One of the chooks has gone broody. On the weekend she was determinedly sitting on the eggs she and her fellow denizons of Chickendome had laid that morning, and stayed there rather than adventuring out in the garden with the others when I opened the door to the pen. A fairly pointless endeavour, given that we don’t have a rooster. I left her there for a bit, then went and lifted her out of the nesting box and removed the eggs. She stomped outside in a bit of a huff, then started scratching around and went and joined her fellows. Later in the day however she’d left them and returned inside to the nesting box, this time carefully incubating some straw.

I’m not sure how to cure her of this habit, apart from hauling her off the nest every so often and hoping that she realises that no matter how dedicated she is to sitting in one position, she’s not going to get chickens out of it.

It’s raining heavily and relentessly today and I always worry about the chooks in this sort of weather. Half their pen remains dry, but it’s not much space to scratch around in and I imagine them being rather bored during the day, staring dolefully at the pouring rain and watching the rest of their pen turn to mud.

We came back from five days visiting family in Melbourne and spent some time together in the garden over the past few days – mowing, pulling out fallen fences and ripping up lantana. This year will bring so many changes for us and I think we both feel the impetus to organise and arrange the property. And remove lantana, that bloody stuff. At least it has fairly shallow roots, its one saving grace.

We started the new year eating croissants, and then trying to pull the ute bullbar back into position after I had a little disagreement with a concrete post. We were mostly successful, and I am determined to stay away from concrete posts this year. They’re no good for me. Or the car. And that should be a nice easy resolution to keep.

There seems to be a basic instinct in all young children who visit our house to make high pitched screeching noises and run after the cats, who roll their eyes and belt in the opposite direction. Ella was a bit shy when she came to visit us last weekend in our unfamiliar house, but that didn’t stop her from engaging in a bit of cat chasing.

Each time we have children come to stay I realise how very un-child proof our house is. It felt terribly unfair to constantly tell Ella not to do things, so on Sunday morning Naomi and I lolled around on the couch and watched Ella methodically pull books off the bookshelves and hand them to us triumphantly. I took the opportunity to re-alphabetise my fiction, which might seem like a pointless sort of thing to do, but when you have a lot of books and your husband is moping around the living room asking for something to read, it makes it easier to locate one of the two or three authors he likes to read.

Ella also quite liked the chooks, who followed her around as she toddled about in her very tough little bare feet. I feel that I’ve done a good job socialising these chooks – they follow me around the garden, put themselves away at night, and lay lots of eggs. I have been rewarding them with rotten strawberries. Best chook parent ever, that’s me.

Strawberries are cheap and plentiful at the moment, and I loved the look of the Strawberry Summer Cake on Smitten Kitchen, with the juicy caramelised strawberries on top dribbling through the cake. I actually used a sugar substitute that my sister-in-law had given me (decanted into a container, so I have no idea what it was), with a couple of spoonfuls of the blue gum honey that Naomi bought us from Mapleton, because I wanted to get some of its beautifully caramel flavour in the cake. The original recipe sprinkles sugar over the strawberries before baking, but I drizzled some of the honey over them instead.

You’ve got to really cram the strawberries on top of the cake, even if it feels like there’s too many. They basically turn into jam – soft and gooey and melting into the cake. It’s delicious eaten while warm, and pretty easy to put together for morning or afternoon tea.

ingredients:
6 tblsp butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 punnets of strawberries, cut in half
2 tbsps of honey or sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 180C, and grease a fairly deep pie dish or cake tin. I used a square pyrex dish.

If you’re not lazy, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt in a small bowl. (If you’re me, you’ll dump them separately into the wet mix at the end). In a large bowl, use electric beaters to beat together the butter and sugar until fluffy. Mix in the egg, milk and vanilla until just combined, then gradually do the same with the dry mixture (or the flour, baking powder and salt) until it’s just mixed.

Pour the mixture into the pie dish. Arrange the strawberries on the top of the cake, pushing them a little into the mixture and cramming them closely together. Sprinkle them with sugar, or drizzle with honey.

Bake the cake for 10 minutes, and then reduce the temperature to 160C and bake for about an hour, until a skewer comes out clean (of the cake mixture, not the gooey strawberries).

While my brother and I live in (roughly) the same city – well, he lives within it, and I live 50ks away – we don’t spend a lot of time together, so it was nice to spend some time hanging out with him on the weekend. I asked for a coffee, which he didn’t have, so he offered me some kava which was steeping away in a coffee plunger looking brown and sludgy. “Is it nice?” I asked doubtfully, and he said it tasted how it looked, which was entirely accurate – gritty and sourly unpleasant. Then he taught me how to play The Decemberists’ Down by the Water, which I hadn’t heard before. We recorded a fairly crappy version of the song through the sophisticated method of lying a mic on a table and sitting around it. Given that it’s a directional vocal mic, I thought the balance and sound were surprisingly good – my slightly out of tune ukulele and the uncertain harmonies I was singing, not so much. I really like how our voices blend together, although I suppose that has a bit to do with genetics, rather than our magnificent vocal skills.

Later I had dinner with a friend at Piaf at South Bank, where we shared snails and lamb’s brains for our entrees. I hadn’t eaten either before and didn’t particularly take to them. Not so much because of flavour, as I thought they both simply took on the flavour of what they were cooked with, but the texture of both was fairly unappealing. Particularly the brains, which were softly slippery, and as I swallowed I kept thinking about my own brain, and people eating my brain out of my skull with spoons. I am not an adventurous eater when it comes to offal. And clearly I am also a drama queen. I don’t feel the need to consider my limbs when eating a leg of lamb.

The rest of our meal was fantastic though, and then we wandered along the river for a while and watched a laser light show, while I checked my phone occasionally and updated my disinterested dining companion on the rugby score as Ireland unexpectedly beat Australia. We then went and found a cafe to order dessert, and a couple of enormous long blacks which were served in bowls, with a cute mini milk bottle on the side. I was rather taken with the novelty of coffee-in-a-bowl, but it was an idiotic choice of beverage, given that it was my first coffee of the day and consequently I was cheerful and brightly alert until after midnight when I forced myself to try and sleep. No more novelty sized bowls of coffee for me. Not at night, anyway.