Category Archive

Australia

You should absolutely check out this Australian home decor (particularly if you like cats!)

The real estate listing describes this Australian home as, “A wonderland of colour, this torrens titled character maisonette is filled with a whole lot of charm!” You say “whole lot of charm” I say “whole lot of pictures of cats” …and dolls, and hanging baskets full of fake flowers.

The stuff I keep my stuff in: creative storage solutions

Homie Lauren has some creative storage solutions in her “very white, white and beige rental” in North Queensland Australia. From tea cups that help her brush her teeth, to floral boxes that have been tables and benches, to a great solution for storing washing powder when you live in the tropics. This is the stuff that she keeps her stuff in…

Hang your herb garden in front of your window

I’m fluctuating between giddy and jealous over this amazing hanging herb garden submitted to our Flickr pool by Homie Pennyhaslop. I’m giddy because I’m stoked to share it with you. But I’m jealous because I WANT ONE!

Rick and Annie’s handbuilt treehouse in Australia

What would it be like to inhabit a normal-sized home that’s actually a treehouse? Now we know. We picked up a friend of ours and offered her a ride, and we didn’t know we were in for such a treat when we got to her destination!

This tipi on a raft in a lake in Australia is the most interesting home I’ve seen this year

When you can’t afford housing where you need it, what do you do? If you’re like Will Woodbridge, Australian university student, you build yourself a raft on a nearby lake and take up residence there.

Water apples in Australia — like tiny watermelons in the trees!

I was delighted to find my favourite fruit in the wild this week. Water apples (also known as bell fruit) are familiar to me from my childhood in West Africa where I called them “pommes d’eau.” Get all the facts on this forage-able fruit within.

How to handle jackfruit — and three recipes to use with it!

Near our house is a botanical garden which includes a small, pathetic tropical fruit orchard. We visit every now and then, usually bringing home a few lemons, but not much else. Most of the things growing there are not super productive, because they aren’t cultivated or cared for, and there is usually only one tree from each species. The trees are also labelled with nothing but a name (and sometimes not even that), so it’s hard to know when things are ready for picking.

A few months ago we grabbed a jackfruit, but when we cut it open it oozed so much latex that we got scared and threw it away. Then we saw Australian celebrity chef Luke Nguyen make a salad with green, unripe jackfruit. He talked briefly about how to cook it. That was enough to inspire us to have another go.

8 ideas for the bounty of mangoes this spring in Australia

As America picks over Thanksgiving leftovers and gears up for Christmas, I’m loving summer here in Australia, because summer = mango season. My partner Andy and I are mango-obsessed, so I was not terribly unhappy to leave the US in the end of October, saying goodbye to its snow. Especially because it meant coming home to a box full of mangoes.