Simplification

Well.
Here I am.
Montréal.
Permanently.
Finally!

Actually, I've been here for three and a half weeks now, but I have been suffering transplant shock and have barely been able to bring myself to write emails, let alone a blog post. Don't get me wrong, I love it here. I love it more every day, and Charles is just the best darn husband a girl could wish for. But I did recently give up at least 90% of my possessions, my house, my car, and a job of eight years, not to mention again all the goodbyes I've said to loved ones in the last couple of months. I've been vacillating between being emotionally exhausted and like a kid in a lolly shop as I've been exploring my new home in far greater depth than I've had a chance to previously.

I also find my life refreshingly simplified.

I haven't got a job - haven't even started looking yet to be honest - but settlement did come through on the sale of my house so I could hold out for a year if I was willing to fritter away my life's savings. Without the job and the house I am also released from some of the more mundane financial facts of life: the mortgage, house repairs, home and contents insurance, income protection insurance, car insurance etc. etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... And to be honest I am not missing the stresses of my old job one bit. The woman who two months ago was ranting and raving about government funding cuts, AWOL project partners, interminable grant reporting procedures and budget adherence is now spending her days on the swing at the park, dreaming up what she's going to cook for dinner while she waits for her stepson to finish making new friends. Or spending three and a half hours walking to the Mont-Royal, up it, down it and back again before lunch. Or stumbling across super-cheap Chinese/Portuguese supermarkets in unexpected places. Or potting out a balcony herb garden. The only ranting and raving that's been going on has been at the squirrels for digging up my rocket seeds twice.

I still don't think I'm down to a baseline heart rate after the last few months, but I'm getting there. I'm making the time to look after myself and relaxing, eating well, exercising and enjoying life with my beloved after three years of being in a long-distance relationship. It's not often in a First World life that you get to untangle yourself so much. It always takes something drastic like an international relocation, or a number of much less pleasant scenarios. That or a conscious drop out. I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally hear a desperate voice in the back of my brain screeching, "Stalled superannuation contributions!!!!" But it's early days yet, eventually I'll get a bit bored and start looking for a challenge, or a complication, or a bit of stress.

But not just yet.

Just because it's called Rainbow, doesn't mean it's a hippy commune!

Is there such a place as Paradise On Earth? I suspect one's options on this expand considerably in line with one's tolerance to mould. I love Cairns. No, I do...it's just that the first third of the year always brings with it a constant battle against the forces of evil. I mean, mould. Ahem.

As pre-empted a while ago, I just went to Northern New South Wales to visit some beloved friends and their munchkins as part of my grand Farewell to Oz Tour. I've only been to Northern New South Wales once before as an adult, in the mid-'90s, and I have a very Romantic view of it as one of the most beautiful places to live in Australia. It is also the hippy 'capital' of the country. I think I had been there less than 24 hours this time when Jane drew my attention to a jacket that she'd just pulled out of the wardrobe that was fluffy with subtropical mould. Cue needle dragging across a record...

But if you can get over that (or yourself, and Lord knows I need to do a bit more of that of late!), then gee willikers it's pretty. My friends live near The Channon. There's a creek at the bottom of their driveway and a waterfall at the end of their road. They live on a multiple occupancy intentional community, on which the husband grew up. And yes, it's called Rainbow. No social profiling, please! They are building their own solar-powered, composting toileted, hempcrete-lined, passive solar, recycled or reclaimed when possible, totally awesome home that looks straight out into rainforest. It's truly beautiful and very contemporary in design.

Chedy's mum still lives on the community. She's a ceramicist and a fanatical collector of vintage objects and textiles. I was lucky enough to sleep in an alcove of her studio and woke up each morning to total eye candy of old kitchenalia and a ceramicist's tools of the trade. Heaven for me! She had a very established orchard and veggie patch, and here's what's so great about this region: rosemary grew next to pineapples, roses grew next to pawpaws, Brazilian cherries grew alongside grapefruit, and both strawberries and bananas looked happy. For a gardener like me that's a pretty impressive interzone of domestic food crops! It wasn't long before I was emailing Charles to suggest that maybe Northern New South Wales could be a good  spot for us eventually, if we find our way back to Australia. The big, fat kookaburras and the mix of rainforest and eucalypts were giving me a pre-emptive strike of homesickness, too.

That's about it for the blabbing. I mostly wanted to get back in the writing saddle today, and I'll leave you with more pictures than words. Please find here some images of a very extended Anzac Day long weekend holiday: the 'Goldie' from Coolangatta; views from the Pinnacle looking out to Mt Warning; happy snaps from Rainbow; and the mandatory trip to Byron Bay, at the Tallow Beach end.

 

 

 The End

Buh.Nah.Naaas!

Yesterday I tackled a garden maintenance job that you only get in the Tropics: I had to cut down a banana tree. Don't freak out non-Tropics dwellers, that's just what you have to do. Bananas grow and spread via suckers, so just like their common tropical garden cousins, heliconias, you are doing them a favour by effectively 'dead-heading' them when they have developed their fruit. The 'tree' can then put its energy into putting up a new trunk, rather than continuing to support a bunch of green fruit that isn't going to get any bigger.

Bananas are so easy to chop down even I can do it with my dicky back. A relatively sharp pruning saw just cuts through the fibrous trunk like the proverbial butter. I'm getting to be such an old hand at it I managed to do it today without getting any of the impossibly sticky sap on my new dress, which I foolishly wore just for the occasion. I think I might have let this bunch go a bit too long, though. There are lots of little tell-tale brown spots and pin holes in the fruit that indicate that the bugs have got into them. But that's ok, there's a second trunk ready to chop down next weekend.

I don't know why I postpone chopping down bananas so much. Maybe it is that disgusting sap, or maybe it's because they are the chief privacy screen between me and my neighbour. But there are just so many great things to do with bananas once you've chopped them down, I'm always surprised I left it so long once I've done it. I now have recipes for using the fruit, leaf, bell (or 'flower'), and the trunk, so I thought I'd share some with you.

The most simple thing is of course to eat your delicious banana (after it has taken about three to five weeks to ripen, depending on the time of year) and feel proud as Punch that you grew it yourself. Yeeeah! Then you can get a bit fancy and use the leaves to wrap whole or fillets of fish in, and barbecue, grill or bake them. Pop some Asian herbs in with the fish, along with a splash of coconut milk, fish sauce and/or soy sauce. The trick is to soften the leaves first, either by blanching them in boiling water, or by passing them over the flame of a gas burner on the stove. This stops them splitting when you try to wrap the fish. Secure the banana leaf with a toothpick and away you go.

My hands down favourite way to eat bananas, though, is banana cake. In a former life, when I owned a café in Adelaide, I used to make banana bread, toast it and serve it with ricotta and honey. Pretty good, right? But maybe a bit passé these days ... Then a few years ago my friend Jess gave me a CWA cookbook (the Country Women's Association—an obsession I may share with you one day. I've linked to the Queensland chapter because their site has more info than the national one) and it had a banana cake recipe that, with a bit of tweaking, has become one of my all time favourite cakes. Because my home grown bananas are little Lady Fingers or Sugar bananas, or some such thing—at any rate not the usual large Cavendish variety you get in the supermarket—I slice extra bananas up lengthwise and decorate the top of the cake with them and then crumble palm sugar over the lot. Bah.Nah.Naaas!

CWA-inspired Banana Cake

250g butter, softened

¾ cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 ½ cups self-raising flour (or 1 ½ cups plain flour + 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder)

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

½ teaspoon salt

3 large bananas, or 9 small bananas, cut in chunks (mash if you don’t have electric beaters)

250-300g sour cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 large or 6 small bananas, extra for decoration

1 handful dark palm sugar, or brown sugar

Preheat oven to 180˚C. Grease and line a 24cm diameter cake tin. Cream butter and sugar with electric beaters. Add eggs one at a time. Sift flour, bicarb and salt together. Add flour mixture, bananas, sour cream, vanilla and cinnamon to the butter mixture and mix well until bananas are dispersed right through. Pour into cake tin and arrange sliced extra bananas decoratively on top—I do a little flower pattern, aaaw! Sprinkle palm sugar evenly over the top and bake for 40 mins or until firm to touch.

Original recipe from: Country Women's Association of Australia, Country Classics, 2nd edn, Penguin Group (Australia), Camberwell, Victoria, 2007, p. 142

My other hot-favourite banana recipe is Luke Nguyen's Banana Trunk and Chicken Curry. Obviously, banana trunk is not that easy to come by if you don't happen to have handy access to banana trees, but if you do, then definitely give this a go. I'm going to trial freezing the sliced up trunk this time (I might quickly blanch it first), as I have no plans to invite a small army around to eat a spicy jungle curry this week. I found my taste needed to add a squeeze of lime and a little bit of palm sugar at the end, but see how you go, you may also want to add a bit more banana trunk—you will have rather a lot of it. If you are in Australia, the following link also has a short video of Luke preparing the dish in a very ambient setting (clearly I should invest in some pigs to help me deal with the excess trunks). Luke is very charming and unpretentious as TV chefs go, so it's well worth watching. Unfortunately, I doubt the video link will work outside of Australia, but you can still get the recipe: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/lukesmekong/recipes/detail/recipe/13878

And then, of course, there's the bell. To be honest though, I just never get around to doing anything with this other than photographing it. Lame! I do want to try this though: Barramundi with Banana Bell, Hmong Style
One day ...
Enjoy!