Julie and Julia

So this morning we planned to cycle to 'Nothing Ordinary' an antiques and art weekend hosted by Gina Brown at her stunning property 'Lion's Bush' at the entrance to the Hamlet of Fort Nottingham. Whiling away the hours in bed, re-designing my web store www.simplysam.co.za, put pay to that idea. Especially when my daughter announced that 'Julie and Julia', the wonderful cookery movie about the life of Julia Childs and Julie Powell was about to start on TV. Well that really re-organised the day as the whole family lazed around eating popcorn and just being a family!
Whilst watching I remembered the movie was the inspiration for this blog, but I've not written in ages. Call it lazy, bad time management or even lack of inspiration, but Julie and Julia has inspired me to put my 'blogging' hat on again!
I don't have anything quite as exciting as cooking loads of recipes, as Julie Powell did, but something you should know about me is I love cooking and taught basic cookery to men and women in Pretoria from my home. This had to be one of the most joyful times of my life. Some of these people, believe it or not, had never even eaten with a knife and fork before (in Africa one eats with your hands!), so I taught my students how to set a table and at the end of each session we would sit down to enjoy the food we'd made (usually a starter, main and desert) and get to know each other better. At that stage I was dreaming of living in the Midlands, so I kind of pretended I lived on a farm by growing my own herbs and keeping a couple of chickens. Well besides teaching the students cookery, I also taught them a bit about home grown herbs and  sometimes we would even charge through the garden trying to find the proverbial need in a haystack when we realised we were short of an egg or two for a recipe. Well have you ever .....
So after watching Julie and Julia, my eleven year old was inspired enough to dig out my old 'cookery school' files and after playing a game of squash in Nottingham Road, we had to purchase all the ingredients for Choc Chip Cookies and Chocolate Cheese Cake. It wasn't until we started making the Cheesecake that we realised there was no Gelatine in the house, so our fridge Cheesecake was quickly turned into a baked one and  and  very yummy it was too.