Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Family”
My father was a naturally gifted cook – years ahead of his time in terms of experimentation and sophistication. He loved Chinese food, one reason being that his first job (at age fifteen) was at Chung Gong’s greengrocer in Launceston. Through the protective owners he developed a taste for Cantonese cuisine, acquiring useful cooking skills along the way. Every few …
My parents were poor but ate like kings, at least in terms of being well ahead of the times and eating things that would eventually become very trendy and costly in high-end restaurants. Jerusalem artichokes are one example: they once weren’t fashionable. However, for as long as I can remember, my father grew them. Certainly at Swan Bay he had …
Are quinces not one of the most remarkable of fruits! On our recent visit to Olive’s Cottage at the end of April we had offered to take dessert for lunch with several friends. The quince tree in the cottage garden was full of fruit – not ripe enough to use. However, it gave us the idea for the perfect dessert: …
A check of the Internet shows that April 1, April Fool’s Day, is a very popular time for food writers to talk about the fruit and cream based dessert known as a ‘fool’. We have decided to do likewise. Elizabeth David, in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, devotes several pages to the English fruit fool. Most fruit fools …
We don’t have a garden big enough in Melbourne to grow vegetables, which is rather fortunate: unlike my father, I am a hopeless gardener! We do, however, manage to maintain a reasonable selection of herbs. Paradoxically, while my father had an extraordinary vegetable garden, he grew little in the way of herbs – mint, parsley and chives. Instead, like most …
If there is one regret we have about living in Melbourne and not on the Tamar, it is ready access to just-picked, home-grown fruit and vegetables. While we have a good herb selection, our garden in Melbourne isn’t big enough for fruit and vegies and I am not sure we would be good at vegetable growing anyway. Ever since I …
Are peaches the most delicious of all fruits? I won’t answer that question as I can’t. Finding the perfect peach What I do know is that my father, George, grew the best peaches I have ever tasted. He didn’t really have to grow his own as he had free access to the stone fruits grown in the various Tamar Valley …
(Continued from: An Afternoon Feast) Olive’s Cottage is both a business and a holiday house for us. This means that there are generally jobs to do when we visit from Melbourne. We try to work these into enjoying the property, catching up with family and friends and searching out new experiences in the region. Business matters Our intention had been …
It was late Sunday night when I realised how much the lunch that day was a microcosm of life at Olive’s Cottage, with memories from my parents’ time mixing with aspects of how the cottage works for us now. During the afternoon we had lamented to our Tassie friends that we had eaten our breakfast while a recalcitrant wallaby calmly …
There isn’t any need to go into detail about who we are and why we set up this blog: all that detail can be found from the ‘Welcome’ (‘Home’) page, the ‘About & Contact’ page and ‘FAQs’. A blog is something I (we) have thought about setting up for some years. It was just a case of finding the right …
