Great balls of matzah!

The story goes that when Marilyn Monroe was married to Arthur Miller she said to him, ‘Matzah balls? Isn’t there any other part of the matzah you can eat?’

I don't know if the story's true; I only know that when Passover approaches it's time for me to get out the matzah meal and get cracking. This year for me, yesterday was the day.

There's no real recipe. Or rather there are endless variations. For one packet of matzah meal I used four eggs, a tablespoon or so of margarine, salt and pepper, and enough vegetable stock to make the mixture not too firm and not too sloshy. (I use vegetable stock, not chicken, so my vegetarian daughters can eat them too.)

I rolled the mixture into balls and left them to rest for about half an hour before dropping them carefully into boiling vegetable stock for around 40 minutes.

At this point in the process I always hear my mother's voice in my head.

‘Make sure the water’s properly boiling,' I hear her say. And, 'When they’re cooked, take them out one at a time. Don’t tip them into a colander, or you’ll end up with a heap of sludge.’

I did that once. Mum and I laughed about it together. I had to throw the mess out and start again. These days I'm patient.

Anyway, Marilyn, I don't know what you were complaining about. Is there any other part of the matzah worth eating?

Quince Jelly

We weren’t planning to gather quinces.
We were on our way down to the market garden to pick a lettuce and some rocket for dinner when we detoured to see if there were any quinces on the tree in the top orchard. There were so we stayed to pick them. This was at my daughter K’s place. A couple of quinces were too high for me to reach so I had the bright idea that if I lifted my granddaughter J up she’d be able to pick the fruit. That didn't work: although she’s slightly built she was still way too heavy for me to lift very high. In the end K clambered up into the fork of the tree and got them that way.

The next day I began the process of making quince jelly.
After wiping them down, I cut 2 kilograms of the quinces into pieces, including the skin and cores, and put them into a pot with 2 litres of water.
I brought this slowly to the boil, and then simmered it, covered, for about an hour until the fruit was tender.

Then I needed a potato masher but couldn’t find one anywhere.
‘Try the sandpit,’ K said. It took me a few minutes of searching among all the buckets and spades, pots and pans, toy cars and Barbies, but eventually there it was.
I had to boil the kettle to pour boiling water over a muslin square for the next step so I poured some over the potato masher when I’d washed that too. While I mashed the fruit, K pegged the cloth over a pot and I poured the pulpy mixture into that.

Then we covered it with a tea towel and left it to drain over night.

That was the end of my involvement. Farmdoc and I left the next day so K finished making the quince jelly on her own.
She first added ¼ cup of lemon juice, and then a cup of warmed sugar for each cup of liquid, and after that she used her normal jam making method.
The only difference she found was that when she skimmed the scum off the top, the jelly was less forgiving than jam as there’s nowhere to hide anything.

The result was jewel like. Bottled autumn.

Dear Diary

Journal keeping is such a weird practice when you examine it. I mean, who cares what I did today or how I felt about it?

Actually, I met with my editor for the first time this morning. I was nervous about it; she was lovely. She gave me the publishing schedule for my book. I gave her a jar of my End of Draft jam.

I recorded all this in my journal.

Why did I do this? No one else will read it. Mostly I can’t even bear to reread it myself.

It’s a habit: I’ve been keeping a journal for over twenty years now.

It’s a way of catching my thoughts, or capturing story ideas or dreams before they disappear. Sometimes, like when I can’t sleep at night, I use my journal to get rid of the kind of thoughts that buzz around my head like wasps trapped in a bottle.

I use it to make sense of whatever’s happening in my world. To let off steam. To practise writing when I don’t have an ongoing project, or as a safe place to try out things that I may end up using in a current project. Even to record events.

They say there’s a chip of ice in every writer’s heart. Sixteen months ago, in July 2007, my mother looked as though she was going to die. I sat every day for hours in her hospital room and wept as she refused food and struggled for breath. And I recorded it all in my notebook. Sometimes I sat by her side and took down her words like dictation as she spoke them.

It’s as though there are two parts of me that co-exist: the doer and the recorder. I watch myself as much as I watch everyone else (What’s she doing now? Why is she doing that?), only with myself I have access to my inner life – feelings, thoughts, dreams and memories – whereas with others I have only the externals. It's no wonder I was drawn to writing a memoir.

When would-be writers ask me for advice, I tell them to keep a journal. It’s not always what they want to hear and I often can’t explain what journal keeping gives you that’s so important to a writer, but I know I could never have written either of my novels without that habit of mine. And of course Alzheimer’s: A Love Story owes its entire existence to that pile of spiral-bound notebooks that document it all – my mother’s decline and my ongoing reactions to it, every painful, happy, sad, funny moment.

Bushfire

Visiting our daughter and son-in-law, K and B, and their children, a month after the bushfire on their property, Farmdoc and I walked along firebreak tracks freshly gouged through the bush by brigade bulldozers. On one side the trees were unburnt and tangled with undergrowth, on the other side there was bare dirt, blackened trunks and scorched leaves.

We saw where the fire began, where it raced down Foxs Lane, only missing several houses by a few metres because of the efforts of the Country Fire Authority. In one front yard a fibreglass water tank was half burnt. In another, a new poly tank stood next to a cleared site where the debris of a destroyed house had been carted away.

We saw in the blackened trees the path of the fire as it headed down Foxs Lane, straight towards K and B's lovingly tended organic apple orchard and the chickens in their portable runs amongst the fruit trees. Then, redirected by a sudden wind change, the track veered across paddocks into the Wombat State Forest and through the bush that runs across the top of K and B’s property.

B is one of the most fire prepared people I know: sprinklers on the roof and around the fringe of the bush, a water tank on the back of a ute, fire hoses and petrol-fuelled water pump. He says now that it’s not enough to say your fire plan is just to evacuate, because there may not be sufficient warning. He says that you have to secure your house as well as you can so it doesn’t become tinder to burn your neighbours’ property. And you have to be properly equipped to flee too, with long sleeves and trousers, woollen blanket and water bottles. That if you stay you need to be prepared for that too. In these latest fires, people napped in their houses with closed windows so they didn't smell the smoke until it was all around them.

From K’s kitchen window the view is of blackened trunks. In the damp of early morning, the air smells of ash, like a cold dead fire left too long in the grate. But their house was saved and so were the sheds, the orchard and the market garden and all the animals.

I can’t imagine how that week felt, as they lived in the house surrounded by smoke, heat and spot fires that kept flaming into life. The fire brigade patrolled night and day, back-burning in some places, putting out flames that threatened to grow too big. K and B lived on their nerves.

But they, and we, know they were amongst the oh so lucky ones. They have a kilometre of fencing to replace and they’ve lost their innocence, but they have a supportive community and they discovered that the human spirit is as resilient as the Australian bush.

Call Me Elle

The story goes that when Elle Macpherson was asked in an interview what she likes to read, she replied that she never reads anything she hasn’t written herself.

It’s probably not even true, but it’s a great story, so in our family whenever one of us is reading something they wrote themselves, we call them Elle.

For the last few days I’ve been revising my book, using some enormously useful comments by my wise and generous friend Jane, a dictionary and the Style Manual. When I’m done I’ll send it out to another reader and then when it comes back, I’ll do another Elle.

Pollyanna

Earlier this week I went to Hobart. I discovered when I got there that I had left the power cord of my laptop back home in Mole Creek, neatly wound – I had a clear memory of rolling it – on my desk. My first reaction was to sulk. When I’d done that I realised there was no pressing work I had to do, so I could just enjoy myself, drinking coffee and reading. Making the most of the situation – and the mild autumnal weather – I suppose.

I sat all day the first day reading the latest Meanjin (Volume 68 Number 1 2009). It was a great companion and just what I needed.

This from an interview of Nam Le by Sophie Cunningham:

How do you judge others’ work?
…For me something has got to keep me wanting to turn the pages, not necessarily in a cheap charged way but just in a sense that I feel as though there’s an authority or a confidence or a strangeness that’s at work in the pages that makes me want to submit myself or relinquish some part of myself. Beyond that, I define it in negative relief, honestly. I define it by stuff that doesn’t jolt me out, stuff that doesn’t make amateur mistakes, by stuff that obviously takes care and doesn’t take easy outs.

Like your approach to your own work?
It’s so easy to hedge and to worry about sentimentality or melodramatic prose, but if you haven’t got the guts to risk sentimentality then you risk losing sentiment altogether. [As an editor] I’d always go for the raw and the strange over the polished and competent.

Nice words to have in my mind as I approach the revision of my book.

Yeeha!

Last Friday afternoon I printed out the chapter of my memoir that I was working on and took it with me down to the Laurel Berry, Mole Creek, which is where I’ve written so much of this book. There, while I shared an iced coffee with Farmdoc (they know exactly how we like it) I revised the chapter. And that was it for the first draft. Done! Finished!

On the way home we picked blackberries and a few apples from a street tree and fed our neighbours’ dogs because they were away.

In my inbox, when I checked, was a message from my editor, asking me when I might be ready to deliver the manuscript. A nice coincidence.

Over the weekend I read through the manuscript and made some changes. One or two chapters stood out as needing a fair bit of tightening but I decided to leave those for my workshopping crew, to give them something to do.

I knew there was still a long way to go with this book and a lot of hard work, but I felt freer then than I had in a long time so I celebrated by making blackberry and apple jam.

The wood for the cooking stove came from a blackwood that fell across the fence into our home paddock a few years ago; it’s dry now and caught quickly.

I couldn’t resist giving this batch of jam a special label.