today

More from the garden. These are the ends of the stalks of the rainbow chard I have been using to make a pie —it seems a shame to throw them into the compost with out stopping to appreciate their wonder. I'm fascinated by these plants, they're like the silver-beet I used to know as 'spinach' but with red, magenta, yellow and orange stalks.



When I started cooking for myself, I learned to call this plant 'silver-beet', rather than 'spinach'. It went into a number of things [pies, stir-fries, soup] but I was always a bit puzzled by the flavour I thought of as soapy, which didn't seem to be mitigated by the addition of lemon juice — which I had read was an ideal partner to spinach. Now I think the perfect foil for the earthy, alkaline quality of chard is sweetness, rather than souring. Spinach is sometimes paired with currants and pine-nuts. Chard seems to benefit from the addition of the flavour of cinnamon or all-spice, the gentle sweetness of ricotta, onions cooked until they are well softened and golden brown, or fried or toasted nuts. Its coarser aspect is softened by fat or oil.

I grew rainbow chard by request (G had admired it at the Ceres community garden), sowing the seeds midwinter between rows of broad beans. I left it to disappear below the taller stalks of the beans, food for the earwigs. Since the broad-beans have taken their faintly eau de cologne scented crimson flowers back down into the compost, the chard has come into its own. My gardening books say that chard is a heavy feeder, so it probably appreciated the nitrogen that the broad beans gathered into the soil. I am amazed at its beauty and its tolerance of the recent heatwave. At first, I didn't know what to do with it. Since discovering English spinach 18 years ago, I've come to see chard as the poor cousin. However, I did remember that a marvelous chef called Rachel Titchener, who I worked for as a kitchen-hand, grew rainbow chard and made a beautiful pie. This is my memory of Rachel's recipe -





1 x onion
oil for frying
salt and pepper
about two handfuls shelled walnut pieces
ground dutch cinnamon or allspice
a large bunch of chard
ricotta cheese (about 250g)
feta cheese (about 100g)
thick filo pastry
olive oil and butter

Make the filling: Wash the chard, slice the stalks and leaves into thin strips. Chop the onion finely, fry gently in about 2 tablespoons of oil with a sprinkle of salt until soft. Add the walnut pieces and about three quarters of a teaspoon of cinnamon or allspice. When the nuts are slightly brown and the onion is coloured, season with salt and pepper, add the chopped chard stalks and cook, adding the chard leaves as they cook down, stirring to mix the leaves, onion and walnuts well. Cover the pan and allow the leaves to steam. When they are cooked down, remove the lid and increase the heat to evaporate excess moisture. Mash the ricotta and feta cheeses together in a bowl, add the cooked chard mixture and mix.

Lay out a sheets of filo pastry in an appropriate tray, brushing with a mixture of olive oil and melted butter between each sheet. Let the pastry hang way over the sides as you will be folding it over to cover the top. Place some of the filling on the pastry, distribute evenly, cover with more sheets of pastry, add another layer of filling, another of pastry, fold the bottom pastry over. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the pastry is well browned.

As they were also growing in the garden, I added a few leaves of cavollo nero to the filling, and stirred the finely chopped leaves from a few sprigs of mint through the cheese mixture.

Labels: garden

Labels: garden

from the garden this evening—black kale and the first broccoli for the season

Knitted mostly as a means of finding out how to make a non-pointy hat, after spotting someone wearing a similarly shaped item in the IGA supermarket one evening.

a work made recently for a seminar at the VCA. Thank you to Geoff for such patient collaboration! The idea being to make something like one of those figure/ground illusions where you might see a vase [the positive space], or you might see two facing profiles [the negative space] — they're apparently used for psychological testing.

I wanted to make "the space between me and someone else". We used a coil pot technique, which I neglected to research before-hand. The results were cathartic.


We made a second attempt in order to achieve something that would be recognisable as a human profile. I'm not sure the product requires refining. But further attempts are in the pipe-line.

Labels: thesis

I found this black she-oak fruit a few weeks ago on a walk home form the studio and it has sat on our kitchen table since then. The other morning I noticed that the seed capsules have opened. Not hard to propagate from seed, apparently, so maybe, in a few years, we could have she-oaks singing in our back yard on windy days.

Labels: garden

My Christmas eve activities included rolling dolmades and preparing the stuffing for a lamb roast for lunch with the Orphans on Christmas day. I listened to an audio book of Plato's Republic while I was rolling, folding and stuffing. At this season of enforced and often uncomfortable togetherness, it seemed a luxury to be indulging in such productive and fruitful aloneness -

The Republic is something that I have been thinking I want to read, it is a representation of conversation as method, conversation as a means of instruction or learning, after all. Somehow though, I just don't think that we are meant to learn by reading slabs of text.

Labels: thesis