The curry bush is small and grey; the flowers are brilliant yellow pompoms all through the hot weather. The smell flows over the ground and up your nostrils; courtyards and garden edges seem to catch it and hold it, just like the bathroom does. (Don’t try to cook with curry bush – it changes flavour.)
I’ve just come in from watering now. My knees smell of mint, where I brushed past the Egyptian mint as I came through the back door. My toes smell of thyme I trod on as I pulled out a bit of invading kikuyu from the thyme beds. My hands smell of lemon verbena and chamomile as I picked both for a cup of bedtime tea – tiny yellow flowers, pungent now, but insipid and composty when dried – I don’t see how anyone can drink chamomile tea from tea bags. My hands probably smell of wombat too, from picking Pudge up from on the flat.
If anyone kissed me now (but Bryan is up at the Fire Control, manning the radio as relief crews are sent to the fires down the coast), I’d taste of the parsley I chewed while I ran the hose over the ginseng first of all (cherished for three years now and just starting to form roots) and then the herb beds out the back. My hair probably smells of scented geraniums that I brushed under while watering the parsley. And all of me smells of curry bush – it’s almost an oily smell, impossible to get rid of, pervasive as cigarette smoke – it’s a good thing we like it.
It’s getting dark now; the sky is smoky with dusk, not fresh smoke, I think, so there is no need to panic. The wind is still in the wrong direction. The grass on the Tablelands was bleached almost white as we drove home tonight; the trees were pale green, the whole landscape almost skeletonised by dryness. I have never seen country fade so fast.
January 15
We are craving cold things – iced watermelon, as fragrant as good sherbet, you can smell it across the room (and hear it calling you from the fridge).
E and I can eat a watermelon in two days, a relic perhaps of my childhood – when we’d head off to the beach with towels, Vegemite sandwiches and a watermelon, and dinner would be corn on the cob (even my mother’s culinary powers stretched to that) or one of her stews (whatever meat was cheap – usually mutton shoulder chops) with whatever else we had on hand – pineapple, sweet potato, tomatoes, always onions, bits of spud and sometimes pumpkin too. Surprisingly good, or perhaps we were just ravenous. (Sometimes in the stew there’d be bits of string as well as paper, and once a sea-shell and another time a bit of wood – it became a joke to see what we could find.)
It’s no accident that three of my mother’s four children turned into avid cooks – we had to learn to cook to eat. Or perhaps I am unfair – my mother’s cooking at least showed improvisation, a determination to use what was there, which is the basis of all good cooking traditions (of course, culinary skill should be there somewhere as well).
Mum has cooked well since she discovered microwaves – a bowl of mixed veg imprisoned behind the glass for three minutes. And the joys of yoghurt and precooked chooks. Cold chicken and hot vegetables or sardines on toast, and fruit for after, and toast and sugar-free marmalade shared with her Corgi for breakfast. Hers isn’t a bad diet, after all.
Sometimes I dream of living in a city, being able to choose bits and slices from every tray in a neighbourhood delicatessen. Not in summer though. Last time I was in Canberra I went to a delicatessen but walked out without buying anything except bread (which was good for a change). But the local baker Matt’s bread is superb. Mine is okay…and Giles’s is wonderful.
January 16
Rain – just enough to count the drops, and then a deluge – a full forty-five seconds of it. But at least today is cool and misty; for the first time in weeks we can draw breath deep into our lungs again. The world still seems bleached with heat – as though it’s been painted by a watercolourist stingy with paint – but you can see the hint of deeper colours underneath.
The egg tomatoes are ready, and the first of the capsicum – long yellow dangles, like pop-art jewellery (they’d make good earrings). The first few went bad in the heat. It’s been the first time in a fortnight I’ve really felt like rummaging in the garden – the extra breath of heat from steamy soil was too much to face.
There are a few late artichokes too, from the seedlings I put in this spring, and the rosehips are swelling on the rugosas – they’ll be a lovely crop if the silvereyes don’t get them first – and the basil has finally leafed enough to pluck big handfuls, and the zucchini are swelling so fast you’d think they’d burst, which means the chooks are being fed plenty of zucchini lately.
You can probably tell a lot from a household by its vegetable rubbish. The chooks get a giant bucketful every day – outside leaves of lettuce and silverbeet stalks and tough bits of marjoram and paper from the garlic; thick rinds of watermelon and bowls of peach and plum and cherry stones and crusts of yesterday’s bread.
All our dinners are similar at the moment – meat or pasta or rice or spuds in some fashion. But always a great dish of veg – whatever gets picked from the garden first, tossed into the old black cast-iron pan with olive oil and garlic – spanish onions, celery, zucchini, tomatoes, the first of the butter beans, artichoke hearts, button squash, florets of cauliflower, torn-up basil leaves or marjoram leaves, chopped parsley, garlic chives or wild celery, spring onions, parsnips or tiny new onions from among the poppies (we pulled out the poppies because they were windblown in the heat, and pulled up the tiny onions at the same time).
Sometimes there’s more tomato and basil than anything else, with a strong flavour of garlic; or more beans and onions, or celery and chives and artichoke hearts, or zucchini fried till brown with spanish onions and garlic, all soft and crisp and olive oily. Every night is different as well as being the same.
The young asparagus has survived the heatwave, and the new white fig is wilted but alive. Sing halleluiah and watch the weather forecast.
January 17
I dreamt of Gabby last night: her slow helpless dying, the maggots from her hole.
I had to creep downstairs with the torch to check on Pudge, who was happily and steadfastly chomping across the lawn, round and silver in the moonlight. She didn’t see me.
So I went back to bed, and inched closer to Bryan’s furriness, and fell asleep.
January 21
Dinner at Robin and Virginia’s, driving through the dust and wilting peach trees along the valley to climb the far ridge to Fox Hill. The peaches are so fat they look ready to succumb to gravity, and many have, so the smell is a combination of freshly fermented peach hooch and hot soil. You could feel the echo of last week’s heat sing from the earth, even though the air itself was cool, having meandered up the valley from the coast, softened by sea mist.
It was even cooler in the Fox Hill kitchen, tall ceilings and blue-white walls, with paintings, sketches, lithographs, collages, photos all precisely placed, so you have to concentrate either on the walls (in awe) or on the people, and either choice seems rude (while Robin gleefully pounced on our 1985 torch, announcing that it was subject to a recall notice, had we seen, it was in the paper somewhere…as he rummaged in the newspaper pile).
Dinner was mostly via Conrad and Carol, who grow veg down the valley and bring them up to town once a week, rousing Virginia and Robin in the early morning to sing the praises of corn or beans or artichokes – much the same produce that we grow here, but it’s fascinating to see what other hands do with it.
Virginia made chilled yoghurt and cucumber soup with chives and new potatoes and beans. And peach cake afterwards with cream, while Lottie the poodle sat at the table, in a posture infinitely more erect and elegant than ours (her manners are superior too), and ate the last of the rolls that Robin had baked this afternoon.
Pudge was waiting for us at the front steps, giving her own peculiar little yips which mean: ‘I want food. Now.’ So we fed her and she crouched in the darkness, paws on either end of her carrot. A dedicated eater.
We could still hear her gnawing when we went upstairs to bed.
January 2
3
I’ve decided veg have voices. No, I’m not joking. Haven’t you ever heard a zucchini yelp when you snap it? It’s an anguished sort of sound, the cry of a zucchini cut off in its prime – which is the best time to harvest a zucchini. If a zucchini bends, it’s too big. They should be finger thin and snappish.
Fresh corn squeaks when you thrust your teeth in, though it needs to be fresh. Supermarket corn just oozes. Peas pop if you steam unpodded young ones…the air pressure builds up till you open them. It’s a disgusting sound. Kids love it.
Carrots crunch (or they should) and tomatoes squelch – home-grown ones do at any rate. Most of the flavour of a tomato is in its juice, so if you can slice it without a wet patch on the bench you’ve either got a modern hybrid or cut into a pink tennis ball by mistake.
E’s favourite vegie sound at the moment is the bang when I forget to prick holes in the jackets of the spuds before they’re baked. It’s a good solid boom – fun for youthful males, but I don’t recommend it for the oven.
Summer Veg in Olive Oil
This isn’t so much a recipe, as a catalogue of what’s in the garden or at its best in the shops.
Slosh some olive oil into a pan. Slice a bulb of garlic – yes, I do mean a bulb, preferably just dug from the garden (at this time of the year it looks like a young onion, not papery and segmented at all). We cook them, bulbs and stems and all, like garlic-flavoured leeks, but nicer. It won’t taste garlicky at all as long as you (a) chop it, don’t crush it and (b) cook it till it’s mush in the olive oil. That way you get flavour instead of acridity. Elderly garlic tastes more sulphurous, and if it’s turning brown or powdery the stench will last for days.
When the garlic is soft, add chopped-up baby zucchini, still yelping, tiny squash, pearl-sized peas, miniature carrots, tiny artichoke hearts, thumbnail-sized cucumbers (don’t peel), juvenile beans, asparagus heads, pickling onions (peeled but not sliced – if you need to slice them they’re too big), quartered new potatoes…whatever you can get your hands on that’s young. For this recipe you need things soft and mild and sweet.
Seethe the whole lot as slowly as you can, stirring as little as you can without it sticking, for at least 30 minutes (though this depends on the amount of veg), until the veg are just starting to amalgamate but are still intact.
This can be served hot or lukewarm, and is good with almost anything, or by itself, or with hot fresh bread (probably the best accompaniment) or as a pasta sauce.
January 24
‘Mum, what smells?’ asked E. So I checked.
It’s a dead rat in the hall ceiling. At least in this weather it will soon desiccate. Dehydrated rat.
January 26
Four fat maggots inching their way to the bathroom, and the stink still lingers, a combination of sweet and musk. (You could almost imagine it sliced thinly on focaccia.) Swept up the maggots and opened the bathroom window wider.
Bryan swatted three flies in mid-air this evening. An Australian record? Bryan swats flies with concentration and passion, and is extraordinarily efficient.
February 2
Noel Wisbey was eating a peach as we drove past this afternoon, juice dripping down his chin. It has to be a Fragar. Noel says they’re his favourite peach.
They were Grandma’s favourite too. I remember her picking a Fragar off a tree, the peach still hot from the sun, with a blushed almost transparent skin, so large she had to hold it in both hands to bite it while the juice ran down her fingers and trickled along her arms, and we had to take her down to the creek to wash off the stickiness.
That, said Grandma, is what a peach used to be like.
A Fragar should sit in a bowl on the table and be admired, fat round and perfect and eaten when no other flavour might distract from its perfection. Fragar is an old variety. Like old roses, blushed and fragrant.
But a Fragar is a white-fleshed peach and the public expects yellow. ‘When you’re selling Fragars you have to sell yellow peaches too,’ says Noel. ‘A shop may take a pallet of Fragars – but they’ll have to have a pallet of yellows too. If a peach isn’t yellow, most customers will ignore it.’
February 3
Even the brown has faded on the hills now, as though the earth has been poured into bleached skulls with too blue sky behind. I asked Roger the Ranger (National Parks variety, now retired but the name has stuck) what the forecast was.
Roger is passionate about weather, and has worked out a long-range forecasting program for this area. He predicted an eighty-seven per cent probability of damn all; and for a moment I found myself furious with him, as if it was his fault the forecast was so bad. If he’d just tried to make it better…
The creek is hardly flowing now, though the pools will keep us and the animals going for months, as they did in the last drought (the pools shrank to weed-filled puddles, crammed with a hundred mountain ducks).
February 4
Clouds – high, grey and even – but no rain. Not even the smell of rain, as though the sky is laughing at us. The swimming hole is filling with algae, and the valley is full of the dull drumming of the pumps, pulling water from the creek and water table while it’s still there.
There were roos on the flat last night – maybe eight or ten of them. We could hear their thumps from the balcony. The roos only come down from the hills when it’s dry. And it is.
Pudge has taken to pushing the rubbish bin over and rolling it round and round the paving to attract our attention so we’ll come out and feed her. So we do. She’s an intelligent wombat. She’s trained us well.
February 9
Jenny and Trudi – my cousins – came down from Sydney late last night, driving along the track in the darkness, which takes courage for the uninitiated, and were promptly attacked by Pudge, who ran up to the car with glee, and butted their heels as they got out, yelling hip hip hip, which is wombat for something or other.
Trudi naturally assumed she was rabid or manic or both – and leapt back into the car. I grabbed Pudge and slung her over my shoulder (which at least kept her still, though another good T-shirt now stinks of wombat).
We spent this morning trout fishing; then up to the packing shed to buy peaches for J and T to take back to Sydney (we are again between ripe peach trees).
Ned was there, shirt off, shoes off, sitting back in his chair and enjoying the faint tonguing of the breeze. He showed Jenny and Trudi around the shed – the conveyor belts and defuzzers and cooler and waxing device and peaches everywhere, great barrels and boxes and neat stacked cartons. And, like E, Trudi couldn’t wait till we got home to eat her first peach; I think the two of them had eaten four by the time we rattled down our track.
The clouds were gathering over Monga this afternoon; but I don’t believe them.
February 10
Rain – so thick you can’t see through it. The girls left in almost zero visibility; and I walked back to the house dripping, with a grin on my face.
No Pudge last night. Pudge is no fool and won’t come out in the rain…not the first night at any rate. (I suddenly realise that this may be the first rain she’s ever known. Perhaps she’s waiting for us to turn the sprinkler off outside her hole.)
February 11
The grass must have grown an inch in the night. The flat is green, the gums have spread their leaves again so the hills are green as well. Pudge ventured out at eleven o’clock, hearing Bryan slam the door as he squelched down to the chooks; so we fed her oats and carrots in the shelter of the back door, then she went back to bed. (E wanted to bring her inside; but I pointed out her coat was thick and she was quite happy. Besides, she smells of wet fur.)
There was a leech on the bathroom floor this morning. I shoved it down the drainhole.
February 12
Still raining – soft rain now. Ned had his shirt on as we drove past the shed to the bus – Ned wearing a shirt is the first sign of a new season. The first of the late-season peaches are ready today too – though too wet to pick more than
two or three. Firm-fleshed ones, bottling peaches that stay firm in syrup all winter; but I prefer them fresh – peaches with bite.
The peach trees look thicker and greener than they did last week. Not just the dust washed off. They’re standing straighter, the leaves pointing out instead of drooping; and the creek is galloping across the rocks.
February 13
Sunlight when we woke up and a million birds yelling as though they’d been waiting to yell for days. The creek is flashing happily and swirling into corners; but it still wasn’t enough rain for a flood; and certainly not enough to replenish the water table.
But at least the valley’s green.
February 14
Treated ourselves to a new doormat today. The old one is much chewed (Pudge consoles herself with it when she’s waiting to be fed). When I lifted it, enough hair sifted out to knit another doormat. Or maybe another wombat.
Bought another case of peaches at the shed on the way back from the school bus; but even E’s appetite for peaches is almost gone.
February 16
‘In Spain and those hot regions they eat the [Love] Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt and oyle, but they yield very little nourishment to the body, and the same naught and corrupt.’
Year in the Valley Page 13
