>> beautiful children’s clothes by Talc Boutique.
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Tiny pencil-width fingers press into the floury pizza dough and brothers Tom, 7, and Henry, 9, jokingly jostle as to who gets to tear up the salami. Their older sister, Charlie, 11, watches patiently, letting the boys complete this simple task – the other night she cooked Greek-style roast chicken by herself.
Children in the kitchen: opening the flood gates to a catastrophe of potential burns, scrapes and failed invention tests, or a valuable learning and creative experience?
Two articles written by Kate Gibbs published today in Good Living, The Sydney Morning Herald. Weekly kids’ recipe column starts…
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The midnight feast. A childhood culinary romantic adventurism fuelled by fairytales and heros and Harry Potter. It’s children who dreamed up the idea of waking and sneaking and hushing and uncovering some extraordinary concoction of food and carbohydrate-laden treats in the middle of the night. And we adults should bring it back.
Ideally the midnight feast should be lit by the moon and a roaring fire, and there should be pyjamas and some clandestine setting. And icing sugar. And heart-shaped lobster sandwiches and white peach pulped and topped with champagne or soda water.
A new book, Midnight Feasts: An anthology of Late Night Munchies, includes recipes from the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Rose Gray (of the River Cafe), and includes suggestions of tinned sardines in bed in the dark, and chorizo cooked in sherry.
The ideas may leave us a bit flat, but the very fact that there is a book, a recipe book, about midnight feasts is something to be rejoiced and cheered on. For me, a caramelised apple stack of pancakes would be perfect. Sure, a pink-iced donut in the middle of the night is not great for your health, but let’s all do it once and then have vegetables for a week to make up for it. Plus salads just don’t work for a midnight feast, they are much too serious.
I leave you with this paragraph taken from Nine Coaches Waiting, in which the governess heroine and her fiance sneak away from an Easter ball to a rendezvous. Together they share a midnight feast, which starts with lemonade and Champagne.
“Thin curls of brown-bread with cool, butter-dripping asparagus; scallop-shells filled with some delicious concoction of creamed crab; crisp pastries bulging with mushroom and chicken and lobster; petits fours bland with almonds, small glasses misty with frost and full of some creamy stuff tangy with strawberries and wine; peaches furry and glowing in a nest of glossy leaves; grapes frosted with sugar that sparkled in the firelight like a crust of diamonds … ”
pic from www.mrslilien.com
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There is this excellent invention our New Zealand counterparts call The Bach, pronounced The Batch. It’s a small little dinky thing that you traipse to for weekends from Auckland and Wellington and wherever else you live. But then your Bach is your showpiece, as well. City-dwellers take great pride in the Bach, and it’s often more attractive, cleaner, more creative, just better, than the actual city home. But another thing about the Bach (and in this way it’s not like Australians’ “weekender”), is that they often start out small, and then are built on and extended, and attached to, so in the end it’s a sprawling thing made up of all these parts and rooms. This is the quirk of the Bach.
The Boatshed, a luxury boutique hotel on Waiheke Island just 40 minutes boat ride from Auckland (we saw whales on the way back!), is the best possible version of the Bach. The white-painted, wood-panelled abode, on the top of a hill overlooking Oneroa Beach and the world, started out as a family holiday cottage of designer David Scott. It’s now run by his son Jonathan, whose immaculate taste has turned a cottage into a showpiece, a bach into a luxurious and unique hotel.
In true bach style, The Boatshed has been added to and built on, so there are now a series of little boatshed rooms looking out to sea, an attached two-storey lighthouse that has its own dumb waiter so guests don’t have to bother coming down if they don’t want to, and a main cottage.
All rooms are different, but all maintain a sort of beachy boaty holiday moodiness. The interiors are light and sun-drenched, with polished concrete floors inside and sprawling decks outside. At night dozens of candles are lit, and a communal dining area sparkles as Jonathan, always the host, brings five-course meals and matching local wines to the table.
A house icecream is made from fresh chopped mint from The Boatshed’s own garden (another post, soon), and the Asian chicken ball starter is fresh and fragrant, with a lemongrass hint and water chestnut crunchiness. Breakfasts are made to order, including a perfect Hollandaise sauce with poached eggs and herbs from the garden, and includes local fruit toast, muesli and yoghurt to prepare guests for an active day ahead, if they choose to leave the hotel.
Borrow some bikes from The Boatshed and power up and down the roller coaster hills of Waiheke. Cycling on Waiheke turns the adage that what goes up must come down on its head. Instead, what goes downhill must soon go back up, and the minute you feel the wind in your hair as you whooooop downhill, there is going to be some wheerr-err-ahh-ooowwws when you have to climb the next hill. But getting to the top is always worth it. Pain, gain.
Coffee at Spice and lunch at Stoneyridge Vineyard. Mudbrick Vineyard and Restaurant offers possibly the island’s best dining outside The Boatshed itself. Oneroa village’s Waiheke Fruit and Veg sells organic beers and local wine, artisan bread, local cheese and Italian hams.
For more on The Boatshed, click here.
All photographs by Kate Gibbs (using a Helga camera).
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This beautifully designed and heart-wrenching site, Donate-A-Meal, gets viewers to fill the plates of hungry children. Apparently 16,000 kids living in Dusseldorf, Germany, are hungry. They are growing up in welfare benefit households and their tummies are “rumbling and grumbling”. They wait in a queue as you fill their plates with schnitzel and potatoes. Click through and just try to resist their little faces looking back at you, waiting.
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Am absolutely crashy tired so no energy to give full worth to the discoveries I made over the weekend, but then wouldn’t sleep very well without offering a sneak, at least, of this little boutique hotel on Waiheke Island, on New Zealand’s North Island. The Boatshed, as crisp as a New Zealand sauvignon blanc and as invigorating as a jetboat down the Waikato, but without the diesel and instead with elegance and wood-panelling and a five course dinner to greet you when you get the late boat from Auckland. All this I will explain a string of New Zealand posts over the coming days. Meanwhile, dog lovers should check out the paw prints on the outdoor decking in the little glass-house setting above, and food lovers can squint at the micro herbs growing in the pots in that same room. Or just check out The Boatshed here if you need to rush about it. Meanwhile, we who have experienced Waiheke Island are very laid back bro. A sneak peak will have to do for now.
Photos by Kate Gibbs (colourcross processing)
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Incredible cheese, all from Farmgate Cheese. The selection changes regularly, not that you’d need it to. The melty Woodside Charlestone Jersey Brie, when ripe, is just about the softest and earthiest thing you can imagine eating. And the best part is you can order the cheese online, ready to be stored away for your next dinner party (or cheese need moment).
1. Gorgonzola Piccante: a cow’s milk blue cheese from a region north of Milan. 2. Livarot: cow’s milk washed rind cheese from Normandy, France. Possibly the strongest of the Normandy washed-rinds. 3. Hampers: home delivered cheese, possibly the best idea since … bread and cheese. 4. Queso Manchego: made in the La Mancha region of Central Spain from the milk of sheep of the Manchega breed. 5. Woodside Charlestone Jersey Brie: the moulds ripen the cheese from the outside in, a process that takes around six weeks. 6. Truffle Pecorino: Boschetto al Tartufo is a mild semi-soft cheese made using a blend of sheep and cow’s milk, loaded with white truffle shavings. 7. Tarago River Strzlecki Blue: a goat blue from the Gippsland region of Victoria. 8. Milawa Goat’s Camembert: from the the Gipplsand region of Central Victoria. 9. Ossau Iraty: New seasons milk of the Manech ewes is collected from the bergers of the Ossau Valley and Iraty region in the Basque, between France and Spain.{ 2 comments }
A Saturday morning at Palm Beach, where we dropped in to the decked and red-and-white stripe decked out The Boat House. Hands down, best fish and chips I’ve had in Sydney, all beer battered and crispy flathead. Sunny wintery Sydney on the Hawkesbury at this little cottage setting was refreshing and so happy making. Two little girls ordered two enormous strawberry milkshakes. After lunch, wandered down to Whale Beach, where the sand is extra grainy and the surf was up!
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.. Love this concept from the blogger Mom Food Project. Collect your mother’s recipes while you can, stack them away and keep them for future generations. This hand-typed version is stained and proper. Remember when those little lined cards were actually useful and recipes could actually get blobs of sauce on them?
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1. Italian Easy: a fabulous cookbook filled with easy to handle pasta- and other recipes. 2. This “La Cruse” skirt is framed loveliness. Yellow and grey stripes with a little white T tucked in is planned summer wear. 3. Rent a Crowd: Wall art from Elly Nelly. 4. Eplica font from My Fonts. 5. Royal treatment of jelly using these moulds from Bompas & Parr. 6. Travel bag from Jack Spade: Tarpaulin Dry Dopp Kit $95.
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