The Hampering

Happy New Year, readers! I hope you've celebrated in style. Ladies of taste and distinction that we are, Tara and I ushered in the new year with fascinators, passion pop and a lot of rather terrible dancing. I drank, I ate, I took my shoes off and ran around outdoors, and now that those last few fateful swigs of cheap champagne are leaving my system I'm finally feeling capable of blogging again.

So, Christmas hey? Well that's done and dusted for another year. My Christmas was the usual exhausting, lovely, talk-politely-to-that-distant-relative-you-hate kind of affair. My sister, my man and I combined our vegetarian super powers to make Jamie Oliver's delicious nut roast (otherwise known as "the best stuffing my Pop has ever tasted" *sigh*) and of course we had pudding, salads, daggy christmas hats and wine. So. Much. Wine.

What else happened this Christmas? Well... I totally made hampers you guys! I gave them to people, and they were well received, and people ate and drank and were merry. You have no idea how relieved I am that the hampers were well received. Baking, jamming, truffling, macaroning, turkish delighting... I held my breath when people first tasted what I'd made, and I swear to Dawkins had someone looked unimpressed, I would've staged an almighty Christmas meltdown. I'm not saying homicide, but I have a feeling the fallout would've attracted the attention of the local media... the words "crazed" and "rampage" come to mind.

So above is a photo of my completed hamper. Chris, my tolerant and talented partner (fiancee, boyfriend, guy I like to kiss on the mouth) did all of the design work, I did all of the cooking, and together we hot-glued and folded and tied bows until what you see above was finished. Rather naively I had assumed that preparing eight odd Christmas hampers would be relatively straightforward. Hah. Flash forward a month and I was stuck in my kitchen at 2am on a wednesday night, microwaving vegan gelatine alternative and scraping almond meal from the walls. Nonetheless... I'll do it all again next year. I'm just proud as punch at how everything turned out:

Lime Jelly from here. I didn't modify this recipe at all, except to leave the lime pulp in (but not the peel).

Chocolate Truffles from here. I prepared half with the milk chocolate and sea salt, and rolled the other half in a combination of cocoa powder and cayenne pepper. The salted truffles tasted a little like caramel, and the chilli chocolate ones were warm, rich and slightly spicy.

Turkish Delight from here. I substituted gelatine for agar-agar, a nifty vegan seaweed derivative that works just like gelatine but without all of the snouts and trotters and beef skin. I'm pretty sure Turkish Delight is one of those inherently difficult to enjoy sweets. It's sickly, it smells like grandma's potpourri, and the powdered sugar it's rolled in is a choking hazard. But I got it in my head that I needed to make a Turkish Delight with the White Witch quote from Narnia printed on it. So: Turkish Delight for all!

Pfeffernüsse. I made these using this basic recipe, but I doubled the spice quantities. Apparently these babies develop their flavour over time, but given that I was baking them a day or two before Christmas I thought it best to flavour them heavily to start with.

Oh, and I made Macarons. Boy did I make macarons. I made three failed batches of Macarons, two average batches, I made a great batch really early on and then promptly ate the lot, and I made the macarons seen above in the few days before Christmas. I'll blog about the delicate art of macaroning some time soon. I'll need an entire post to dedicate to my macaron saga...

So, hampers! Burns and spills and hot glue everywhere but hampers got done, bitch. Please let me know what you think of our lovely goods! New year, new goals... I'm toying with the idea of attempting a market stall this easter.

AWAAM's Godless Christmas: a How To

The Christmas Tree Cluster

.

We decorated my parents’ house and their Christmas tree yesterday. And it was while I was twining tinsel around every object in the house that I realised something: I really like Christmas. Not just the tinsel, but everything else. The lights and the shopping and the wrapping of presents. The food, the family, the fights. The deep breath before the start of a new year.

.

For an atheist, it was a small revelation. Ever since I was a child, and I lost my belief in Santa and God in rapid succession, I’ve always enjoyed the time off, the presents and the togetherness, but never the trappings. I’ve merely tolerated the festive season. This year, however, something changed.

.

I’ve decided that Christmas – or the summer solstice, or the winter solstice, or what have you – is, as the religious believe, a fantastic opportunity to celebrate and be thankful. To enjoy tradition and ritual, and to honour something larger than ourselves. So this year, I’m celebrating something pretty special: the birth of the universe.

.

And I’m doing it the traditional AWAAM way: with food and music.

.

.

Stars are already a symbol of Christmas - why not co-opt them in the same way that Christianity did from the pagans? It was, after all, in the furnace of the earliest, dying stars that the heavy elements of the universe were forged, from which all life eventuated. We are all star stuff. Celebrate that by busting out these delicious looking Star Cookies, found at the ever wonderful Souvlaki for the Soul.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wonderful and hilarious ode to a godless universe. This gorgeous cake is a recreation of one of my favourite scenes from the series. Nothing says ‘let’s celebrate our brief existence’ like a whale and a bowl of petunias, recently come into being and plummeting towards the earth. You can find detailed instructions on Geek Mom.

My recommended listening this Christmas is something a bit different. Gather your family, find yourself a radio, and tune into a dead station. Listen to the static. Most of it is caused by random electromagnetic interference, but about 1 or 2 percent of it is 13 billion year old radiation left over from the Big Bang, expressed in microwaves that can be picked up by your radio. What you are hearing is the birth of our universe.

.

And if you’re still in any doubt that the universe and our place in it is worth honouring, watch this extraordinary video.

Happy Christmas everyone.

Bits and Pieces of 2010

Good afternoon bloggers, and welcome to perhaps the most overdue post of A Whistle and A Milkshake’s life. I must admit I’ve neglected this blog recently... but I have excuses! In fact several infuriating factors have precluded me from logging on. Exploding laptops, shaped internet, and that ever present guilty feeling that keeps me from blogging at work. Nonetheless, this post is just disgustingly overdue. I've got a long list of recipes and tunes to catch up on, so please bear with me, this could be a bit of a mess...

So what have I been up to lately? Well, the last month or so has seen me busily preparing Christmas hampers for my friends and family. I think hampers make a great alternative to the usual Christmas gift giving. Personal, equitable (everybody gets the same thing!) and a pleasure to prepare. Oh, and I haven't had to set foot in a shopping centre this December, an added bonus given that inner city Melbourne is an orgy of gift-grabbing craziness at this time of year. This year I've made lime jelly, turkish delight, chocolate truffles and incredibly delicious but hard-to-master macarons. Rather a lot of work has gone into preparing and packaging these little bits and pieces, but with the help of my partner and a couple of charitable friends, it's all coming together quite nicely. Expect a couple more posts on the specifics of hamper making soon, including a post about macarons and the importance of reading the recipe.

What else have the last few months meant for me? In light of my recent transition back to vegetarianism, I've been trying to wrap my head around as many new vegetarian and vegan recipes as is humanly possible. I've memorised so many uses for the humble chick pea that I fear I may be pushing important names and dates from my memory, but exploring vegan cooking in particular has been hugely rewarding. Messy Vegetarian Cook is an excellent veg and vegan blog, with recipes for everything from sweet potato pie to japanese inspired tapioca rice balls - vastly more delicious than they sound. I'm also loving Vegan Yum Yum for the great salads, and I finally tracked down my very own copy of the inestimably wonderful Veganomicon. A great addition to any kitchen, whether one is vegan or not. But I'm not just reading recipes, I've also read a great number of books on all things vegetarian: Johathan Safran-Foer's Eating Animals is a deeply affecting read from one of my favourite authors. I've also read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics (quite the heavy going tome) and perhaps my favourite non-fiction book of the year The Face on Your Plate by Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason: a psycho-analyst, and a strict vegan. The man is sixty eight years old and looks younger than my fifty year old father. His spritely looks and way with words have me inching ever closer to a completely vegan diet.

Oh! and music! What have I been listening to? Glenn Richards released his new solo effort Glimjack, and I've played the thing so much that every note is now committed to memory. The album is wonderful. Dark, full of self-deprecating complaint and bitterness, and yet occasionally so breathtakingly lovely as to cover me in goosebumps. "I'm the soldier who in his dead hours, took the flesh of the horse and made only joy, then to faint in the flowers, to dream of his woman's kiss and of the April showers of home" - the man still has it people.

Joanna Newsom's epic Have One On Me has also received several thousand plays this year. It's just about as good as everyone has been saying. I don't have the words to do the thing justice, so you should probably listen to it for yourself. Try this for starters:

Other bands that have featured prominently include The Jezabels, who have released three EP's to date and put on perhaps the most impressive live show I have seen this year. Jónsi's debut solo effort Go Do worked it's way to the top of my scrobbling list and induced the odd sneaky tram cry on my morning commutes (it's just beautiful). I've also been listening to Seabellies, Firekites, and the debut EP from Brisbane band Pensive Penguin. Three lovely Australian bands whose tunes suggest car rides with the windows down despite the fact that summer still seems very far away indeed. More on these guys soon, I hope!

So there you have it. A long, rambling brain dump of everything that I have been intending to blog about over the last few months. I have three complete blog posts sitting on my old laptop. They appear to be written entirely in something like windings, so if any of you know how to repair a corrupt word file please let me know? In the meantime I'll try to muster the energy to write the things again. I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions, but I promise to bore you all with long, confused blog posts throughout 2011. Xx.

My First Christmas (Lunch)

A Very Merry Picnic

Well Christmas Day 2009 has come and gone, a fact I can scarcely believe, because not only does the passing of Christmas signal the end to another big year, but it also means that I have successfully pulled off my very first Christmas Lunch. That's right people, my lovely lady friend and I were in charge of Christmas Lunch this year, we wrote lists, made a few confused phone calls to our mothers (How long do prawns keep in the fridge? What's the name of that sauce you make? Are they pine nuts or almonds in that salad?) and after a lot of shopping and menu-planning, settled on a Christmas picnic in the park.

Fresh Fruit & Cheap Wine

Veggies ready for the oven

I'd highly recommend the Christmas Picnic idea: for starters we didn't have to prepare much food - just some salads and roast veggies, the rest we bought from the markets. Because we cut down on the amount of cooking required, we weren't trapped in our teeny-tiny kitchens with our ovens pumping all day, and we even fed our stinky prawn carcasses to some very happy local magpies, no cleanup required. The weather was bliss, the park was beautiful, and I didn't have to clean my lounge room in anticipation of an onslaught of guests. This picnic idea? Total winner.

Cold Ham - Poor Delicious Piggies

Cheeeeesee!

The Menu:

- An assortment of cold meats, cheeses, bread and dips bought from Melbourne's multitude of excellent fresh food markets.

- Four big salads (wild rice salad, pear and walnut, tomato and feta, and fruit salad too)

- A kilo and a half of fresh prawns, complete with home made Rouille.

- Roast veggies (the only addition to the menu that required the oven)

- Choc-Ripple Cake (still delicious, even after a rough commute to the park)

- A truckload of red wine, and G&T's in the esky.

I Love Choc Ripple Cake

I'm really pleased at my first Christmas Lunch. The food and drink: plentiful. The fuss: minimal. Weather: Bliss. Plus because we pulled if off, my Lady Friend and I are officially Queens of Christmas, until we either fuck up royally next year, or let our parents take the reins again. How very merry.

Swings, Flings and Tasty Things

Hello my little bloglings, it's been a while!

Between a broken - in fact, somewhat on fire - laptop, overseas adventures and long hours at the library, I'm afraid I have been neglecting you terribly. But there are many whistles and milkshakes on their way to make up for it.

In the last few weeks I traded in my small city in for this island paradise

Waiheke Island: perhaps the greatest proportion of vineyards to landmass that I've ever encountered. Also beaches, jungle, mountains, family, food and hedgehogs.

I saw the marvelous Animal Collective in Melbourne Town

They were as good as this pictures suggests they might be.

I saw this incredible, beautiful film, and then had to run through Melbourne with an unfortunate case of cryface to make it in time for my flight.

It was so worth it.

And I've started making plans for christmas. Like most of my plans on any given day, they involve baking. I am contemplating these delicious gingerbreads

Ruminating on these delicious peppermints

And I am very much enamoured with these salted truffles....delicious? Why yes, I think they might be.





And I'm going to finish watching this charming film - right now, if you please.





I do so love a good con. And a Gentlemanly Rogue or two.