Helen Lehndorf

news + musings

  • Sometimes reaching out to your heroes works out

    (Above: Morag Gamble + my book! *squeals with delight* Image borrowed from Morag’s website. I love this photograph. I look at it when I’m having low moments to do with writing stuff and it cheers me up.)

    Today I’m returning to an occasional series of sharing anecdotes from my experiences after publishing A Forager’s Life . This is a story about how I reached out to some writing or permaculture heroes, people I respect and look up to, and how it panned out.

    I have an amazing publicist at Harper Collins, Sandra Noakes, without whom I would not have had such good reach with the book or opportunities like feature articles in national publications, appearances at literary festivals and featuring on the bill at WOMAD.

    Any writer worth their salt, however, will do their best to get word out on their own steam as well. If you believe in your work enough to publish it…you have to keep backing it beyond publication. Publication isn’t the finish line. In some ways, it’s just the start line of phase two. Reaching out to people can be an excruciating experience. You have to steel yourself for plenty of ‘thanks but no thanks’ or, worse, silence. (*cue the sound of crickets chirping.*)

    Just after the book came out, I wrote to a dozen people (nature writers, permaculture heroes, eco-podcast hosts) introducing myself, explaining why I thought they might be interested in the book and offering to send them a copy. Out of that dozen – two said yes.

    Out of the two who said yes please to me sending a book…one worked out wonderfully well. The other person ghosted me. Being real with you, it’s hard not to take it personally…but for my mental health I’m choosing to believe that they were in a place of overwhelm with life and my book was one of the things that could fall off their ‘to-do’ list with minimal consequences …rather than: they just didn’t like the book.

    I share these details with you, not for sympathy, but to demonstrate how thick-skinned you have to be in the writing. business (and I’m not particularly…I bruise fairly easy). Take my recent lovely news about the Verb Home Based Writer’s Residency. I’m still so over the moon about this. What people don’t see, though, is the manifold rejections from other opportunities that I have thrown my hat in the ring for. The writing life takes tenacity…the amount of tenacity demanded can be wearing and I have definitely had fallow years where I just couldn’t find the grit to keep on trying. Or when the responsibilities of my life precluded space for creative pursuits.

    Anyway, this is a happy story, not a gloomy one!

    One of the permaculture heroes I approached was the indomitable, prolific, generous Morag Gamble. This name might not mean much to you if you aren’t active in the permaculture world but in permie-land, it means a lot.

    Morag is a permaculture teacher, mentor, writer who lives in Australia but works at a global scale. She has an excellent Youtube channel with dozens of helpful permaculture clips, she teaches permaculture teachers at the Permaculture Education Institute, and she runs a non-profit which gifts permaculture education to refugees in East Africa. She’s an incredible woman for whom I have a lot of admiration and respect.

    You can imagine my delight when she took me up on my offer to send her my book. I wrote a friendly letter and posted it off and then a while after that…she got back in touch to say that she’d read and really enjoyed the book (!!) and invited me to be a guest on her podcast! I was, and still am, thrilled.

    + Morag’s daughter also reviewed the book here.

    The podcast was conducted via Zoom. On the day, I was so nervous, my mouth kept going dry which is very annoying when you want to chat away and try to sound relaxed. I needn’t have worried, though, because Morag is just as warm and genuine as she seems in her videos and podcasts and talking to someone so aligned in values was an absolute dream.

    Here’s Morag’s description of our conversation: “As a published author of books like ‘A Forager’s Life‘, Helen has a beautiful way of emphasising humans’ reciprocal relationship with plants and the wisdom of plant tending. She also highlights the significance of hyperlocal food systems and the power of food commons and radical reciprocity.”

    You can listen to our conversation here.

    & while I didn’t have to tell you that I got the slot on Morag’s podcast because I chased it…I like to be honest about ‘behind the scenes’ things in the writing world in the hope it helps people get a sense of how things work and (maybe) to inspire you to keep going with whatever your dream is…even when things feel too huge or overwhelming.

    People will say no to you or they won’t respond at all…and that’s okay. Everyone is busy, often to the point of overwhelm, and I think one out of twelve is not too bad…especially given how delighted I was with the outcome. A more courageous writer than me would have sent out hundreds of emails…not just a dozen…but that was the maximum of what my nervous system could handle.

    I hope this story might have given you a little bit of inspiration to take the next step forward in working towards your aspirations. x

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #7

    (Above: Kitchen table vignette. The bowl was my grandmother’s.)

    Happy Friday 13th…lucky for some…let’s decide to claim it as lucky for us, hey?

    Winter is now truly here. We had our first frost this week. The fire is a fairly constant companion. I’ve had my first experiences of getting summer vegetables out of the freezer and feeling grateful that I preserved them: Luisa plums, cherry tomatoes, pesto.

    & Next weekend is Matariki & winter solstice already! That seems so strange…I’m having a subterranean-feeling year where I’m struggling to keep track of time.

    Here’s this week’s digest of things I’ve been digesting:

    A poem about strangers becoming fast friends because of a fig tree

    I love pretty much everything Ross Gay writes. This is one of my favourites, about communal joy and ripe figs.

    An indulgent way to get some Vitamin C:

    This year the mandarins on my mandarin tree are really small for some reason. It could be because it was a hot, dry autumn and I didn’t water it enough? Any thoughts?

    Anyway, they are fine for juicing and for this recipe for boiled mandarin cake. This makes a bright yellow and moist cake and it is relatively healthy…made with almond meal, eggs and no butter. The longest step is boiling the mandarins…maybe put them on to boil at breakfast time and then make the cake for afternoon tea?

    Something to watch:

    A beautiful film (40 minutes) about a UK folk singer Sam Lee who is in deep relationship with the threatened nightingale bird. He spends each spring living in the forest and making music for/with these vulnerable birds.

    It’s also about the old folk traditions of the UK. It’s is visually gorgeous, calming, the perfect weekend watch for rattled nerves.

    What pottering is… and isn’t:

    A little article about the gentle art of pottering:

    “It’s important that pottering activities aren’t taxing, time-sensitive or goal-oriented. Pottering isn’t jobs. It isn’t chores. It involves tasks that are so low down the priority scale that they don’t merit a mention on any to-do list…

    …Importantly – and this is good news for pottering’s greatest fans, prevaricators and procrastinators – pottering projects can be abandoned unfinished, to be re-continued in some as-yet unspecified future timeframe.”

    -Judy Rumbold

    I love it when I have the time to potter. Lately, I love any unscheduled time…calendar days without commitments…staying in on weekend nights…days where I don’t really need to know what time it is…

    This week’s affordable art:

    I love these murmuration prints from artist Lesley Ann’s series of paintings. (They are all beautiful…but in case anyone is shopping for me, I like number three the best, lol.)

    (Photo borrowed from Lesley Ann’s Felt Shop.)

    Monty Don being very opinionated about what to wear in the garden

    This very old (2005) article I like to re-read every so often, just because of how certain Monty seems that he’s right.

    I also like his particularities: trousers must be high-waisted, cashmere makes a good first winter layer (nice for some, Monty!), & jeans are ‘stupid’.

    How charming and precise is this?: “If you are uncertain about the required cut, (for trousers) check out photographs of agricultural labourers in summer (ie, jacketless) circa 1880-1914.”

    (Above: Of course I had to go and find such an image for you. Essex grain harvesters, early C20th.)

    A song about foraging:

    This week’s addition to the slow growing Slow Small Media playlist is a song about foraging…mushrooms to be precise…

    I love this British duo, Small Plant. All of their songs are so sweet and gentle…but of course I had to choose the foraging song to share with you.

    From the ‘Mushroom Walk‘ lyrics,

    ‘Slow Down…. and bring your awareness to the ground’.

    Indeed!

    *

    If you’re enjoying these weekend digests, please do share them with a friend.

    I hope you have some time to go slow and forget clock-time this weekend. Wishing you zingy cakes, drowsy afternoon naps and soothing short films aplenty.

    x Helen

  • Another morning, full of hope

    Do you ever have movies that you love so much you watch them over and over?

    I am an obsessive re-watcher, re-reader, re-listener. When I really love something, I want to take it in over and over again, enjoying it manifold times and, in the process, getting new things from it. I’m not someone that needs endless novelty.

    One of those films I love to re-watch is a wonderfully odd documentary from 2013 called ‘Cutie and the Boxer’.

    It’s about two Japanese artists, Ushio Shinohara and Noriko Shinohara, living in New York City. They are a married couple and they are startlingly honest with one another. Their creative paths have caused them all sorts of suffering and tensions…and yet they can’t help but live for their art despite art being ‘a demon that drags you along’ as Ushio says at one point.

    Whenever I’m feeling a bit gloomy about my creative life…feeling fatigued from the endless tenacity it takes to keep writing on top of the endless demands of family/community life…I like to rewatch this film and it always lifts me back up and re-invigorates my love for the creative life.

    Both Ushio and Noriko are very dry, very blunt and very funny (maybe it’s a Japanese quality? I don’t know enough Japanese people to know.) Even though there are very sad elements to their story (poverty, alcoholism, domestic inequalities) …ultimately the film is a testament to never giving up your creative aspirations.

    Do you have any movies you like to watch over and over when you need a lift? Films that feed your creativity? Tell me in the comments – I’d love some recommendations. I especially love documentaries.

    Here’s one of my favourite Ushio moments from the film (I captured these by taking photographs of my TV screen so excuse their bad quality):

    *mic drop*

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #6

    (Above: the sweet and tiny reading hut at the Red Bach, Turakina, where I recently had the good fortune to spend a weekend.)

    I lost most of this week to dental surgery recovery and felt quite sorry for myself…however, it has not prevented me from rambling the internet with my forager’s bag over my arm looking for good things for you to read.

    If you love me don’t feed me junk

    Those of us of a certain vintage *cough* possibly have a certain nostalgia for the wholefood health shops and cafes of the late 70s through the 80s. I really enjoyed reading this very personal, quirky and interesting research project by artist Faythe Levine about her parents involvement in health food education when she was a child. This research is presented in such an interesting way.

    It sparked a lot of nostagia in me of the health food cafes of the 1980s in Taranaki and the Manawatū which I would frequent as a punky teen getting interested in all things countercultural. I would gnaw down the sprouted lentil salads served in gritty pottery bowls, eat the earnest sugar-free carrot cakes with oily carob frosting and feel like I was really living on the edge.

    A song

    This week’s song is my one of my favourite bands, This is the Kit. I love this band so much. They sing about things familiar to me…like gardens, and cups of tea, staying in to cosy up, friendship heartbreak, and environmental angst.

    I thought I’d share this song ‘Empty No Teeth’ because I’ve been laid up with dental horrors this week…but also, because I love that the lyrics for this song mention ‘autumn…compost….leaf mulch’ …

    (I used to put compost in poems so often that my poet friend Jo banned me from using ‘the c word’ any more. It’s hard, though, because compost heaps are so full of life! and metaphor!

    *By the way, you can listen to the slow-growing playlist of Slow Small Media songs over on Youtube here. (I don’t do Spotify…because #payartists)*

    Affordable Art

    This week’s affordable art is a beautiful scene of a lakeside path meandering through trees. The artist, Gill Allen, writes that it is a scene from Mistletoe Bay in the Nelson region of NZ. I love the dappled light and it makes me think of my slow foraging walks. It offers such a peaceful feeling, I think.

    & you can buy an unframed A4 print for just $39!

    (By the way, if you are an artist who has affordable art to share…or you’re an art-appreciator who has some good leads for me, please share in the comments or email me.)

    A comforting dinner

    I’ve been eating soft foods this week because of dental pain…so here’s a soft and nourishing main dish which uses that handsome vegetable, Italian kale, Kale and Chickpea Ragu, served on polenta.

    Polenta is such a comforting rice/pasta alternative for the colder months…and so easy to whip up.

    Art to admire …surreal reading women

    I spotted these reading women by american artist, Rick Beerhorst on Lithub. I really like the way he captures something of the magic of being lost in a book by the way he paints hovering birds and the like in front of the women. He’s a contemporary artist but they feel like paintings from another age.

    Radical Neighbouring

    This is a new film by inspirational film production company, Campfire Stories, about a man who was gifted a farm (!) and grows food to give away. It’s a beautiful and inspiring story.

    A beautiful photo essay of some urban ‘neopeasants’

    If you’re a permaculture person, you might know of Artist As Family, an Australian family who have a poetic, creative approach to urban permaculture and ‘re-common-ing’ the ‘burbs.

    They just shared a beautiful photo essay (photos by Max Roux): ‘Max slung his camera over his shoulder as we forested, farmed, gardened, creeked, salvaged, ate, played, loved and listened to one another’… and I find it very earthy, heartening, inspiring.

    A tantric, non-dual poem expressing life’s ineffable beauty

    The Secret of Contentment

    By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
     

    To be the seed and not
    wish to be the flower.
    Or to be the flower and
    not wish to be seed or rain.
    To be the rain and be grateful
    to be the rain. Which
    is to say, to be the self
    and delight in being the self.
    But when I say self, I mean
    to know the self as seed.
    As flower. As rain. When I
    say to know, I mean to
    ever be in wonder.

    *

    I hope there are good things in your weekend. I hope you still have moments in your life when you can ‘delight in yourself’. I hope someone buys you coffee/cake/wine/chocolate when you least expect it. I hope you have access to a cosy fire, a good book.

    See you in a whole new week

    x Helen

  • I’m (one of two) inaugural Verb Wellington Home Based Residency recipients!

    Today some news, rather than a musing…I’m very excited to share with you that…

    The other recipient is the wonderful Henrietta Bollinger.

    This residency is aimed at writers who can’t, for personal reasons, go away to multi-month/year-long residencies, or overseas residencies.

    I think it is so wonderful that Verb Wellington has created a residency with this kaupapa.

    Over the last couple of years, I’ve had raw and deep conversations with fellow-Taranaki writer Cassie Hart (who also finds it hard to get away from home) about how most residencies leave out writers who have health issues or care loads that prevent them from accessing the usual style of residency. We chatted about what our ideal residency would look like…and we agreed it would look like a financial stipend and no need to go anywhere!

    I thought about lobbying CNZ to try to make something like this happen but I never got around to it, because: care load …

    …and then Verb Wellington created one which looked just like what Cassie and I had talked about!

    It means SO MUCH to me to be selected for this residency. I have been writing poems and essays this year and the residency will assist in getting those closer to publication.

    Thank you so much, Verb Wellington!

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #5

    (Above: My inspiration wall. Are you an inspiration wall / mood board kind of person?)

    Let’s start with poetry:  

    How are you doing?

    Every time I catch up with the news, I feel pretty bleak for a while afterwards so I’m making myself go in search of a poem to remind me of all the good in the world. This one from Ada Limon is very beautiful and helpful, ‘Instructions For Not Giving Up.’

    Do you spend time in NZ bush huts? Here’s a cool collaborative creative challenge… 

    Check out this wonderful call out for anthology submissions from creative powerhouse couple, Kemi and Niko . 

    Go to a favourite bush hut, respond to your surrounding in words and/or images, submit! 

    Dancing our work, dancing our meals

    I love this piece which was on Dark Mountain recently about a dancer in dance-training in Japan where the class danced every aspect of their lives. 

    They danced their garden work, they danced their food, they danced from place to place. 

    From the piece: ‘Ours was a dance that featured the odd, the twisted, the dark, the ugly, the sick, the old, the infirm. We danced as bodies coming from the earth, eating the earth, becoming the earth.… we were animal, human elemental, sometimes all at once.’

    I don’t entirely understand what is happening in this piece and I loved it. Sometimes good writing can have that effect, hey?

    It made me want to dance my chores….dance my sweeping, dance my cooking, dance with the weeds as I kneel on the ground. 

    A long and melancholy song

    After I posted about my recent discovery of Sun Kil Moon, a friend asked me if I knew of this song ‘Farewell Transmission’ – full of yearning and foreboding. 

    The song was recorded with the whole band playing it live after just learning the song’s bare bones. It has a potent energy that can only come from when musicians are in the moment together, riffing and  trusting, watchful and present. At first the song didn’t especially grab me…but then it traverses through some interesting territory and the spare and repeated refrain of ‘listen’ at the song’s end becomes really powerful. 

    I have been listening to the song on high rotate since my friend told me about it. 

    Of course I ended up researching the band and the song a bit, because: nerd, and found this moving article on Orion magazine about the song and the sad demise of the writer and vocalist, Jason Molina. Jason Molina died of alcoholism, as did his mother. One interpretation of the song is that it is like a warning from his mother about his potential trajectory…which he ultimately did not/could not heed because of his illness. This only adds to the song’s haunting quality. 

    (& you can find the slow-growing playlist of all of the Slow Small Media songs together here on Youtube.) 

    In the kitchen

    This weekend, I want to play with making beetroot lattes! A while ago I bought some beetroot powder on a whim because I couldn’t resist the colour. I’m yet to use it so I looked up some ideas of uses and was taken with the idea of a bright fuschia-coloured latte. 

    I will use this recipe as inspiration but will play around with various powders I have in the cupboard…medicinal mushrooms, maca, spices. If it goes well, I’ll report back. 

    Affordable Art

    This week’s affordable art is just $25 for an original, inky linoprint from MairangiAtelier! What an amazing price for something hand-cut and hand-printed.

    There are several native birds to choose between in this listing but I particularly like the hawk, the Kārearea. 

    I have a pair of Kārearea claws which I preserved in salt (saved from roadkill)l. I love to hold them and visualise the freedom of soaring high, high above the land as a hawk. 

    Music nerd fun

    Let’s round off with a fun one. I love to watch the iconic Amoeba Records series called ‘What’s in my bag’ where famous musicians (and others) share what they have just shopped from Amoeba. It’s always interesting learning about people’s obsessions and a great way to find new music, too. 

    Comedian Bill Hadar’s ‘What’s in my bag?’ is a nerdy delight (18 mins) I especially love that they didn’t actually invite him. He’s such a nerd for this series he emailed them and asked to appear on it. How very geeky and sweet. 

    *

    This weekend is my city’s iconic Red Cross Book Sale, three huge halls full of second hand books! It’s a joy for the bookish, a highlight of the local calendar and it goes allllll the long weekend. I usually go along at least twice. 

    I also have a friend’s 60th birthday party…because apparently I’m now of the age where friends are turning 60! Not sure how that happened. 

    I hope all is well in your world & I hope you enjoyed at least one thing from this week’s digest.

    I’m enjoying sharing the strange corners of the internet that I lurk on with you.

  • 52 and still stumbling over the ‘A’ word…

    (Above: journal word cards I make for my workshops.)

    Over the weekend, I was at a beach-side retreat for women so I was meeting some new people. I had just taught a journaling workshop (if you’re reading the blog because of foraging…you might not know my second book was about the practice of keeping a journal and I teach journal workshops) and a new acquaintance asked if I were an artist.

    I made some digressive, stumbling reply about how I loved to ‘mess about’ with art, had a visual element to my journal practice, love to play with art materials…mumble mumble… but ‘no, I am not a ‘proper’ artist.’

    My friend C, who was standing there, who is a visual artist, has been to art school, etc, interjected and said,

    ‘Helen, you are an artist. You are. You spend a lot of time doing art. You’re an artist!’

    I thanked her…the conversation moved on…but it left me reflecting.

    (Above: Mixed-media chamomile from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I have taught creative writing for most of my working life (at university) and there I was, encouraging my undergrads to claim the ‘W’ word, ‘writer’ for themselves.

    ‘If you are passionate about writing, you spend your time writing, you are a writer!’ I said to them. I meant it, too. I felt there was power in the claiming of the word for themselves.

    And yet…and yet…here I am, old enough to know better, and still wiggling around doing the same thing for myself in another creative discipline. I studied creative writing at university and spend a great deal of time writing so it feels simple to claim ‘writer’ for myself. I still wobble around with claiming ‘artist’.

    Aren’t our brains fascinating, and odd, and annoying?

    (Above: Mixed-media red clover from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I think part of it is where a passion intersects with an audience, or with capitalism. I find it easy to claim ‘writer’ because I have published things and had an audience respond to them. My words have earned me (a little!) money. I have been successful in selling books.

    (Above: art manifesto in the making. Sketchbook notes.)

    My art is mostly in the vein of play, experimentation and enjoyment of the creative process. I have exhibited art work and sold a few things. When my children were small, I supplemented my income with making self-designed and drafted textile crafts and paper goods. I love taking photographs. I feel I have a good visual eye.

    So how is it, I can, for years, have encouraged students to claim ‘writer’ for themselves and yet fail to take my own advice in another discipline?

    Do you have a creative practice noun -artist, writer, musician, singer, potter?-…..you yearn to claim and inhabit but struggle with? I’d love to hear about your blocks or advice for overcoming this odd phenomena.

    Love, Helen, (confident writer, tenuous artist.)

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #4

    Somehow it’s the weekend again, friends. What even IS time lately?

     

    (Above: Black peach cake. We’ve been exploring butter-free baking due to butter now being mostly unaffordable in NZ. More about that below.)

    What does it mean to get older consciously? 

    At the start of this year, I started a Pinterest* board: ‘Conscious Ageing’. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to fill it with. So far I have been stowing in there memes about integrating the past, looking after yourself well and any images of older women that I find inspiring. 

    I wrote a little in ‘A Forager’s Life’ about being on the threshold of ‘baby eldership’. I don’t want to get older before my time (I know 52 is not that old) but I do want to walk into my elderhood with open eyes and conscious integration along the way. 

    With these sorts of things in mind, I enjoy reading material written by people a little further along the path than me and I really enjoyed this article by Laurie Wagner about her observations of her changing self as she gets a little older. Honest and compelling writing. 

    (Beautiful artwork by Dee Nickerson.)

    Heartening writing on finding joy in spite of/amongst a heavy care load: 

    I really appreciated this article about the tensions of caregiving but/and joy in spite of it all. By Elizabeth Kleinfield.  

    This line from Elizabeth’s article:

    ‘The worry is constant, a background hum beneath everyday life’

    really captures how life has felt for me as the parent of a kid with a disability. Even when I get an opportunity to ‘relax’ …I can never entirely relax. The hyper-vigilance of care is as deep in me as my bone marrow. 

    How to easily increase the yields from your garden harvests by reframing how you see vegetables: 

    Are you a vegetable gardener? Here’s a helpful and interesting video (11 mins)  from garden writer Huw Richards on how to get more from your harvests in the garden by considering all of the parts of a plant…it’s kind of like ‘nose to tail’ eating except for vegetables. Eat those flowers! & in some cases, eat those roots!

    A beautifully-written origin story: 

    I really enjoyed this article by New Zealand writer and reviewer Lucy Black about the origins of her ravenous reading habit (I know Lucy IRL and no one reads more books than Lucy!) I always appreciate articles which explore working class experience and Lucy’s article is buoying and beautiful. 

    Affordable art: Iko Iko’s Cavallini Posters

    I promised to find you affordable art under $50 NZD. This week’s is under $20! Iko Iko’s Cavallini Poster range of vintage-inspired posters are just $17 each.

    Predictably, I have this foraging one on the back of my front door. I also have this dandelion which I bought a few years ago. Most of them are so gorgeous…I’d love more but I don’t have much wall space left. Luckily my big dandelion still brings me joy every day. 

    A no-butter-needed tea loaf 

    In New Zealand, butter prices are rocketing. We can no longer afford to buy butter each time we grocery shop as we used to. 

    But my sons like to bake so I’ve been encouraging them to find recipes with little to no butter…which has cause a tea loaf revival in our house. Old-fashioned tea loaves are often dairy and egg free, yet still turn out moist and light. There are endless variations, date loaf, ginger loaf, here’s a nice dried fruit version we made this week. 

    Inspiring Creative Process videos

    Country Living UK has a Youtube channel and within it, they have a series of beautiful short films (around ten mins) about the creative process of artists who make work (from lots of different mediums)  inspired by nature.

    I’m slowly working my way through the playlist…but none so far have disappointed. 

    Calm, cosy and soothing viewing. 

    A beautiful song

    I love this sweet and poignant song by New Zealand artist Maisy Rika, called Reconnect. If you are not from NZ, the ‘Tui’ and ‘Huia’ mentioned in the opening are new zealand native birds. I love this repeated lament towards the song’s end…

    ‘Change is inevitable, things don’t last forever…

    things don’t last forever, things don’t last forever‘

    (By the way, I have started gathering all the songs I’m sharing here into a slow-evolving playlist. You can find it here on Youtube. )

    Tell me in the comments what you’d like more of or less of for these Friday digests. 

    This weekend I am going to a wild west coast beach for a gathering of witches. *cackles manically* What are you up to? 

    (*Pinterest is the social media account I have the biggest following on. I have 16, 000 followers over there! I’m not quite sure how that happened…perhaps 15, 990 of them are bots?)

  • In the kitchen this week: an experiment with basil and a batch of Fire Cider

    (Above: the things I put in this batch of Fire Cider. Every batch is unique. It’s a real ‘use what you have’ medicine.)

    Kitchen-witchery is slow work.

    Sometimes things that end up the jars in my kitchen began months ago with literal seeds in the greenhouse or foraged finds from a season the opposite to now. If I count growing, harvesting and sometimes drying or macerating in to the recipe hours…I have to describe the recipe method in months rather than hours. This is why I love ‘slow food’ or the localising food movement…it operates on an entirely different time-scale to the deadening speed of supermarkets and fast food outlets.

    An example of this, I just conducted an kitchen experiment which began in back spring as seed…basil seed…grown by both me and my friend Bev of Kereru Natural Products. I had a modest basil harvest but Bev’s basil really flourished this summer and her basil patch was thigh high! I’d never seen such large basil plants. Whilst looking after her place for a weekend in summer, I harvested some and made a large batch of pesto; some for her, some for me. I’m used to making pesto without a recipe but for such a large batch, I googled a recipe to help me with proportions. I used this one which calls for 16 cups of chopped basil (!) to give you a sense of scale.

    (Above: basil, basil everywhere.)

    After the big basil-making session, the woody stalks were left behind. The stalks smelled so divinely peppery and aromatic, I felt loathe to compost them. So I tied the stalks from Bev’s basil and from my own in a bunch and hung them upside down in my greenhouse to dry.

    (Above: one of the bunches of dried basil stalks and flowers.)

    Last weekend, with harvest season madness slowing down enough to get to some more peripheral tasks, I bought the dried basil stalks in and had a go at turning them into a basil salt by cutting them into small chunks and grinding them into NZ seasalt in my electric spice grinder.

    I had to use garden secateurs for this, as they were very woody once dried. My spice grinder juuuuust coped. It made a not-very-visually-appealing, khaki, fibrous salt. However, what the salt lacks in visual appeal in more than makes up for in flavour.

    (Above: ground basil stalk + NZ sea salt. It’s not pretty but it’s delicious.)

    It has that intense, almost licorice smell that the top notes of basil has. It tastes like ‘essence of basil’. It’s freakn’ delicious and while it’s not attractive enough to be the kind of salt you’d put in a cute dish on the table, it makes a great ‘deep notes’ salt. I will be adding it to things which slow cook, like soups, stews and using it more like a stock than a table salt. I think this experiment was a success although if you have any thoughts about how to make it look more attractive, let me know in the comments. (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of each post to find the comments box, btw.)

    Another thing I made on the weekend, was a batch of Fire Cider as we’ve gotten through all of last year’s.

    Fire Cider is basically a brew of ingredients which stimulate the immune system, the digestive system and are anti-inflammatory, steeped in apple cider vinegar. The resulting fiery brew can be taken as shots with a little water through the winter to help stave off winter colds. I also use it in dressings to we are ‘eating’ our medicine through the winter as well.

    There’s a fascinating story about Fire Cider. In america, a natural goods company attempted to trademark ‘Fire Cider’…an insult to this commonly-known and used folk medicine! An angry and indignant group of ‘fiery’ herbalists fought in court against this attempt to trademark folk medicine and WON! Hoorah! A victory for the commons.

    There’s no real ‘recipe’ to Fire Cider. You use what you have and the ingredients you prefer. I don’t like white onion in mine but I do like the heat of chillies and garlic. I used some oranges for vitamin C. Rosemary, sage and thyme, calendula from the garden > all great for sore throats and coughs. Plus ginger and turmeric. by the way, I’d made the apple cider vinegar myself from our summer apple harvest. (See what I mean about slow food?)

    I find it a fun thing to make because it looks so pretty in the jar while it’s brewing. Our is currently sitting on the kitchen table…at least for a while.

    (Above: still life with garden blooms, fire cider brew and a huge persimmon my mother-in-law gave me.)

    Every late summer and autumn, I make various winter medicinals: oxymels, tinctures, vinegars, throat sprays…etc. I think everyone should be able to access simple herbal medicinals. They can be very expensive from the health store so I like to share what I make around with my friends and family.

    & that’s what’s been happening in Ahuru Kitchen this week. (Our house came with a name on the front: the Māori word, Ahuru, which means nest.)

    Do you make medicinal things in your kitchen as well as culinary things? Do you ever do strange experiments with odd ingredients? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

    & May we all have robust health this winter! x

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #3

    (Above: dawn in the Otaki Gorge…from a trip there recently.)

    Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #3

    Make a cup of tea, snuggle up with your laptop if you have one (for a nicer reading experience than squinting at your phone) and enjoy some nourishing longer reads and beautiful things. 

    In these digests, I am not looking for things to share that are new, fresh, hot off the press (although sometimes they might be)…I want them to feel like an antidote to the speed and brain-addling endless novelty of social media so I am slow-mooching around the internet looking for quality over novelty. 

    A remarkable interview with a beekeeper who turned a wall of her house into a natural beehive so she could live with her bees

    If you have any interest in bees, you must read this interview with beecharmer Susan Chernak. She turned part of a wall in her house into a natural bee hive! open to the outside so that she could live with her bees. 

    Living with her bees, she observed that bees sing to each other, they cry, they take naps. 

    Reading this made me love bees even more. 

    A Song

    This week’s song has been one of my favourites for many years now:  Riptide by Laura Viers. If you’ve ever been knocked sideways by life, you might find this song comforting. Laura is also a visual artist.

    In the lyrics the narrator gets dragged out to sea by a riptide, asks the stars for help to get back to shore…then kind of gives up and makes peace with her surroundings. A song about surrender, I guess. Gosh that sounds depressing…but it’s not. It’s a beautiful, gentle and soothing song. Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics. 

    ‘Left with essence

    Of the moon and stars and night

    There’s no other route

    I cannot take self to flight

    I’ll float here with the shrimp and brine

    And on my cheeks and hair

    The salt will always shine

    And with this phosphorescence map

    A sailor’s chart, a mermaid’s hand…

    Something I’ll find.’

    An affordable art work

    When I can’t quite afford a print or painting by an artist I admire, I often buy their greeting cards or postcards and just frame those. That’s what I did a few years back with these two works by Australian artist, Lucy Pierce when I desperately wanted some of Lucy’s art on my walls but was too skint to even buy a print.

    (Above: Two of Lucy’s framed greeting cards on my kitchen wall. The image above them of the golden offering hands is by my friend, artist and writer Carly Thomas.)

    Lucy’s work is of the earth, of ancestry, of deep time. I find it warm and nourishing work. I hope to buy one of her amazing clay terraphim for my altar…I just can’t decide which one calls to me loudest. Lucy also writes on Substack here.

    I find this mandala of women ‘Belonging’ to be an inspiring piece about deep time…time as a spiral.

    A solace poem 

    Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.

    These opening lines get straight to it:

    ‘Before you know what kindness really is

    you must lose things,

    feel the future dissolve in a moment

    like salt in a weakened broth.’

    But please go and read the whole poem. 

    + Do you want to know a poet’s trick for absorbing the full beauty of a poem? 

    Read it out loud to yourself, slowly, with short pauses at the end of each line to let the words really sink in. Then, if you like the poem, read it out loud to someone else in the house. 

    A recipe…or two

    Now that the weather is getting colder, this Mushroom and Lentil Cottage Pie is a hearty and vegetable-dense vegetarian version of a cold-weather classic.

    & for dessert, here’s a simple dessert recipe that is a must-add-to-your-recipe-file. In my household, we make Melissa’s ‘Any Kind of Fruit Tart’ so often that there is a copy of the recipe stuck to the inside of the baking cupboard. If you’re bored of crumbles but feeling too lazy to cream butter and sugar to make something cake-y, this recipe is your friend. (I see that she originally posted the recipe in 2011. So I guess that means we’ve been cooking it for fourteen years!) 

    Melissa is one of my original blogging friends from back in the early 2000s. She never stopped blogging so has much delicious content to delve into if you feel like spending some time in her calm and mindful world. 

    A calm and inspiring short film

    (Above: Twig poet and forest rewilder, Maria Westerberg.)

    Do you ever rewatch things you enjoy? I do. If something gives me a wash of calm or soothes like a balm or boosts my creative energy …I will rewatch it over and over.

    I’ve done that with this short (twenty minute) film about a ‘A Twig Poet’s Rewilding Journey’. 

    I particularly like her ‘Face Books’. 

    What is a twig poet? 

    Watch and find out and immerse yourself in her mossy, quiet world. 

    A mini-meditation 

    This beautiful video of sunflowers unfurling is two minutes long, very compelling, very soothing. (Warning: it may send you down a Youtube wormhole of timelapse flower unfurling videos.) 

    *

    I hope you enjoyed some of that. This weekend I will be pulling out the very last summer stragglers: a long tenacious cherry tomato, the green beans have finally given up producing, a chilli plant is starting to look unhappy with the cold evenings. 

    & I have a list of people I want to send snail mail to…overdue replies to beautiful missives that came my way last year. Now somehow it is May already and I haven’t written back yet. This weekend I will finally get to that. Do you still write snail mail? 

    I hope your weekend is good…and if it’s a busy one, make sure you fit in a short nap at some point…because the busier you are, the more important it is to take a nap.