When Holidays Collide

I've been thinking a lot about holidays this last week. Yes, I know I'd have to get someone to look after the chooks... Perhaps reminiscing about previous holidays will have to do for now. And this is the one I keep escaping to in my head...

The beach was huge and deserted – aside from the massive driftwood logs and the colony of seals living at one end – and all we could hear was the wind whistling between the cliffs and our children’s delight as they explored the wide expanse of sand. It was my fantasy Australian summer holiday; a beach to ourselves. Only it was autumn and we were in a tiny Californian coastal town.

Our wooden cottage stood at the top of the hill, surrounded by tall grasses, looking down over the ocean. The shingled restaurant sitting on the edge of the cliff was empty except for us and the waitress.

After dinner, the kids tucked in bed, I went searching for wineglasses and a corkscrew in the kitchen. On the bench sat a black, hardcover journal with ‘Guest Book’ embossed on the front, one I hadn’t noticed earlier. Tucking it under my arm, I ventured back to the lounge imagining I would quickly flick through seeing endless entries of names, remarks about the weather and home cities.

When I did close the journal, the bottle of wine was finished, the sky pitch black. I lost two hours inside those pages but I had found so much more.

Here it was; the guest book I’d been waiting for all my life. Entries that went on for 10 pages: the soldier back from fighting in Iraq who couldn’t get over the quietness here, who could still hear gunfire and bombs in his head but who found the beach and the ocean healing. Every morning he’d walk along the beach and stare out at the open expanse, marvelling at nature and questioning his involvement in manmade destruction.

There was the couple who came here to try and save their marriage, who had managed to find the time and space in this little cottage to actually see each other properly for the first time in years. After two nights they left feeling stronger in their desire to stay together. Did they?

Soon followed the man who brought his girlfriend here to cook her a romantic dinner of pasta followed by strawberries and chocolate and who joyfully left at the end of the weekend with a fiancée.

Then there was the family with teenage children and an old Labrador who had been holidaying here for years and had recently discovered their beloved dog was dying of cancer. This weekend was the last holiday for this old dog and the family delighted in watching him run along the beach he had always loved and playing in the long grasses surrounding the cottage. It was bittersweet, the family unsure they would ever be able to return to this little town without their dog.

But I think the story that caught me the most, the one I kept returning to, was written by a woman on her honeymoon. Only a couple of days before, she and her now-husband ‘got all dressed-up in new party clothes’. With their kids they ran down to the San Francisco registry office, had lunch at a very ‘swanky’ restaurant with their families and close friends, all stayed the night at ‘an even swankier’ hotel before piling the kids and dog into the car and driving to this tiny town to stay in this little cottage.

Their days had been spent relaxing, playing on the beach and enjoying becoming a family: ‘all of us here together, my wonderful new husband, his two young sons, my little girl, and the new baby we’ve just discovered is growing inside me.’

It was the baby, such a symbol of lifelong love and hope that captured my imagination the most and who I kept thinking about long into that night. A baby who would by now be a preschooler, a baby who cemented two families together forever.

The beach didn’t feel so deserted the next day. The driftwood and colony of seals were still there but I could also see that soldier, sitting on a rock just next to me lost in his own private hell; there was the old Labrador bounding past, flicking sand up joyfully as he discovered a new lease of life; the unhappy couple tentatively holding hands at the water’s edge; the newly engaged couple lying on a rug away from the rest of us. And there were the newlyweds; watching their children build sandcastles alongside my own; his hand resting protectively on her stomach.

A new beginning for them all.

And a beach that was never really just to ourselves.

When Home is the Kitchen... an Interview with Food Writer Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan

Six-and-a-half years ago, Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan’s husband Maxwell started a blog called Apartment Therapy. His mission is ‘helping people make their homes more beautiful, organised and healthy by connecting them to a wealth of resources, ideas and community online’.

When the blog began, Sara Kate was a food writer. She says, ‘We both believe that if you talk about the health and vitality and style of the home, you cannot ignore the kitchen and the cooking that goes on there.’

She began writing a weekly food column for Apartment Therapy. ‘When I had time, I wrote more. I was also doing freelance print writing. At a certain point we held our breath and took the leap for a dedicated cooking site. That was five years ago. We haven't looked back.’

And so began The Kitchn, an inspiring blog filled with food information, recipes and kitchen tours. With more than one million readers, it is obvious that many of us believe that a kitchen is central to our feelings about home.

For Sara Kate, her favourite kitchen is the one she cooks in now; ‘It's where I feed my family every day. It's not fancy. I have a pretty crappy 24" stove and a small refrigerator, one drawer, two upper and one lower cabinet all along one wall. Then a long Ikea butcher block for chopping and serving. But from it I sustain my daughter's life and her love of food, so for that reason, it wins.’

‘My least favourite kitchen was probably the one I had in a shared apartment before I was married. Roaches, ants, you name it. New York City shared living at its best.’

Having a small kitchen means that Sara Kate is forced to ‘pare down constantly. I don't have anything that I don't use.’

What she loves most about the kitchen is it’s ‘(tiny) skylight’. ‘I can watch the sun pass, sometimes a full moon, and pelting rain. I also love that the "bar" (butcher block) allows people to be in the kitchen with me without being in the way.’



Anytime is a good time to be in her kitchen; ‘Whenever something is cooking. Also, that time when the sun passes over the skylight. The light is magic.’

Although the family has a small, round dining table, they have most of their meals at ‘the bar’.

Since becoming a mother, Sara Kate’s feelings about her kitchen have not changed. ‘It has only reinforced my belief that cooking is one of the most important things we can do for our children.’

For Sara Kate, the kitchen will always be the heart of the home; ‘It feeds us. We need that to be alive, and we also get so much pleasure from it.’

As for a favourite meal to cook in her kitchen? It’s Sara Kate’s mother’s Italian Wedding Soup.

‘When it comes to soups, I can easily say I have a hands-down favorite. My vote for this soup is heavily influenced by nostalgia; it was one of the first real meals my mother fed me when I was a baby. The legend is that I'd slurp it loudly and the broth would dribble down my neck and into my clothes.

The recipe was handed down to my mother, and adapted at each stop, from a man named Fran, whose daughter was my first babyhood friend. I don't really remember Fran — he passed away when we were still tiny — but he lives within me every time I make this soup. Now I feed it to everyone — from my own little person, who also slurps and dribbles it, to Saturday night company, who usually use a napkin.

We always call it Italian Escarole Soup, but it's also known as zuppa di scarola, or Italian Wedding Soup because it is a traditional course at Italian nuptials. It is simple to prepare, but has enough flourishes — herby meatballs and a last-minute addition of cheesy egg ribbons — to make it special enough for guests.

Italian Wedding Soup is highly adaptable; try other greens like kale (as I did in the photo below) or chard, add grated lemon rind to the meatballs and some lemon juice to the broth for brightness, or consider spicing it up with some ground red pepper flakes added with the onions and garlic.’

Italian Wedding Soup

Serves 6-8

3/4 pound ground organic meat (chicken, turkey, pork or beef)
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs
3 large eggs
1/2 cup grated Romano cheese, divided
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano (or 1 teaspoon dried)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 medium yellow onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
8 cups chicken stock
1 bunch greens trimmed and torn into bite-sized pieces (about 6 lightly packed cups)

Combine the ground meat, bread crumbs, 1 egg, 1/4 cup of each cheese, oregano, salt and pepper in a bowl. Mix thoroughly, then form the mixture into 3/4-inch to 1 1/2-inch balls. You should have 20 to 30 meatballs, depending on how large you form them.

In large skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium high heat. Add the meatballs in batches, and cook, turning, until browned all over, 3 to 5 minutes. (If they are still a bit pink in the middle, don't worry, they will continue to cook in the broth.) Set them aside on paper towels to absorb excess oil.

In a 4 to 6 quart soup pot, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon oil over medium high heat. Add the onion and garlic and sauté until onions are tender and garlic is soft, but not browned, about 5 minutes. Add the stock and bring to a boil. Add the greens, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the meatballs and cook another 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine remaining 2 eggs and remaining cheeses in small bowl and stir with a fork to blend. Slow pour the egg mixture into hot soup, stirring constantly. Cover and simmer just until egg bits are set, about 1 minute. Season to taste with salt and black pepper, maybe even a squirt of lemon juice, and serve immediately in a low bowl if possible so the meatballs are visible.

To re-heat, simmer gently over low heat.



To receive more of Sara Kate’s recipes, cooking tips and stories, subscribe to The Kitchn here.
To follow Sara Kate on twitter, click here
To find out more about Apartment Therapy, click here

Sara Kate also has a new recipe book coming out next week, February 1st. Good Food to Share is available here.

Photos of Sara Kate and her kitchen © Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan
Photo of Italian Wedding Soup and recipe reprinted courtesy of The Kitchn

When Home is... a book inscription

“To Sybil & Geoff,
With best wishes for future happiness.
From Tom & Claire”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sybil & Geoff as well as Tom & Claire for the last couple of months. It’s a bit odd really as I don’t know either couple at all.

All I do know is that Tom & Claire gave Sybil & Geoff a 1954 edition of the book The American woman’s new encyclopedia of home decorating and somehow it turned up in my sister’s vintage store Retrospections. My sister sells a lot of second hand books, but most don’t have inscriptions inside. If only all second-hand books did have inscriptions though. I doubt I’d ever buy a new book again.

Today, what would be a funny read about being a 1950s housewife is so much more with that inscription inside. Who were Sybil and Geoff? Was this an engagement or wedding present? How did Sybil feel about being given a book about home decorating? And poor Geoff. I can’t imagine that was an exciting present for him back in 1954. Or 2011 either.

Fifty-six years have passed since Tom and Claire bought that book. Did it sit on Sybil and Geoff’s bookshelves for the duration of a long marriage or a very short one? Who made the decision to give it away? Perhaps they are no longer here and all their books were boxed up and given away by one of their children. I wonder if their marriage even produced children.

Did they emigrate to Australia? I’m guessing they were American given the title of the book. I think the Australian women of the 1950s had their own home decorating guides. Or perhaps the book was found at an American market long ago and brought to Australia by another owner...

And as for Tom and Claire, were they close friends of Sybil and Geoff? I do find it interesting that Claire has written Sybil’s name first while signing her own after her husband’s. I’m guessing they were already married and that Tom definitely didn’t go shopping for Sybil and Geoff’s present, let alone write the inscription.

Perhaps they weren't that close - Claire's signoff is a bit cold really. Not 'love' or even 'best wishes'. 'From' is close to 'Yours sincerely'. Perhaps Tom and Geoff were work colleagues and the wives didn't really know each other? Or perhaps Claire was just a tad formal and thought Sybil's house could do with an injection of style.

It’s a mystery and I’ve never even read the book. Unfortunately my sister sold it quite quickly. I’m guessing Sybil & Geoff and Tom & Claire had a lot to do with its appeal. And I hope for their sake it has ended up in a happy home.

When Home is... a Mud Room

What do you get when you mix rain and snow? Mud, apparently. In parts of America they even refer to this as ‘mud season’. This same season obviously applies to anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere and therefore houses on this side of the world often have an extra room to deal with such messy weather: a Mud Room.

Given the weather in Sydney at the moment I could really do with a Mud Room. Defined on the website wisegeek.com as a room that ‘constitutes a clear boundary between indoors and out’; it is also there to ‘help keep the house clean’.

The only problem is that a mud room shouldn’t be your main entryway – which is really for receiving guests – it should be accessed from the side or back of the house. That could be an issue with our terrace house and its very narrow side passageway.



Given we are running out of living space, bathroom space and bedroom space I’m not quite sure why I’m dreaming of a room that’s sole purpose would be storage; a room that people are simply meant to drop their wet clothes, school bags and boots in and quickly leave.



But it seems there is no logic to the weather so I won’t analyse my daydream about the mud room either.


Images via thetrendyhome.com

When Home Falls Apart... an interview with Author Isabel Gillies

When Isabel Gillies gave up an acting career in New York to move her family to Oberlin, Ohio she felt her life was close to perfect. Her husband had a teaching job at the University and they could give their two little boys a more carefree childhood in the country.

When they bought an 1877 redbrick house, built by a mason, Isabel felt all her dreams had been realised. The perfect house for the perfect family. As she notes in her book, ‘I’ll never be able to write about how great it was.’ Only it was not meant to be. Within months of moving in, her husband announced he was leaving Isabel and the boys; her perfect home metaphorically falling down around her.

Last year, Isabel published a memoir Happens Every Day chronicling this crisis time of her life. Beautifully and intimately written, it reads as a conversation between friends and is extremely difficult to put down. Told without anger but with insight, understanding and compassion, Isabel’s story is compelling and will leave readers wanting to know more... thankfully, her next book is due to be published in August 2011.



Home has always been important to Isabel, even when she was young, ‘When I got married and really had to make a nest for little ones, I don't think the idea or feelings about the home changed very much, it's just that before I felt like I was playing house and then suddenly it was the real deal.’

In Ohio, her redbrick house became an emblem for a perfect family that Isabel soon discovered no longer existed. Did such a devastating experience change those feelings about what ‘home’ really is for her?

‘I never in my life thought I would live in a house like that. I had grown up in apartments, and this house felt so REAL. I felt I had to treat it like a respected elder in the community. It sort of felt like mine, but really I felt it belonged more to American history. I respected it more than I lived in it. I think I would have grown to feel like it was mine, but I didn't live in it for very long.’

‘There were bats in the attic of that house, and 100 year old glass windows. It was a trip. I felt that had my kids grown up in that house, it would have sunk into their bones - all that history. I thought they would be able to feel that house wherever they were in the world.’

Renovating it into their ‘dream house’, Isabel could imagine her family growing old here together. As she wrote in her book, ‘Everything was planned out for our big family life for the next 20 years. Anyone who walked in the doors could feel that.’

When she became concerned about her husband’s feelings for a colleague who was also a friend of Isabel’s, she felt their home would communicate the stability of their family, ‘I wanted everything to look as calm and pretty as possible. I also wanted her to really get the picture of just how lovely the life going on inside this brick house was.’

She writes in the book that when she realised the marriage was falling apart, she still believed the house would save them, ‘The room started spinning, but my eyes found the side of the counter. Josiah and I had spent hours deciding what shape the curve of the counter should have. There are many different grooves you can choose or you can have it quite plain. We chose to have one groove in the middle of the curve. Elegant and simple. I held onto the counter and felt the groove under my hand, reminding me that we had built this house. We had chosen colours and fixtures and a life.’

But it was not enough. As Isabel tells me later, ‘It was an important place because as much as I loved to have it, it also taught me that home is a lot more than a house.’

‘When I think of that house now, it seems sad to me... Maybe you never can feel anything but pensive about the place where a family you loved ended, or rather, changed.’

‘When I think of the frumpy, funny faculty house we rented before we bought the brick house, I feel happy.’ Despite being ‘worn from years of professors and their families making their lives for a bit of time in it’, Isabel felt very strongly about this home, ‘It was a bird’s nest that just stays in the tree for years while different birds use it to raise their young. It was warm, generous, and smelled of must and wood.’

Leaving Ohio meant moving back into her parents’ apartment in Manhatten, the home Isabel had grown up in. ‘All my feelings about home and what I had built and what had gone away and what was ahead of me, had been put in a powerful blender and I didn't know which way was up.’

‘However, all the good feelings about a home are inside you and are impervious to the blender. They travel with you no matter what is going on in your life. So, in many ways, my feelings about home in my twenties and when I was in Ohio, and then when I was back in New York and even now, are very much the same.’

Now remarried, Isabel, her husband and her sons still live in Manhatten in an Upper West Side apartment. ‘Again, even though our home is probably the most grown up home I have ever made myself (I am 40 after all), I still feel like I could be in the apartment I lived in when I was 23.’

The relationship she has with ‘home’ is no different today; ‘I love the time at the end of the day when I know the kids will be home soon from school and then my husband will follow soon after from work. I wander around and plump the pillows, neaten the mail table, turn on lights in the bedroom and start to heat up whatever is on the stove so it smells good when they walk in.

Home, for Isabel, is still and will always be about creating a safe, happy nest for her family; ‘I hope that maybe if I do all that stuff, it will go into their insides and they will take a homey feeling with them wherever they are, whoever they are with, and for the rest of their lives.’



For more information about Isabel, visit her website here.
For more information about her memoir, Happens Every Day, click here.

When Home is... a Guestbook

In my experience guestbooks left inside holiday houses, B&Bs and guesthouses have held little appeal. The majority only leave enough space for one sentence, which for most entries is usually about the weather. You glean little information about the people who had visited before you, what their lives are like and what brought them to the same holiday house you happen to have chosen.

So, when we opened the front door of a cute, wooden two-bedroom cottage in the tiny seaside town of Jenner, Northern California last year and I noticed the guestbook on the kitchen table I gave it little thought.

Instead we unloaded the bags and took the kids down to the beach. The coastline had already captured my imagination: rough seas, rocky cliffs, grey sand and driftwood. Not far away, around the next headland in fact, was Bodega Bay where Hitchcock filmed The Birds. Little has changed; the seagulls are still the size of rabbits and the coastline is both haunting and romantic. I didn’t want to leave.



We ate dinner in a little seafood restaurant that evening with multi-paned windows overlooking the ocean. We could hear the wind howl through the door cracks and see the swell of the sea. It looked like rain so we huddled together and ran up the hill back to our cottage, quite early. All I needed now was the ghost of the sea captain from The Ghost and Mrs Muir to appear and my love affair with this landscape would be complete.



After the kids were in bed, we settled on the sofa and poured another glass of wine. I spied the guestbook again and decided to flip through while waiting for Stuart to find the corkscrew.

Here it was; the guestbook I’d been waiting for all my life. Entries that went on for 10 pages: the soldier back from fighting in Iraq who couldn’t get over the quietness here, who could still hear gunfire and bombs in his head but who found the beach and the ocean healing; the couple who had come to try and save their marriage, who had managed to find the time and space in this little cottage to actually see each other properly for the first time in years; or the man who brought his girlfriend here to cook her a romantic dinner of pasta and strawberries and chocolate and who joyfully left at the end of the weekend with a fiancée.

Then there was the family with teenage children and an old Labrador who had been holidaying here for years and had recently discovered their beloved dog was dying of cancer. This weekend was the last holiday for this old dog and the family delighted in watching him run along the beach he had always loved and playing in the long grasses surrounding the cottage.



But I think the story that caught me the most, the one I kept rereading throughout our stay, was written by a woman on her honeymoon. Only a couple of days before, she and her now-husband ‘got all dressed-up in new party clothes’. With the kids they ran down to the San Francisco registry office, had lunch at a very ‘swanky’ restaurant with their families and close friends, all stayed the night at ‘an even swankier’ hotel before piling the kids and dog into the car and driving to this little cottage.

Their days had been spent relaxing and enjoying becoming a family: ‘all of us here together, my wonderful new husband, his two young sons, my little girl, and the new baby we recently discovered has started growing inside me.’

It was the ‘new’ baby, this symbol of lifelong love and hope that still has me thinking of this family and that guestbook.

A family I have never seen and never will see but a family who lived in the same space we did for a short while during a momentous time in their lives; a family who by now will have grown to six with a baby who today must be a preschooler.

A family I will always think about whenever I think of our time in that tiny Californian town.