

Nibbling Your Way Through the Holidays
The holidays are a time for nibbling. Everyone is on different timetables. Kids sleep in or wake at 5 am. Breakfast can last for three hours and morph into lunch. Our holidays are often one ‘proper’ meal, with everyone sitting at the table for two courses. The rest of the time people nibble. Main meal leftovers are excellent nibble material: add holiday meats to lettuce, pistachios, pine nuts or cashews for crunch, or small cubes of baked bread with, perhaps, chunks of mango


Holiday Blog: Alternatives to the Plastic Christmas Tree
Alternatives to the Plastic Christmas Trees Photo found online (source unkown) Tired of the old green and shaggy but don’t want to go fake and plastic? Try an Aussie Christmas tree instead! New South Wales Christmas Bush From Wikimedia Commons (unattributed) This comes with its own home-grown red baubles, though the brilliant red 'flowers' are made up not of petals but calyces. These are actually the sepals that initially made the bud that protected the developing flowers. As


Holiday Blog: Drought Christmas
I wrote this almost forty years ago, in the late 70’s, during a drought that went on until 1983. I lived in a shed at the time; read by candlelight and rose with the sun. It sounds like a hard time, but it was the happiest I had ever known, a community that shared hardships as well as tomatoes. We had music evenings every full moon - you didn’t even need candles, just the firelight and the glow of the moon. And we had Christmas together, like the one below. Drought Christmas