Nadine Williams

The King of Cakes

Galette des Rois:

There is something about religious tradition which gladdens the soul and in French culture, the festival of Epiphany when the Three Wise Kings, who visited the Christ Child, is celebrated with a special cake on January 7 each year.

The cake is called  La Galette des Rois and it is celebrated in the same manner of Christmas – with a gathering of the family and inside the cake a bean is inserted and whoever finds it, is king for the day – or Queen. For contemporary French children, mothers insert a small ceramic toy which cannot be swallowed, but the old tradition was to insert a dried fava bean, and to this day whatever is found is still called “la feve’’

The first time I ate a piece of La Galette des Rois, I was in  Brittany, France at the home of our friends, Gerard and Martine Rolland.  They were the happily married couple I wrote about in my book From France With Love and we were staying there as their guests, as we did each year we visited France.

It was a joyous occasion, especially for me, when I found the bean and wore the crown – a gold circle encrusted with coloured glass. ( No party hat as we were remembering the rich wise men who brought precious gold, incense and myrrh to baby Jesus).

The tradition for the Queen (moi) included my picking the King by putting the bean in his glass. Gerard added his own flavour by saying in his household, the queen is kissed by all her subjects – a very pleasant end to a great lunch celebration.

The day is a sweet memory because it was the last time we spent around the dinner table with Gerard. He died of cancer two months later.

So, each year we carry out this tradition, and usually the grand-children are eager-eyed around the table.  It is remarkably simple to make using puff pastry sheets, thawed in the refrigerator.

Cut the pastry sheets into two circles the size of  a dinner plate… then place the puff pastry on a baking sheet.  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Make the frangipane cream for the filling and this recipe makes enough for 2 galettes (often needed to allow a reasonable slice for each guest.)

We Must Cultivate Our “Garden”

Eighteenth century French writer, Voltaire in his novel Candido, says “Il faut cultiver notre jardin’’, which means “we must cultivate our garden’’.

He is writing metaphorically that it is important to cultivate the spirit within as well as the beautiful things in our life.

This gem of French literature was unearthed by my French teacher, Elsa, who added in her Christmas card:  “For me, our friendship is one of the flowers of  the garden’’.

Such is also the wonder of Christmas and New Year that we find lovely words to say and write about each other.

Style is yet another inimitable quality of self, allowing us to express ourselves in myriad ways whether through fashion, home decoration, writing, garden design, cooking, sewing, photography or handicraft. Whatever turns you on.

Flowers, for me, have been my “tools’’ of style since I sold flower fashioners fitted with suction caps as a young 20-something mother wanting spare pocket money to buy a television set.

I sold heaps of them on the party plan, arriving at people’s homes with a bucket of flowers and shrubbery (cheap) plonking such exotics as pointsettias, birds of paradise,  and agapanthus into the shapely range of vases I was also selling.  Necessity was certainly the mother of invention for me. And when I had earned that 600.00 to buy the teak telly, I simply kept arranging flowers for my own home.

It has become my statement of style and the floral arrangements are finished long before I begin to cook a meal for guests.

When brother-in-law Ken Otto hand-crafted a beautiful timber pedestal for my 50^th birthday, my arrangements evolved into expressions of sophisticated artistic floral art.  It has rarely been without a vase of flowers since and in my retirement, flowers are still a budget item each week.

Back to Voltaire. His sentiments will be the theme of my Facebook page Life & Style by Nadine Williams, which enjoyed a “soft’’ opening in the latter months of 2010.

Now as we open up a lovely new blank page of our lives for 2011, let me invite you to find time to read my writings on life and style.

My writings will be simple expressions of style I witness in people’s lives written to inspire everyone to cultivate their own stylish ways of being.

Style, I believe, helps us stay young at heart –  whatever our age – and fosters satisfaction and contentment.

“Philly’’ a phoney for real French fromages.

The French people are precious about their cheeses and savour the nose, palate and taste of  their ancient fromages with as much passion as their wines.

But now there is an American invader, the odourless Philadelphia Cream cheese which is attacking the land of camembert, brie and Roquefort fighting for a share of the 24kg (53lb) of cheese eaten by the average Frenchman each year.

In a trial move into the lucrative French cheese market, Kraft, the US food giant has packed its product on supermarket shelves in western and southern regions of France.

Purists, who reckon there is no cheese like a French cheese are fighting the move by Kraft warning that the survival of the cheese industry is at stake.

The US giant has pushed its foot in the door in France, which is already suffering a decline in its unpasteurised cheese products, which has seen sales of camembert fall by 2.6 per cent last year while industrial cream cheese sales rose by three per cent.

However, an article by Adam Sage in The Times,  states that French people are already being weaned off quality cheeses to French brands equivalent to “Philly”such as St Meret, made by Bongrain, the French food group.

“Ninety per cent of French people eat cheese which has no taste and the texture of rubber now,’’ said Virginie Boularouah, who runs the Fromagerie Chez Virginie in Paris.

She doesn’t say it’s a bad thing, but has little nice to say about the product.

“It’s just that it doesn’t taste of anything and it doesn’t smell of anything much either.’’

Leave it for a base for cheesecake she advises.

Because it won’t hold a candle to the authentic French cheeses such as comte, which takes 40 months to mature, let alone those delicious fresh goats milk cheeses sold in cheese boutiques and village markets all over France.

One wedding, two funerals and a ”nouvelle maison”.

Pop goes the French champagne cork of my life on the eve of  2011.  How else to  capture the fabulous happenings of 2010 which have taken Olivier’s and my life together to a higher plane.

Goodness. Who would have imagined I would sell the film option for my best-selling book From France With Love, but  young Adelaide film-maker, Peta Astbury wants to bring my love story to the big screen.  And whoever would have thought I would face my greatest fear  and launch my own website in May 2010.  There were daily challenges, but I have written 90 articles since and husband Olivier has dutifully posted them all with accompanying photographs for your information and entertainment. ( hope.)

The year of our family began with the wedding of my step-daughter Sylvie to her long love, Alain, in Pine Creek, Northern Territory.  It was a simple garden ceremony while the rain bucketed down onto the white marquee. A sensational French banquet prepared by a young French chef named Julie, who happened to work there at the bar meant we feasted on oysters, barramundi and entrees galore.  Dessert was a multilayered masterpiece.   The event triggered my return to travel journalism and we enjoyed a trip on The Ghan in platinum class, and the article was publishedin 50-Something magazine.

This was also the year sadness struck our family. Olivier lost his French mother, Giselle, who in Avignon. Despite a mercy flight courtesy of Qantas, he missed saying “Goodbye’ by half an hour. But she knew he was in France and on his way because he telephoned her from the airport before taking the TGV within 50 minutes of arrival. It simply wasn’t meant to be, but at 91, she was suffered a fatal heart attack as he passed the hospital gates.

Despite his grief, he chuckled somewhat when the priest of the historic St Martin’s Basilica in St Remy de Provence was a French speaking black priest from the Ivory Coast. “Maman would have loved a black priest conducting her funeral,’’ he later related.

It was a humble farewell with few villagers attending and she was cremated in Marseilles.

He and his sister, Francoise, scattered their mother’s ashes in the pine forest behind their first home in Pont Demay as she wished.  She lived in the white house close by as a young married woman during the war with her two toddlers before her life tumbled into poverty.

I met Olivier in London in August and we visited Edinburgh with our London family, daughter Serena, Jon and the three grand-children and attended the sensational Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Another glorious road trip around France, a few days in Paris and we returned home to move ourselves from Belair (where Oli had lived for 35 years) to Hindmarsh Island.

I need to backtrack because while Oli was conducting his duties as the only son, I was left alone here in  OZ to pack up our belongings. That one word “belongings’’ is a story in itself as his much-loved things far exceeded mine because I had sifted through my stuff three times.

Our seachange has also presented challenges, not the least being travelling to Adelaide repeatedly. But our island home sits on the marina where the River Murray flows past and all we lack here is a boat tied to the jetty at the bottom of the garden.  Birds are our neighbours.

However, our biggest change this year, a sometimes overwhelming challenge, has been to raze our home at Belair to build our new retirement home.  This is not a task for the faint-hearted!  We took our lunch the day the bulldozers arrived and it was an emotional event for husband Olivier.  However, the foundations of our new retirement home have been poured and we say roll on 2011 to bring us back to our real home – Belair.

My three  children have wrestled all year with the deteriorating health of their dad, Graham Williams, my former husband, who suffered from melanoma. He lived to see his son, Tyson, turn 30 and we had a happy celebration at Tyson’s house on June 12.  Graham died in his bed on November 1 and by chance, I was staying unexpectedly at Tyson’s house that night.  It was a poignant moment, as was Graham’s funeral a few days later. Naturally, the children have been grief-stricken. I don’t know how ex-wives are supposed to feel, but I have wept this year, too, because we were married for 15 years and together for 20 years.  I have much to thank him for especially my tertiary education and at this time all those happy memories rise up in the mind.

To happier things.  In October I was guest speaker at my largest society event – Novita’s Spring Rose Garden lunch which was a sell-out and in November, this event connected me to a prominent South Australian who is keen to try and find funding to bring From France With Love to the screen. Peta has also fulfilled an important clause in our contract and has hired a screen-writer.  So, watch this space.

Challenges help us age well, which is a reason why I started up my Facebook page Life & Style by Nadine Williams in November!

Christmas was a delightful, fun expression of our crazy family life… great French food on Xmas Eve,  traditional turkey and trimmings riverside on Christmas Day, wonderful friendship and great experiences.

However, this has been a unique year because it is the only time I will be living anything like my Germanic forebears,  great-grandmother and grandmother, who lived on the River Murray at Caloote. And I treasure each day here.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year, Joyeux Noel and do check out my website  www.nadinewilliams.com.au.

My Hand-made Christmas

We wanted something different and special to decorate our island home for Christmas because we didn’t want rummage through our storage pile of boxes to the artificial Christmas tree.

And with ingenuity, we have created a beautiful Christmas tree from half dozen dead pine branches still with pine cones attached, which we sprayed silver. They were fixed into an empty  red tin flower bucket filled with polystyrene filling for packing boxes.

Piled to the rim, they looked remarkably like snow and around the bucket I wrapped a  pretty Christmas ribbon.

We shopped for baubles light enough not to snap off the twigs of the pine branches and found eight hand-made Christmas decorations for an average of $2.30 each and a tube of red baubles from Ned’s at Victor  Harbour (the cheapie shop).  They were dangled strategically from the branches to create a beautiful thing.

The most poignant decoration on the tiny tree, though, was a lone felt cut-out of the word “Peace’’, so light, it might float away.

As if a magic potion, there the tree sat on the sideboard and that word “peace’’ prevailed throughout our Christmas Day celebrations. It witnessed all the joy of gift-giving, making  ham sandwiches for a packed lunch at the beach, and the mayhem of preparing the evening Christmas meal for seven.

And sitting around the table, the joy of the family gathering for our roast turkey Christmas dinner, was reflected in those small red baubles.

The pretty floral centrespread, too, was my handiwork after Olivier and I picking foliage from the verges of Hindmarsh Island.

The colors – the emerald greens of pencil pines and three gloriously yellow Banksia flowers with sprigs of holly  and other leafy natives – toned in with the French Provincial table cloth.

How wonderful it is to be retired to have the time to make these embellishments to give our home creative style at Christmas.

Philipa’s Christmas: How Arts Decoratifs create joy

This is the house, so glorious with colourful Christmas arts decoratifs that it could well be used as Santa’s cave.

It is laden with the exotic style and Christmas cheer of  new-found Goolwa friend Philipa, who sits amidst the living room’s splendour with her doggie, Misty, on her lap.

Misty has a festive collar, too, which tinkles as she jumps from Philipa to tear around the room.

Of course, the Christmas tree is a splendid thing with its cluster of wrapped gifts, but it is the cheery overall festive theme which delights.  The twinkling lights and pretty pine garland strung above the kitchen cupboards, the tub of tinsel and baubles and pine cones positioned at the window and the placement of myriad things, which makes this such a special place.

“I bought the laurel pine garland and decorated it,’’ she says.

“I am a country girl, you see and a farmer’s daughter, so we have always been self-sufficient.’’

Now she switches on the piece de resistance, a magnificent piece of decorative China, an animated  snowman, and like magic, tiny Christmas figures begin to revolve around its open core.

The single-fronted glass house exudes Christmas style from the street where the full glory of her decoration is visible because of its window walls. The front approach is stunning, too, with a beautiful Christmas wreath on the door and the decking dotted with tubs of bright red geraniums and lone green miniature pencil pine.

“I like to make my house cheery for people driving by and they see that this is a happy place,’’ she says.

“It makes them smile.’’

“I like the excitement, the anticipation and I love the decoration of the home at Christmas, the whole preparation for celebration.

“But I also love the spirit of Christmas; the spirit of giving, of being able to receive graciously.

“Keeping the spirit of  Christmas alive for children is paramount… the happiness, the excitement, the anticipation, for children to see this is a happy time.’’

Yet, behind all the beauty of her environment and her warm words, lies a Christmas story of absolute tragedy which befell Philipa.

Sitting here amongst the twinkling lights, the draped tinsel, the table decorations and her carefully displayed Christmas treasures of a lifetime, she tells of one Christmas 19 years ago, when she was helping a messy friend to clean her house for Christmas.

It was on December 9 and her three year old daughter, Felicity was with her. One minute she was playing with the white kitten of the house, and the next minute, Philipa saw that her little girl was no longer there. She found her face-down in the backyard swimming pool. Felicity had opened the door behind her mother’s back, following the kitten, who had used the kitty door.  Philipa applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance arrived, but it was too late.

“There I was vacuuming my friend’s house and I guess Felicity found she could reach the door handle,’’ says Philipa.

Christmas to Philipa could so easily be a season of mourning.  Yet she chose not to.

“Life is only what you make it. Even the Christmas Felicity died, I was determined to feel some joy, to capture a little of the spirit of Christmas.’’