Cookbooks.

I spend a lot of time pondering life in Hobart. Tonight, exhausted and wishing myself at home we dropped into the supermarket in the city only to witness a woman bail up the chap stacking shelves with the whinge that she had cut her finger on a shelf and was going to report it to, of all places....The Mercury (the local paper). I grit my teeth.

But last night, Jane from Life on Planet Baby went to town to Fullers Bookshop to hear Tessa Kiros talk about her new cookbook Limoncello and Linen Water:

A sweetly pretty book where the recipes are nostalgic and woven together from myriad directions. Being Hobart, it only took a matter of minutes to materialise at the front of the queue for an inscription:

(Jane took this photo)

Of course, I couldn't help myself and had to tell her about how I regularly cook from her book Venezia in my kitchen in Hobart in an attempt to try and transport us back to Venice, if only for one fleeting dinner. It's a tenuous link but miraculously it works. Food is clever the way that it can do that.

How vivid is the memory of the giddy thrill that came with swapping the plane for a water taxi and speeding through the haze where the sky and water were indistinguishable....before the incredibleness that is Venice was revealed:

And the first, much anticipated, taste of gelato (pistachio)......of course there was a gelateria right next to where our feet touched land.

Then, just because I could, I told her how powerfully the quote on the back cover resonated with me:

Suddenly the talk veered towards the aqua alta, sirens and thunderstorms and the watery beauty and unpredictability of Venice. Tessa Kiros lives in the countryside somewhere between Siena and Florence. She lives in a beautiful part of the world.....and then she told me that I do too. And she's right. But it's very easy to forget.

Rx

PS Who has stumbled on Heidi's gorgeous new blog? Back in May, when I was totally demoralised by the fact that I had been blogging for quite some time and had NEVER received a comment, Heidi was one of the first to make one and has regularly and perceptively continued to do so. She has a distinctive voice and a wide range as a comment maker in blogland yet now you can read about and see pictures of her life in Adelaide....I thoroughly recommend having a look.