About Hopes and Dreams ~ Mariella

Hopes, dreams, aspirations, delusions of grandeur ~ those wispy tendrils of impulse that crawl their way into and out of your everyday thoughts. They tease and cajole and taunt and creep sadly away when ignored, only to rage another day, perhaps during moments of discontent, when you can least tolerate them!

~Am I following my heart? 

~I have one life, am I being true to me?

~Is this what I want to be doing right now opposed to……the thing is, if you are having a phenomenal time at work, the weekends would not seem so desperately alluring!

~The final stanza in the poem ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost rings in your head

‘I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.’ 

If these sing and ring and ping impatiently in your heart, perhaps it’s because you are not following it!

Bronnie Ware released a book called ‘The top five regrets of the dying’, and which regret do you think tops them? I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. In our ‘liberated’ modern society it goes further than that, we have expectations of ourselves, we expect to not be able to make a living by pursuing our eccentric mad dreams so we end up chopping them up into thus far acceptable slices through prearranged avenues, or we claim them as hobbies instead of plotting a new course.

The problem with unrequited dreams is that they make you restless. They bite at your ankles, whisper through your days and yell through your nights, be brave!

https://www.facebook.com/ShotgunTori

Presently I’m listening to 'Be Brave' by Shotgun Tori, whom I went to see recently, she’s singing as loud as the customers in my shop will tolerate, ’Throw caution to the wind, be brave!’ but as responsible mortgage paying members of society we may have a hard time running off in different directions pursuing dreams as concrete as wind but her words speak of not waiting another day to turn your sail in the right direction. 

A wise friend once said to me, ’If you spend just 10 minutes everyday working on your dreams, you’ll be further than you were the day before, and a year from now you’ll be glad you started today!’ 

The world needs a workforce, but what it needs more are people alive with the creative light of following their dreams, the electric buzz of excitement when standing up and doing something that means so much to you that you have goosebumps on your goosebumps, its more contagious than flu, it’s enviable and addictive to the point of continual and welcome repetition!  

Home made Cream Cheese ~ Mariella

I love cheese, cream cheese especially. But I’m not mad about the preservatives and additives that come with it, especially as many of them are known to aggravate existing allergies. So in other words they turn mild intolerance into adverse reaction! 

And you thought it was the dairy! 

I now make my own cream cheese and its so easy!

First you need to make yoghurt:

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-make-your-own-yoghurt.html

I find that it works out well to make the yoghurt in the evening, leave it overnight and prepare the cream cheese before work so that it’s ready by the time you get home.

Step 1:

Separate the curd and whey - Tip the yoghurt out into a clean cloth. The easiest, tidiest way to do this is to lay the cloth out in a colander in the sink, tip the yoghurt into it and close it up with string to make a little bag. Then tie up the bag above a bottle to catch some of the whey which can then be used in smoothies and cooking. If you’re short on time you can leave the bag in the colander and place a heavy weight on top, placing the colander in a bowl to catch the whey.

 

Step 2:

Turn the cheese out into a bowl. Depending on what consistency you like, you can leave it as is and stir in some salt and pepper/chives/Cayenne pepper etc and serve straight away or bottle and store in the fridge (remember to sterilize your bottle) or you can add your flavourings and blend with a handheld blender to make it smooth.

That’s it! It practically makes itself!

No place like your family home! Now plant a Tree! ~ Mariella

The culture shock upon arrival in Gauteng for another Gem and Mineral show is lessened by the knowledge that we get to play catch up with family. And my family home is the stuff of dreams, well, my dreams anyway! The image above shows my parent's house from the front, don't worry, I can't see it either! And the entire property is like this. When my parents moved onto the land in 1982, there was a house with a fence around. They started planting trees and established a vegetable garden almost immediately.

Yip, that's me on the right, with the pigeon-toed cowboy boots on! The open range you see in the distance is now well developed. Good thing they don't keep cows anymore!

Their vegetable garden is now smaller, but they still eat out of it everyday. Lettuce is a Winter crop but the birds are so hungry for fresh young leafy greens that my parents cover their crops with shade netting, leaving the sides open for quick access.

If I were to think on what eating habits I have most impressed on others, it would have to be the size of my salads! Every night, for dinner, we all ate a salad of fresh lettuce and herbs out of the garden roughly the size of any other family's family salad!

They also planted an orchard. I have great memories of climbing peach, apricot, plum, lemon, pecan nut trees in season and eating them warm in the garden. If we all planted fruit trees on every property we lived on, whether we were renting or not, we'd all be picking naturally grown, fresh, healthy fruit from our own gardens. 

My mom's lemon trees hang heavy every year and my daughter decided to make lemon rind to sell at my Food Market in Plettenberg Bay. 

http://oldnickmarket.weebly.com/

This is a hibernating apricot tree, it's huge and still bares enough fruit for my mom to make enough jam for a year at a time! 

Spring is on it's way and this Nectarine tree is clearly feeling optimistic. There is an old Chinese Proverb which says it all: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”