Puree de Papillon

I have just returned from two weeks in Broome. It is a short drive up the road for us, of eight hours sans kidlets and about thirteen with these small and delicate creatures, especially those desiring frequent wee stops on saltbush and other crackled roadside paraphernalia (rusty cans, roo bones and the occasional dinosaur skeleton, according to our eldest daughter). For Pilbara dwellers, Broome is a love or hate escapade. Those here long enough to have known Broome BTB (Before Tour Bus) reminisce on the simplicity of this pearling village with its Asian flavours and infinite shoreline. I'm a bit like that with Coral Bay, five hours south of Karratha and home to Ningaloo Reef. But that's another story (involving heaving sobs on a previously Edenic shoreline now beseiged by signs like 'Swimmers watch out for boats'). I'll get there another day. Broome now has, as many a Paradise Found, been well and truly...found. Yet, as I didn't know this particular town before it became a backpackertourbuscruiseliner bumper-sticker-with-camel-silhouette, I'm an addict.

My husband and I had the fortune to be showered by a group of students with the gift of a meal out. Let me say, this was to be no ordinary meal. Well, the actual meal might be, but its significance cannot go unremarked. We had not been out to dinner, or on a date (ew...sounds freaky) since children. That's four and a half years ago. In fact, due to the complexities both everyday and ... completely out of left field, with family life, we'd basically been stapled to home since 2005. So, the experience was significant. The stepping over a deeply etched line in red dirt (or Cable Beach sand) meant we would be simply having dinner together. Alone. Just us and the meal on our plate. Whatever we dared.

And what did we choose?

Well...we were game. Or it was.

Let us step back to the drive up the road from Karratha; in particular, roadkill. Game. The meal, at the gorgeous Old Zoo Cafe as opposed to the stuff which litters the roadside, was divine. Entree, in particular, marked my virgin foray into the stuff which usually splatters windscreens at high speed. My husband and I shared a rather more delectable looking tasting plate which included roo and 'mu. ie. Kangaroo and emu. The other three weren't roadkill, but of the aquatic variety of exotic flavours: croc, barra and pearl meat. We sampled and savoured each bite, in turn analysing its flavours, textures, tenderness and colours. Astoundingly, the croc was the whitest of silky sweet meat and the bird, our humble emu, was a maroon, delectably grilled medium rare. I loved this feast and avoided, with surprising success, imagining the untidy ends these animals often come to in the wild, or out on the open road.

What the menu didn't offer up, however, was the most delectable of game I have ever encountered. Indeed, a fare the fairest of game. Let me take you back to Sandfire Roadhouse...

Sandfire Roadhouse is located about 300 kilometers north of Port Hedland, halfway to Broome. Three years ago, Sandfire was unfortunately, no matter how semantically fitting such a tragedy might appear, destroyed by fire. Finally, around Easter this year, the new building opened. Phew. Icecreams at Sandfire again! Maybe not quite Eftpos, but at least a fridge and freezer in operation along with these naughtily ironic caps for sale advertising the repeated failure and subsequent success of BP getting their roadhouse back into action after such a protracted demise: Something along the lines of 

Except there really needed to be a cross through the 9 and a '10 to finally finalise the rebuilding fracas.

So hurrah for Sandfire Roadhouse!

What DID survive the fire, fortunately, was a lovely area of thick trees and scrub through which wanton peacocks and peahens squander and ponder the relentless heat of this north west desert region. The trees are  reticulated, there's plenty of polkadot feathered parading and even a couple of albino peahens meander about. We have always loved spending a few minutes in this oasis, amongst the birds, if for nothing but to enjoy the sight of a tree. Or fifty. To remember shade with a hint of cool.

Well, this time we stopped at Sandfire, dug up enough change for me to buy icecreams and my husband to secure his ceremonial Sanfire cap, and headed yet again straight for the peacocks' den of serenity. But this time things were different. The birds had visitors. In their thousands. And evidently, the visiting cacophany of butterflies we encountered were multiplying, exponentially and insatiably in the heady shade. Next thing you know we're attempting to fob off four year old most keen to understand why a couple of butterflies were hugging. Yes, clearly, transfixedly, grappling with each other and holding on for dear life. Who ever would have thought?

What a wonder this sight was! Lurid golds and dusky yellows, pupil-black mirror spots all swish and flutter through the peacock sanctum. Nothing like it ever seen before. Not at Melbourne Zoo, Perth Zoo, in any butterfly enclosure purpose built to house and protract the procreative possibilities of this whisperlight lick of a creature. Sandfire needed a cap just for this butterfly extravaganza.

Still, with hours yet to travel (and many a wee stop yet to be had despite banning fluids and even Hi5 songs about waterfalls, rivers and baths) the inevitable departure ensued. We departed the roadhouse - itself now solid(ish), functional(ish) and prepared for any future fire, cyclone or attack by rampant tourbus (maybe not the latter) - leaving the beautiful butterflies to

SPLAT!

...  become Puree de Papillon. Like silken butter (how fitting their name quickly became), a splodge and drag across the windscreen. Just as one might apply an elegant smear of squash mash across fine china. Or carrot. Or sauteed and whipped sunflower petals. Except this time, it was just dead butterfly. Butterflies [pl]. By the time we reached Broome, our view of the encroaching Kimberly twilight was, to say the least, rather golden.

And so, that was all I was missing from dinner at the Old Zoo Cafe, from my crossing-over dinner, from my Broome experience. What a little dollop of that buttery butterfly delight upon my plate might have done for my palette I shall never know. But one thing is certain, puree de papillon is by far the most equisite roadkill I have ever been blessed to encounter.

If you can't find goat's milk fromage blanc...

It's time I moved on from my rant about alot [sic]. I could begin this entry with a foray into my town's Eagle Boys and their pizza's on special (brandished across a sign perched beside a busy roundabout, thus increasing my chance of death by ectopic apostrophe). But it's late in the evening and I should be sensible with my heart rate.

The spotted apostrophe monster makes me angry. Quite often. A lot. This makes it such a joy to read a glossy magazine with all its apostrophic morsels intact. And it is from such a magazine that I'm going to share a little something which all ended in tears. Joyous tears of the hysterical, body heaving variety. Let us go back nearly seven years to when I am in Melbourne. Of course, it is wet. Winter is vile with seeping cold yet, as ever, heady with culture and cheap takeaway. It is on such cracker black, bruised and soggy nights I cosy up in my Box Hill kitchen, unable to sleep, to pore over recipe books or posh, high-end travel and entertainment magazines (stolen from my psychaitrist's and doctor's waiting rooms in general. Oh, and once from the mechanic at the end of the street). In such an environment, it is easy to indulge in recipes you know you'll be able to find the ingredients for, if not visit the chef's actual restaurant over the next weekend. I believe such heady reading late at night is, as a good friend of mine puts it, 'food porn'. I've spent a significant proportion of my late night adult life fondling the folds of recipe books and gourmet magazines. No fuss (no mess) no calories. And all those deliciously onomatopoeically charged words such as the portly portabello mushroom, fennelguk? fennelgeek? And caperberry.

So here I am now, nearly seven years on from abandoning my rainy post in Melbourne and running out of money in Karratha - not necessarily completely unserendipitously, the spot in Australia most diametrically opposed to Melbourne - a vast outpost and timeworn rock shop. This place is Hot. Red. Separated from the known universe by the horizon. Which is to say, if you walk to the end of my street, you will fall off. Not the sidewalk, but the end of the universe.

Karratha, gateway to awesome natural wonder, awesome landscapes and awe ore (one might call this region a Chinese fortune cookie), is in close proximity to an array of yearned for features, such as the long drop wonder of Karijini gorges, limitless space crowded only by saltbush and good drying days, and that stunning midnight glitterati - our not so humble, multi billion dollar gas plants.

Sadly, however, there is other stuff we can't boast of. Take, for instance, this food porn folly. It's all well and good for me these days to pick up a gourmet travel magazine (sure my dentist doesn't mind) or a fancy schmancy food glossy. It's another thing to find half of its contortionesque ingredients lists in our shops. I once managed to salivate myself into a puddle over a wagyu beef burger recipe with organic this, hand fed that, and pickled whatsihooses. And subsequently did the hard yards to build the thing. But with our range of grocery options extending to Cs and Ws, the burger was yummy. For a burger. Beef - beef. Bacon - not organic. Cheese...tasty. Not gruyere. Etc. Beloved loved it. He loves anything he doesn't have to cook. So, on my cooking nights (the 364 days of the year we don't eat a tuna sandwich) I am exulted and praised beyond Anne Tenney's wildest imaginings. Amazing how loved one can feel when one places microwaved boxed barra with hot chips and vinegar on the humble dinner plate.

But, back to the porn. It's Sunday night. All on my lonesome. On the couch. Begin canoodling with a five year old copy of Vogue Entertaining. It's plastered with mini Italian gelatis, coated in pastel chocolate and always worth a drool. My old favourite mag. And I indulge, flick through luscious culinary exploits. Then I am halted by a crazy, if not ironically logical thought: after all these years, isn't it about time I cook something out of this magazine rather than just licking the pages?

Flicking through, I arrive at a comfortable page. One whose recipes correspond with a delightful tale of fresh, tropical summers and nostalgic ocean breezes. Close enough to home I thought. Except we have mudflats, strong winds and the occasional cyclone to decrease summer nostalgia and electricity supplies on occasion (although not this year). Anyway, it felt right, this fare. So I grabbed pen and paper and began to peruse the ingredients list of a simple looking salad with green beans. It incorporated seven ingredients, the easiest of which to source were salt and pepper. Lemon peel was also fine. Lemon infused olive oil - could even manage that in Karratha (I know this because a couple of weeks ago I thought everything I stirfried was off because it would suddenly take on this heady left-in-the-pantry-for-a-decade whiff in the wok. Nope. Took me a while to work out I'd accidently bought lemon olive oil rather than the plain variety and, in a fit of pique, binned the lemon olive oil in melodramatic ferocity for its clever tactic of destroying several of the previous week's meals.)

But with Pilbara eyes rather than market extravaganza Melbourne ones, things went a little haywire after this. I was offered options for the beans: Roman beans, round beans or runner beans. Hmmm...I mused...then there are my options: slightly bruised from the truck beans, frozen beans or, out on a limb here, baked beans. I was tending towards the latter if for nothing but the joy of feeling I was pushing the culinary envelope just like this Vogue. Ok. So, we're going baked beans rather than Roman ones. Tick.

Now, what to do about the stoned olives (is that really the phrase? Like they've been marinated and bottled in weed for a year or two?). The recipe asked me to use Niçoise or Ligurian olives. Now, first of all, any ingredient with a word containing a squiggled cedilla ç was bound to be unnatainable in the Pilbara. I mean, we're talking about a place where such beautiful French street names as Legendre are necessarily pronounced 'Legendah. Mate.' And what does a Ligurian olive look like? More to the point (and this is getting weird now) what does a stoned Ligurian olive look like? I hear that and I'm thinking of an imported roadside worker, melting in the heat and out to it after a big night at Trawlers (No kidding, that's was the name of our nightclub. Thank goodness, they've just renamed it). Again, my choices for olives were less...exotic: Bottled or unbottled. And less onomatopoeically luxurious than stoned, I could buy them pitted...or unpitted.

Then we're down to the final ingredient. And here's where my spiral into a mise en abyme of possessed hilarity gained its ultimate and final momentum:

Please use '80 grams of goat's milk fromage blanc.'

Fromage blanc. Is that like creme fraiche? Or cheese? I wondered if I might be able to find some goat's milk Fruche. Even if not goat's milk flavour, would strawberry Fruche do? Or lemon lime (to complement the olive oil)? Or, what about that pomegranate Fruche I'm sure I saw? Suffice to say, Karratha and goat's milk fromage blanc - not a happening thing.

BUT -

Joy of joys, this ingredient was suffixed with an friendly little *. The Asterisk of Hope in my baked bean, black olive and pomegranate salad. This asterisk would hopefully offer me a fair trade. So I'm thinking...creme cheese? Marscapone cheese even? Or maybe just Bega? So I scan the page, hunting down directions for assembling this salad until I reach the recipe's end. And there it is, in a flourish of italics, my salvation. Awaiting confirmation of the simpler option, I read the asterisked postscript:

*If you can't find goat's milk fromage blanc, substitue for marinated Persian feta...

WTF?

Suffice to say, I laughed. Aloud. A lot. Then I closed my Vogue Entertaining and toddled out to the kitchen pantry for a late night snack. Baked beans, of course. Followed by a punnet of Fruche. And I went to bed, spent and satiated. And slept soundly, dreaming of stoned Persian goats nibbling on olive pips somewhere far, oh so very far, from here.

The albatross mop

I am not crying over spilt milk. The inflection there, by the way, as you read that sentence, must be on 'crying'. It must also necessarily be delivered in a whining tone. This tone complements the whingy 'y' in crying. You might better think of this first sentence as having been delivered by a whirlwind mother of two who is not not crying, but crying about a broadranging organic kitchen collage.

For, neither am I crying (here it again, that wincing 'y', eyes gone all squinty and pathetic in their condescention) over the tin of curry powder little E_ has managed to infuse the kitchen with. No, it's not some delightful, gourmet Korma by Kurma, built to nuanced perfection by a two year old culinary prodigy. It's just curry. The whole tin. Splayed from the fridge to the sink in piles like raging iron ore dust, the amount akin to a quantity required to adequately nourish, say, a 2000 acre wheat crop.

I'm sticking everywhere I tread. There's also the pulsating berry mush dotted about the dining area beside the kitchen. Momentarily masticated then offered like dollops of change cascading plop, plop, plop into a wishing well.
And then there is general Pilbara about the space. You know, Pilbara. Supposedly means 'dry' in aboriginal language. Should also mean 'vanquishingly dusty' and 'inextricable' and 'radiant against white' and 'incomprehensibly clever at infiltrating hitherto unknown cavities'. Like behind the back of the fridge. Beneath the dirt that's been mopped, mudlike, from the terracotta tiles. Between my teeth. I need dental floss to de-Pilbara on days like today, when I am not crying over spilt milk which has sat unloved, perched precariously on the dastardly corner of the dining table just waiting for small child to suggest its descent into the dry, sticky and too pungent ravages beneath.

Then, there was macaroni and currants for maths this morning. The perils of homeschooling. Or freefalling through the wonders of craft. Craft. Craft has a way of being crafty, all right. I think we might call it conniving instead of craft. In a sentence, we have connived our morning away. Of course, we would thus have to add it to our list of 'c' words. 'C' is for 'conniving': Tricky, sneaky, underhanded, dastardly, sticky, gloopy, gargantuan in its terror. Crunch crunch crunch, after a morning's conniving. And then, if the activity involves, say, tins of Spam, or making collages out of last night's lasagne, then conniving becomes carnivorous. Carnivorous canniving and and Italy's left overs are all over my tiles too. Oh bugger, they've just spilt the split pea and corn soup leftover from lunch. It's lunging, langourously, abseiling in slow motion off the edge of the mountain ash precipice. This dining table's loving it too...A conniving carnivorous cornivourus chorus.

Food is fun. Ha.          Ha.          Ha.

Returning to my beginning (which has become my near end indeed Mr Eliot), I must cite the wondeful tale of five animal friends in Pamela Allen's children's book, Who Sank the Boat?

Was it the milk which poured on the floor?
Was it the curry, cascading, what's more?
Was it the berries all sluggishly stuck?
Or just macarone and currants? Oh fuck.

Who sank the boat? All at once, mish mash and splish splash /I'm sunk and I'm gone, insanity's spawn. (And I'm certain beyond a blackberry's thorn that Pamela Allen's decorum, with her delightful tales of misplaced logic, prevents her from considering 'insanity's spawn' a possible rhyme for any adventure's digressions, any character's transgressions).

As least if my proverbial boat were a'leakin', I could tip it up and simply pour out the milkcurrymacaroniberrycurrantPilbarabechamelminceabseiling corn through the front door and off down the sewage corridors of the street.

Did I mention we need rain here? It's so my turn.

Instead, I am resigned to fill the mop bucket and attend to the misery.

Luckily, it's a clean mop bucket, so when I fill it with wine and dippeth in my fine crystal to partake of its wonder, I'll be the queen. That idea's floating my boat right now. But nay, I believe a good splosh of mop will suffice, and to such duty I now resign my tears. I hate mopping. Mops are grit and grunge and give far too much away. I wish I could kill my mop.

So, ship ahoy. My mophead albatross awaits. An albatross which, unlike Coleridge's foppish neckbrace, is given regular opportunities to redeem itself in the name of ephemeral domestic purification.

So who DID sink the boat?
It was, quite simply, just me, after all, the one left in charge of defeating the squall.

I should have mopped days ago.

Conversation with a cyclone

It is hard to believe your nerve. We thought you might be coming a little sooner. Now we believe you're not coming at all. You've simply piked. Yes, whimped out, taunting us with your little sidekicks forming somewhere around 90 degrees and sashaying about a little on the spot then drifting off in an always southwesterly directiong before fading, lost in ocean swell. You've had the power of a party popper. All poooof, pffft, a little spray of colour, a little tinkle of dust particles made to step momentarily sideways in the wake of the pithy flutterings of crepe.

This is north west WA, dear cyclone, grand whirling adventurer of the sea and threatener of the coast. It is our time. Aside the cruel fact that we're gagging for your rain, you rehydrate our bones. Mine are wizened now. Waiting, sucking on dry air and swallowing the occasional spit of some renegade cloud. Have you ever felt like a drybaked chicken carcas, cyclone? I am crisp to the touch, my nerves burning electric, singing through the air like power wires strung pole to pole across the landscape.

So, we charge you with negligence. For this is a place of climactic irony. We who choose to force ourselves upon this place accept the blessings of a mild and sunny winter as refreshment, payback for the heat and wildness of summer. But summer, oh summer, summer is God here. Summer is adventure. The true rejuvenation of spirit. Its dramatic contrasts, of thudding heat against the near orgasmic threat of cyclonic travesty, are the blood which thumps through us over these six months. Systole, diastole, dry heat, torrential salvation.

And so, I have a hole in my heart.

You have forsaken us, oh cyclone.

It's not that we necessarily want annihalation - yes, you came with Laurence before we'd had time to shift the calendar to greet you. You mashed a caravan park. You destroyed cows. You wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting and the unprotected before we'd had a chance to settle into your rhythms -but then you abandoned us.

Then again, writing in anger or self pity is never going to tempt you into our longitude now, is it? You always win the argument. So perhaps I should cajole you, tell you how we need and love you. Our backyard does, anyway, the local lopping company having quoted two kidneys to fell the many dead palm branches dotted around our place. You, oh great leveller of the north west, are our only hope. Sure, you'll be messy, but aren't kidneys important for something?

All this dry, dead air is sending me into a spin. Ironic, really. That's your job. But with Robyn faffing about somewhere in the middle of nobody cares where, nobody cares. We do though. We'll take your Robyn, or any STUVW you might cough up in the next 28 days. You know you're a chance. The meteorologists do even if you don't. They're still predicting, 'the possiblity of a cyclone by the end of April'. The clarity of vision is astounding. But, despite its hypnotic vagueness, the fact is, they're correct.

Patch up my heart and you will feed me until November. I need that here. Winter comes. It is long, blue, eternal and already we have lived under dehydrated orbit for near a year. Bruise our skies and stitch us up good before our blood runs dry, oh cyclone.

PS. I bought my daughter The Wizard of Oz to watch on your night of nights. You wouldn't disappoint a four year old now, would you?