Music

I used to run a music venue, mainly cause I love that feeling good music can give you. It's funny though how music can date and age, yet still take you back to a time and place.

Then there is the rare time when you pull out an album that you haven't listened to in ages because you thought it had dated and discover that it was actually a timeless classic, so rich and layered that it shocks you.

The album I am referring to is Cake's Fashion Nugget. I remembered the cool brass and quirky lryics but had forgotten the layering, the way the bass is at the front of the mix, the sheer joy of the songs.

Love it.

Lantanaland from the iPhone

Happy meal

In my quest to save money (so I can afford a cow) we are having one meal a week where I focus simply on the spend. This week was a old Jamie Oliver recipe, like all his early recipes it is very simple.

Just slice a few potatoes into cm thick slices and toss with oil, salt, diced garlic and rosemary. Bake till just golden. Cook off a big heap of mushrooms with butter and more garlic and finish with juice and zest of a lemon. Take enough fish fillets skin on to cover the potatoes, not too thin fillets and cut through the skin halfway about four times. Stuff these cuts with a mix of fennel, dill, basil, parsley, basically whatever you have in the garden. Drizzle the skin with oil and sprinkle with salt. Toss the mushrooms through the taters and lay the fish in skin up on top. Bake until fish cooked.

This may not be exactly how a very young Jamie did it, but it's what I do after having first done it. We had a small salad from the growbed on the side, dressed with a squeeze of lemon juice and a drizzle of fishy oil from the bottom of the pan.

Normally I won't cook to price, just to flavour, but I really want that cow.(which my mate has named Dolores, great cow name)

Total cost for two? $9





Lantanaland from the iPhone

Design

Lantanaland is many things. It's a rough piece of land, covered in lantana. It has a beautiful, but run down cottage on it, basically with one bedroom. What it needs is some renewal, not renovation, but for this I need to be sure of one thing. Good design.

We've been watching Grand Designs again, which always gets my design juices flowing. Interestingly the host, Kevin McCloud, wrote an article about the different reactions of the brain. Go shopping and buy something and you are pandering to the heroin of the brain, dopamine. Quick fix, short high, need more. But design or build something, plant a veg garden, anything that will provide pleasure over a period of time, produces serotonin, a much longer and pleasurable high. No wonder I like building things.

I digress.

The house here is small and very run down, particularly the deck. But we will need another room if (when) we have The Child, so the plan was to build a small extension, providing a bedroom up top, with a lounge below. The current lounge would be invaded by the kitchen, keen to pursue an old world colonization policy.

But what about the design! This house is very well designed. It doesn't need aircon in SE QLD, as the whole house breathes and catches the breeze. I'd like to build in strawbale, as I love the organic lines and texture. In fact The Wife and I have a great list of ideas, but it time to put together a master plan.

By this I don't mean sketches of how I want the house to look, because I'd rather the architect came up with those first without my influence, but rather the plan of how this building will fit into our life. For instance the kitchen is very important. I would like Lantanaland to one day be the provider of my income and food will play a big part of it. So the kitchen has to be able to look toward the future Lantanaland and anticipate what I might need. In other words how big do I make the walk in larder? Where does the cold room for hanging sides of beef and whole pigs go?

I've already had a lesson in poor design. When we moved here I found the old chook pen was full of white ants and had to be dumped. So we moved and I madly designed a chook house and pen. A chook house that turned out to be a feed trough for fox and snake, hard to access and hard to modify. So lately I've been working on a small changeover system, then I'll pull down this one and start again.

So this is the first of a few open discussions with myself about what needs to be discussed, pondered or put to paper. Feel free to butt in with any thoughts of your own, because I'd hate to miss something because I'm only using my brain alone.


Lantanaland from the iPhone

Muppets

I've been working as a sales rep for over three years now, that's a lot of radio national, AM, PM and The World Today. Not to mention the rubbish local ABC radio passes off as community minded interest in politics. As a result the once bright flame of interest and passion in politics and the political process is now just a twisted blackened cinder of cynicism. Too many interviews where the pollie parrots back the party line ( I almost crashed the car when Gillard gave a coherent and reasonable answer to a Fran Kelly question this morning. Maybe she was spending some of those tax dollars on drugs before handing it back to the grog companies). Too much party politics and to me they seem the same anyway, a bunch of lifers from the political system who wouldn't know what a real job looked like if it bit them on the arse.

So it takes a fair bit to get me angry these days, but this Muppet, Mr Moral High Ground Senator Stephen Fielding has got me fired. I mean I didn't know we had gone to the American system and had a president whose personal views controlled the veto over the parliament.

Anyway he sort of was elected so we've got him I guess, but it gets better. This muppet has the delusion that by defeating this bill he has struck a blow against binge drinking in this country. Well in the seven years I ran pubs I never heard this statement "gees beeso, those drinks are a lot cheaper, I'll have less of them tonight. "

I mean if he'd screwed the Ruddbot for some restrictions on advertising or had siphoned some more money into research or prevention then I'd be fine with him calling a press conference like Robert Downey Junior to say "Screw this - I AM IRON MAN!"

But all he did was focus the stupidity of a system where one man with a minority vote and a set of personal beliefs can stick it to the majority elected government but doesn't have to answer to the majority of the people come the next election.

I guess Karma has it in for me though, for in return of the flickering flame of political interest, this lobbed into my inbox today.

Hi, beeso (beeso).

Pauline Hanson (HansonPauline) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Pauline Hanson's profile here:
http://twitter.com/HansonPauline
Oh Dear.

Lantanaland from the iPhone

Cook books

I own a few cook books. Some are essential, like Stephanie Alexanders cooks companion, the best reference that I have, while others are beautiful, like Jamie Oliver’s garden based book with all the color sketches and Maggie Beers book with the embroidered cover.

Most have been given to me as gifts, in fact one of the few things I miss about being a kid is the stack of books I'd get a Xmas. Now no one buys me fiction anymore. But I still get cookbooks and the occasional garden book. A couple of our close friends gave me my favorite non fiction book -The Healthy House Cow.

I do have a few yawning gaps in my library. Asian cooking. Need the spirit house cook book or something that will teach me the building blocks of that style of cooking. Suggest away people.

But flicking through my collection with some guests on the weekend I saw a book I would recommend to everyone. Practical, no silly cheffy food and the picture on the front features the authors obviously sloshed. Cooking Under the Influence -check it out.

Lantanaland from the iPhone

Mmmm bacon

After my eureka moment on the weekend the conversion of the washing machine has been surprisingly smooth. Normally I miss something in the planning stage, I probably need to do a few sketches instead of just imagining it in my head. I bought a few bits and bobs from Bunnings and scammed a few bits from my fantastic neighbor Eric. Eric has two whole shipping containers full of stuff, something I will only be able to aspire to if I can keep it out of eyesight of The Wife, who is not that fond of clutter, for some strange reason.

Then it was just two days of cutting and riveting, plus a few of my favorite hardware item, the mighty zip tie. A bit of the chipped gum trees and some herbs (bay, rosemary and lemongrass for all you suspicious bastards out there) and I was away. I'll try leaving it in the smoke for about two days. It'll be a bit of trial and error at first, but then it will rain bacon, smoked tomatoes and chilli, salmon and ham.


Lantanaland smokin from the iPhone

Eureka!

When we came home from NZ a few things had happened. Lantanaland looked like part of the set from The Thin Red Line, eight foot high thick grass everywhere, troops moving stealthily towards their LZ, well they could've been, that grass was thick. The other one was that our trusty washing machine veteran of seven years of sharehousing, finally gave up the ghost.

The washing machine was easily replaced with a nice new water efficient one that put less strain on my limited tank based water supply. I spent most of the weekend slashing and mowing, only reinforcing my feeling that a cow, while it might be a lot of work, is much better value than mowing. Take all the gardening I did this weekend, I used liters of fuel and all I get is a better-looking Lantanaland. If I had a cow, not only would I have mown grass, but that grass would be converted to milk and cream and cheese and manure which can be converted to fruit and veg. Hughesy has kindly put me on to a few leads for the cow, so I can only hope that my mowing days will soon be limited to the house block.

So that leaves one dead washing machine. I originally had planned to strip out the motor and the barrel and turn it into another chook house. The last thing I wanted to do was just dump it and I thought a washing machine chook house would be cool. I did a bit more mowing than started to strip out the washing machine when I had one of those moments that make Lantanaland and being here and having this place just the most satisifing thing for my soul.

You see I've been wanting to build a cold smoker for a while, but I lack the materials. I dry cure my own bacon but it needs that beautiful smoky flavor to be the real deal. A old wine barrel would be ideal, but they are pretty expensive, so my long term plan was to build one out of stone, which would be cool, but not cheap and time consuming and I need that time to mow the bloody lawn.

So I'd taken out the barrel and motor and was sitting there looking at the shell, thinking of how the best way to use it for a chook pen when it hit me, here was the perfect cold smoke oven. It already had easy access through the lid a strong steel box and a hole in the bottom for the smoke intake. All I need is a firebox, some pipe, some racking and a flue. It just happens that I put some belly bacon in the cure today, the first Lantanaland bacon.

To complete a great recycling day I used the barrel to repot a jade tree of The Wife that had badly outgrown its pot. All I need to know now is who's coming for breakfast next weekend?






Lantanaland from the iPhone