making, eating, listening, seeing

Heide Gallery are currently showing an exhibition showcasing 30 years of their collection. Two pieces that stood out for me were Charles Blackman's 'Alice' and Mary Boyd's 'Hands'. Such powerful works, both of them.

Aimee Mann's music is keeping me blissfully happy. As is this beautiful autumn weather.

Have been eating at Pope Joan. Their corn cakes are to die for.

Lot's of carving still to do but am hoping to print next weekend. Now that it is said, I'm committed. Ha.

recommended

Carolina | especially their brioche french toast with stewed summer fruit, mascarpone and mint. An old shoe repair shop reinvented as a cafe on Nicholson St, East Brunswick.

IQ84 | Murakami's new 3 volume-fiction piece. In paper form it comes as a massive 1000 page hard back brick. Not easy on your arms, hands or hips when reading. Go the ereader version if you can.

Hibiki-an | for beautiful Japanese green tea. Nothing available in Australia compares to what they have on offer through their online shop. Try their sencha range. The sencha karigane is very good.

Holly Throsby. Especially her album 'Team'.

in the heat:

| cold cherries straight from the fridge

| Maggie Beer's Quince & Bitter Almond ice cream

| gin & tonics with slices of lemon or lime and lots of ice

blue noodles in texas

Blue Noodles, Japanese woodblock print, Kylie Budge

I was really very touched when food magazine, Edible Austin (as in Austin, Texas) approached me about using one of my woodblock prints featuring Japanese food to illustrate a story about this same topic. So Blue Noodles sits proudly alongside this great story about Japan's gift to good food in the world. You can see the web version here. Hard copies are available from Edible Austin. They've included some fab resources and recipes.

Blue Noodles was created about 8 years ago while living in Kyoto, Japan. I was surrounded by incredible food all day long and it seeped into my creative consciousness, and then leaked out into my printmaking. At that time I was very fond of eating enoki mushrooms and renkon (lotus root) and so if you look carefully you'll see them swimming around in this print. You can buy fresh renkon in some Asian grocery shops in big cities in Australia. It's highly nutritious (why don't we eat more of it in the West?) and really nice lightly fried with a touch of soy sauce or chilli powder (zing!). Add it to stir fries for a bit of pazazz.

Here are some links to a couple of Japanese cooking blogs if you feel inspired to learn more:

justhungry
justbento

In terms of other Japanese favourites I'm a bit of a closet fan of okinomiyaki. Each region has their own way of making this dish but I do love the Kyoto version. A friend from Hiroshima once made me their local style (with noodles). Interesting! Do you have any favourite Japanese food/s?

a study in chillies

All picked from the garden this morning. There are plenty more to come from a couple of healthy looking chilli bushes we have happening. Crazy curly looking things, some of them.

The tomatoes are almost fully ripe. Amazingly one plant has 17 full size tomatoes on it! It's loaded down and has made it through the heat wave without too much damage.

We had a friend drop off some super sized plums from her tree last weekend and then another friend dropped by with apricots from her neighbours' tree. That same friend also gave us home made ice cream flavoured with cardamon and apricots from her garden. Delicious! It's a regular locally grown fruit bounty swapping session around here these days.

Ah summer...........

nostalgia and a bit of green tea

I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person but sometimes, out of nowhere, it hits me like a slap. This story about kooky food in Osaka did it for me. Amy Richardson has a really perky blog called pretty yum yum about food and fashion in Japan. But it was her interview with inside out that really got the natsukashii (nostalgic) juices flowing in me. All that colour. All that odd stuff. In the name of food. Oh how I remember it. Like mayonaise on everything. Including onigiri (rice balls). And nori (seaweed) on top of spaghetti napolitana. Mostly my nostalgia centres on the good stuff like the creative use of green tea for flavouring food. My memory of going to Uji, a famous tea region and having green tea udon, green tea dango and green tea ice cream. And cycling through old parts of Kyoto like the north-east side of the Kamo River and smelling the scent of roasted green tea in the air. And having macha in Ippodo an old tea house on Teramachi dori in Kyoto. Ok so it seems my nostalgia is mostly about all things tea. Well that's nothing new is it?