I was going to write you a 4 July post, but I remembered in time that in the US, it\u2019s still 3 July. In Australia, we\u2019d take the Monday off and make a long, long weekend. But not this week. Not any week until our next public holiday in fact, which, for Canberra, is in October.<\/p>\n
Winter is different in Australia. Some people assume I\u2019m referring to the cold or lack thereof (they think that all Australia is too hot, all the time), but in my part of Australia it\u2019s cold. Not as cold as Alaska, but cold enough for big coats and snow. The main reason Canberra doesn\u2019t get much snow is because it\u2019s too dry. The best-known snowfield in the whole country (where there is snow even in summer\u2026 in places) is close.<\/p>\n
Winter is different because we don\u2019t have time out. We deal with the encroaching dark and we do not celebrate the incoming light. We have no public holidays and the only way to get time off work is if one has children. All my teacher friends are on holiday this week, and most of them are down the coast, where it\u2019s less cold. Anyone not at school (as a student or a teacher) just has to deal.<\/p>\n
I used to deal by experimenting with different recipes for mulled wine and mulled wine equivalents. Those recipes covered 700 years of spicing wine and were most excellent at keeping the cold at bay. Friends would visit to help me drink it. I can only drink a few sips these days and, because I\u2019m COVID vulnerable few friends visit, so there will be no hypocras, no sangria, no mulled wine in July.<\/p>\n
Instead, I\u2019m making portable soup. Eighteenth century style portable soup, to be precise. The ancestral stock cube. A soup that you can cut with a knife and that has so much gelatin you could use it as a building block.<\/p>\n
In fact, I do use the cubes as building blocks. I can make much healthier sausage rolls or meat pies with a much better flavour and at least as good a mouth feel as the same dishes made using suet or duck fat. I can chop up some vegies very finely and have a delightfully warming beef broth in minutes. I can build so many dishes with the portable soup.<\/p>\n
This is appropriate, because I\u2019m writing about building blocks this week. The building blocks I\u2019m writing about are the building blocks of story, though, not of food.<\/p>\n
The closest to the midwinter delights northern hemisphere folks talk about and what I actually experience is this particular harmony between what I cook and and what I write.<\/p>\n
A few people celebrate what they call Christmas in July here. If friends asked me, I\u2019d join them as I do for any other Christmas, but\u2026 I\u2019m still Jewish. There is no reason for me to set up a Christmas celebration for myself. And the only Jewish holy days in July this year are fasts.<\/p>\n
July in Canberra is a good month for work and a very bad month for most happiness. As I tell everyone every year, be nice to me, for my sarcasm is close to the surface throughout July. Also, be nice to me because I\u2019m cold. We\u2019re in the warm part of the day and it\u2019s not a cold day and the temperature outside is hovering just above 50 degrees F. This is the weather for sarcasm, just as December in the Northern Hemisphere is the season for joy and mirth and gifts.<\/p>\n
If anyone wants to give me gifts to make me merry, I\u2019ll not say no. In the meantime, I will create building blocks and hone my sarcasm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was going to write you a 4 July post, but I remembered in time that in the US, it\u2019s still 3 July. In Australia, we\u2019d take the Monday off and make a long, long weekend. But not this week. Not any week until our next public holiday in fact, which, for Canberra, is in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,406,636,56,20,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid-life","category-food","category-life","category-life-experiences","category-process","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2806"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2813,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions\/2813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}