Lots to talk about today.  First, you all know Kim Bultman from Cravings of a Lunatic?  She has an interview series called Burning Down the Kitchen and today she’s interviewed ME !  I couldn’t be more stoked.  It’s usually me writing about other food writers/bloggers but today I’m on the other side of the desk.

Kim writes clever questions and gives plenty of time to get the answers in and then she visits the interviewee’s blog and chooses a recipe to try.  She said she’d been eyeing my apple and pear crumble and that’s the one she did on her post.  It looks SO good.  She didn’t stand the pear up in the crisp but chopped it, making it heaps easier to eat, I’m sure.  Mine was a knife and fork effort.  She also added pistachios – doesn’t that sound good?

Next, the Chef, the Photographer and the Blogger workshop for Saturday in Maleny has been put off til June 22nd.  I’m not sure the reason but positive there is one.  So much food stuff going on with the Noosa International Food and Wine Festival only a week away.  It’s a big deal up here in the food bowl.  I’m on one of the panels, I’ll be doing a Q&A with Tetsuya Wakuda

My sister arrives on the 18th from New York so she’ll get to go and see me work.  It’s been five years since I’ve seen her so we have a lot of catching up today.

I haven’t told you much about Maleny but it’s a small country town in the hills in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast.  It’s about 30 minutes from our house and because winter is coming, it’s always much colder up there. It’s a beautiful tourist area and you can see all the way to the ocean from the hills.

Notice how all the cars are angle parked but backed in?  Yes, that’s the rule in Maleny.  It looks old-timey, doesn’t it?  It is.    There are less than 6,000 people in the town but it’s a huge food producing and tourist area with a very large dairy and a cheese company and other producers as well as farmers.  Remember Lizzie Moult from Strayed from the Table?  She doesn’t live far from there and she goes to Maleny’s farmer’s market with her garden’s produce.

Finally, I did enter the contest with my tea infused bread pudding for the Dilmah Tea company’s high tea challenge but when I went to submit, there was a requirement that in addition to a recipe using tea, we had to come up with a tea pairing.  You could have heard me from where you are doing the AARGH!!

Since I love iced tea and I had raspberries left over from the bread pudding, I chose a raspberry iced tea.  I know it was really boring but I wanted to have the tea stand out so I made ordinary scones and filled them with whipped cream and raspberry jam.  THEN I was able to submit.  Not overly clever but it’s in.  🙂

I should have read the form more closely.  I’d had a peek and I thought it was an either/or so I chose the recipe.  By the time I finished, my kitchen looked like a bomb had gone off, I was covered in flour and I’d nearly lost the daylight to shoot the final photo.  Thankfully while I was upstairs editing the photo and filling out the form, my sweet husband went down to the kitchen and cleaned it all up.

“Do you REALLY need to use every single utensil in the kitchen, dear?”

“yes”

This tea was lovely and you can drink it  unsweetened or with any sort of sweetener you like.  Do you like iced tea as much as I do?  When I lived in the South, there were two iced teas.  “You want ‘sweetea’  or unsweetened?” was always the question.  Nearly everyone chooses sweetea.  I’m not sure when it turned into one word but it definitely was when I was there and sweet it was.

Need some Mother’s Day ideas?  The Cooking Doctor put out a magazine full of them!