Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 22, 2019

I made these the other day when the great void inside me yearned for something cake-y and lemon myrtle-y. I’d recently had a piece (and the unattended leftovers of several strangers) of lemon myrtle cake a friend’s party and bought a sachet of the quintessentially Australian flavouring at a market stall. I had a hankering that just couldn’t be satisfied by the pumpkiny lumps I’ve been making so much of and thus these… things* were created.

* They’re not exactly biscuits, but not entirely scones. I mean, I COULD have called them sconscuits or biscones, but I guess I didn’t have the foresight to invent a culinary term at the time. You better believe that I shan’t lack the bravery to boldly invent new terms in my ground-breaking cook booklet that leads to a cooking show that leads to a career of towering highs and crushing lows before a nice, comfortable period as an extremely wealthy and wise 50-year-old with a massive kitchen and a refreshing outlook on life.

Here’s something I wouldn’t so much call a recipe as a creative process:

Pulse three cups of rolled oats in your food processor – this is apparently my base for all food items these days. Sure, it’s gluten free and probs like low GI or something, but I genuinely love oats. It’s possibly because horses like oats and because I have the soul of a wild mare with a flowing mane, galloping into the sunset.

Next, get three teaspoons of baking soda. Consider what’s at stake here – the satisfaction of your cravings – and add another teaspoon to put a bit of fluff into these fellas.

Then grab a decent pinch of salt, being the fancy kind from the sea that required you to grind into your fingertips a little. I’m sure other salt is fine, but using fancy salt makes me feel good about myself.

Next, get two tablespooons of brown sugar and four teaspoons of ground-up lemon myrtle stuff – I think they’re leaves, but I don’t actually know.

Then get two heaped tablespoons of margarine. I felt this recipe called for marge instead of butter, even though I haven’t got either the baking nor the chemistry background required to understand why. Plus, I was trying to get rid of the stuff to clear space in the fridge.

Rub the shameful butter alternative into the crumbs until you have something that looks like wet, dirty sand.

Dump in one beaten egg and mix.

Now add like three tablespoons of milk and stir again.

Add a cup of dry, un-pulverised oats.

Next, fret that it looks too dry and far too dense. Remember that you have another egg in the fridge you need to get rid of because it’s slightly cracked and therefore can’t be boiled for breakfast.

Decide to get a bit of phat air in there by chucking it in the food processor you haven’t yet put away, pulsing it until it’s all bubbly.

Dump this in, mix and then add another two heaped tablespoons of milk (of course I know that liquid cannot heap and that this is a illogical instruction that requires the follower to defy the laws of nature, but it’s my way of saying that I was overzealous in pouring the milk in the spoon and a bit dribbled over but I’m not sure how much).

Mix.

Then fret that it’s too wet and add another half a cup of oats. Yes, this recipe requires a metric buttload of oats. I’ve started buying them in bulk.

Get tired of all this wetting and drying and decide that it’s time to be bold, dammit.

You lump the mixture into sloppy balls, whack them on a baking tray and chuck them in the oven.

Check them after about 10 minutes, rotating the tray.

Stick them back in for another five minutes. Let the timer go off but be distracted for about two or three minutes before you remember the lumps of goodness at risk of burning into crispy humiliation.

Now I’m usually a massive goo lover. I love my dough  as raw as my emotions but in this instance, you want to let these babies go slightly brown. In fact, you want a bit of crumbly crunch to them. Trust me on this.

Also, even weirder, the finished product doesn’t actually need to be smeared with butter. In fact, added butter kind of spoils it. That was very hard for me to write, but I felt it was important to add.

Let them cool slightly before biting into one and just let yourself feel a comfort you’ve not felt before. It’s like if the nicest, cuddliest person you knew was somehow inside your abdomen and was giving your stomach one of their famous hugs. Of course, this is very sad because this grandmother figure has found herself in quite a difficult and frankly horrifying position, but at least your tum feels great.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 8, 2019

This is the perfect dinner to make when you want to cook, but don’t actually feel like cooking.

It fills your house with hearty, delicious aromas but doesn’t require much in the way of stirring, sautéing or much any “ing”ing, really. It’s more of a cut, slop and smoosh kind of dish. And you don’t even cut that much, come to think of it.

It’s a rip off of a tray bake, but when I first made it I felt like some kind of freeballing cook, boldly chucking things together led only by my chef instincts. It almost certainly already exists, but I felt like I was breaking real ground at the time. I was in a flurry of inspiration, thanks to my gourmet muses: tinned tomatoes and microwavable rice.

I feel this dish would pair well with a cheap red wine and Ratatouille (the Disney movie about the French rat who loves to cook).

Step one: Rip off a piece of baking paper, violently scrunching it in your hand to squeeze out your rage. Not only does this make you less likely to write angry, rambling Facebook statuses taking aim at people you’ve never met, it will also help the paper to better sit in the baking dish when you unfurl it. Shove this paper into the corners of a square baking dish and exhale, letting go of your hate.

Step 2: Preheat an oven to 210 degrees. I mean, you should have done this first, but you were busy cleansing your soul. If your oven has a grill function, engage that bad boy. We want crispness here, people.

Step 3: Slice a chicken breast in half lengthways, so it’s about two or three centimetres thick. Think schnitty.

Step 4: Season this raw slab of flesh with a few good pinches of salt, rubbing the grains into both sides.

Step 5: Remember that thing you read about salting raw meat ahead of time, and regret spending your morning buying out-of-print DVDs and pony ceramics from an op shop instead of caressing raw chicken. Set chookie aside.

Step 6: Open a packet of microwavable rice – I get something with the words “wild” and “medley” in the name, because it makes me feel fancy – and tip into the paper-lined tin.

Step 7: Roughly chunk a medium-sized onion. I used “chunk” as a verb here, because it’s sounds slightly better than “slice and dice it, but fatly”. Just cut it into medium, irregular pieces for a rustic vibe.

Step 8: Crush about three or four cloves of garlic, smooshing with the flat side of a knife under most of your weight (plus the added weight of your existential dread, that can only help at this point). This makes it easier to pick the skin off and saves you from having to chop it like a chum.

Step 9: Place the garlic and onion atop the rice.

Step 10: Tear up two large handfuls of fresh spinach with your hands and scatter on top of the rice.

Step 11: Open up a can of crushed tomatoes, dumping it into the baking tin and marvelling at how it mirrors the a rapid evacuation of one’s stomach. Slop the chunky liquid so it covers the entire surface of the rice.

Step 12: Glide out to your slowly-dying-but-not-dead-yet collection of pot plants, serenely plucking a dozen or so basil leaves from your garden. Ignore the silent cries of the plants you’ve failed, telling yourself that you’re an earthen goddess. You could also buy fresh basil from the shop or ask a neighbour skilled in the art of not killing stuff if you can pillage in exchange for whatever you can scrounge around that might be worthy of a basil trade – perhaps they’ll take pity on you and insist you take the leaves for free.

Step 13: Rinse and tear the basil, scattering it over the tomato and squelching it into the mix.

Step 14: Delicately lay the chicken atop layers of goodness, because slapping them in there would give you serious splashback which would be annoying to wipe up.

Step 15: Crumble over a few cubes of goats cheese, preferably the super wanky kind that comes drowned in olive oil with thyme and pepper. I wouldn’t judge you for using the whole jar, but do keep the oil for drizzling on assorted hot breakfast items to keep that luxe feeling going.

Step 16: Drizzle with oil of some kind – either the goat’s cheese oil or that garlic olive oil you bought on a whim when it was on special and only used once like three months ago.

Step 17: Chuck into the oven for about half an hour, until the chicken has browned to the point that you’re certain it won’t give you violent diarrhoea.

Step 18: Using a spatula, dig under one of the chicken pieces and dump the claggy mix on your plate.

Step 19: Keep returning to dish to pick at the rice until you’re so full you can only communicate via groans.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 21, 2019

I’m showing Clifton off to a Sydneysider and it’s a pretty big deal.

A friend I used to work with mentioned she wanted to venture up into the Sunshine State for replenish her depleted New South Welsh soul and I decided to take on the role of tourism guide.

I have the stereotypically Aussie hat. I have the booming voice. And, thanks to an overly theatrical primary school principal who took an interest in the town’s history*, I have some local stories up my sleeve.

* We also did what I like to call an arena spectacular dramatisation of the Stations of the Cross one Easter which was a theatrical triumph. The audience sat in the middle and the torture, death and subsequent resurrection of your boi Jesus happened around them. It was delightfully extra and absolutely worth all the hours of practice. 

On a side note, I probably owe said overly theatrical primary school principal a great deal for nurturing and enhancing my extra-ness as a child. His ambitious productions really fostered my melodramatic nature. Bless him. He’s made the world a better place. 

I used to give this tour all the time, when my mates from school would come out for a sleepover. It was honestly one of the highlights of their visits (for me and my mother, at least).

Mum would pick us up from the bus stop at Nobby and as soon as those seatbelts clicked, the official driving tour of Clifton began. We’d slowly snake through the streets, pointing out places of both historical and personal significance to our guests/hostages, not giving much of a toss if they weren’t as emotionally invested in the decision-making process behind the town Christmas tree*. It was more than pointing out the iconic buildings, it was about the stories each street had. And when you have two excitable ramblers in a car, you can imagine how many slightly-disjointed stories we had to tell. What should have been a short ride home would take more than half-an-hour, sometimes longer depending on how long daylight held out.

* In the television series I plan on writing about this town, the Christmas tree issue is going to need a two-part episode. There’s a lot of meat to that topic. Lots.  

It’s been about a decade since Mum and I have given one of these tours, so we’re pretty excited to receive our lucky, lucky guest. We usually go off the cuff for these tours – play it by ear, as my mother says – but I have a few attractions that must be included in this particular excursion:

The church with the dead man under it: This building is another testament to the thrifty and somewhat crafty nature of this town. Back in the day (I’m not sure exactly when but it was back before black-and-white TV, so that’s a long way back) Clifton’s growing Catholic community needed a bigger church, but they didn’t have the dollars to build one. What they did have was the inside knowledge that James Mowen, a wealthy bloke about town, had left aside a large sum of money in his will for a monument to be built over his grave. I’m guessing he didn’t stipulate what this monument would take the form of, as the parish decided that a church could technically be a memorial… so long as it had the right plaque. So they dug him up from his spot at cemetery, plonked his body into the ground on the empty lot and built a church over the top of it, using his money. They named the church St James and St Johns, which I suppose was a sufficient-enough nod to old Jimmy to warrant the use of his money*. Pretty clever.

* So, as we were giving this part of the tour, the local priest was coming back from his afternoon walk and spotted us casing out the joint. He let us in and showed us around, which allowed me to brag about the stained glass windows… because that’s where I am in my life now. Bragging about the stained glass windows in my hometown’s church. Anyway, turns out they also put a plaque up for old Jimmy, but they put it right up the back. 

The path which used to have a coin glued to it: “There used to be a coin glued here,” I’ll say, pointing to roughly about the spot where the coin was once glued, “I’m not sure who finally managed to pick it up or what they did with it, but I imagine they’re a rich soul indeed.”*

*Unfortunately, I missed out on this opportunity, but there’s always next time. I’m hoping that featuring that coin in the paper will prompt someone to come forward with the tale of who finally managed to snag the 20 cents from the footpath. I imagine it’s quite a story. 

My favourite rock in town: This would hands-down have to be the large clump of geological material near the flagpole at the Scout Hutt. It was great for sitting on.

My favourite log in town: Obviously this would be the log in a small clump of trees at the old preschool. If you don’t know the one, I feel sorry for you. It is a brilliant log. It was instrumental in my development as a emotionally-rich, ever-pondering person.  It was the place I could escape the foolish chatter of my peers and find solace in my own deep, complex thoughts… while pretending to be a lion on Pride Rock.

The cement-filled bottle tree: This is without a doubt my favourite Clifton landmark. It just speaks so much to the character of this town. Now, I have no idea how the tree came to be filled with cement, (please do enlighten me via a Letter to the Editor if you know the tale) so I have illustrated the story with my own dialogue. I imagine it went something like “geez, the bottle tree has a hole in it, better do something about that,” to which some cluey person chimes in with a “ya reckon we could just fill her up with this leftover cement?” The group all shrugs in agreement with a chorus of “yeah righto”s and a few “too easy”s. There was no mucking about, nothing fancy, just good, honest concrete-aided problem solving. That tree may have been planted by our banking forefathers, but it’s thriving because our no bulls–t spirit. It’s beautiful.

The Clifton Courier office: Obviously.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 14, 2019

No matter how accomplished or mature you are, you still revert to your old ways when you return to the family home.

There are certain things I’ll always do when I get back to the Maguire House. I’ll kick my thongs off at the front door and not put them on again until I leave. I’ll open the pantry, freezer and fridge to take stock of the good food in the house. I’ll tidy the clutter on the counter.

And when it comes to eat, I’ll revert back to the pretty, territorial teen who fiercely defended her seat at the Maguire Table.

Each mealtime, I’m seated at the shorter side of the long, rectangular table with my back to the fireplace.  Depending on your way of looking at the world, you could say I’m at the head of the table.

It’s a commanding position that means I’m sometimes backlit by flames, which paints quite a badarse picture, come to think of it. It makes me sound like some kind of matriarch on a quest for world domination, which I quite like.

Sitting opposite me, at the other end of the table, is my father.

Come winter, Dad moves my chair from the end of the table so he can gaze into the fireplace and, I don’t know, think about burning his enemies or something.

When the cold winds blow, he attempts to dethrone me and have me relinquish my position at the table for his own personal gain.

To which I say, bugger that. You chose to bring me into this world; you now must now live with the consequences of your decisions. And one of the consequences of that decision – along with a lifetime supply of happiness, sass and excessively cheesy risotto (the secret ingredient is about half a block of Bega!) – is seeing my freckly face at the end of the dinner table.

This stoush becomes a matter of pride, for my position will not be simply scrapped from the seating plan like a third cousin’s problematic boyfriend with bad sideburns on an already overcrowded wedding guest list.

It’s not just about a simple chair, but the acknowledgment of my belonging in the family.

And while I have been known to occasionally break ranks of a breakfast time to be closer to the butter and honey, that end seat is my dominion.

I’m not the only one who has such an emotional tie to a vinyl-covered chair.

Each of the Original Six (which is a super cool way to my immediate family, which makes us sound like a team of super heroes rather than a bunch of short-than-average, slightly-pink Caucasians who all apparently say “off” funny) has their positions, which have been voluntarily enforced for at least two decades.  I don’t know how we came to sit in these positions; I don’t believe we ever discussed who was supposed to sit where. We just did. Each and every mealtime.

I don’t want to say “we knew our place” because it has some very uncomfortable connotations of gender roles and power imbalances and what have you, but we did.

But it’s not just about my personal power struggle or my superiority complex.

It also just made things easier when it came to setting the table.

Because setting the table required intimate knowledge of each family member. The butter dish had to be kept away from my younger sister, who would pick at the butter with her tiny fingernail. My father had to be given the small but long-handled spoon for dessert, as it allows for a stylish wrist flick and forces him to take smaller bites, thus dragging out the eating experience. Another sister has a particular fondness for a certain butter knife. Mum likes to gnaw the bones of our “finished” chops, so the scrap plate is best placed by her.

Everything had its place, but for a reason.

And while the Original Six has a few new characters, they’re also adapting to the unofficial-but-strictly-enforced seating plan system. Thankfully, the table Dad scored from a relative whose workplace was getting rid of stuff is big enough to squeeze around more people between the six seats, so there’s no need for a separate table for the outsiders.

I’m not going to shy away from it – I like my power position at the end of the table. It’s a skerrick of superiority I will continue to cling to as my self-esteem withers with age and each realisation of my unfulfilled potential. I will be struck down with the blow of a sword before I renounce my title.

Unless of course a guest has popped over for a cuppa and a piece of fruitcake, in which case I’ll gladly abdicate to give the impression that I’m a reasonable person who has more important things to care about than where she sits at a table.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 17, 2019

Style is not about fashion.

A have a pair of tiny floral shorts that I like to wear on casual outings. They’re short, yes, but not short enough to be indecent. The print isn’t the most fashionable these days, but I wouldn’t say it’s outdated enough to be deemed ghastly. And they’re a little bit on the stained side thanks to my unfortunate pushing position when attempting to free a bogged ute from a muddy campground, but they’re respectable enough.

I like them. They go great with sloppy Joes and they’re unrestrictive in the crotch. They’re everything a look for in a pair of shorts.

And yet, every time I slip them on, I hear my friend’s voice*, telling me that I should not be wearing them out in public.

* I should probably point out that, normally, this particular friend’s advice is extremely sound. In fact, I’d trust her to be my power of attorney. If this friend had the authority to make my decisions on my behalf, I’m convinced I would be in a much better place. It’s probably something I should be seriously investigating. However, if she were to be given the power to manage my affairs, the contract would have to make an explicit stipulation about this particular issue.

Why?

Because they’re pyjama shorts, she tells me.

It’s as though the fact that I purchased them from a shop that sells pyjamas restricts them to household wear only, maybe as far as the backyard boundary if I’m among people within my inner sanctum.

But I reject this claim.

Firstly, on the grounds of the definition of pyjamas.

A quick Google search defines pyjamas as “any clothing suitable for wearing in bed”.

I actually don’t sleep in these shorts. In fact, I rarely sleep in in any of the cutesy little pyjama shorts I own. I actually sleep in the free t-shirt they gave me for finishing uni. It’s not really a t-shirt on me with my comically short torso, it’s more of a shapeless dress, which makes it the perfect size for optimum sleep comfort. It’s mildly-stained and the cheap fabric is impregnated with my personal musk due to overuse, but I feel like the fact that it confirms I somehow obtained a tertiary education balances all that out.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t actually wear these pants while I’m sleeping, with the exception of spontaneous daytime naps.

So, technically, said shorts are not pyjama shorts.

Secondly, who cares if they are, in fact, clothing designed to be slept in?

As my father says, “it doesn’t matter if you’re dressed like a bag of… [organic, all-natural fertiliser], someone will still take your money”. This isn’t a jab at his dress sense – if you’re not wearing dust covers on your boots, you’re probably underdressed – but is meant to that illustrate your worth is more than what you wear.

Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with looking swish in a banging outfit. I’m not suggesting that caring about what you look like is shallow. In fact, I’m saying the opposite.

When you wear something, you should go ahead and own it, regardless of what other people might think. Unless you’ve been asked to adhere to a specific dress code*, you follow your own damn code.

* When a dress code says “don’t we jeans because we’re not animals”, do not wear jeans. I bloody mean it. 

The saying goes that the most important thing you can wear is a smile (but, if you want to avoid indecent exposure charges, I recommend also at least wearing a smock* that covers the important bits). Any combination of clothing can be a killer outfit if you team it with confidence.

* Or perhaps some strategically-placed leaves. 

My filthy sister, who everyone thinks is some shiny glamourzon because she has blonde hair and is skinny, used to rock up to school with unbrushed hair nearly every day towards the pointy end of her schooling career. We had to get up fairly early to catch the bus and I suppose she just didn’t feel like dealing with the trauma of bushing knotty hair before the sun was officially up. Instead, she would tie up her hair and add a Barbie hairclip to the nest, which she said gave the appearance that her hairdo was messy on purpose. And then off she’d go to school in her little white Kia, blasting Britney Spears and leaving a trail of sass behind her as she went.

And that’s something I think we should all aim for. Forget about the haters and craft your own sense of style, be that ironically pink hairclips or practical lawn-mowing kit. Wear what makes you feel good – while keeping within the restraints of the law, of course – and own it.