#mymovetothemeadow

Food, food, glorious food….

/ susiecameron / Leave a comment

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These are the beautiful breakfast chia bowls from Milkwood in Berry, pretty AND delicious…

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Is this the quintessential Aussie breakfast?

How lucky are we Aussies to live where we do and have the huge range of amazing food products to choose from that we do. I shouldn’t say products actually, as that conjures up pictures of supermarkets full of packaged goods – rather I should just say amazing food. Full stop. Until recently I didn’t realise that avocado on toast was an Aussie ‘thing’ but merely something we have been doing for 20 years!Sunshine on toast! With our busy lifestyles smoothies are an obvious choice in the mornings when that extra 10 minutes of snatched sleep is often more appealing than getting up to poach a couple of eggs. The new kids on the block are chia puddings with various toppings, bircher mueslis made with nuts, almond or rice milk and fresh fruit of the season, breakfast tagines, shakshuka with it’s rich tomato and capsicum base, haloumi with chimichurri and corn fritters with smoked trout or nitrate free bacon – the list is endless. In my perfect world I would eat breakfast and dinner only and make them both AMAZING!!

Our local pub is quite famous for it’s Alpaca burger.

If like me, that brings a picture of big brown eyes with thick long lashes to mind you may not find it easy to order one, but they are good enough to have been voted one of NSW top 6 pub burgers. Our local winery, Silos, incorporates a working Alpaca farm and they produce wool, doonas, pillows and scarves as well as meat and sausages. They also sell the animals with a male going for $1000 and a female for $2500 and they seem to make pretty good low maintenance animals for a small holding as there are lots to be seen scattered over this part of the South Coast.Their meat is showcased at The Hungry Duck, Wharf Road as well as The Berry Pub so give it a go peeps!
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A little corner of our lounge is dedicated to my favourite blue and white collection.

It’s been a lovely week in The Meadow. My birthday was celebrated and enjoyed with a quick overnight trip from the youngest son making it extra special. We had an early start at the beach with Bailey and then home to prezzies and an evening in a local restaurant we have been wanting to try for ages – The Hungry Duck. A delicious 5 course degustation was consumed and the interesting flavours of sashimi of yellow fin tuna with a blood orange sorbet sounded weird but proved to be a  party in my mouth and at a mere $55 a head we were thrilled. In Sydney it would be A LOT more than that! http://www.hungryduck.com.au

A run and a swim is always a  great start to the day….!!

2016-02-28 10.04.29We had a lovely weekend with my nephew Niall and his girlfriend Sarah coming to stay. They have just arrived in Australia after living in the UK for the past 5 years or so and Sarah is still pinching herself that she is now living a mere 10 minute walk from  Bondi Beach and waking up to blue skies and sunshine most days! Sadly it was pouring when they arrived in The Meadow so to make up for it we sought shelter in the local winery and enjoyed a comprehensive tasting of their produce before checking out Haven & Space in Berry to stock up on some very well priced homewares for their new house! The next day dawned bright and sunny and Sarah took some beautiful photos (as seen below) before we headed to Gerroa for a beautiful brunch and a swim. The ocean is just the most perfect temperature at the moment and we are relishing it all the more for knowing Autumn and Winter are around the corner.Lying on the warm sand listening to the waves break onto the shore and with an azure blue sky for as far as you could see it felt as if I was on holidays!

Note to self to do this more often……

The only downside of our week was discovering that our development application has been referred to a historical consultant in Sydney who is apparently going to decide whether or not our house should be listed. Needless to say we do NOT want this as it restricts what we can do to the place. Our renovation design is classic and decidedly in keeping with the era of the building and as it is all at the back of the property hopefully despite being of ‘interest’ historically we will still get the tick of approval. Just as well we hadn’t fallen in love with the idea of a big modern glass cube extension out the back I guess………

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A Tricky Week.

/ susiecameron / 2 Comments

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I’m not quite sure why, but this week I fell victim to something that felt a lot like stress.

“How can this be?” you ask, when I’m surrounded by the serenity of the countryside and wake up to birds singing and nothing to do all day except tend to the veggies.

Well, life still catches up with you no matter where you are and after a week of being joined to my computer and a list a mile long of things ‘To Do’ I took a much needed day off away from technology to unscramble my brain and reconnect to the tranquility! Cam has been away being A Businessman and trying to get things in place for the big ‘End of Things’ mid March and I have been holding the fort with the Chocolate Drop and the chooks. Perfect for me to get a whole lot of things sorted out I thought. Accommodation was researched for our trips, wedding suppliers chosen and booked, meetings with the builder and architect arranged for our imminent renovation and then I started choosing tiles, taps, doors and windows,ovens, benchtops and toilets etc etc. So, as useful and convenient that the internet is, it means many, many hours on the damn computer and not much time out in the real world.

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This little cartoon resonated with me! I guess we just have to learn to unscramble our minds and see and enjoy what is right in front of us….

So I had a day off….

I felt guilty not doing some of THE LIST and a bit twitchy not being ‘connected’ but it was good for my soul and I enjoyed some local walks and a trip to Bowral. The drive was sublime. Blue skies and fields of bleached straw with little hay bales dotting the landscape. Beautiful homesteads with their deep verandas and tree lined driveways and cows, horses and alpacas grazing in paddocks that stretched endlessly into the distance. And to top it all off at the end of the scenic drive there were shops…!!

With Paris this Autumn in my mind I purchased a rather stylish pair of ankle boots to sashay around St Germain in and I couldn’t believe it when the girl told me it was the last pair! For heaven’s sake we’re still in the middle of Summer and these are the new Winter season stock – CRAZY!

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This is a little snapshot of my most local and regular walk. Luckily this is right on our doorstep!

Funnily enough one of the things I’ve missed the most from my old life back in England is the hedgerows. Little winding country lanes with hedges of blackberries and raspberries all interspersed with brambles, huge stems of cow parsley and healing plants like nettles, burdock, comfrey, dandelion and dock leaves. You can walk for miles in the English countryside because we have hundreds of public footpaths running in between privately owned land with stiles to go over their fences making it wonderfully accessible and communal. Australia doesn’t have this sadly, which means we are limited to walking along roads and in the National Parks. The only trouble is no dogs are allowed in The National Parks so our dog walks in particular hinge on having some nice local country lanes to wander down. In our instance we are blessed to also have the magnificent 7 mile beach to walk along but there is only one small part that is an off leash dog area.

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Some little Aussie hedgerow plants!

One good thing about being home alone is that I haven’t had to cook and it’s been easy to start the NEW REGIME. Instead of giving everything up simultaneously I have slid gently into my new eating plan and hopefully I will stay on track having the odd night off for a dinner out or at home with friends. My squidgy bits have to go!! I’m so lucky to have a wonderful Pilates Studio near me and a very dedicated, knowledgeable and patient teacher who knows just how far to push this old body!!! A couple of hours a week there in conjunction with some walks, stretching and a general awareness of posture will hopefully make the difference I am looking for. This young lady looks like she is appreciating the rather drop dead gorgeous view from the reformer too (makes that awful glut work a bit more bearable!!)

I finally found out where the other rock pool was in Gerringong. It is tucked away around the corner from the main beach in what was the old boat harbour back in the late 1800s. Produce came and went from here to Sydney and other towns along the coast and it’s position in a naturally sheltered bay made it a perfect place to also build a ‘Ladies Baths’ to be kept quite separate and away from the ‘Mens Baths’ of course!! I love swimming in rockpools as I’m pretty hopeless in the surf but LOVE the sea! It is a lovely place for a swim with the water being naturally replaced with the tides and always fresh and clean. If you read and believed the accompanying risk warning however you would probably think twice before entering! All this before you ever get to thinking about sharks……..

Bailey is now the proud owner of a new bed.I am hoping that it won’t go the same way as her first one which was chewed to death. She doesn’t really chew things so I think it was the fact that every morning she awoke to the holes she’d made with the stuffing tumbling out tantalisingly close that she couldn’t resist. The new model is a lot harder to ruin and I can cosy it up in winter with something snuggly.

So I’m choosing to forget her prior indiscretions and remember that

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Summer Fun

/ susiecameron / Leave a comment

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Well Summer came back with a vengeance this week didn’t it folks!!

We were reduced to waking up early and getting straight onto the physical tasks that needed doing or it was just way too hot and sticky later on. Worse still if we didn’t do it in the morning we would have to sacrifice Happy Hour to do it in the afternoon shade so that was enticement enough for me to wake at dawn!!

We have planted a new hedge along our front perimeter, well actually we’ve just filled in the (many) gaps in the existing hedge so that it will eventually outline the garden with a nice neat edge! We’ve poisoned off all the grass under the new crepe myrtle trees so that my new gardening helper Todd can dig a beautiful winding flower bed for me to fill with hydrangeas. Todd can’t help me for a couple of weeks as he is the celebrant for some friends in Byron Bay this week and has some musical commitments to complete as well – he sounds like an interesting and well rounded guy who will hopefully be able to help us with the hard yakka stuff so that everything is looking lovely in time for the wedding!

The farmer behind us planted a huge paddock with corn a while back with the intention of feeding it to his 1000  cows as a treat. Just the thought of milking 1000 cows twice a day is enough to make my head spin to be honest – it must take most of the day! We’ve seen the corn growing taller and taller so we trundled across to have a close up look. It’s quite a sight and at least 8 foot tall and it stretches endlessly in either direction. I’ve never seen our house from this angle before and it looked quite different from behind…

The house from the front isn’t looking too crash hot at the moment. The local courtesy bus that a certain son caught back from the pub a couple of weeks ago decided that it was easier to drive straight across our lawn at 1 am than to reverse back out and as it had been raining for the entire 2 weeks previously, the mini van sunk into the lawn leaving track marks reminiscent of an airport runway. 250 kilos of soil later we are hoping the grass runners will soon start to infiltrate the soil and we will have our nice lawn back! So much for courtesy eh?

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Our (almost) resident handyman Smutzer came down to help Cam put up the dartboard. After having it propped up in the corner of the garage for the past 12 months it thrills me every time I walk into the garage to see it now perched happily on the wall. A perfect 1.73m from the bullseye to the ground and with a nice background board for the wayward darts (they would be mine) it is a vision of beauty! To see the two boys working side by side with the new drill kit was very pleasing and the old dog has certainly learnt a new trick and can now use the Xmas gift the kids gave him.

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A few other residents have learned a new trick too…..

We have been letting the chooks free range for the last couple of hours in the afternoon which they love. Love however may not be quite the right word for how I feel when I see them in the middle of my rose bed kicking up  all the mulch I have lovingly laid down but I do like seeing them roaming around the garden and enjoying some freedom. Even the traumatised chook comes out now but is usually the first one back in and is easily spooked. I wondered what the strange noise was coming from the veranda the other day and discovered a soccer loving chicken right outside my door…..!!

Turfco, our local turf farm and a business that is heavily involved in all local happenings are also a creative mob and I always know what special event is coming up as they create a little scenario with some model cows who have become quite famous. It always brings a smile to my face as I drive by their turf farm and see how they’ve interpreted Xmas, Easter, the footy finals or Valentine’s Day…

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We enjoyed our degustation dinner at The Green Olive in Nowra and can recommend it for lunch if you are passing through on the way to or from Sydney, much easier to get a car park here than in Berry too! I had been good all week so it was lovely to have some wine and a delicious dessert to round it all off – a real treat!

The next day dawned hot and steamy so I needed no encouragement to get up and take Bailey for a nice walk and swim on 7 mile beach. Sammy joined us and we all loved watching her really stretch out and run through the surf chasing seagulls and leaping into the waves to swim with her special mate visiting from Sydney….

We have an official ‘retirement’ date now – March 15th (God help me!!) and in the lead up to the handover Cammo is in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide – in fact he’s everywhere other then The Meadow,  but that gives me some time to organise all the upcoming events! We are going to have a road trip to country Victoria in Week 1 just because we can-yay!! I have always wanted to visit the Daylesford region and it should be beautiful in early Autumn. A foodie destination as well which is always a good thing!Then another week up in Forster to visit family and friends and we can take the Chokky Drop too which makes it easy. My Mum is celebrating her 80th birthday in September in the UK and we are planning a trip there to kick our heels up with the birthday girl and also having a week in France before and a week in Lake Como afterwards so I am like a woman possessed researching hotels and doing some quality armchair travelling along the way! Not to mention the wedding of course which is coming along nicely organisation wise, it’s such a fun time to have with your daughter – precious and special. A kind of final chapter to the years of dressing up and playing fairy princesses as a child, a wedding is the grown up version and I want it to be every bit as magical as she imagined it as a little girl.

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I remember doing this with my Mum and the story continues……….