G'Day,
Monday memories prompt site asks us to share a memory each week. This weeks suggestion was to write about a family member.
I choose more than one. I choose my Aunties and Uncles.
I have been lucky in my life to have quite a few family members whom I identify with. My Uncles and Aunties being amongst them.
My Dad's only sister My Aunty Marion whom I loved and whom I think I am a bit like. An earth mother. I hope so anyway. I have written about her on several occasions here in my Blog.
She lived on a 5 acre block on the river bank in a small town in the Hunter valley of New South Wales. My father's birthplace, Merriwa. A life style like that would be my choice if I ever could afford a bit of land and house of my own again. But really, the material things that remind us of passed loved ones are not the things we remember best about them. It is their personal attributes and influence that we try to follow by choice in our own lives.
I loved that she was the kind of person who could not turn away a person in need. That is something I have failed to accomplish, for fear of consequence.
I loved that she was a real worker. That is something that I think I have succeeded at, no matter how unpleasant the work attempted. Ethics and hard work.
She loved her plants and animals and rocks and walks and maybe I inherited those loves of mine from her.
I loved that she stayed in the one house for ever. Something I would love to be able to do, ah well my life is not finished yet is it. I guess that you could call that a yearning for stability. I am between two worlds on that one though. Wanting to explore my country as well as have that home base stability. I don't think she ever traveled much from her own local area during her life.
She influenced me with her jam and pickle making, I love to do that and I hate to see the things I have grown go to waste and want to preserve them. This past season I made fig jam, sweet mustard pickles, bread and butter pickles from cucumber and saved herb and flower seeds to replant next spring when it warms up again. All from the produce in my garden.
Other Aunts and Uncles.
Uncle Bill for his quiet strength and family values.
Uncle Wal for his adventure, quirkiness and love.
Aunty Joan for her acceptance of me and her sociability.
Uncle Roger for his stoicism.
Uncle Charlie for his sense of humor and cuteness, my Dad's twin.
Aunty Marg for her amiability.
Love them all, and others whom I didn't get to spend as much time with due to distance or other reasons. Uncles and Aunties are a definitive influence in our lives. I hope one day I might be thought of as that by some of my family.
And the world turns.
Bye. Love Linda.
Monday, 16 May 2011
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Memories on Monday "Food"
G'Day,
Monday Memories requests we write about Food.
Yep,
have that ,
done that,
over done that,
need that,
enjoy that.
Too much food.
It shows.
A memory of special food came to my mind of when my parents took us to Singapore. I was 13 when we moved there and we stayed for just under a year and a half. My Dad was in the Australian army and the year was 1972. It was just after he returned from Vietnam. We found out later that a trip on active duty was a pre-requisite to a posting to Singapore and he had wanted us girls to experience another lifestyle and country. We had lived in Malaysia as babies but of course had no memory of that time. So off we went. I was christened in Penang, but that is another story.
Singapore to us was a gourmet paradise. So many wonderful foods to try, and we did! We had some friends amongst the local community and they introduced us to wonderful food. Food from the night markets and street side stalls. We were warned that those places were unsafe and we should not eat food from them. But... we did and loved it without any ill effects. The satay stalls along the waterfront across from the Padang. Oh Yum, hot spicy and delicious. The market down on Orchard road that was in a big car park, only at night, full of great stalls of all kinds, and all cooked on site in front of you while you waited. The steamboat, cooked in a simmering silvery stockpot in the middle of a rickety table on fold up chairs, in a skinny crowded lane way with light bulbs hanging over head.
There was a big open air eating area near our friend's flat. We often went there for noodles or soup, and I always got sugar cane juice. That was crushed through a thing like an old fashioned washing machine wringer. I tasted it many years later in Sydney and thought it was foul stuff, but when we lived there I loved it. Ricky Wong was our hosts name, and my sister went out with him for a while. Anyway his family adopted us and took us lots of places when we lived there. They would send their driver in a big black Mercedes around to chauffeur my sister and I when we went out. I remember sinking down into it's soft leather seats. Talk about hospitality. Ricky's elder brother Anthony became my big brother, hehe. His Mum and sister used to ooh and ahh over my whiter than white skin and pinch it. Not the sort of skin a teenage girl wants, I never could tan, but to them it was a novelty. Lovely times to remember.
Ricky and Anthony took us to a street vendor stall once and we tasted real birds nest, not the fried noodle type that you usually get called bird's nest. Real bird's nest is just that, birds nest. It is a particular type of bird that makes it's nest from it's dried saliva, very rare and expensive.
I remember once Anthony took me to a huge banquet with him and I was shocked and horrified to learn there was a room out the back of the restaurant. When you were too full you went out there to vomit so you could go back and have more to eat. And No! I didn't use it. The trick was to have just a tiny taste of each course offered and there were many courses. I think there were 20 something. It was the custom to eat and enjoy food offered by your host and to not do so was an insult to them. Also it was a compliment to burp at the table because that meant that you were enjoying your food and also that you left the scraps on the table cloth and made a mess because that meant that you were enjoying your food too. Those table cloths were snowy white and perfectly starched.
We lived in Changi when we were there, in the area that is now part of the Singapore airport. They started building that after we left there.
Just a few blocks from our house and around the corner was the infamous Changi prison. The same one my poor Uncle Roger was held as a prisoner during WW2, before being sent to Burma to work on the Thai Burma railway. He survived and came home, many didn't, he was never a well man due to illness from that part of his life though. I went to a party in there once. Inside the prison. The guards used to live on site. The party we went to was one of the guards children. Dancing and loud 70's teen music.
Anyway, we would hop on the bus and go down to Changi village and there was a curry house type shop down there that we loved. Mum would send us down there to get take away curry. When we went to the village to shop ,we used to go to that curry place and get a bowl of curry gravy and a paratha and tear bits of it up and dip it into the gravy and eat it. We got some looks off the locals until they got used to seeing us around. Or sometimes just have that paratha with lemon and sugar on it. Paratha are India bread type things, sort of like a buttery flaky big pancake, cooked on the griddle. Changi village does not exist anymore. I remember the little wharf there too with those old boats that went out and came back each day with their catch. They didn't look very seaworthy.
And the markets. We would go there to buy our vegetables and fruit. Smells and sights and sounds and colors and, and, and, wonderful. We would buy rambutans, lychees, pawpaws and jackfruits straight from the farmer.
Live animals at the markets were slaughtered on the spot and taken home with you , many didn't have refrigeration so it had to be fresh. Live chickens and other poultry, seafoods, we used to buy big live crabs and take them home and our Amah would cook for us.
There was, (reputedly though it may have been a story to shock us girls), a place in China town where you could go and eat monkey brains while the monkey was still kicking. Ew! Well if it was only a story to scare us , it worked.
Dad , Mum and us girls had a favorite restaurant that was down by the beach at Changi. It was called the South China Seas restaurant. It had great food and was open on three sides, under a big tin roof . We loved to go there and sit by the water and watch the sunset and have our meals. They had the best chilli crab there. I remember that we always had chilli crab. Mmmmmm Yummy. Then we would walk along the beach. The beach being just a narrow strip of sand littered with coconut trees and their associated debris, but it was still a beach and quite close to home for us to get to, a short taxi ride.
I loved to go down to Changi beach and had some friends at the kampong there. I went out with a boy called Ringo, a Malay boy and when I went to his house one day his mum was all dressed up because I was coming and served us tea and tiny cakes on a decorated tray. I was honored. Ringo died in a motor bike accident at the age of just 17 when I was there. I have a lifelong fear or motor bikes and never got on his bike with him. He used to follow the bus I was on and meet me where I got off the bus. Hehe. We would go across the road to the beach and have coconut drinks straight from the coconut. Little boys would climb the trees and cut them down. Then the vendor would chop off the top with a machete, mush it around a bit to cut some of the soft pulp inside then serve it straight from the shell with a straw sticking out the top. Then we would hire little canoe boats and float on the water in them. I loved that. I still love canoes. I remember the sun beaming down and the little canoe, floating, rocking gently with me laying down inside it. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
About a block and a half from our house was another kampong that had a funny little shop. I used to go in there and get the home made ice blocks and tins of jam that was made with eggs and orange and had a strange kind of creamy texture. I guess that is not there anymore either.
I also remember buying these funny pickled sweet and sour apricots from street vendors that I loved but they always made me cough, they almost took my breath away, god knows what preservative they were made with. Another strange snack, bought in little packets, was dried salted cuttle fish that you could chew on for ages and made your breath stink, but tasted very good. I wonder if I would like that if I tasted it now I am an adult. Hehe.
And the chewing gum was called chiclets. And the soft drinks came out of a bottle and were poured into a plastic bag at the shop, they kept the bottle, with a plastic pull string at the top which when pulled shut acted as handles, with a straw sticking out the top.
We also ate dried salted sunflower and pumpkin seeds for snacks. Don't know if I am spelling this right, but we called them kwachi seeds. Good because you had to shell them as you ate them so they took a long while to eat.
Sometimes while we were waiting for the school bus in the mornings an old man would come riding along on his bicycle with a tin box type thing on the side of it and we would buy little bundles of rice, topped with some type of salty dried fish stuff and wrapped up in banana leaves to form a little triangle thing. They were yummy too, but very hot with quite a dose of chilli in them. We took them to school for our lunch. Another old man also came around on his bike selling hot buttered corn on the cob from the back of it. We often bought that too.
At the cricket club in the city they made big platters of fried rice topped with chilli, so so hot, burn your mouth out. Hehe. But we ate all that stuff then. I still have fads every now and then for things with chilli. We often went there with Dad when he played cricket at the Padang and another club in town that I can't remember the name of. It was a life time ago. Singapore has modernised and changed so much since those days.
When we came back to Australia there was Asian food available but nothing of the quality that I had experienced in Singapore. Of course now things have improved. Cities having their own areas where you can get great Asian foods. When we came back to australia we went to visit Wagga (a country town) and were taken to Choy's, the only chinese restaurant in the whole of Wagga. It was very popular and well patronized by the locals, but it served what I came to know as Australian Chinese food. Dumbed down for Australian palates. Nothing like the real stuff. The Malay, Chinese, Indian, Nonya food of Singapore.
We have caught up I am pleased to say, in many ways. In and around the westfield shopping area at nearby Woden town center where we live now, are a plethora of multi cultural foods to be experienced. Very good.
That's all for now.
Bye.
Love Linda.
Monday Memories requests we write about Food.
Yep,
have that ,
done that,
over done that,
need that,
enjoy that.
Too much food.
It shows.
A memory of special food came to my mind of when my parents took us to Singapore. I was 13 when we moved there and we stayed for just under a year and a half. My Dad was in the Australian army and the year was 1972. It was just after he returned from Vietnam. We found out later that a trip on active duty was a pre-requisite to a posting to Singapore and he had wanted us girls to experience another lifestyle and country. We had lived in Malaysia as babies but of course had no memory of that time. So off we went. I was christened in Penang, but that is another story.
Singapore to us was a gourmet paradise. So many wonderful foods to try, and we did! We had some friends amongst the local community and they introduced us to wonderful food. Food from the night markets and street side stalls. We were warned that those places were unsafe and we should not eat food from them. But... we did and loved it without any ill effects. The satay stalls along the waterfront across from the Padang. Oh Yum, hot spicy and delicious. The market down on Orchard road that was in a big car park, only at night, full of great stalls of all kinds, and all cooked on site in front of you while you waited. The steamboat, cooked in a simmering silvery stockpot in the middle of a rickety table on fold up chairs, in a skinny crowded lane way with light bulbs hanging over head.
There was a big open air eating area near our friend's flat. We often went there for noodles or soup, and I always got sugar cane juice. That was crushed through a thing like an old fashioned washing machine wringer. I tasted it many years later in Sydney and thought it was foul stuff, but when we lived there I loved it. Ricky Wong was our hosts name, and my sister went out with him for a while. Anyway his family adopted us and took us lots of places when we lived there. They would send their driver in a big black Mercedes around to chauffeur my sister and I when we went out. I remember sinking down into it's soft leather seats. Talk about hospitality. Ricky's elder brother Anthony became my big brother, hehe. His Mum and sister used to ooh and ahh over my whiter than white skin and pinch it. Not the sort of skin a teenage girl wants, I never could tan, but to them it was a novelty. Lovely times to remember.
Ricky and Anthony took us to a street vendor stall once and we tasted real birds nest, not the fried noodle type that you usually get called bird's nest. Real bird's nest is just that, birds nest. It is a particular type of bird that makes it's nest from it's dried saliva, very rare and expensive.
I remember once Anthony took me to a huge banquet with him and I was shocked and horrified to learn there was a room out the back of the restaurant. When you were too full you went out there to vomit so you could go back and have more to eat. And No! I didn't use it. The trick was to have just a tiny taste of each course offered and there were many courses. I think there were 20 something. It was the custom to eat and enjoy food offered by your host and to not do so was an insult to them. Also it was a compliment to burp at the table because that meant that you were enjoying your food and also that you left the scraps on the table cloth and made a mess because that meant that you were enjoying your food too. Those table cloths were snowy white and perfectly starched.
We lived in Changi when we were there, in the area that is now part of the Singapore airport. They started building that after we left there.
Just a few blocks from our house and around the corner was the infamous Changi prison. The same one my poor Uncle Roger was held as a prisoner during WW2, before being sent to Burma to work on the Thai Burma railway. He survived and came home, many didn't, he was never a well man due to illness from that part of his life though. I went to a party in there once. Inside the prison. The guards used to live on site. The party we went to was one of the guards children. Dancing and loud 70's teen music.
Anyway, we would hop on the bus and go down to Changi village and there was a curry house type shop down there that we loved. Mum would send us down there to get take away curry. When we went to the village to shop ,we used to go to that curry place and get a bowl of curry gravy and a paratha and tear bits of it up and dip it into the gravy and eat it. We got some looks off the locals until they got used to seeing us around. Or sometimes just have that paratha with lemon and sugar on it. Paratha are India bread type things, sort of like a buttery flaky big pancake, cooked on the griddle. Changi village does not exist anymore. I remember the little wharf there too with those old boats that went out and came back each day with their catch. They didn't look very seaworthy.
And the markets. We would go there to buy our vegetables and fruit. Smells and sights and sounds and colors and, and, and, wonderful. We would buy rambutans, lychees, pawpaws and jackfruits straight from the farmer.
Live animals at the markets were slaughtered on the spot and taken home with you , many didn't have refrigeration so it had to be fresh. Live chickens and other poultry, seafoods, we used to buy big live crabs and take them home and our Amah would cook for us.
There was, (reputedly though it may have been a story to shock us girls), a place in China town where you could go and eat monkey brains while the monkey was still kicking. Ew! Well if it was only a story to scare us , it worked.
Dad , Mum and us girls had a favorite restaurant that was down by the beach at Changi. It was called the South China Seas restaurant. It had great food and was open on three sides, under a big tin roof . We loved to go there and sit by the water and watch the sunset and have our meals. They had the best chilli crab there. I remember that we always had chilli crab. Mmmmmm Yummy. Then we would walk along the beach. The beach being just a narrow strip of sand littered with coconut trees and their associated debris, but it was still a beach and quite close to home for us to get to, a short taxi ride.
I loved to go down to Changi beach and had some friends at the kampong there. I went out with a boy called Ringo, a Malay boy and when I went to his house one day his mum was all dressed up because I was coming and served us tea and tiny cakes on a decorated tray. I was honored. Ringo died in a motor bike accident at the age of just 17 when I was there. I have a lifelong fear or motor bikes and never got on his bike with him. He used to follow the bus I was on and meet me where I got off the bus. Hehe. We would go across the road to the beach and have coconut drinks straight from the coconut. Little boys would climb the trees and cut them down. Then the vendor would chop off the top with a machete, mush it around a bit to cut some of the soft pulp inside then serve it straight from the shell with a straw sticking out the top. Then we would hire little canoe boats and float on the water in them. I loved that. I still love canoes. I remember the sun beaming down and the little canoe, floating, rocking gently with me laying down inside it. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
About a block and a half from our house was another kampong that had a funny little shop. I used to go in there and get the home made ice blocks and tins of jam that was made with eggs and orange and had a strange kind of creamy texture. I guess that is not there anymore either.
I also remember buying these funny pickled sweet and sour apricots from street vendors that I loved but they always made me cough, they almost took my breath away, god knows what preservative they were made with. Another strange snack, bought in little packets, was dried salted cuttle fish that you could chew on for ages and made your breath stink, but tasted very good. I wonder if I would like that if I tasted it now I am an adult. Hehe.
And the chewing gum was called chiclets. And the soft drinks came out of a bottle and were poured into a plastic bag at the shop, they kept the bottle, with a plastic pull string at the top which when pulled shut acted as handles, with a straw sticking out the top.
We also ate dried salted sunflower and pumpkin seeds for snacks. Don't know if I am spelling this right, but we called them kwachi seeds. Good because you had to shell them as you ate them so they took a long while to eat.
Sometimes while we were waiting for the school bus in the mornings an old man would come riding along on his bicycle with a tin box type thing on the side of it and we would buy little bundles of rice, topped with some type of salty dried fish stuff and wrapped up in banana leaves to form a little triangle thing. They were yummy too, but very hot with quite a dose of chilli in them. We took them to school for our lunch. Another old man also came around on his bike selling hot buttered corn on the cob from the back of it. We often bought that too.
At the cricket club in the city they made big platters of fried rice topped with chilli, so so hot, burn your mouth out. Hehe. But we ate all that stuff then. I still have fads every now and then for things with chilli. We often went there with Dad when he played cricket at the Padang and another club in town that I can't remember the name of. It was a life time ago. Singapore has modernised and changed so much since those days.
When we came back to Australia there was Asian food available but nothing of the quality that I had experienced in Singapore. Of course now things have improved. Cities having their own areas where you can get great Asian foods. When we came back to australia we went to visit Wagga (a country town) and were taken to Choy's, the only chinese restaurant in the whole of Wagga. It was very popular and well patronized by the locals, but it served what I came to know as Australian Chinese food. Dumbed down for Australian palates. Nothing like the real stuff. The Malay, Chinese, Indian, Nonya food of Singapore.
We have caught up I am pleased to say, in many ways. In and around the westfield shopping area at nearby Woden town center where we live now, are a plethora of multi cultural foods to be experienced. Very good.
That's all for now.
Bye.
Love Linda.
Monday, 9 May 2011
Sunday Scribblings "May"
G'Day,Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is "May". Well! That's my middle name.
My sisters were both born in the month of may.That makes it a significant month, doesn't it?
Plus in my part of the world, the month of may heralds autumn.
These few photos were taken late last week around my own back yard.
The above picture is of the nasturtiums I planted in my vegetable garden. Over the last few days they have withered from the first frosts of the season. I planted them as companions to the veges, but at this present moment have forgotten their particular use. But I really did plant them for... um? Can't remember.
I am watching a show at the moment on ABC talking about IQ and race. I used to get high scores when I was young with those tests, believe it or not. Mine has dropped with age, I am sure. Lol.
May is mother's day and mother's day in Australia is accompanied by beautiful chrysanthemums. These brilliant gold ones are flowering merrily at the moment in my back yard. I didn't plant them , so I can't take credit, but they are still lovely. There are a bunch of them right in front of me now on the desk.
May is autumn and with that comes harvest of the last summer growing vegetables from my garden. I grew great butternut pumpkins this year. However the original owner of this house treated his soil, it sure was great. The biggest ones must weigh 6 kgs or more.
The bright sunlit leaves on this big tree brighten my day, it drops mess all over our cars when we park out the front underneath its branches. The seed pods roll under my feet when I walk there and are quite a hazard. But it sure is pretty isn't it. Canberra is known for it's autumn colour. In the summer time, this tree gives shade and shelter and in the winter it lets the sun shine through. I think it is one of the maples, is it?
Over the last week the temperatures have been dropping dramatically towards wintertime. The wind was cold all day today when I was working around the yard. I cut back the strawberries and worked on tidying the potted plants,and trimmed and tied the espaliered pears tree on the back fence. I do enjoy filling my lungs with the cooler crisp air of autumn, which is more pleasant than the hot dry air of high summer isn't it. Each season holds its own pleasures.
May your May be lovely,
Where ever you May live.
Cheers.
Linda May.
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Sunday Scribblings "Cake"
G'day,
Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is "Cake".
I am sitting here eating my breakfast as I type this. Wondering.
When will it be your turn
when will you get to eat your cake again.
Weighted down by responsibility and duty
That nobody else wants to have to comply to
the wheel turns slowly
if it spun any faster you would fall off the edge
So you wait for the circle to return to you
Sometimes I feel like I have spent my whole life pandering to everybody's needs except my own.
When will it be my turn.
Or is that just life in general.
In my case shut up and put up.
Bye
Love Linda
Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is "Cake".
I am sitting here eating my breakfast as I type this. Wondering.
When will it be your turn
when will you get to eat your cake again.
Weighted down by responsibility and duty
That nobody else wants to have to comply to
the wheel turns slowly
if it spun any faster you would fall off the edge
So you wait for the circle to return to you
Sometimes I feel like I have spent my whole life pandering to everybody's needs except my own.
When will it be my turn.
Or is that just life in general.
In my case shut up and put up.
Bye
Love Linda
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