August 2019 – MakeCookGrow.com

Two Ann CleevesThrillers and Blood Orange Sorbet

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ANN CLEEVES MURDER THRILLERS

Ann Cleeves, an English crime writer, has written more than 30 novels, including a series of thrillers set in the Shetland Islands. Several have been made into a television series filmed by BBC ONE featuring the main protagonist, Jimmy Perez. All are great viewing. Our most recent read, Wild Fire, was written in 2018 and is the last in the Shetland series. It would also make a great film. Cleeves has worked as a probation officer, cooked at a bird observatory and as as auxiliary coastguard and these interests are all apparent in her books.

This was a gripping murder thriller, with well developed characters and a clever plot. The descriptions of the surrounding landscape make me want to visit the Shetland Islands but only in summer!

Another murder thriller by Ann Cleeves, this time from the Vera series. Many of these stories have also been made into a television series by the English company, ITV. This story has more of Vera’s private and early life revealed in it as her father is involved in the plot. He was not particularly law abiding and not pleased when his daughter joined the police force. Again, a gripping, clever and entirely engaging story.

BLOOD ORANGE SORBET

This is a Blood Orange Sorbet, one of the many citrus treats we enjoy during the citrus season. It’s quite difficult to find blood oranges in Perth but the juice makes a very good sorbet.

Start by putting the bowl of an icecream maker in the freezer for 12 hours, or according to your machine.

To make the sorbet, make a sugar syrup by mixing 2 cups of sugar with 2 cups of water. Stir and dissolve the mixture in the microwave. Cook one minute, stir, mix another minute, stir then decide if the syrup needs more heating to completely dissolve the sugar.

Juice five blood oranges, plus a lemon and add to the syrup. Some recipes add zest, but we don’t, then chill the mixture.

With the paddle in place in the bowl, mix for about 12 minutes until the syrup is almost solid, tip into a container and put back in the freezer until you’re ready to eat it. Delicious.

( There is a range of Blood Orange Sorbet recipes online )

AND IN THE WINTER GARDEN

The first of the tulips. They’re gorgeous, but strangely they are blooming on very short stems.

I love arum lilies but they are considered a weed in Western Australia. I grow them in a contained bed where I can see the large, lush green leaves and lovely white flowers from our bedroom window.

The white irises have begun blooming. I have them in garden beds and in pots.

Monday, August 26th was INTERNATIONAL DOG DAY.

People and dogs have lived side by side for thousands of years and we celebrate this symbiotic relationship on 26th August.

Founded by author and dog behaviourist Colleen Paige, in 2004, not only to focus on our pet dogs but also consider abused and abandoned dogs and puppy mills.

The benefits of dog ownership are enormous. The use of dogs to assist blind, ill and anxious people is ever increasing. Dogs are popular visitors in hospitals and schools. They create social opportunities at the dog park, for themselves and their owners. And even when you’ve been together for years and years, they are still genuinely excited when you come home!

All dog shelters welcome volunteer helpers, money and donations of blankets, towels and sheets.

Our groodle, LOUIS.

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Making Natural Dyes and Lavender Hearts

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Last year I was nearly exhausted by the time Christmas arrived because I was making so many gifts right up until the Big Day! This year I am experimenting with a few things I can make long before the silly season starts so the week before Christmas is still fun.

I’ve been collecting and drying lavender and planned to make some lavender bags. I am experimenting with natural dyes, using 100% cotton ticking as the base fabric.

The first dye I tried was boiled avocado seeds and skins to make pink tones.

After the dye had cooled I soaked the cotton ticking in it for an hour then hung it out to dry. It is a pretty dusty pink colour.

Next I boiled rosemary twigs to make a yellow dye.

This dye is quite pale and not what I expected

This dye is made from onion skins and is a great orange colour. I used the skins from two brown onions and boiled then for fifteen minutes. This is a strong colour. The next day I boiled red onion skins to see if they resulted in a different colour. No, just the same!

I haven’t used fixers or mordants with any of these pieces I’ve dyed. They are only intended to be decorative.

From left to right, the basic cotton ticking, then the avocado dye (pink), the onion skin dye (orange) and the one on the right is the rosemary dye (pale yellow)

I cut a template of a heart shape then used this to cut shapes from all three pieces of dyed fabric.

Machine stitched around the heart shapes leaving a small gap to poke in the wadding and shake in the dried lavender. Clipped the edges. Turned it to the right side, using a scissor blade to poke the heart point out and ironed the heart shape. Clipped the pointy end off the heart so it sat better when turned right side out.

Stuffed the point of the heart and the top with wadding, then poured in dried lavender. I made a little funnel out of scrap paper to direct the lavender in to the middle of the heart. Later I discovered a kitchen funnel worked well, too. I sat the heart in a cup to pour in the dried lavender.

Cut the ribbon and then stitched a button where they crossed. When my parents left the farm my Mother gave me her many jars of buttons. When clothing was finally exhausted, she’d cut off all the buttons and keep them. She kept buckles and other sewing notions, too. I played with the buttons as a child and now I’ve re-used some of them on these lavender sachets.

Sweet smelling, pretty gifts ready for storing until needed.

INVENTORS MONTH

Consider the printing press, antibiotics, the internal combustion engine, the internet, electricity, sliced bread, safety pins and contact lenses: they were all invented by great thinkers and tinkerers and we benefit from them everyday.

August is INVENTORS MONTH. Time to consider and feel gratitude for the amazing range of inventions making our lives easier every day. So, pop the CORK from a BOTTLE of CHAMPAGNE, sit out in the sun on your CHAIR and take a few PHOTOS on your PHONE to celebrate.

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Decluttering, Making Draught Excluders and Going Down South

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DECLUTTERING and MAKING DRAUGHT EXCLUDERS

How do you dispose of things when you declutter? When I recently did a big, well overdue wardrobe declutter, almost everything went into the Church Charity Bin. This was because the clothes, shoes and handbags I was removing were all in good condition. They were work clothes and I’ve finally accepted I wasn’t going to wear them again. My clothes are far more casual now.

When we came back from living overseas for a few years, an entire household of sheets, blankets, quits, towels, pillows and tablecloths came back with us. Unsure what we’d need, I kept most things thinking I would sort and discard when our container of household goods from our previous house arrived. When that happened there was no time for a proper sort so the linen press bulged with a jumble of stuff!

This week, my husband and I emptied, sorted, refolded and restacked the linen press. We ended up with two huge bags of blankets, single bed sheets, pillows and towels to throw out. They looked faded and unloved after not being used for years. These bags were taken to the Dogs Refuge. I couldn’t go because I’d want to bring all the dogs home with me.

They rejected the pillows. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise! My mother really feels the cold and was complaining about the draughts coming in under three external doors.

I made her draught excluders and stuffed them with recycled polyester wadding from two of the pillows! There’s one thin one to put in the gutter of a sliding door and two sausage ones for two normal doors.

The first excluder is small and thin to push into the gutter of a sliding door.

I discovered the easiest way to poke the wadding into the excluders was using a old copper stick, or dolly, from the laundry. I don’t have a copper for washing but find this smooth, old stick so useful for so many jobs.

( A copper is a deep copper bowl built over a fire box. It is filled with water and a fire is lit under it to heat the water. When it is hot the clothes to be washed are immersed and agitated by the stick, before being rinsed, put through a mangle to remove water and hung out to dry. Coppers were used before we had washing machines.)

To make the two bigger ones, I traced around a mug to create four end pieces, then measured and cut two strips for the bodies.

Used the template lines to guide the stitches joining the ends to the body of the sausage, the clipped the edges before turning them right side out.

The linen press is tidy and logically stacked, the excess things have gone to the Dog Refuge and I’ve made my Mother three draught excluders. Now I just need to find out what to do with thousands of books. Text books, travel books, poetry, histories, biographies, fiction and non-fiction, collected over four generations.

GOING DOWN SOUTH

Last week we went to Australind to stay with my mother. The second day we were there, we all went to Busselton to visit her friend. After morning tea we left them to have a good chat and we went further south to Dunsborough, a well known holiday destination. It was a beautiful clear, sunny day and after a lovely wander around the shops we bought lunch and went down to the beach. Gorgeous.

This is Afternoon Tea Week. Afternoon Tea is a British tradition dating from the 1840s. Traditionally, fine china accompanies delicate sandwiches, scones with jam and cream and little cakes and pastries. Sounds wonderful. Start boiling the kettle now!

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Cooking, Mending and Reading.

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MAKING MARMALADE in the MICROWAVE

Using the abundance of citrus fruit to make chunky, delicious, quick marmalade. Try it!

Winter means citrus fruit and citrus fruit means marmalade. The specific microwave instructions are here.

Gathered a collection of citrus fruit and cut into chunks before processing until the skins were finely chopped. Added some finely diced preserved ginger.

Saved all the pips and some skins, rich in pectin, into this little muslin bag which was cooked with the fruit pulp. The marmalade set beautifully and the skins from the pectin bag were deliciously glazed and crystallized. They would be perfect chopped into cooking or used as cake decorations.

Grapefruit, lemon and kumquat marmalade with a tiny bit of ginger. The tulips are in a vase behind the bonsai, not growing out of it!

MAKING SHORTBREAD

Visiting my brother and S-I-L in Beverley, a country town two hours from Perth, taking the shortbread and marmalade I’d made. A lovely day in the country.

MENDING A MOHAIR BLANKET

This loosely woven mohair blanket is quite old and was showing signs of constant use, particularly evident from the number of pulled threads. It’s very warm and light. Greatly inspired by The Repair Shop, a BBCtv program running on local television, I spread the blanket out on the table and spent most of a day weaving the threads back, under, over, under, over using a blunt darning needle. Occasionally there was a tear or very thin, worn thread so I mended it with matched cotton thread. It looks new again!

READING

This fabulous book written by Marcus Binney features interiors designed by antipodean Anouska Hempel, who arrived in London in 1962. Her interiors are Oriental in style, which I really like, too. We brought back furniture and decorative pieces when we came back to Australia after we’d lived in China and I enjoy seeing how she incorporates pieces into her settings.

We’ve visited two hotels she decorated in London and one in Amsterdam. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing her own house, Cole Park and gardens and other interiors she has done, including their apartment in Mayfair, in this book. She has just decorated the Six Senses Duxton Hotel in Singapore, too, so that’s on my travel list now.

An inspiring book. I bought mine from Book Depository.

The last of the roses before they’re pruned and some camellias.

Dawn from the back door. A cold and crisp start turned into a wonderful, sunny day. Again.

Wonderful! Today is Book Lovers Day. Put down your screens and settle somewhere comfortable and enjoy a long read.

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Visiting Beverley, Western Australia

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This lovely Wheatbelt town is a two hour drive from our home. It is one of the early areas established in the West Australian colony. Land grants were first taken up in 1831 and the town was established in 1868.

The old well maintained buildings, some with great street art, house the usual supermarket, hardware supplies, pharmacy, cafes, a great dress shop, a bakery and art and craft shops and galleries, plus some shops selling old wares. It seems to support a vibrant arts and sporting community. Beverley is an easy drive from the city and an interesting way to spend a day in the country.

Last week, on a cool, clear sunny winters day, we visited family in Beverley. After lunch, we went for a wander along the wide, main street, Vincent Street. Many of the architecturally interesting facades from early development remain.

Famous for the Beverley Soaring Club, the largest club in WA, you can book a trip for a silent view from the sky.

The council publishes a detailed guidebook, Welcome to Beverley, full of useful information. It includes the plan for a short walking tour of the main street.

ROADS BOARD OFFICE. Built in 1908 and in use until 1961, this is now a private house.

OLD COURT HOUSE Designed by George Temple Poole and built in 1897, the courthouse was in use until 1990.

George Temple Poole, an Englishman, was born in Rome, where his parents were holidaying. After working in Ceylon and London, he was appointed Superintendent of Public Works for Western Australia in June 1885. He oversaw the design and construction of more than 200 buildings throughout Western Australia. Thirty four of these are listed by the National Trust and described as, ” essential to the heritage of Australia and must be kept.”

OLD POLICE STATION AND COTTAGES These Federation style cottages and Police Station, just off Vincent Street, were built in 1910 and restored by the National Trust in 2010.

OLD COUNCIL CHAMBERS Built 1898.

OLD BANK HOUSE 1907, Federation style, now a private residence.

FREEMASONS TAVERN Originally this building had wide verandas, typical of when it was build in 1886. It was re-built after a fire in 1908. Recently renovated.

BEVERLEY STATION AND PLATFORM THEATRE Built in 1886 and restored in 2006. Now a multipurpose cultural precinct and railway station. Like so many other areas of the town, it has a carefully clipped and maintained garden.

BEVERLEY POST OFFICE Still in use as a Post Office plus a newsagency, built in 1910 in the Federation style.

To the right of the Post Office is the ANZ BANK, built in 1909.

BEVERLEY OLD JUNIOR SCHOOL Designed by the famous West Australian architect, George Temple Poole and built in 1894. Typical red brick building with large windows, a school design repeated all over Western Australia.

On the way home, canola crops in flower.

Green countryside following good winter rains.

Grass trees, damaged in a previous bush fire, recovering well.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to all horses in the Southern Hemisphere for yesterday! Horse ages are standardized so the closer the horse is born to August the first, the older it is in its division. In the Northern Hemisphere, horses celebrate their birthdays’ on January the first. Hope you made a carrot cake for any equine friends you have and helped them celebrate by kicking up your heels.

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