"...where cooking is the furthest thing from drudgery yet springs entirely from hard work, where delight and resourcefulness and imagination and practice are more important than recipes, where eating itself is an act of grace."
I once lived on a 113 acre farm in Gippsland and ran a small food business called Tamsin's Table. We offered cooking classes but at the heart of it all were our long (a half day or more) lunches that we hosted every Sunday, nearly every week, for seven years. Years earlier I had committed to eating, to the greatest extent that we could, from the farm and this was the food that we served at the Table.
Keeping our own family in food, as well as providing a feast for another twelve to twenty four people each week, tested me in so many ways. I learned so much, worked so hard, and wrote a lot.
In reading back over the many words, these 'letters' in particular stood out - I realise that I was traversing the same ground as I am now, just from a different perspective, through different eyes and found myself overwhelmed with tenderness and love for that time. I thought you might be curious to read them too. Most of these were written in 2014 - a very difficult year for the farm and the garden, but the challenge let something loose in me and my body remembers, more than a decade down the track, the feeling of total immersion, total rootedness, in LIFE.
The Tamsin's Table blog has moved to this site. The posts below were originally published at tamsinstable.com.au.