Blog ideas from a weekend walk

"When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder." Tom Hodgkinson

You've probably noticed that I have been a bit uninspired of late, so this weekend I decided that, on my ordinary everyday walk I would pay special attention to things that might inspire a blog post. And I would take a photograph of the triggering thing.

This is what I found - I think I have counted correctly - 43 photographs, one of which had two items in it, well maybe more. We shall see.

The first photograph above is my favourite photograph from today, which is such a gorgeous day. It took me four attempts to get the photograph. Bees don't stay still for long, so I just pointed and hoped. A harbinger of spring, and the fruit to come, as photographed elsewhere. But the bees were in just one of those trees, which is slightly odd. And perhaps something to investigate. Beautiful as these ideas are however I have covered them all before in various guises, I should also note that I forgot to take a photograph of the bee hives in my neighbour's garden to complete the bee theme.

So what else? In no particular order - just how the photographs appear on my desktop. Weeds.

Also written about before, either individually, or in a group. On the left oxalis which is rampant in our garden. Our 'lawns' are really oxalis. You can eat the leaves - maybe the flowers too, and I do think they are pretty. On the right a weed that tends to appear in the overgrown rough gutters on the side of our roads around here. I don't know what it is, but it sort of looks like horseradish to me. And if I dared I could dig it up and check it out. The leaves look eatable too, but I guess it would be somewhat dangerous to try. I saw a lone dandelion too but didn't take a photo because I thought I would see more.

And here is a mushroom. I don't know what kind or whether it is poisonous, and it's not really the time of year for them. Well there hasn't been enough rain I suspect.

They are lovely to photograph, so I took the photo, but I have definitely done mushrooms in one way or another many times. Not just from the foraging point of view, but also, of course, for the foodie aspect. They seem to becoming a meat substitute for many vegetarians these days. And doubtless they will crop up again sometime.

And maybe I should add this photograph to the weed group, because here I am talking massive damage done to trees around here by deer - a feral - i.e weed-like animal. And you can eat them too. Although we don't very much here in Australia. The local council says it is culling some of them, but they are obviously still around. They have attacked my very nascent olive trees - almost down to the ground.

I did see some rabbits too, but the rabbits are far too fast to photograph. They disappear into the bushes. Every time we come home and drive through the gate, we see several scattering in all directions.

Both deer and rabbits - and indeed other feral animals have been written about before however. So no inspiration there. Just mildly interesting photographs.

Ditto for non feral wildlife - ducks - there are lots around here, and we all love to see the ducklings. Kangaroos too. I think that sign was put up on the busiest road in my very local area, after the death of a kangaroo along the road. Ducks and kangaroo are eatable of course, and I've talked about them before too.

Still on animals - an example of the painted Eltham chooks, to represent the chooks that are kept here and there around here. In fact I did see some, but they were too far away to photograph, and the goat on the same property almost was as well - and his companions certainly were. It's an odd house - on the mainish road, with the pretty ordinary house built about 30 years ago right at the back of the property, to which nothing else has been done, except building a small fenced area for the goats, who otherwise wander the property and a caged area for the chooks, who also wander around during the day. Interesting but all talked about before.

The last item above is not a real animal of course, and so it could be talked about in its guise as a Christmas ornament of some kind - and a very weird one at that, or it could be seen as a representative of the pig - food for the whole world almost, except those who abhor it for religious reasons. So many things you can say about pigs, and pork, and I have said some of them, but I'm sure there is more.

It's winter and so the few vegetable gardens that I pass are somewhat unproductive at the moment. But I did see the odd water tank and signs that recycled water was in use. And I don't think I've ever really done anything on irrigation, so that's a possibility. Lavender - lovely though it is has been done by me. It's a beautiful flavour for things like crème brulée. Fruit trees in winter mode with the skeleton for the nets that will be cast over the top to protect the fruit from our wide range of Australian pests. Possibly one could concoct something from that.

Gardening - my big failure in life. And to demonstrate that fact here are the very last remains of a perfectly good pomegranate that was growing outside our front door. The tree is pretty old, but is still very small and does not bear much fruit. This year it had two pomegranates, one of which I almost saved, but it's still sitting in the fridge unused and has very probably gone off. This one didn't even get picked, but then I think it had been attacked by something - birds, possums ... I think it's too high for the rabbits, and maybe that's why I didn't pick it. But I could have protected it with a plastic bag or something as it grew. A demonstration of my catastrophic gardening skills. Although I did just pick a big bunch of my parsley for my daughter-in-law.

Still on gardening. A compost heap in which some potatoes (I think) are growing, bird shit - on which the fortunes of Nairu were built, wombat poo - another example of excrement to nourish the soil, and a somewhat battered green recycling bin in which one can just glimpse some twigs. Fodder for the council's recycling efforts - compost for the parks. I haven't really done a lot on this kind of topic, so maybe there's something there. And why don't we eat wombats? Did the Aborigines eat wombats? They're pretty big after all - and meaty looking.

Here's something a bit different. Amongst the pebbles in our drive, and here and there on the unmade roads as well, one comes across small, sometimes rather largeish pieces of rock which to my untutored eye could be marble. An igneous, crystalline rock anyway surely. And don't they make kitchen benches from such materials? If you had a large slab of this it would be rather glorious as there are interesting streaks and clumps of colour running through it.

A history of the earth, and a potential kitchen bench all in one.

At the back of a carefully designed and newish garden there stands a pizza oven. I think the corrugated iron hides a potential vegetable garden. I vaguely remember that last year there were tomatoes and so on within.

A pizza oven. Now I haven't written about them, although, of course pizza has been explored on many occasions. A middle-class toy I guess. I wonder if it's one of those things that you buy on a whim, use once and then never use again because it's all too hard. Worth investigating some time perhaps.

Detritus. In some ways the most interesting potential lies in the rubbish of our lives. In fact although there were odd bits of plastic of no known origin, and the odd discarded tissue, there was actually not a lot of rubbish by the roadside, and what there was, was concentrated in one area on the busiest road, which I guess is rather obvious. So herewith a few examples of what I found on this particular occasion. Another day may well have turned up something different.

First of all what could be described as natural rubbish. It will certainly decay, and has probably either been thrown out of a passing car, or discarded when a walker has finished eating it. On the left orange peel, in the middle banana peel., on the right egg shell. Lots of opportunity there - the decay aspect, the trashing aspect, what can be done with oranges, bananas and eggs in their natural state? What can be done with the peel? Can you do anything with banana peel? How did that egg shell get there? Can you do anything with eggshells? People have written whole books on oranges and bananas. As for eggs - books, and books and books. They can appear in every school curriculum subject. So much can be said about any of these three, that I'm sure I could find more than I have said already.

Real rubbish - an ever-changing scenario with lots of potential. Packaging, the rubbish problem, plastics - the bamboo fork is perhaps a sign of an increasing need to be less damaging to the environment. So much to say about bamboo cutlery - a future topic perhaps.

Then there are the individual items themselves. Each of those products is worth a post of its own, both through the product itself, and its constituent parts, the companies that make them, the marketing, the design, the wording - protein, organic, oriental ..., the people who consume them and so on - ad infinitum really. For me the name Krispy Kreme always conjures up something spooky and horror film associated - there's a weird association to explore.

On that same busy road a car was parked - covered with stickers on the back window - four of which were worth exploring: Whittlesea show - a suburb on Melbourne's far outskirts. So near the country in fact that it is capable of putting on an agricultural show. I have never written anything about those. The Kilsby Sinkhole in Mount Gambier. What is that? Where there's water and diving there may well be potential for something food related. Scientific Anglers - who are they and what do they do? Apollo Bay Fishermen's Co-op - ditto. And what is that strange figure that is fading from view? I should have looked in the windows of the car as I passed, as well. There might have been something interesting sitting on the back seat. But I forgot to do so. Such is my very short attention span these days.

The gas meter by our front gate. Yes we have gas - for our heating, for our hot water and for my wok burner. It's an old house, but new houses are not allowed gas. Today I was reading about the ongoing drive to electrify everything and whether the government's renewable energy targets will be met. I had not really thought about one thing the article mentioned - that as gas is eliminated in homes, and factories, more electricity will be required. There is probably a lot to be said about gas in the home in many different ways.

A now disused Wendy house in a garden that I pass on all of my walks. Do children play in Wendy houses nowadays? Do little girls have tea parties, and play house in these spaces? Or do they somehow do it all online? Lots to explore there.

Then there are other historic reminders. Running off the main road into our little residential corner of Eltham is a road called Sweeneys Lane, named after the convict who settled here and who owned all the land around. You can just glimpse the old cottage, which appears to have been renovated recently and an old sign pointing to it. There is now a newer - not new - just newer - house on the property and the last big chunk of it's former very large acreage was subdivided around twenty years ago into large blocks of land, some of which have magnificent views on a court called Culla Hill - from where Sweeney came. I'm sure more could be found about the man, and his neighbours. They must have farmed - but what?

Nearer to Montsalvat there is a house in whose garden there is this piece of old agricultural equipment and today with some bales of hay by it. So more to learn about the agricultural history of Eltham some time.

So yes, I did find a few potential future topics, even though many of the food related things have been dealt with before. There is always something new to learn, as Vernon Howard - whoever he is - said:

"Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will."

At the very least there will be more rubbish to explore, more car stickers, more passing vehicles, more changes to the environment ... and almost all of them will eventually turn out to be food related - well if you try hard.

It was a lovely day for a walk anyway.

POSTSCRIPT ON JAMIE

On the left is my version of Jamie Oliver's roast lamb on flatbread dish - on the right, as a reminder, is his, which I talked about yesterday. He took 5 minutes to demonstrate it on a Facebook video, admittedly with some cooking time left out. I thought it would take me about a quarter of an hour, but I'm guessing, because I didn't really check properly, that it took me somewhere between 20-25 minutes. But then I had to assemble everything, peel the onion and carrot - I wasn't game to not peel the carrot, the broccolini stalks the cucumber and the half celery stalk that I used for my slaw. He did none of those things and his ingredients were all there ready to go. He just had to grate them. I'm guessing it probably took me five minutes or so to assemble everything. I used Ottolenghi's Sweet and smokey spice instead of his ground coriander, and I added the mint leaves at the end, rather than into the slaw - which would have been better. The crispy chilli oil I sprinkled on to my portion was great though.

But it worked and twenty minutes is pretty fast to get a meal on the table anyway. We pronounced it 3 and a half stars, but said it was worth doing again. I'm sure there is room for improvement on my part - I should have rolled the dough out a bit thinner I think, and maybe kneaded it a bit longer, although it did rise quite satisfactorily. So give it a go sometime when you have some lefover roast lamb to do something with. Or any other roast meat - or veg come to that. You can find his mini video here.

But it's tried and true Shepherd's pie with the rest of the leftovers tonight. Not as fancy or exciting, but oh so good.

YEARS GONE BY

August 24

2024 - Soothing busyness; unexpected beauty

2023 - Brunch at Nopi - well not really

2022 - Melbourne Italian - a cookbook gift

2021 - Duck confit - easy but expensive - according to Wix this post has 163 views!! How? Why?

2020 - Missing

2019 - "This club was bult for fun"

2018 - A word from ... Richard Olney

2017 - Lucky dip - weird from Trieste

2016 - I don't cook much anymore