Chasing The Sun

Good morning from Melbourne!

Here is the transcript of my latest Podcast – it went up yesterday evening and you can listen to it HERE.

There are no pictures because – well you will see why! Todays picture is from my walk yesterday evening.

“I am recording today from Melbourne, Australia. I am out on the little patio in the garden. Melbournites have beautiful little gardens out in the front of their houses with a well manicured pathway to the door. And secret corners out the back. I love the houses here too with the porches and trees.  It is sunny but cool and quiet down here in the cul de sac. You might hear a few birds and maybe a dog or two, (planes) but basically this is suburban. I do look forward to hearing all the midwest birds when I get back to the farm out in Illinois but that’s not for a while yet. 

For the moment I am travelling. Doing the rounds of my family –  I am of an age where I can move from home to home doing my children’s gardens and cooking all their favourite foods. It is an old fashioned mothers way. And we love the old fashioned ways using new found technology so I can work on the road. 

My kids  want all the old food – food my mother and grandmother taught me to make. Meatloaf and shepherds pie and lasagne, scalloped potatoes, things like that.  Ordinary food. The food they grew up on with a solo Mum with too many kids, two jobs and not enough money. Those were brutal and brilliant times. But those stories are not for this podcast. Not today

Thank you for listening to my podcasts by the way and for subscribing. This is a member supported podcast and you are so important to the process. (Please subscribe if you have an extra $5 a month. After all it goes straight to feed for the animals and trees. Lots and lots of trees).

Anyway, my home made muesli is cooking in my daughter’s kitchen – I can smell it from out here – the oats and the nuts and seeds, roasting quietly. She is away. At work. I write. And cook. And talk to you. 

As I was leaving New Zealand and on my way to my daughters house, here in Melbourne.  I popped in to see my little brother for a few days. 

He met me at the airport and immediately whipped my sunglasses off my face to clean them. He cannot bear dirty glasses. I laughed. I had not been able to catch up with him for a few years due to covid and so forth but there he was  – we fell into our old family roles, the rhythm of older sister and little brother –  without a pause, a blink or even a seconds thought, 

We were going to record making a pumpkin pie, me and my little brother who is not so little anymore so we bought ourselves a pumpkin and some raisins because we could not find sultanas but in the end people kept popping into the house and we got delightfully side-tracked; eating crackers and cheese and making the pie and drinking wine all at the same time. Not a good idea. Or maybe a great idea who knows. 

But we didn’t get to record it. 

Pumpkin pie always reminds us of our mother when she was up and about.There were eight of us altogether in that big house on the beach. There was a period when we would play Chase the Sun. It was a whole family game. Mum said it was very important to do things together and we never played cards or played board games,  all our fun had to be outside. 

On Chasing the Sun afternoons, Mum and I would make huge dishes full of food, and  cover them in tea towels. Mum would pack bags of rag cloths and nappies.   Dad would get the combi van ready and round us all up in the late afternoon and we would stuff ourselves and all the food, plus a billy of water and a tea pot into the van and drive up from the beach and into the hills to follow the sun. Racing to get last of the sun before it set. I am not sure if we did this for years or only one summer but chasing  the sun became a huge handle into the memories of my childhood before Mum got sick. 

These expeditions were determined by the weather and decided on the day. I think. 

The two dishes she made for these expeditions were pizza – I will get to this – it was a deeply horrible rendition of pizza (we never even ate a real pizza in those days so I use the term loosely – I am not even sure she knew she was making a pizza).  And pumpkin pie. Not American pumpkin pie but one of her own devising. I never once saw my mother read a recipe book – the only one she owned was the old Edmonds cookbook (which she flicked over to me) and sometimes she scribbled down recipes in the back of my grandmothers handwritten recipe book. She collected recipes pulled out of magazines and glued them in there too and her friends would write recipes in there sometimes.

But her own recipes were mostly in her head and if they were written down it was  in some kind of dreadful shorthand that takes some deciphering. With a pinch of this and a spoon of that and a teacup of this and coffee cup of that. The recipes in grandmas book always had a date at the top of the page but seldom a heading so after she had died and my grandmother and aunts had died, and they were all gone by the time I hit my late twenties, you kind of had to make the recipe to find out what they were for.  

She never wrote down the pumpkin pie recipe though – we didn’t need to – we just made it – Mum and I. 

 She would make this pie in a huge heavy roasting pan. 

OK here is the recipe the way I remember it. Grab a pumpkin that is dry. Maybe a blue pumpkin or a big grey one. Roughly chop into the same size pieces and scoop out the seeds. Mum would send us outside to chop it up with a clean tomahawk, or an axe then throw the seeds to the chooks. We literally chopped it up on the chopping block. Lord help us. No-one cared about germs in those days. 

Don’t peel the pumpkin,  just cover the pieces with hot lightly salted water and cook until soft. Then drain, cool a bit and scoop the flesh out of the skin. The skin went to the chooks too and some to the dog. Make sure it is well drained. Keep the flesh as dry as you can. While the pumpkin is warm add sugar to taste, a good cup of sultanas and a little lemon zest. Mum probably used lemon juice, I don’t think we even had a zester. But I love the infinitesimal bite of the lemon zest. Let it cool a little further. In a small  bowl add two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla to a little cream, whip it up. Then stir that into the warm pumpkin mixture.  

Do you see the absence of cinnamon and nutmeg? This pie tastes like sweet pumpkin – there in no attempt to hide the taste of the pumpkin. 

Line a dish in a puff pastry. The bottom and right up the sides. Stab all over with a fork. 

Fill it with the pumpkin mixture and top with a freshly whipped meringue. 

Have the oven heating at 350F or  (wait let me work this out – 180 Celsius)  my little brother and I forgot to preheat the oven (I blame the wine) but this was a significant error – don’t make the same mistake. 

Bake for about forty minutes then without opening the door turn the oven off and leave to cool. This is how you get light crunchy meringue. 

Remember recipes are really suggestions so feel free to play with this one. Mums pumpkin pie was often a little chunky and her meringue was always perfect. 

We ate our pumpkin pie cold but Mums pretend pizza was hot so we ate that first.  We would have driven a little way into the hills then someone would see a piece of sun, sliced up by the shadow of the hills: call out and we would pull over, stumble out of the van, grab a couple of slices of the pizza, I would haul my little brother onto my hip and we would all race into the patch of sun to eat it.  Who knows where we would be, sometimes near a cliff or a patch of bush or up a country road.

The moment the sun would go behind a hill we would all pour back into the van and drive further up until we found more sun. Then eat our pumpkin pie. Out there in the dying light.

We would follow the sun like this until it set below the hills and into the sea and dusk would descend.

The VW Combi was outfitted with a little gas cooker so Mum would have brought the copper kettle already filled with water and we would make a pot of tea for anyone who wanted one – no milk – no sugar. Black or nothing. Often we shared the mugs. 

OK. I know you are dying to hear about it. Here is Mums pizza. 

She made a scone base. (I will pause here to let that sink in). She did pat it out a little thinner than her normal scones but it was a huge scone in another big rectangular roasting dish. Are you ready? She spread a tin of watties spaghetti on top of the scone – quite thickly really, then sparsely sprinkled that with cheddar cheese. And that was it. Into the oven.  It was a bit of a mess to eat but we loved it. We were long rangy skinny kids – always hungry – we ate anything. 

Now that I think about it – that might have been the original deep dish pizza! 

I have to say though my younger siblings have never asked me for the recipe for Mums spaghetti pizza! 

Thank you so much for listening. This is Cecilia – leave me a comment. What is the craziest thing your Mum or Dad ever cooked for you. Oh and let me know if you tried the pumpkin pie .”

Listen to the podcast here – it is a short – 14 minutes – HERE

Here is the link to the pumpkin pie recipe.

This is the best Mama recipe for the meringue.

Take care and Talk soon.

Celi