Value, Identity, Motherhood, Career: This months focus

Value, Identity, Motherhood, Career

This month I want to focus on value, identity, motherhood and career. It’s something I have been turning around in my mind quite a bit lately. Puzzling out this particular rubics cube. What is my worth when it’s not measured by a predictable pay cheque at the end of each fortnight? What is my identity when I can’t quite articulate the answer to the inevitable “What do you do?”  What is my value to a society that views success exclusively in career terms?  Read more

The importance of tradition and rituals

traditions
When I think about my childhood and adolescence,this is what is etched into my memory: 

  • Sitting at our dining room table and eating breakfast and dinner together, as a family, almost every day.
  • Driving to Brisbane for Christmas Holidays and staying with my mum’s parents and great grandmother. HUGE Christmas days with my Dad’s enormous family and alternating smaller ones with my Mum’s family.  Read more

Sharing my passion – Sarah’s Salads

Food has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember.

Some of my earliest memories are of baking with my mum. My family always grew some of our own fruit and vegetables, or had chickens be it for eggs or meat.

On Christmas holidays we would drive from the Atherton Tablelands to Brisbane and stay with my Grandparents. My Grandfather was a mad horticulturist – fruit, vegetables, flowers, he grew it all in abundance. I would sit in the peach or nectarine tree and just gorge myself. Even now, with his ill health he still instructs my Grandmother on what needs to be planted and done in the garden at their retirement village.

These days I also love growing my own herbs and vegetables and am hoping to expand into some fruit trees this summer.

Sarah's salads

 

I love reading and watching chefs and cooks who focus on the importance of good produce, Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer are my all time favorites. And then there is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame, and of course the adorable Jamie Oliver, and the charming Valentine Warner.

Something I am always complemented on is my salads. So as a way to share my passion with you, our lovely readers, I have put together a small collection of some of my salad recipes – Sarah’s Salads. These are the ones people constantly ask me the recipes for. I’m big on pimping salads and taking them to the next level. So each recipe has an optional “pimp it” section as well.

These recipes are not original, they are all influenced from others I have tried. I do hope that you enjoy them.

Bon Appetite!

Sarah xsarahs-salads_Image

Valuing Motherhood

Baby and Calf - photo credit Robyna MayWhat do you do? It’s an innocuous question. An icebreaker. Something we say.

It’s not generally a request for a persons complete CV. Yet, that’s how I answer that question. I am at home at the moment on maternity leave but I will be back at work next year. I did manage IT and knowledge for a law firm, but managing a big team with children wasn’t ideal so I have moved into more of a consultative role.

It’s only recently that I have started asking myself why I do this. What am I really saying is: I am a mum, and that’s fun and all, but I am also an intelligent, successful person with a career. I am actually quite smart and valuable. And you aren’t going to see me that way if I only tell you the mum bit. Read more