Today I saw a recipe on another blog (http://nzecochick.blogspot.com/2011/10/super-easy-crumble.html), another kiwi girl writing for whoever wants to stop by and read. I have not met Madeline, but I really enjoyed her post and the recipe that she shared made me think yet again about food and cooking….
Some of you know me well enough to already know that for the last 3 months Doka and I have been living without a kitchen. This is not ideal, but it’s summer time here in Korcula and for the most part we have been working 14 hour days so not really a lot of time for cooking anyway. We’ve been eating cereal, fruit, salads and a lot of take away pizza! I am quite amazed that the novelty of the pizza hasn’t worn off yet, but they do occasionally spice it up a bit here;
Pizza calzone, Korcula style!
am so looking forward to cooking again that I have been saving favourite recipes that I have stumbled across on-line, am not sure what I will make first… we are hoping to move in the next couple of days. I’ll let you know what I make for the celebratory dinner, it won’t be quite as fun looking as the above but I know it will taste GREAT!
What’s your favourite meal? and where did you eat it?
Leave your comments below, I would love to hear from you.
I feel a little deceptive with the title, like maybe I should be off to summit Everest without oxygen or porters – not this week! I have instead signed up for a new blog challenge, I enjoyed participating in the last one (via Nikki Pilkington) so much that I thought I should try another… why not?
The Ultimate Challenge requires that I write something for our blog EVERY day this month, I haven’t seen our introductory email yet and as we are about to close the shop for the day I thought I would make a start anyway.
Interestingly I have noticed that my most popular posts to date have generally not been related to our filigree jewellery business. I hope that will change when I start to capture some of the family history of filigree making – approximately 500 years to capture, can’t wait to start on that. My father in law will hopefully be back here in Korcula with us in December and I hope to make a start on the historical stuff then.
To date my most popular post has been ‘My Mum’s’ – maybe I sound like I am from some dysfunctional up bringing and jumped round a lot of homes/Mums… Hopefully no-one was too disappointed to find am just a regular girl with a fantastic Mum in New Zealand and now a newish mother-in-law here in Croatia.
Please let me know what YOU would like me to blog about, I would love to hear from you. 30 new topics? Re-visit some old favourites? There are so many options and I look forward to sharing my progress in this new Challenge with you.
Six months ago Doka and I arrived back here in Korcula having spent Christmas and New Year with my family in New Zealand.
We moved back to Korcula to open our own business here, we arrived with very lots of motivation and belief in our business but with very little start up money, no premises to work from and no working papers! When I reflect now I find it quite amazing what we have achieved in 6 months.
Here is the space that we are now working from – up until 15 April 2011 Seba Dizajn was home to a small bar or kanobar, we had on several occasions sat here and had a drink, but never thought it would become home to our business venture.
The last hurrah!
Ruth Seba in kanobar with previous owner.
It was during our first few weeks back in Croatia while we were running about trying to get paperwork organised etc that I kept hearing ‘polako, polako!’, literally translated as ‘slowly, slowly’. An easy word to pick up and pronounce, and one that sums up Korcula life very well.
Generally it appears there is no hurry to get anything done. In some ways this is a very nice concept, however I am someone who is used to running about and getting things done when I need them done. I excel at slowly, slowly when I am on holiday but as an approach to work or by workers here I found it very frustrating at times.
I remember asking Doka one day, ‘What is the Croatian word for fast?’
I still don’t know!! And he often tells this like some sort of joke here, and Croatian people find it very funny… but I just want to get things moving along at a kiwi girl pace.
(nb. Croatian for fast = postiti, not one we hear very often but I will try to remember it for future reference)
There is so much to learn, I seem to have picked up a lot of ‘shop talk’ which is helpful but I am often lost when words come at me very fast. Thank goodness English is so widely spoken, when I was at school in New Zealand I never thought about learning another language (although one friend and I did attempt a correspondence Japanese course for a few weeks).
There has been so much else to do that my language ‘lessons’ have not been prioritized, now that our season is winding down I need to focus on the language, polako, polako!
Polako - good things take time! I love the laugh that my in-laws are sharing in this photo.
At Seba Dizajn we know who sewed on our sequins and knitted our hats, we are proud to be supporting Fair Trade producers in Nepal. We have had quite a lot of customers commenting on our scarves and bags not being made in Croatia. It is hard to keep everyone happy! We are yet to find Croatian made textiles to stock in our shop, but we only opened our store in June and our search for fabulous Croatian made products continues.
My previous job was based in the highlands of Scotland where I managed a small Fair Trade company that sourced, and continues to source, all of its products in Nepal. Doka and I had talked about stocking only Croatian made goods alongside of the stunning filigree jewellery that he is producing in the store, it was a joint decision to support Nepal and Fair Trade and stock products from Nepal.
Nanu, Pemela & Mango Shobu, Kathmandu November 2009
We stand by our decision and hope that in time there will be growth in awareness of Fair Trade here in Croatia. I have seen Fair Trade candles in the Kozmo store here but no other ‘Fair Trade’ recognised products – yet…
This has been social media summer for me: rather than soaking up the sun, frolicking in the waves and dancing the sultry nights away with an eye to where the next Mojito is coming from, I’ve been soaking up the tweets, floundering in Facebook and blogging the grey days away, with an eye to my Search Engine Optimisation.
It’s been a steep learning curve – and an exciting one. I would never have believed I’d get so excited about being e-mailed with notice of a re-tweet, or get such a kick from a comment on the blog. It’s become all about the visibility, the reach, the influence, the followers…
I have to confess to getting quite hard-nosed and outcome-driven about it all. But I was stopped short when
talking to my highly valued friend and coaching colleague, Elaine Burke (find her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/elaineburke). Elaine started to talk about generosity and the importance of being generous with your materials and your knowledge. I immediately jumped in with, “oh, yes, of course, as a loss-leader” thinking in terms of growing a following and a market by getting your materials known. “No,” said Elaine, “I meant just being generous for its
own sake.”
I felt abashed and yet also excited. Connections started to be made in my mind, dominoes started to fall and cogwheels turn as I thought of all the material I had looked at in the last few weeks: words, diagrams, videos, ideas, reviews and tools that others had been generous enough to share with their online communities.
Links emerged for me between this generosity, so apparent within social media, and the idea of each of us as a curator of our own creative worlds. With iPods, we know longer rely on someone deciding on which music goes with which other music: we decide, we curate our own musical space. Then we share it for others to enjoy and adapt and make their own. With Flickr and InstaGram, we are all capable of curating and sharing an exhibition of our lives and passions for others to view, pass on and critique; we curate our own aesthetic space.
And with social media, and its inherent democratisation of so much knowledge, we can each curate our own libraries of information, picking what is relevant, and organising it in such a way as to make sense within our own unique workflow and social patterns.
This must influence us as artists and makers, as we look for inspiration within our social media communities as well as within our physical and inner worlds. How exciting to see others curate our work, incorporating it into their own lives and spaces.
Thanks to Elaine, I will seek to practise generosity for its own sake in my social media dealings – just as I take for granted that I can benefit from the generosity of others – and I will look with curiosity to see whether and how others curate my ideas into their worlds.
I know Michele would appreciate your feedback on her post, please leave your comments below.
