Each year, someone volunteers to host Christmas and this year it was Tracy’s only sister. House in mid-renovation, two teenage children coming and going between her house and her ex-husband’s, two dogs in the back yard and a crowd of thirty to feed. Brave. So off to the mountains mid-morning, before the heavy Christmas day traffic got started. We pulled up to the house on the high side of a valley that is not quite Selby and not quite somewhere else and there was my mother-in-law sweeping the drive, a Sisyphean task in the Dandenongs where it rains eucalypt bark. A kookaburra also welcomed us, sitting on the telephone wire that crosses the unmade road from one side of the valley to the other. He didn’t laugh but had his beak apart as if smiling widely. He was fat and jolly like Father Christmas. He hung around most of the day, perching himself on various trees, stumps and fences. Lunch cranked into action around 2 p.m., in an informal buffet style so you could move around in betwee...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.