ALL ABOUT FOOD

I don’t know where the year has gone but I know that it is moving way too fast for the amount of work that I want to get done! I have two exhibitions planned for 2013. One will be a group tapestry exhibition with three other graduates of the Diploma of Art Tapestry and the other is a solo exhibition, “ All About Food’ This exhibition will include tapestries, paintings, recipes, a hand written cook book and the new blog that I am writing. I spent my working life since the age of 18 somewhere in the food industry so I suppose it is no surprise to me that most of my art is about food as well. The idea came about when everyone started asking me what I would do when I finally finished my diploma? My son Coen is keen on cooking but I am a bit of a tough teacher! I have been told that I am worse than a kung fu master as I think that if you do something you should always do it properly. I am concerned that in these times of change and technology that no one hand writes anything anymore. Coen has no cook book at school and recipes are searched on the internet and printed off and put in plastic folders. This all seems so impersonal to me and on the news the other evening they were discussing if they should stop teaching children how to write and teach touch typing instead! To me family cook books should be hand written and not A4 printed pages. So a project has begun. This is a post from the other blog that I am writing for the exhibition. At the moment it is author read only as I was planning to publish it at the time of the exhibition. Somehow I think that maybe I should publish it now as I don’t know who would bother looking back through the older posts?

After twelve years of drought and bucket only watering it is such a good feeling to be inspired to garden again. Life here has just been in survival mode for what seems to be the longest time. There are fewer great pleasures than growing and cooking your own food. The long days of summer bring with them time to enjoy being outside and the fruits of one’s labor.

I was in Ararat today and found these seeds and coriander and basil plants at Aldi. The beginning of spring always inspires you to begin planting for the summer. I usually buy seedlings but the prices are becoming more and more expensive along with fewer plants in the punnets. The pots of basil and coriander were cheaper than buying a punnet of them from the nursery although, when I worked full time at the restaurant we never had any success with planting them out in the garden. So I will see how it goes.

Although I have calendulas growing in the vegetable garden I was inspired by my time in India last year to plant some marigold seeds. One of my favorite memories of India is when we caught a rickshaw through the famous chandi chowk market. It was early in the morning and the farmers were delivering huge hessian bags full of marigolds to be made into garlands.