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Random Snippets

May 15, 2017 by Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

A few random (happy!) snippets from the past couple of weeks…

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The closing down sale at Cash Palace Emporium continues, and Elaine seems to magically produce new stock each time I pop in. She’s still taking delivery of goods that were ordered months ago, then immediately reducing them by 50% to try and sell them in the remaining four weeks that they’re going to be open. I have absolutely no affiliation with the business, but we share a passion for ethnic and vintage textiles. Like so many others in Sydney, I’ve come to quite adore her.

She has a new shipment of vintage kantha silk shawls on offer…

…and gorgeous Uzbek suzani pieces…

I couldn’t resist this hooded kantha coat – the Ajrahk cotton is hand block printed (stamped) and hand quilted. Maybe it’s because I’m now in my 50s, but I think it’s cool.

Pete, however, was less convinced but greatly amused. My friend Bethany thought that I looked like Friar Tuck. I’ve ignored them both and worn it constantly since I bought it…

The garment is so beautifully finished on the inside that it just needed a few buttons to make it fully reversible. I asked Elaine if she could spare me any and bless her, she gave me these vintage hand-carved camel bone ones…

Cash Palace Emporium
139 Catherine St
Leichhardt NSW
(02) 9569 5977

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My daily walks on the Inner West Greenway and the Iron Cove Bay Run have been enlivened by Art on the Greenway – “An Outdoor Art Exhibition with a Green Focus” – which will be on display until Monday 22nd May 2017. The artworks are located on the Canal Road Hub (near Blackmore Oval).

I met local artist Allyson Adeney as she was setting up Memory Wave IV…

Allyson uses upcycled crystal and glass stemware to create her gorgeous pieces…

…which she then carefully positions in situ…

We Stand Together by Janny Grant was created from rescued local gum branches which were destined to be chipped…

Nomadic Winds: a journey’s rest II by Sally Kidall is a collection of small “houses” positioned at various angles over the pedestrian footbridge…

The Battlers by Ro Murray and Mandy Burgess was inspired by a group of Hunters Hill women who banded together in the 1970s to save the bushland near their homes. I have to say though, that every time I walk past the figure in the photo below, I find myself humming the disco classic…”You can’t stop the music…nobody can stop the music”…

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As a result of all the fabric treasures I found at Cash Palace, I’m been in the midst of a little sewing mania. Last week I discovered these instructions for turning a shawl into a poncho with one seam and proceeded to madly stitch up all my pashminas. After all, as Noel Fielding once said, it’s impossible to be unhappy in a poncho…

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The fossil I bought myself for my birthday a few months ago continues to live on my desk – I find myself holding it quite often during the day. It’s incredibly smooth and exquisitely beautiful. Oh, and 113 million years old…

…and translucent!

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I popped into the MCA recently to view Khadim Ali’s The Arrival of Demons 2017, a site specific mural commissioned for the MCA foyer. It depicts imagery from Ali’s Afghan/Pakistani/Iranian upbringing, overlaid with eucalyptus leaves taken from the Aussie passport that Ali has held since 2015. It’s truly glorious – I particularly love the way he’s incorporated the steps into his artwork…

mca1

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Finally, if you’re a Sydney foodie, you’ve probably heard about Yakitori Jin by now. This new Japanese eatery has (finally!) opened up in our neighbourhood and it’s been packed out since day one. And what else would you expect from a restaurant where you can order five chicken tails (bishops/parsons nose) on a stick?

Chef and owner Aki hard at work…

We’ve never been to Japan, but our friends who have tell us that it feels like eating in Tokyo. As a bonus, the food is delicious!

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Hope you’re all having a wonderful month! ♥

Posted in Cool Things, Food & Friends | 29 Comments »

The Frugality of Sourdough

May 12, 2017 by Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

“Why do you do it?”, my friend Ellen asked me.

She’d popped in to pick up a couple of loaves (one for her and one for our neighbour Lou across the road) when the doorbell rang and Will arrived to pick up the third loaf of the four I’d just baked.

I thought for a minute, then I explained.

Four one-kilo loaves of freshly baked, slow proved sourdough bread cost me $2.36 in flour (59c each). It used to be less, but I’ve recently upgraded the bakers’ flour I’m using. I’d had to bake anyway as we’d run out of bread, but we rarely eat more than a loaf a day and it always feels wasteful to run our big oven just to bake a single.

Mixing up four kilos of sourdough by hand isn’t much harder than making a one-kilo batch. Our high hydration overnight technique (my current go-to formula) involves just minutes of hands-on time, so the only tricky bit is finding a container large enough to hold the dough as it proves on the bench…

And then…I get to have cups of tea with the neighbours when they pop over to pick up loaves. They send me photos of their kids scoffing Vegemite toast and the lunches they take to work the following day, often with suggestions and feedback. It helps to fortify the powerful bonds we already share as a community. Best of all, every bake saves four families a trip to the shops to buy an $8 artisan sourdough loaf.

If I’m honest though, my neighbours are doing me a favour, because they give me an excuse to bake in bulk. Over the past ten years, sourdough baking has become a huge passion – I adore the feel of the spongy dough, and messing about with different shapes and slashes, and the oooh moment when I lift the roaster lids to see how much the loaves have risen. It may be one of the oldest and most prosaic forms of cooking, but it has never lost its magic on me – every single loaf feels like a gift and even after all this time, I still find myself marveling at the alchemy of it. It saves us heaps of money (even with all the loaves that go out the door) and it keeps everyone I love fed. That’s a pretty addictive combination!

Duck fat and smoked paprika twists for our neighbour Mark, who very kindly mows our front lawn!

If you’ve never baked bread before, I’d encourage you to give it a go. Our basic yeasted tutorial or, if you have access to some starter, the basic sourdough tutorial and the overnight sourdough tutorial, are all good places to start. And if you’re already an enthusiastic baker, I’d love to know who you share your loaves (or other baked goods) with! ♥

Sorry folks, I don’t have any more dried Priscilla starter at the moment. I’ll let you know when I have more to share!

Posted in Food & Friends, Frugal Living | 56 Comments »

Sock It To Me!*

May 9, 2017 by Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

*with thanks to Maree at Around the Mulberry Tree for the title suggestion.

A final update on the stripey socks!

In case you’ve just joined in, here’s the background story on the socks we’ve been collecting from our podiatrist Richard.

Of the last batch we picked up, 40 cleaned and tumble-dried pairs were delivered to various charity organisations for distribution to those in need…

I’ve discovered that the cotton-rich heel-free tubes make perfect heat packs, filled with 500g of whole wheat and stitched across the top. They cost me just 80c each and take five minutes to put together…

Serendipitously, my neighbour popped over that afternoon with a migraine and neck pain. She’d baulked at the $40 wheat packs from the chemist, so I popped one of mine into the microwave, then draped it over her shoulders…

I split the side seam on one sock and turned it into a useful bag…

Stripey sock juggling balls only require two seams and if I cut carefully, I can get all three balls from a single sock…

I filled another sock with flossy salt to form a soothing eye pad (note: apparently you should never heat salt in the microwave). I chilled it in the fridge for an hour or so, then my young friend Grace tested it out for me…

It takes four socks to make a beanie, but then again, I do have a large head…

I’d managed to wear a few socks out at the toes, so I turned them into fingerless gloves for my morning walks. I emailed Richard to tell him that I’d been out in my matching hat, socks and fingerless gloves, and he deadpanned… “You have issues I’m not qualified to work with”…

A couple of photos to finish…Richard the Sock Monkey…

…and Karen the Sock Owl…

It’s been great fun – thanks for coming on this socky journey with me! ♥

Posted in Frugal Living | 23 Comments »

In My Kitchen, May 2017

May 3, 2017 by Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

In my kitchen…

…are cheat’s crostolis, made by deep-frying a packet of dumpling wrappers and tossing them in icing sugar mixture…

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In my kitchen…

…were old friends who joined me for a marathon hot cross bun baking session on Easter Saturday. Carol and I have been friends for over 30 years but Anita, Helen and I go back even further – we were in school together in 1975!

We made 96 buns in total that day!

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In my kitchen…

…were dark chocolate salted caramel popcorn Easter eggs, inspired by my friend Choclette’s post…

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In my kitchen…

…are silk scarves made from vintage kimono scrap, found in the backroom at Cash Palace. Some of the pieces date from before the Second World War…

imk0517g

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In my kitchen…

…was a mountain of spent vanilla pods, which I’d saved over the past decade from bottles of homemade vanilla extract. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away such a valuable resource, even after most of the goodness had been used up, so I’d carefully saved them in an empty bottle at the back of the linen closet.

Last week, I scraped out all the remaining seeds…

…and rubbed them into three kilos of white sugar. The boys are pretty happy to have vanilla sugar again for their tea…

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In my kitchen…

…were four free-range chicken carcasses, purchased from Haverick Meats for $1 each. As most butchers only take off the breasts, thighs, drumsticks and wings, there’s always a heap of meat left on the backbone. I pressure cooked two of the carcasses for stock, then carefully picked the meat for soup.

The remaining two were roasted to create a darker stock. They too went into the pressure cooker, but not before I ate the bishop’s noses – my favourite part…

Before cooking, I removed all the fat and skin from the bones – this was gently rendered into schmaltz and stored in the fridge.  We ended up with six boxes of stock, two jars of schmaltz and chicken noodle soup for five adults. That’s a pretty good result for $4!

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In my kitchen…

…after our marathon hot cross bun baking session, were four fledgling chefs, cooking up a Korean BBQ storm…

They made seafood pancakes and pork wrapped enoki mushrooms…

…then they lit up a griddle plate on the hob. They’d found it at the Korean supermarket and it didn’t quite sit flat on the cast iron trivets, so Pete the engineer devised a solution.

Me: “What are you doing with the kids’ dominoes? They have sentimental value!”

Pete: “I’m making blocks to hold up the Korean BBQ hot plate the kids bought..”

Me: “But you’ll break up the set!”

Pete: “Oh, most of them have been gone for years. They make excellent plywood spacers. There’s a stack of them built into the wall over there…”

Sigh. So much for keeping the old toys intact…

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Tell me, what’s happening in your kitchen?

If you’d like to write an In My Kitchen post, please do so by the 10th May and send your link to our new host, Sherry at Sherry’s Pickings. Thanks for hosting Sherry! x

Posted in In My Kitchen | 47 Comments »

Cash Palace Emporium, Leichhardt

April 24, 2017 by Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

Cash Palace Emporium in Leichhardt is closing down, and everything is 50% off the marked price. If you’re a lover of ethnic and vintage textiles, I highly recommend that you race over there as fast as you can. The small store is packed full of treasures, carefully selected by legendary owner, Elaine Townshend.

You might recall that I bought my kantha quilt coat there last year. It’s made from a vintage Indian quilt, which in turn had been handstitched from reclaimed saree fabric. It’s the ultimate in upcycling and I wore it constantly last winter…

There is a wide selection of clothing and semi-precious jewellery on offer…

One-off carpet bags, each constructed from hand quilted fabric…

I bought a vintage 1920’s formal kimono in stunning condition and turned it into a jacket and shawl…

In the back room there are fabrics, cushion covers, bedspreads, quilts, wall-hangings, shawls and more. I may have lost my head a little over these Japanese prints…

I’ve been sewing furoshiki cloths…

…and practising tying them. It’s an indulgent but joyous way to use up scrap vintage kimono silk…

I’ve had a run on juggling balls, so I’ve been sewing squillions more. I adore my friends – they’re always enthusiastic about anything I throw at them (no pun intended)…

Here’s my own personal set – fat origami cherubs made with scrap salvaged from a vintage child’s silk kimono…

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Cash Palace will be open for another eight weeks, so if you’re in the area, do pop in and go treasure hunting. It’s a true family affair – Elaine’s son Luke and daughter Fleur are running the shop while she’s in India, and her granddaughters are often there helping out as well. Say hi for me if you pop in, I’ve been haunting the place!

Cash Palace Emporium
139 Catherine St
Leichhardt NSW
(02) 9569 5977

Posted in Cool Things, My Photos | 17 Comments »

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