When I was a little girl I would sit on our Formica bench top and help Mum with the cooking. I’d be sifting the flour and grating the cheese for the scones, and peeling the carrots for the soup. She showed me how to tell if the cake was cooked and just how long to beat the butter to get it to turn into mock cream. Of course I was always on hand to lick the bowl too.

We’d have Sunday afternoon tea at my grandparents, Mopsy and Popsy’s, with the Aunts and Uncles, all who are fabulous cooks, and expert gardeners.

As a non-vegetable eating vegetarian (this means I lived on white bread vegemite sandwiches) and fussy eater at aged 8, I took it upon myself to create some new stuff and Mum was always encouraging. This is where I started my love for cooking, and this website is dedicated to the memory of my Mum Bev.

My grandmother Mopsy had three wedding rings. She wasn’t a polygamist, she had the same husband Popsy for 60 something years. The first ring she had back in 1926 when she married, a rather modest number, sadly slipped off her slender youthful hand when she was working in the garden. The replacement ring bought several years later, was more expensive than the first, and managed to stay around for the rest of her married life.

However , years later, after four children and plenty of good old country cooking (and eating), it became too small and needed to be upgraded to an even more expensive and larger ring.A short time after buying this third ring, to everyone’s surprise the original ring was found by my granddad. He dug it up in the garden.

It had been buried in the kumara patch for more than 30 years, and now I have that lucky ring.