Day To Day: Calm Conversations with a Friend

#7 Macadamia Muesli and Rainy Day Tales

• Jacquie Joy • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Ever found yourself captivated by the sound of rain on a tin roof? This cozy chat blends the soothing symphony of rain with the vibrant atmosphere of a bustling neighborhood café. Your friend shares a slice of their life in the Sunshine State, complete with the quirks of Queensland lingo and the comfort of a morning rainstorm that breaks the heat.  She chats about local cafe culture, homemade maple macadamia muesli, a day at the cricket, and the charming antics of cockatoos feasting on the macadamias from a tree. 

Jacquie Joy:

Welcome to the Day-to-Day Podcast, calm Conversations with a Friend, spoken by Jacquie Joy, and you are listening to Episode 7. You decide to check your messages. One new voicemail it's from one of your friends. You decide it's time to sit down, make yourself comfortable and have a listen. Hey, I'm sending you some rain sounds from this morning because I'm hoping it will make you feel a little cooler. It sounds like you may be ready for the heat wave over there. To finish, it will make your daily walks a lot more comfortable.

Jacquie Joy:

I bet we're getting closer to summer now here, so we're seeing a lot more rain again, which is always super welcome to help cool down our often extremely humid days. Lately we've been getting up to 90 plus percent humidity. Now don't get me wrong. I do love a humid day and I love living in the sunshine state and walking around in my togs, but it is actually getting even a little bit too humid for me at the moment and I'm finding myself ducking in to the air conditioning after a few hours outside. I just realised I used the word togs, which I think is a word that is a Queensland made word and it means swimsuit, so I thought I would just translate that for you. Anyway, still talking rain, though, we have been getting morning rain, which I absolutely love. There's nothing more relaxing than laying in bed listening to the rain, and upstairs our verandas have tin roofs, which makes the rain sound even more special, which makes the rain sound even more special. So thank you so much for sending your latest song through to me to have a listen to. I love, love, love and especially love the lyrics, and it was super clever how you weaved your very quick-witted sense of humour in there and it had me laughing out loud throughout the song. You must be so, so happy with how it's all coming together. So well done you. It's all coming together. So well done you. Congratulations again, and I can't wait to hear the next song.

Jacquie Joy:

I've been chatting to Tilly and she knows how much I love going to places and taking audio clips of the ambience of the place. So earlier in the week she went to our local cafe and recorded some audio clips for me. I'll pass a couple on to you in this voice message, because one of the clips even had a how you going mate in there, so you can hear some of the local Aussies in situ at a cafe. I'll dig that up just while I'm chatting to you. Now.

Jacquie Joy:

While I'm doing that, I'll tell you about the cafe. It is about literally houses away, probably about eight or nine houses away, so it is so close. But it has become very popular and if you want to get a table you have to go in there at about 7am or you can just get takeaway. So, funnily enough, if you are lucky enough to get a table, you are often guilted into leaving the table, which happened to Tilly and I a few weeks ago when our elderly neighbour, who is lovely, and her group of friends were just finishing up after church and wanted to have a coffee together, and the four of them stood around us and they said they were happy just to wait there until we were ready to leave. So of course we decided we should probably move on. So it is a very, very popular spot to dine and have coffee, but it is a little difficult to dine in at times.

Jacquie Joy:

Most of the seats at this cafe, and at pretty much every cafe in Brisbane, are outdoor, because that's certainly the style of living we have here, which is a bit like LA. So on to the important things the menu, the menu, and I think if you were here, you would love their homemade maple, macadamia muesli and yogurt. Have you tried macadamia nuts before? They are very Australian and I love them when they're covered in chocolate and I love them when they're covered in chocolate. We have a macadamia tree actually here at the front of our house and the cockatoos visit and love chomping on them. They have very hard outer shells, these macadamia nuts. The only way you can open them is to hit them with a hammer, but I think the cockatoos have very strong beaks and they can crack them with their beaks. When they do have a macadamia nut fest eating fest it's very loud and you often hear lots of rustling and lots of nuts dropping onto the ground. They're quite heavy and they drop onto the tiles here, the pavers, so there's lots of clanking noise as the nuts drop. They're a real treat, macadamia nuts.

Jacquie Joy:

And so, without further ado, I have the cafe audio for you. Enjoy the authentic how you going, mate. You can also hear a dog in this audio. Cafes are a very popular place for dogs here and they often even cater for dogs in their menus. There's always a water bowl welcoming dogs and usually at this particular cafe at any given time there would be five or six dogs there with their owners, we wouldn't take our dog there, however it would be. He's still too young. It would be way too exciting for him and I don't think we'd last long sitting down there before he would create a little havoc, happy havoc, but it would be a little crazy, but it would be a little crazy.

Jacquie Joy:

So I know you love food, and good food at that, and our Thermomix has been turning our house into a little restaurant, so I'll share with you, I think, my favorite recipe of the week this week, which was chosen by our eldest son, cj, and it was chicken tikka masala. A great thing about the recipe was we were able to adapt it to be dairy-free, so we used coconut yogurt and it still tasted absolutely just, flavorsome and fresh. The masala itself contained so many spices that are really incredibly well thought out as far as the amounts of each of them and how they are combined together to produce this really depth of flavour. In the masala they had, of course, turmeric and actually freshly ground cardamom pods, garlic and ginger paste, which we both made ahead of time fresh, and we did add a little bit of chili powder not too much. There was enough flavor in there, as is one thing I've never used or seen used before in a recipe in my extensive cooking experience Not, but still Fenugreek seeds. I'm not even sure if that's how you say it, but that's how it looks like you should say it, and apparently it's a herb similar to clover and it tastes a bit like maple syrup, but it really does look like an incredibly healthy ingredient herb to add into your dishes and apparently it helps with things like diabetes and menstrual cramps. So anyway, that was one of the magical little ingredients in this masala mix. I know you do like spicy food, but we haven't discussed Indian food before. I haven't discussed Indian food before. I'll send through the recipe anyway, because it is interesting reading just to see all of the mixtures of the spices and herbs in there.

Jacquie Joy:

Even if you're not going to plan to cook it, it sounds as though you really enjoyed your Thanksgiving. I so much love the idea of giving thanks and thank you so much for your friendship as well. It means a lot and I can't wait until we can have a few laughs again in person. I'm really looking forward to that. In Australia we obviously don't celebrate Thanksgiving as such, but the Black Friday sales here are now huge and seem to be bigger than our Christmas and Boxing Day sales, and recently they've also started Cyber Monday sales, which seem to be associated with Thanksgiving as well, or Thanksgiving timing. Do you have them there as well? You probably do, and we're a bit behind the times here, perhaps. So did you buy anything on sale around that time?

Jacquie Joy:

I bought a Pro Tools subscription finally Just a basic one, but it can get me started and also I bought an update to complete which I seem to do each year just the Native Instruments package. I expect you may have that as well. I mean, most working musicians do tend to get that collection, don't they? And there's a very cool new synth in there. I think it's called Conflux Conflux, and it just looks like it's got some really modern techie features in it. So it still blows my mind how much synthesizers have changed over the years, and I'm still remembering programming my first one on a very, very old computer. It's something always I find magical about electronic music. Just, there's no limit to these sounds you can make, and they're often gorgeous, with lots of reverb and very lush. So it's like a little toy for me. I can't wait to play with it.

Jacquie Joy:

The football season has finished here in Australia, so now we move into the cricket season, and I know over there you do not play cricket, so it's pretty much like baseball. But there are different forms of cricket and the traditional form of cricket is called test cricket, which takes up to five days to play, so it's even longer than an NFL game. So we went to the cricket on the weekend and the trouble with the cricket is, if there's a couple of drops of rain, immediately the covers come out. And well, actually, the covers coming out is quite entertaining and it's a bit like theatre in itself, because it is all so precise and coordinated getting the tarpaulin I suppose it's called over the pitch itself and then a wider section of the pitch. People come and roll the grass field as well, and so, look, that is entertaining, and that is mostly what we saw on Saturday when we attended for the day. Play was actually shut down after about an hour and a half and in, in fact, the suburbs around the Gabba, which is where the cricket test was being played, suffered flooding. It was a very large storm event. However, we were lucky to stay undercover. Usually, over 100 overs of cricket are played in a day and we watched 13 overs and spent the rest of the day watching the groundskeepers trying to keep the field as dry as possible and just celebrating with people around us and enjoying some time with the family. There were 10 of us there, it was a super relaxed atmosphere and there were some many generous people there who were offering to buy people drinks and to share food, and so it turned out to be a most wonderful day, even though we didn't actually watch much of the cricket.

Jacquie Joy:

Now we finally got our Wi-Fi back. Yay, we've finally invested in a portable modem, so next time, you know, we get a storm and the modem succumbs to a power surge, we will be ready. Not having Wi-Fi, though, always makes you realise how much we use it now in our everyday lives, even for just organising things and also for basic communication. This was a time where I was sharing a lot of photos and media with friends because, as you know, cj had finished school, or has finished school, and was heading off to schoolies. So I was missing that communication more than usual. I'll have to tell you a bit more about what schoolies is when I chat next, because I don't think you have it there in the US. Anyway, I am now back online and have a backup plan for next time. But apart from the lack of communication, I did enjoy the peace of no Wi-Fi.

Jacquie Joy:

And, of course, when there's no Wi-Fi and it was raining, we had to look for some alternate family entertainment. So the old board games came out. I don't know if you have still got any board games in your cupboard, but we had Risk and also Battleships. I love a good game of battleships, but risk tends to bring out a real competitive nature in me, so that made for lots of laughs. It's such a classic game alongside Monopoly, so I'm sure you're probably familiar with it. Anyway, that's probably enough for now. Congratulations again on your latest song. Best of luck getting through all of your coursework this week. I know you have a lot on your plate. I'll speak to you again soon and hope you have a really fun evening. Bye for now.