blah, blah, blah…
Actually, listening to Kate Miller-Heidke, especially in smaller scale concerts where, in fact, the audience is so spellbound that you can hear a pin drop, turns me into a hyperbolic, gleeful mess. But that IS the song’s title and the dance that goes with it is rather amusing.
Just spent the last few days up in Hepburn Springs, about ten minutes from Dalesford and an hour and a half from Melbourne. I went–with the patient and obliging L, who let me drag her all over the place as I traispsed through childhood memories–mostly to see the KMH gig, and was not disapointed. My photography, on the otherhand: disapointing.
(here’s ONE that I quite like): 
I’ve always loved live music. I’ve always loved music, almost obsessively requring some combination of beat and lyric (and, preferably, a cascade of piano) to get through my day, mad as that sounds. I love live gigs, the force of a bassline hijacking my spine and breath so that, when the perfomer gets it right, I am, briefly, sound and pressure. Kate, even before listening to her songs became near-synonymous with all that is beautiful and sweet and funny, glorious and mundane, all that istwisted and poignant, and heartwrenching, about loving the alternate lexographer was a singer that took me out and upward, so I had no breath, and a heart that skipped so much that a new beat was formed from scratch. This gig–a full acoustic set at The Palais , with only Keir Nuttall accompanying on guitar and occasional ridiculous backing vocals–was almost as wonderful as the first time I heard Space They Cannot Touch on the radio and knew that yes, there were, sometimes (just sometimes), words for how I felt Ali. They weren’t my words, but they were perfect, and all I wanted to do was share them.
I still feel the same way. Especially now, when–although at a gig out in the country at twenty-three, rather than doing my homework in a now-demolished bedroom at seventeen–I can only share in degrees, with delays, what I wish I could simply pass on with a kiss, a look, hands held in the blackness beneath stage lights.
Challah
I never encountered challah until I visited the US for the first time. In Maryland, I believe, when the girlfriend and I were staying with friends of hers and their two gorgeous, vicacious children who must be grown by now. Just as lovely, but a lot can happen in two years. Anyway, the children were lovely, hosts gracious, and the food incredible. Along with all these adjectives, there was challah–which, to an Australian lapsed Catholic from the nothern suburbs of Melbourne, was something of a revalation.
I’m sure it exists in Melbourne, but I have yet to find the right bakeries, and in the end my cravings for it overcame a long fear of any breadmaking that didn’t result in pizza bases. For years, while I’ve managed to produce more than half decent pizza from scratch, I have also tried rolls and twists and loaves. These have uniformly become baked objects that, in a flagging world, might stand in as currency. Or shotput.
What changed this, it seems, was challah. More particularly, it was Deb’s challah, from the inimitiable Smitten Kitchen. (Seriously. This site is incredible. Go just for the food porn.)
Deb’s bread making tips are invaluable (short, warm risings? Leave a lot to be desired) and, while the results of my first challah were surely not the most professional to be seen–I can’t even braid my own hair, let alone heavily enriched bread dough–it was still delicious, consumed by my Hoard of a family in a matter of hours, and was a transformation from this:
to this:
So, as the first food post for this blog, I’d like to share the slightly adapted recipe. Read the rest of this entry »
Poem: Leura, August
This, and this, and this, and this.
blanks waiting for word-fill, words fall
and fail, the landscape still and endless
an ocean without depth perception
blanks waiting for word-fill, words fall
away at the drop, past the tops of trees
an ocean without depth perception
Death perception on my tongue, after a slip.
Away, at the drop, past the tops of trees
Birds curl and cry and cringe, aware
Of death—perception on my tongue, after a slip
Just the tip of something others seem to see
Birds curl and cry and cringe, aware
And unfailed, the landscape still and endless
(Yet just the tip of something the others seem to see):
This. And this, and this, and this.
This is a blog…
…with an ontological crisis. Unsure of what its for or who it is written by (whom it is written by? By whom it is written? You’d never think I’d a degree in English) it is possibly half food blog and potentially half review blog, born in a moment of panic and procrastination towards the end of an Honours thesis. Hopefully, by the time it is half sure of who it is and where it wants to be, I’ll be a halfway-librarian who writes a little, reads a lot, and cooks almost everything.
Cheers,
Rose.
