Mandarins once again

I love to see the mandarins heaped up in the shops in Autumn.I love their scent and colour and the crumply feel of them. Mandarins make the best fruit juice, not a luxury at all when they are, briefly, cheap and plentiful.

All the peel can be saved and dried over a couple of weeks on a sunny windowsill. It makes wonderful aromatic beef dishes and sweet bean soups in a Chinese kitchen, and it adds zing to a pot pourri.

Just dogs

I've walked, eaten brekky and now I'd like to sleep until the afternoon, thank you. Call me at three.

I've walked, had brekky and done a bit of guard duty.

What else is going on around here? Gardening? Fine!

Secateurs - yes I can manage those too.

You're sure you don't want me to run off with them so you can chase me like we did with that garden trowel?

I'll just check out what you've moved over here then. Nice pot plant.

Cameras and quilts

I went out to a great op shop in Dana Street to get more pure cotton shirts for a blue and white quilt I've been working on. I can get a lot of good material on their five dollar bag days.
I love the beautiful old church hall, but this time I really looked at the tiles paving the entrance and saw a quilt pattern that I will have to make up soon.

It was a grey, drizzly warm day with a bit of sun, a day you might see a rainbow and so I took along the camera to experiment. It's big and clunky and I still feel selfconscious using it, but it is proving to be a wonderful way to make me take a fresh look around me.

Taking photos made me look again at this building, and processing the pictures I took gave me some fresh ideas for quilts. The same tiles seen from another direction emphasise different colours and parts of the design.

The dramatic windows are also inspiring. These are spare and industrial, and I have some fabrics that I am putting together in a new way having looked again at these above the door.

I haven't a good picture of the gorgeously floral windows in the second hand book section. They remind me of the quilt I'm well into and that I've described to myself as having a pink Victorian gothic feeling. I'll try to take some decent images of them and post them next week. Good practice for me and a joy to look at if I can manage it.

Buttoning up

I piled a handful of autumn-coloured buttons together when I was playing with my button jar.

I thought they would brighten up the wool jacket from the op shop that I'd just washed and mended. I need a jacket now the days are chilly.

They seem to lose some of their brightness strung out in a line, and so I'm still trying to decide which five buttons I'll sew on.

When I've fixed the jacket I'll go for another long walk back to this street and enjoy the autumn leaves again.

Brekky

A peaceful morning meal before the busyness of work. Croissants brought home on the train from distant Fitzroy, red grape leaves from over the back lane fence and strong coffee in my autumn cup. It was hard to get up and go in to work today.

Cooking the quinces

Here are the quinces growing in my garden. I had only a few this year because the tree is very young. These are the last of my autumn fruit.




I bought some more quinces from the Farmers Market in neighbouring Buninyong so I'd have enough for quinces baked in honey and for some jars of quince jelly. These are a much larger and deeper yellow variety than the quinces in my garden.




I love quinces. My mum and my grandma both made excellent clear red quince jelly from the old quince trees that were a so common in gardens in my childhood. Ripe quinces smell exquisite, and quinces seem to be able to produce generous amounts of fruit in even the harshest years.

This is the casserole my mum always used to bake her quinces in a honey and sugar syrup. Quinces take five slow hours to bake in a very gentle heat. I tend to add a couple of rose-scented pelargonium leaves in the last hour.


I have two varieties of Rose pelargonium growing, this one has a slight hint of lemon in its rose. I use the leaves to scent pot pourri, fill vases in the house, and add them to custards, sponges, cooked fruit and jellies.

Books from Clunes

This weekend Clunes was full of second hand and antiquarian booksellers. I spent Sunday there fossicking through wonderful collections of books.

I only bought a few; a complete Banjo Patterson because I had to read The Geebung Polo Club and The Man from Snowy River again and vol IV of Manning Clark because I think I saw vol II in a Ballarat bookshop, and a couple of other good books, none of them more than five dollars.

I took a picture of the horse trough. In the early 1900s a good person spent a fortune building these in every Victorian town and along the roads, to ease the thirst of the horses who worked so hard. There's hardly a horse to be seen in the countryside now, but one memorial of his kindness remains here.

There were lots of other people looking for books, drinking coffee and enjoying the autumn sun.

And watching over them, with his wreaths still bright from Anzac Day, another touching memorial from last century.

I loved walking round the town as much as bookshopping.