Lazy Sunday things

I've been making beaded mask chains this weekend to bring a little cheer to friends and family in Sydney's lockdown. It's basically an excuse to watch a lot of TV but it's also been a nice change from making only edible things.

I've graduated from trying to run to simply running recently and it feels great! I've been slowly building up to it since March with lots of my encouragement from my brother. I've gone from asking Siri if it's going to rain today (as an excuse not to run!) to organising my run days around any upcoming rain.

I have a very lazy Sunday coming up - baking more backwards bread, making some choc coconut granola, and prepping some care packages for Sydney. 

Here are some good things to share:

Starstruck on iView is a fun weekend watch. Jessie, the main character, is like a low-key version of Ilana from Broad City.

Feel Good is a Netflix show I missed last year that popped up in a Dolly Alderton newsletter. Seems like comedies set in London are my vibe atm. 

Hetty McKinnon's has a one-pot pasta with red wine, sage and walnuts. I love the combo of a one-pot meal with fancy-ish ingredients (wine, butter, cheese!). 

A lovely story about exchanging gifts with a neighbour during the pandemic.

I've been organising some baby presents for workmates lately and one of my new favourite things to gift is this cute and fluffy blanket. They're not too expensive (especially if it's a group pressie), and they get a lot of use as blankets and play mats. 

Take care if you're in Sydney, I'm thinking of you!

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Backwards bread

Winter is one of the nicest times to bake bread at home. It's also... one of the hardest seasons for making sourdough. A bit like me, the cold makes my sourdough starter sluggish, and that can drag out the already hours-long process of making bread with no guarantee it'll work out. 

So I was very excited to try a recipe for backwards bread, the bread-child of cute Instagram baker Mary Grace and cookbook author and doula Jessica Prescott. It's a recipe where you mix up your sourdough ingredients and essentially go to sleep, skipping 95% of the special folding techniques that goes into making regular sourdough.

I wasn't sure it'd actually work for me (it was a chilly zero degrees in Canberra last night, compared to the 19 degrees of Mary's test loaf in Adelaide) but it really did. And this lazy loaf might be one of my best yet.

A note for fellow sourdough bakers: My starter takes about 18 hours to rise (!), so I followed Mary's tip and put it in the fridge at it's peak (usually at 3pm if I feed it after dinner the night before) and mixed up my dough using the same starter straight from the fridge. And because it's so cold in Canberra, I put my dough in the oven overnight. It wasn't on, but protected the dough from the weather a bit.

When it works, baking bread is very satisfying. And it turns out it's even more so when you've put almost zero effort into it. 

Four nice things

I am very excited for the long weekend. Our friends Angie and Dave are visiting, we're going to see an exhibition our friends have on and maybe go to a coffee pop-up on Sunday. Here are four little things that've made the work week nice... including a full biscuit jar for my 3pm snack.  I bought some chocolate dipped digestives, inspired by a novel I've been reading where the character regularly enjoys them with a cup of tea. 

Gravity is a new podcast hosted by Lucy Kalanithi that feels so perfect for this still uncertain time, more than a year into the pandemic. I initially tuned in because Lucy is the twin sister of Jo, from one of my all-time favourite blogs, A Cup of Jo. I loved her interview with her sister and the episode on loneliness, which explained how you can be rich in intimate relationships (a partner, close friends, family) but still need the incidental contact and community of acquaintances. Lucy is a doctor, so brings a really interesting perspective to topics like loneliness and depression. I also recently finished listening to the audiobook of her late husband Paul's memoir, When Breath Becomes Air.

When I'm in the office, I mostly listen to yoga playlists to... block other people out when they're in calls or video meetings. But when I'm home alone and WFH, I need something more energising. My current fave is this Momofuku one from David Chang's podcast, which includes a version of Madonna's Borderline that I've never heard before. Someone in my team would call this very older millennial but I don't care. 

And I made these baked chicken, leek and parmesan meatballs the other night, because I loved the idea of serving them in a baguette with mayo, lettuce and pickled onion. They were really, really good for dinner, late night snacks and a fancy work lunch.

Hope you have a cosy weekend. I hear it's going to be freezing even in Queensland!

A new study

The funniest thing about our new place is that it used to be a serviced apartment. There are a couple of clues around the house like a sticker on the back of the front door, reminding us to take our keys. We also have... a spa bath!

A surprisingly nice thing about this move has been setting up a dedicated study. It feels neat, new and cosy. It's very different to our last place where I was working from a spare/junk room that accidentally became a home office. 

Now that it's winter, I'm making food like Hetty's sweetcorn soup with silken tofu and Julia Turshen's any-fruit cobbler to warm us up. I'm going for chilly walks and runs listening to the same podcasts that still somehow make me teary, week after week. Mostly Modern Love and the opening story to this episode of This American Life. I'm thinking of making a lemon delicious pudding soon. I love sunny yellow food in winter. 

I hope you're doing OK wherever you are but especially if you're in lockdown in Victoria. My team sent Pizza Camp to our workmates caught up in it, which felt like a fun small thing we could do. Also, check out this guy making his own Iced Vovos!

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