pirate is not the world’s best deterrent. But if you were, say, interested in getting your hands on some fresh tunes, and you happened to share a computer network with more than a thousand other people between aged 18 and 25, a few gigabits of stuff could happen. Just saying.

But the most interesting year was 2009, my last year of uni. Shortest stack between 2002 (not a horse, not interested) and 2011 (give me time yet). And it’s all back catalogue or new releases of something previously purchased – an obligation buy, not a new love.

Just going through the motions, that was 2009.

Pre-2006, I knew albums. Hitting shuffle would freak me out because I always anticipated the next song. I could name artist and track in the opening chord – my mate and I made a game out of it, on the bus home from school. Now, I know some songs backwards, and some not at all.

Which brings me to:

4). iTunes killed music.

There’s no Bob Dylan on my floor, though I have 10 albums on my computer. No Belle and Sebastian, no Eagles of Death Metal, no Arctic Monkeys, no Daft Punk. No Paul Kelly even, though I think I lost that one. When I moved into college, we decided who to be friends with based on the music lining their shelves. Strolling through an MP3 player is not the same. Hardrives contain a bit of everything; albums are what you love.

5). I need to go to JB Hi Fi tomorrow.

Dress to sexy for this wardrobe

It’s never nice to hear I told you so.
Even if the person who told you so was, in fact, you.
It doesn’t make it easier to swallow. It gets you coming and going – you are both the smug bastard and the headstrong fool, neither one an attractive hat to wear.
But when I open my wardrobe now, out it comes again.
I told you so.
Perhaps a little backtrack would be useful at this point. A few months ago, I wrote this post about my favourite clothes. It was sparked by a dress, which, if I could afford it, was sure would bump something off to make the top ten. Even if I never had the guts to wear it anywhere but inside my apartment. With the blinds down.
My sister found the dress on sale and gave it to me for Christmas.
It is my new favourite dress. I’ve never worn it out of my apartment.
I told me so.
Much has been said (on Gossip Girl, admittedly) about the therapeutic power of shopping. It was in search of some retail Zen that I found this dress. It was a bad week, I had been living in a sartorial abyss (hello, Bunbury) and I had an afternoon to kill in Melbourne.
I found it at Review. Abhorrence of commercial plugs aside, Review is my favourite label and going in to the store without a pile of cash to burn is always a bad idea. I grabbed a pile of garments to try on; all looked great on and I could think of at least six ways to wear each one. And then I grabbed this dress, just for kicks.
There are a couple of rules I try to stick to when shopping:
1. If you don’t love it instantly, don’t buy it.
2. If you think, “this would look great with the jacket/shoes/waistline that I do not, in fact, have”, don’t buy it.
3. If you can’t afford it, don’t try it on.
A.D (After Dress), I have to amend these rules, with:
4. Don’t go shopping straight after a breakup.
It was tight. It was black. It was strappy. It was one shaped panel away from a tinny singing-card rendition of ‘I will survive’.
I tried a few options to tone it down this weekend, all from the safety of my bedroom. The sister, who so generously bestowed it upon me, said I looked like a stripper.
I love this dress. I wear it all the time. But ask me to wear it out of the house?
Well, just remember I told you so.