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Dubrovnik or King’s Landing?

14 Friday Nov 2014

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Whilst in Dubrovnik we stayed in the old city. It’s like stepping back in time. It is a walled city and a fortress with cobbled stone streets, towers, a town square, churches and lot of friendly cats. It’s also where much of Game of Thrones is filmed. Dubrovnik is ‘Kings Landing’. This was a peculiar coincidence as I had just finished marking several essays on transmedia storytelling for a film course I taught at university. Many of my students were huge GoT fans and used the series as a case study for their final essay. It was great reading them because the essays showed a genuine enthusiasm for the topic and that makes teaching a pleasure.

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The city itself is breathtakingly beautiful. It is majestic while still being warm and inviting. Some ancient walled cities are cold and gloomy, but Dubrovnik has a lightness about it. Maybe this has something to do with the light coloured stone that the buildings are made from, or the way the sun seems to bath the squares and towers. I particularly love its narrow curving ally ways and its steep stone stairs and the many charming restaurants and cafes that fill them.

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We had some wonderful food—homely and comforting. At a restaurant called Kopun we had lentil soup, pasta rugusa, roasted capone (young rooster with orange and figs), and barley vegetable risotto. It was at the top of a long stretch of stairs, we ate alfresco and a cat circled us the whole time hoping to get in on the action.

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Last Sunday we climbed the wall and walked the perimeter of the city. Looking in on the city the sight of tightly packed three and four storied builds and the cluster of red roofs brought to life the image of a bustling 13century city. Looking out toward the port I could also see how old Dubrovnik was it was a stronghold against invading forces. Its narrow port would make invading ships clearly visible from the wall and its towers. This however was of no use when the heritage-listed city came under attack in the 1990s from the Serbian army who bombed the city with shells from the hill above. Thankfully the city was repairable and survived.

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Making the most of your gifts

21 Thursday Nov 2013

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Whenever my mother received a bunch of carnations she would pinch out the green shoots and plant them in the garden. Within a few months they had turned into small plants and soon after flowers would follow. My parent’s garden was always full of plants but I never saw them buying any of them or going to a nursery. It was always a matter of exchanging seeds with other Italians or taking a cutting and propagating it. There was something miraculous about this because it was making something out of almost nothing. I remember being enchanted by the idea of propagation and would pinch new shoots from plants on the way home from school and try to grow them. I found it wasn’t that hard and had a lot of success. I still love the idea, but pushed for time, I often end up buying seedlings off the shelf. However, a few years ago a friend gave me a small pot of ornamental indoor lilies. When they died off I dug the bulbs into the garden and that small pot has become around 50 plants and every spring they pop up underneath the mango tree and put on a show.

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Bob are coming

24 Friday Sep 2010

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‘Bob’ the Croatian word for broad beans. That is how we refer to them in our household following my partner’s heritage. They’ve been flowering for about a month. I’ve been squatting in amongst them and anxiously checking them daily for about two weeks for a sign of the pods. I’ve been watching the bees pollinate the flowers. Poppet watches me watching the plants. I asked my mother-in-law, who has watched them grow all her life, to give me some assurance that they would appear. She did. And now here they are bursting through the flowers. I am so excited. Now I’m going to watch them grow daily. It’s a little insane I know, but its satisfying too.

Spring is Here!

03 Friday Sep 2010

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So, in the last post I announced that I was back and then I vanished. Sorry, for misleading you. I’ve just been crazy busy. I won’t bore you with the details because hey who isn’t busy?  However, while I haven’t managed to blog I have managed to do a bit of digging, planting and weeding and the garden is doing well. I took a few quick snaps this afternoon.

This is my first crop of carrots–ever! They should be ready in 3 to 4 weeks.

My Garlic is just about ready to pick.


The remainder of my spring onions have come to seed. They have been overgrown and inedible for over a month but I didn’t pull them up just so I could watch them flower. I love onion flowers they are so light and delicate.

My Broad Beans have flowered and are ready to fruit. I love them raw so they may not make it to the stove.

My Lime tree is absolutely covered in flowers so we are going to have another bumper crop of limes this summer. I’m looking forward to those G&Ts.

Cos Lettuce, so easy to grow.

Rosemary sprigs waiting for that spring lamb.

Celery. I leave it in the ground and pick the stalks as I need them. There’s me in background.

Planting Broad Beans At Last!

21 Monday Jun 2010

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Every winter my husband and I head out to buy the best Broad Beans at ‘Franks’, our favourite little fruit and vegetable shop in Haberfield . The only problem is that all the other Broad Bean lovers in Sydney must also know that Frank sells the tenderest in town. They can run out quickly on a Saturday. We’ve missed out on more than one occasion. You can find them in other shops but the problem is that they are overgrown and tasteless. I have the same problem with fennel. I’ve seen fennel that’s almost the size of a football it so overgrown. Horrible tasteless and fibrous stuff. Now that I have a little garden, this year I finally got to plant my own Broad Beans. I planted them a couple of weeks ago and they are fast growers. They’ve just started to climb and hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be picking my own.

Broad Beans were a staple in my dad’s garden. Although he only planted a few rows every year they seemed to yield a truckload. There was always a time in the season where they were so abundant that we ate them every few days. My dad picked them young when they were still tender and sweet. My mother loved eating them raw with fresh crusty bread, olives and hard cheese. We would get stuck into them at lunch time and by the end of the meal we had a huge pile of empty pods. I still eat them like this when I can get them fresh. She would also saute them with onions in olive oil and a little water. Just before they were cooked she would drop in half a dozen freshly gathered eggs and poach them in the mix. This is still one of my favourite meals. Its a very simple peasant dish but I adore it.  Its not just the flavours and textures that I love, its that it keeps me in touch with my humble peasant Sicilian background in such a basic, everyday way.

Soft Roasted Vegetables For a Tender Palate

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

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I had some serious dental surgery last week and I’ve only been able to eat soft pappy food since. So I’m trying to come up with interesting and healthy soft food. I roasted these vegetables a few days ago in lots of olive oil until they were so soft you could chew them with gums alone. I tossed them together to make a warm salad and then added some more olive oil. I scoff when I’m watching a cooking show and they suggest using a drizzle of olive oil to cook with, or worse still a splash. The cooking classes on Biggest Loser went even further with a spray of oil–which is basically a mist. How can food cooked in a mist of oil have any flavour? We Italians have other ideas when it comes to cooking with olive oil–the drizzle can easily turn into a downpour or even a deluge. People often ask me how I get my pasta sauce so sweet and yummy. Don’t be stingy and use lots of olive oil I tell them.

Ravenous Little Caterpillars

08 Tuesday Jun 2010

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Its been a while since my last post. The heavy rain over the last couple of weeks has kept me out of my lovely little garden. In the mean time my poor Cavello Nero (an Italian dark Kale) has been ravaged by caterpillars. Not using any chemicals in the garden means that sometimes the bugs take over and I lose some plants. It’s mainly green leafy vegetables that I’ve have problems with. I pick the moth eggs off the back of the leaves as often as I can and I squash the little caterpillars when I find them. However, as you can see by the photo below they are very good at camouflaging themselves. It is like a war, and if my efforts wane for just a few days the caterpillars win.

Basil days are over

07 Friday May 2010

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Last Friday the weather turned cold, windy and rainy. I decided I should pick the last of my basil before it got damaged by the cold wind. With a plastic grocery bag next to me I stood out in the drizzling rain and chopped away. Before long the bag was overflowing. Unbelievable!

To quench Poppet’s love of pesto over the winter months I made a massive supply, divided it into plastic tubs and froze it. Lets see how it holds up. I’ve been wanting to post the photo of the last batch of basil for a few days now, but I came down with a virus last Sunday and haven’t been up to it. I wonder if getting ill had anything to do picking basil in the rain?

So what do I do with all those herbs growing in the garden?

28 Wednesday Apr 2010

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I’m always on the look out for recipes that allow me to use some of those yummy fresh herbs from the garden. Monday night I decided to try George Calombaris’ ‘Eggplant and tomato bake’. Yes that’s George from Masterchef–one of my favourite television programs. His recipe has copious amounts of parsley and oregano, so it was a perfect reason to raid the garden. He uses dried oregano but I’ve got so much in the garden I used fresh instead. Because mine was fresh I used about 3 times as much as the dried tbls spoon recommended by George. This recipe requires a bit of preparation but it’s worth it. It is the best stuffed eggplant recipe I’ve tried. The stuffing was unbelievably light and full of flavour. The quarter cup of finely chopped parsley lifted the whole dish and gave it a super fresh taste. I think it might even be healthy! What a bonus. It’s definitely one of those dishes you could easily eat too much of. It does have quite a bit of onion in it, which is fine with me, but it did give my partner a bit of heart burn that night. I’m going to make it next time I have a mix of vegetarian and carnivores over for dinner because I reckon the meat eaters will love it too. I’m dying to make it again and am salivating at the thought of it. If anyone wants the recipe let me know and I’ll post it.

A Bouquet of Oregano

24 Saturday Apr 2010

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I sometimes think oregano is a little underrated. Popular cooking shows seem to focus on basil when featuring Italian cooking but I remember oregano playing a larger role in my mum’s cooking. Oregano is a must in both pizza and pasta sauce. However, the most interesting way I remember my mother using it was with a barbeque. She would pick a bunch of the longest and bushiest stems and tie them into a bouquet. She would then dip the bouquet into a marinade of olive oil, crushed garlic and freshly squeezed lemon juice and brush the meat while barbecuing. Her method meant that the meat was delicately infused with the flavours of the marinade and not overwhelmed by it.

My oregano is growing like crazy in the garden. It’s a revelation as I’d always grown it in a pot. Now, in the ground, it’s spreading like lawn. I have to keep cutting it back so it doesn’t take over. We gave a bunch to Poppet’s day care the other day and the cook was really pleased because she was making Jambalaya for lunch and said she would use the oregano. Wow, what great lunch for the kids I thought. I asked Poppet what he had for lunch that night and he said ‘Ginger Bread Man’, which is his standard answer to that question.