Shroomin', man...

This year, finally, I managed to book myself into a fungi workshop with Alison Pouliot. Mel and I have tried before, but these things seem to fill up damnably quickly. So you can understand that we were happy there were a couple of free seats on a weekend that suited us both. On an overcast Saturday morning we made our way to Trentham.

As we got there we were greeted with a veritable trove of all things fungal, all freshly collected and labelled by Alison.


The workshop kicks off at 11am with a couple of hours in the Trentham Neighbourhood Centre where Alison instructs the group, and we learn about the different types of fungi, debunking myths around identifying safe ones, and finding out how to figure out what should, and shouldn't, either make you sick, trip you our, or kill you. We covered smell, pileus shape and texture, gill types and appearances, stipe forms... it was incredibly thorough, without being an overwhelming flood of information.

After a short break for a late lunch we headed out for the foraging half of the workshop. The place Alison took us to was a great spot, with both native and pine forest areas, and the occasional section that had been in a bushfire. This all meant that we could expect quite a few different types of fungi. Below are some of my favourite shots of the day... I don't remember what most of these were, but I still like the pics.



It's amazing the amount of life right under your feet, that you don't even notice. And beautiful it can be.



Even things you may not immediately think of as fungus...



This is an image a lot of people would recognise... but where are the fairies?



This baby managed to stump Alison, which is quite an achievement. It's not an oyster mushroom; it's not the mushroom that tries to LOOK like an oyster mushroom but glows in the dark and is bad for you... it's something else again. I still don't know what it is, but it was huge!



Check these little babies out! They were growing on a pine cone on the ground.



A lot of people might recognise these as puff balls. These really are an interesting little organism, particularly in they way they spread their spores around -- when the time is right, in a great big puff :-)



Even these tiny little yellow guys are important. How easy would it be to walk right past them without even realising they're there?



These cute little jelly-balls are fungus too.



This is one of the naughty ones ;-) Very popular with people looking for an... alternate view of the universe.



And these... these are the beauties of the fungi kingdom, I think. They are gorgeous, and the smell... absolutely beautiful.

If you have any interest in the fungi world I recommend you keep your ears open in Autumn and get yourself into one of Alison's workshops. It's a good day out, and you'll learn heaps. Plus a nice wander through the bush is relaxing.

Carrot Cake

I love carrot cake, but it's not something I make all that often. In fact, I think I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say it's been YEARS since I last made a carrot cake. It's been so long, in fact, that I can't remember where my preferred recipe is.


No matter, I have a new preference. When I was making this I had a moment of doubt, as it makes quite a wet batter, but it all came together quite nicely. Oh, and don't let the long list of ingredients put you off - they're all basic, and the method could hardly be easier!

Carrot Cake
(adapted from Tracy Rutherford's recipe in 9 August 2004 "Fresh Living" magazine)
2 medium or 3 small carrots, peeled and grated
1 cup self-raising flour
1/2 cup plain flour
1 tsp bicarb soda
1/2 tsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup sunflower oil
1/2 cup golden syrup
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup roughly crushed walnuts
1/2 cup dessicated coconut

Preheat the oven to 160C fan-forced, and grease a 20cm-round springform pan. Line the base with baking paper.

Sift the flours, bicarb soda and spices together into a big bowl. In a jug, whisk the brown sugar, oil, golden syrup, eggs and vanilla together. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon until they just come together.

Add the carrots, walnuts and coconut and mix gently to combine. The mix really is quite moist, but don't worry.

Pour the batter into the tin. Bake for about an hour. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, then turn it onto a cake rack to cool completely.

Once it's completely cold mix half a block of Philly cream cheese with a cup of icing sugar then spread it all over the top of the cake. I dare you not to lick the bowl.

This cake turns out beautifully moist and incredibly more-ish. I ended up giving half of it to my neighbours purely so we wouldn't eat it all within half an hour. As you can see, we didn't even pretend to wait for the icing to set.

Oohh Pretty

I wanted to share some of my favourite images from this year's Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. So here they are:

Slicegate – The Caramel Slice Showdown

I love caramel slice. Especially the caramel bit. I make it the way I like it, but I started wondering how this would stack up against the commercially available stuff. And there are some brilliant caramel slices out there. Unfortunately there are also some really, really awful ones.

So I made a slab of slice, then went out and bought specimens from three different places to pit against my creation. Nine willing taste testers were easily found within the office, and it was on.

I went to great lengths to try and make sure the test was completely blind. I brought the slices into the office in a plain plastic slice container so no-one could know which was which. I presented the samples one at a time. I was hoping to get people’s honest opinions. I think I achieved that. Or at least I hope I did.

I gave each person a scoresheet where they would rate each slice on a scale of 1-5, 1 being the worse and 5 the best, against 5 criteria: base, caramel, chocolate, visual appeal, and overall enjoyment.

Final scores were out of 225 for each slice: a score of out 5 for each criteria from 9 people

Here are the results.

4th place:


Slice B
Base: 21/45
Caramel: 20/45
Chocolate: 24/45
Visual Appeal: 30/45
Overall Enjoyment: 23/45For a total 118/225

3rd place:


Slice A
Base: 23/45
Caramel: 24/45
Chocolate: 26/45
Visual Appeal: 24/45
Overall Enjoyment: 23.5/45
For a total 120.5/225

2nd place:

Slice D
Base: 23/45
Caramel: 31/45
Chocolate: 25/45
Visual Appeal: 27/45
Overall Enjoyment: 26/45
For a total 132/225

And 1st place:

Slice C
Base: 33/45
Caramel: 33/45
Chocolate: 31/45
Visual Appeal: 38/45
Overall Enjoyment: 35.5/45
For a total 170.5/225

I will now reveal the origins of each slice.

Slice B came from Coles. At $4.49 for a pack of 6 slim fingers it was the second cheapest option. As you can see, though, it didn’t rank highly at all with the test group which, I think, means any saving in $$ isn’t worth it in the flavour stakes. Personally I found this slice to be quite plastic with a flavour that I didn’t like at all. In fact, I took one bite then turfed the rest of my piece into the bin.

Slice A came from Michel’s Patisserie. At $3.95 per piece (and they weren’t the biggest pieces: Slice D comes in slightly larger portions) it was the most expensive of those sampled. Comments from the testers include base is “too crumbly” and “a bit dry”, and the caramel “is more fudgy” and “a bit grainy”.

Slice D came from Brumby’s bakery. At $3.20 per piece it rated in the middle of the expense scale. One tester considered this “the best” caramel (and I have to admit, I love their caramel too). They also suggested more base and less caramel. As you can see, the ration of caramel to other layers is... well, the picture speaks for itself. Another tester suggested there was not enough chocolate. For me, if I’m buying caramel slice instead of making it, this is the one I choose and it’s mainly because of the quality of the caramel.

Slice C was the one I made. I can’t work out the cost-per-piece, but it comes down to not-bloody-much. The payoff is, though, the time spent preparing, baking, cooling, cooking, baking, cooling, melting, and cooling. I’m so very proud that my humble little offering ranked so highly. You can find the recipe for it here.

Finally, once the testing was over, I brought all slices back out for the rest of the office to enjoy morning tea. I’m happy to report that C was finished first. A narrowly beat D to be finished next, and I ended up throwing the last of B out.

I really enjoyed this, and I hope my testers did too. I’m already trying to think of ideas to do a similar thing in a month or so with something else I like to bake. Ideas? Suggestions? Taste-testing volunteers?

Heroes

I watched The Shiralee on Saturday for the first time since I was about 8 years old. Needless to say, I appreciated it rather more this time around. It got me thinking. You may wish to stop reading now, because the rest of this post is both rambling and perhaps not happy, but it’s something that I want to get out of my head. And sometimes I can't quite find the words that I'm looking for.

To a little girl, her daddy is a hero. A veritable demigod. He’s Prince Charming and Superman and Sir Galahad, all rolled into one, no matter how shithouse he is as a daddy.

Sure, little girls grow up, and they learn that their parents are human too, but there’s still a lurking ideal, a belief that your dad can do anything, simply because he’s your dad.

So what must it take for that belief to be damaged? To, in fact, be broken, shattered into countless pieces, to the point where a daughter has nothing left but contempt for her father? For her to want nothing more to do with him? I can tell you what it took for me.

My earliest memory of this man, and my only memory of him before the age of 8 or 9, is not of being cuddled, or of love, or having fun, but of him repeatedly hitting my upper arm when I said I didn’t know what I wanted for breakfast one morning. He asked, and when I said “I don’t know” he held my arm out and started hitting it, asking after each time what I wanted for breakfast. Naturally I did nothing but scream and cry, and it wasn’t until mum came to find out what was going on that he stopped. A lovely memory, yes?

Throughout my entire life, he had been there on and off, seemingly as the mood took him. I’m not talking about being physically there, as admittedly my parents were divorced so he only saw us twice a year, but THERE in even a most general sense. Even those two times a year, he’d take us to his mother’s place and, for the most part, I entertained myself by either playing with my cousin or the neighbour’s kids, or my uncles would spend time with me. I still remember, after my brother left home to go to uni, I didn’t hear from our father for a while. After being used to weekly phone calls this hurt, and my 12-year-old self wondered what I’d done to make him stop talking to me.

In my mid-teens it seems that my father decided he wanted to be “dad” and moved near to where I went to school. There followed three years in which I actually got to know him, this man who called himself my father.

Into my adult life the pattern continued – a couple of months of regular contact, followed by more months of nothing. And yet all of this I forgave, because hey, it’s your dad, right? And you’re meant to love your parents. The problem is that I’d learned that my father was someone that I didn’t particularly like. This caused me no end of guilt and grief from the conflicting emotions it raised.

Even up until the final time, the only time it seemed my father initiated any contact with me (bear in mind, he lived 5-10 minutes away) was when his partner prompted him. The final episode happened late last year. Suffice to say there was a falling out, and I claim responsibility for my part in it. I think we could have overcome this and probably continued on as we had been for many years to come, except for what he did. What did he do? He lied to me about his mother’s health. He contacted his brothers and threatened them that if they attended my wedding then they would no longer be part of the family. He called my brother and told him to think “very carefully about the consequences” if he attended my wedding. He spread lies to the family about things I had allegedly said and done. He defamed my fiancé (now husband). He not once actually spoke to me during all of this. Oh wait, I tell a lie – he did speak to me: when I called him to find out which hospital my grandmother was in. All of this over something that, one year ago, he agreed with me on.

The neglect and other shit throughout my life I have forgiven, time and time again. This last I will not. His last words to me were vindictive and childish, and that is his burden to bear. He has lost more than a daughter, I have lost far less than a father. I am now at peace within myself, the conflicting emotions and guilt are gone, as I feel absolutely no requirement to love or honour him as my parent. I thank him for setting me free.