Nothing happens around here until after breakfast. Usually a couple of coffees down, too. With the warming weather, a fresh smoothie often does the trick. Keeping it nice and simple, because we are functioning

A little bit of warm weather through the week had our little salad patch blooming. We decided to thin some out to have baby salad greens with lunch. The thinning also allows more room for those left to

Part of our motivation for getting out of the city to a rural setting is the desire to connect more strongly to the community we live in. It appears that in smaller, more isolated places those bonds are

Well, I'm almost convinced spring is finally here...though I've been tricked before. It's sunny enough outside to take stock of the state of our little garden. It's only a 4m2 patch plus a couple of scrappy

Dashing out between rain showers to get some of these poor sun-starved tomato seedlings out into the ground, I pulled up one of our carrots. We don't have the deepest, or the richest soil in this little

It's the end of the week, and supplies are running low. If we can't make it to a fresh market by Friday we are usually scrapping something together. This is a very different sort of curry to what we are

This is our standard go-to bread, with fairly basic timing and instructions. As we wrote about the starter, there are many factors that affect the final bread, and we can tweak many of these to make the

Spring is still coiled down here in Melbourne. But we might have some warm weather on the way to get us out in the garden. These chillies appear to have decided it's finally worth peering out. And these

There are plenty of blogs and websites and books that tell you how to make a sourdough starter. If you're looking for some new trick or technique, or a foolproof method, you won't find it here. Fact is,

There's always a brace of jars fermenting in the kitchen. In addition to the perennial sourdough starter, there are plenty of things to eat and drink in various stages of readiness. With spring and summer

This is the final installment of the Auberge Garden. Check out the other parts of the series: Part 1: Laying the Foundations Part 2: Pruning and Planning Part 3: Observing the Landscape We had a lot of

A little experiment with my bread this weekend. These two loaves were mixed and proofed together, but one was baked soon after shaping, the other had another 24 hours of cold fermentation in the fridge.

This is the third part of a series of posts showing what we’ve done with the garden so far. Check out Part 1 and Part 2. The trees are trimmed and pruned, and now more light is flooding into the garden

Taking a little break from the garden to warm up inside. As winter insists on creeping on into the early weeks of spring here in Melbourne, we’re still looking for ways to keep warm. Turns out nothing

This is the second part of a series of posts showing what we’ve done with the garden so far. Check out Part 1 here. Permaculture is all about accelerating nature’s processes. We are keen to use as much

This is the first part of a series of posts showing what we’ve done with the garden so far. We have just spent six weeks of late summer at the Auberge in France, and at this stage it’s unsure when we’ll

On a warm, bright evening in late June we sat outside an innocuous bar in a quiet street in Avignon armed with cold pints of beer, watching the city wind down towards evening. A newspaper clipping was

Welcome to Auberge du Lis! We are two young Australians in the process of uprooting ourselves from busy city lives and desk jobs to a quieter, simpler life in beautiful south-west France. As we begin this