Whipping on by

Today seemed to end before it had even really started. Which, I think, is more good than bad given that some days seem to start and start and start, and never seem to get close to ending without the aid of alcohol. Let's hope there aren't too many of those days ahead, now that our last bottle of red wine has been regretfully, but most enjoyably, consumed. I started with a long and exceedingly optimistic list as I always do. Burdening myself with unrealistic expectations is my personal equivalent of a nicotine habit, just as hard to kick, but probably just as perversely pleasurable. Look, this long, long list, so full of anticipation and energy. So much energy! SO much energy. Oh, yeah, did I say...energy? The list has got a lot longer since we've commenced our frugality drive (can you drive towards frugality?). And needless to say quite a few of the items make it onto the next day's list. I don't mind about that. I need to start the day with a long list! But today, I did get my work done before lunchtime, I did wash the nappies and I did bake bread, for the sixth day in a row. Good, huh! (There is, unfortunately, an inverse law of bread consumption when it comes to the home baked stuff. The more you bake it, the more they eat it, great big thick hunks of it. Which means by 3pm, we are usually out of bread. I now absolutely understand why sliced bread would have seemed like the best thing since, well... )


This afternoon was spent moseying around nurseries and pretending not to know Martha while she assiduously excavated the sawdust from the rootballs of the bare rooted fruit trees. I absolutely love the bare root fruit tree season. I find a similar pleasure in looking through all those burnished bare twigs, fruiting spurs, colourful swing tags and tangles of roots as reading through a good recipe book. The anticipation and promise of nourishment and all manner of sensory pleasures, where key ingredients are never forgotten and codling moth flies overhead to next door's trees. The nurseryman predicted rain for tonight, and confidently declared 'kernels' to be a particular variety of almond tree. We walked away with a bundle of autumn fruiting raspberry canes, twenty strawberry runners, a Smyrna quince and a lot of sawdust in our shoes. We will try and plant them tomorrow. After that rain, of course.

On the way home, we could see from back up the road that Rob's cows had staged a mass breakout...into our front paddock. I remembered that walking past them yesterday, I had noticed a covetous gleam in their eye as they mooed at me over the fence. So, we continued up to Ross's (he is looking after the cows while Rob and Cathy are overseas) to let him know. Mark walked off to find him, and I tried to show Martha Ross's pigs. They were proper storybook pigs, white with black spots and big rings in their noses, having a great old time in the leafmould under an old, old oak tree. I admit they were rather loud pigs, and quite large as well, but I have never seen Martha so terrified. Every time the pigs snorted or snuffled she absolutely shrieked and couldn't even bring herself to look at them. Risk averse, like her mother.

By the time cows were sorted and chooks and dogs fed, it had become one of those nights where dinner must be conjured rather than cooked. So... pasta with anchovies and freshly picked broccolini from the garden and absolutely delicious it was.

Eleven minute pasta with broccolini and anchovies

Put pasta water on to boil. In a pan, saute three or four cloves of garlic and three or four anchovies in a generous slosh of olive oil until anchovies have 'melted'. Add some pine nuts.
Slice broccolini lengthways into thin florets and cook for a minute in the boiling pasta water (i.e. with the cooking pasta) then scoop out and stir into the anchovy mixture. Drain pasta, toss through the anchovy mixture. Serve with parmesan. Yum.