Lovely Lavender

A while ago I read the beautiful and elegantly written debut novel ‘The Language of Flowers’ by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. The book is about a young woman’s gift for using flowers and the language of flowers to change the lives of others around her. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years but it was in Victorian England that the interest in floriography soared. Armed with floral dictionaries, Victorians used gifts of floral arrangements to send coded messages to someone else, allowing the sender to express feelings which could not be spoken aloud in Victorian society. 

This past weekend my mom stayed over and to decorate her room Daniel helped me to cut lavender flowers from our garden. The garden is a bit of a sad sight at the end of winter and I wish the rains would come and allow the bare garden to blossom. So, taking into account the (lack of) diversity of flowers available to pick in the garden, I do like the message of lavender. In the language of flowers, the lavender flower’s most common meaning is love and devotion but it is also associated with purity, silence and caution. It represents luck when given as a gift and offers the promise of new adventure.

Drizzle and Dip

I recently purchased a new cookbook (hey, you do not have to be a good cook, or even a bad cook for that matter to have a compulsion to buy new ones before you even tried a recipe from your previous purchase!) The book is called Drizzle and Dip and is based on Cape Townian Samantha Linsells’ popular food blog of the same name. The recipes in the book are divided into three chapters based on food eaten at particular times of the day: Morning, Noon and Night. Samantha is a food stylist, so the images in the book are all very enticing. I am a huge fan of the dark backgrounds with vintage props that she uses for her food photography. Her blog is lovely! 

Our first meal from the book was her Zucchini & Prawn pizza. What made the recipe interesting is that you soak the buffalo mozzarella in cream overnight before using it on the base of the pizza. Trust me, it tastes as good as it sounds.

You can follow her blog here or like her Facebook page.

A few good books

It has been some time since I’ve posted a blog about the books I’ve read. Since then I’ve read my first Jack Reacher book by Lee Child, and have to really ration myself not to read them all one after the other! Here are a few of the books that I can recommend.

Books I love: Scrumptious

One of the cookery books I stock in my shop is Scrumptious by Jane-Anne Hobbs. She started a food blog about five years ago, and along the way her hobby turned into a new career as a recipe developer and now a published author. What I find interesting is that although she thinks TV reality shows encourage people to cook good food at home, they do not show the finer details of the cooking process. For example, they don’t show the patience needed and the time consuming attention to details. For her, cooking and entertaining is about following your heart, planning ahead and being careful about measurements, all the while staying calm, paying attention to every part of the process.

My own little Junior Masterchef (see here) is a perfect example of what the author describes – he thinks everything in the kitchen must be done in a huge rush because you have only “15 minutes to go”. But the two of us attempted the truly scrumptious Linguine with a Chilled Sauce of Chicken, Tomato and Herbs. Lots (and lots!) of chopping and very time consuming, but what a great dish! The five year old’s very blunt knife did not make life easy for him and I smiled every time he licked the tomato seeds off his forearms when it sprayed all over, but we had a great time in the kitchen!

 

 

You can follow her blog here.

Parisian inspiration by Carla Coulson

My family is a particularly close one. When we’re all together for Christmas, no one can go quiet for five minutes without being asked “are you in a mood?” There’s none stop talking and everyone knows everyone else’s secrets. Really, it’s kind of scary. So with my baby brother in Paris, there comes a time when Skype, even video Skype, or Facetime just won’t do the trick. I need to go and see him to ask him in person, every five minutes: “are you in a mood…?” And so off to Paris it is!

To get into the spirit, I’ve done a whole lot of ‘Paris-y’ things: read The Paris Wife, rented the Midnight in Paris DVD, dusted off and re-read the old copy of Peter Mayle’s trilogy about life in Provence. And - I paged through my collection of coffee table books, noticing that I seem to have a soft spot for those photographic books by someone who bought some house somewhere in France.

That includes a story about an extraordinary photographer who lives in Paris. I first fell in love with Carla Coulson and her beautiful photography when I read her book, Italian Joy. She is an Australian woman that gave up her successful corporate job to move to Florence to study Italian. After a while she enrolled in a photography school, met the obligatory Italian boy along the way and a new career and a new life was born. She moved to Paris and wrote the book, Paris Tango. I love the book because her writing is fabulous, giving us more than the photos that are already so beautiful that the images would have been enough anyway. She brings to life the Moulin Rouge backstage, artists' ateliers, haute couture shows and the private lives of Parisians.

She is also the photographer responsible for two other books on my bookshelf, so as you can see, I am a huge fan! Her daily blog is filled with beautiful images that she created or with all things photography than interests her. Well worth the read.

You can visit her website here or like her Facebook page.

Image credit: Photo taken by me

From my library

I am not sure why, but looking back at the first few months of this year I made some unlucky book choices. I never stop reading a book once I start, but lately I’ve been tempted more often than usual. Take for example the much acclaimed The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch or The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach – the first one I stopped halfway and I laboured through The Art right up to the last page, trying to find out why it got such rave reviews.

But someone who deserves every single accolade that comes his way is Deon Meyer. I love his books. Only problem is, I have now read all of them (So, Dear Mr Meyer, just in case you are reading my blog (one never knows :-), don’t sit on your latest manuscript. I know Christmas time is a really good time to publish and that your editors are probably waiting for that additional Christmas boost to launch, but that is still more than half a year away. C’mon man, just publish it and stop the torture!)

So, including the last of the Deon Meyer novels, it seems that everything evened out in the end, because my favourite books turned out to be extraordinary. If you are looking for something to read, try Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and Sister by Rosamund Lupton. They are all, in my mind, brilliant.

Image credits: Photo taken by me; all book covers from Amazon

More to read

Here are a few more of my "best of 2011" books....

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; 

they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, 

and the most patient of teachers.”
Charles William Eliot

Image credits: All images from Amazon

A Place for You

During this time of year, for many of us, the social scene actually speeds up as we spend time with friends around a table to end the year on a high note. Having had to dress a few tables for these occasions, I thought this table ware (and the cookie jars!) from Anthropologie are just beautiful, although they are a bit more bohemian than the things that you will normally find in my cupboard :-)

Image credits: All images from Anthropologie

One of these evenings around the table was my book club's final hurrah for the year last night. Looking back at my 2011 reading list, the highlight was picking up a Deon Meyer book (I know, I know, long overdue). I followed that with another Deon Meyer and another and another... Some of my other favourite reads this year were: 

Image credits: All images from Amazon