Nissen - A home companion: my year of living like my grandmother

A HOME COMPANION

Other books by Wendyl Nissen
Bitch and Famous
Domestic Goddess on a Budget

A
HOME
COMPANION

My year of living like my grandmother

Wendyl Nissen

First published in 2010

Copyright Wendyl Nissen 2010
www.wendylsgreengoddess.co.nz

Some of the material in this book has been published before in columns in the Herald on Sunday, New Zealand Womans Weekly and NZ Gardener.
The publisher would like to thank them for their assistance.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Nissen, Wendyl.
A home companion / Wendyl Nissen.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-877505-05-8
1. Nissen, Wendyl. 2. Home economics. 3. Self-reliant living
New Zealand. 4. Sustainable livingNew Zealand. I. Title.640dc 22

Set in 11pt Mrs Eaves by Katy Yiakmis
Text design and illustrations by Katy Yiakmis

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book is FSC certified.
FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the worlds forests.

This book is dedicated to my three nanas:
Olive Peterson
Eileen Letica
Marguerite Nissen

CONTENTS

I clip our granddaughter Lila into her car seat and give her a kiss. I lean into the car and kiss my 12-year-old daughter Pearl and husband Paul before waving them off. As I turn to walk back to my caravan I feel the most overwhelming sense of freedom. Just me. Alone. For three days. Bliss.

I hastily tidy up after a weekend of sun and sand, endless reading of books to Lila, helping Pearl sort everything out for school camp the following week, glasses of wine shared with Paul as we watch the sun go down, exhausted as our middle-aged bodies adjust to running around after a toddler. I pull out the old Formica table, place my old laptop on it, reach for my favourite pillow to put behind my back and fire up the computer.

As I wait for it to clunk into life I look out at my view. Crystal blue water at high tide laps just metres away, a taupe coloured sandbank breaks the horizon and then there is more blue behind it. Crisp lines of surf, rolling in endlessly. Local kids play in the water practising swear words on each other, a German tourist fishes hopefully and my dog Shirl is under the table, head resting on my feet as she lets out a contented sigh.

I am about to start the fourth book I have written at this table, in this caravan, looking at this view and a sense of complete calm comes over me.

What I write will be part journal, part instruction manual for any woman who finds herself yearning to get her hands covered in soil, rid her house of toxic chemicals, nurture her family and become a green goddess. Even if its just at the weekends.

What qualifies me to write this book is that in the past six years I have made the transition from a high-flying corporate animal to a green goddess nana. Some of you may have read my book Bitch and Famous which details the years I spent as a hard-bitten journalist then editor of several womens magazines. I was a take-no-prisoners sort of girl and like many in my generation was determined to craft a successful career no matter how many hours I had to work and how many enemies I had to make.

Then I just stopped. I reassessed the things that were important in my life and it came down to a select group of people my family. You can have all the money in the world, all the success you want, all the fame and all the friends but without a happy family I believe you are deprived of one of the most basic joys in life.

So I came home to work and discovered the ancient art of nurturing and somewhere along the way harnessed a goddess or two I found lurking within. I wrote the book Domestic Goddess on a Budget as a result of five years in my home exploring safer, less toxic ways of living. In it I shared over 100 natural recipes for beauty and cleaning that I had found by wading through old recipe books that Id found in op shops, looking for old-fashioned alternatives. It sold well and developed a large following, thousands of whom I email with a newsletter every Thursday afternoon. It seemed natural to follow up that book with a home journal. It started off as how I became a mad hippy in one far out year and finished up as simply A Home Companion.

In it, you will find some old favourite recipes and a lot of new ones. You will also find a month by month seasonal analysis of the discoveries I have made throughout the year. In a way the research process has been very similar to DomesticGoddess on a Budget where I sat down and trawled old books to find recipes, tested them out, adjusted them and then shared. But my research for this book has also involved trawling through the 168 columns and the 52 email newsletters I write in a year. I also dug out many books and read them again, pulling out the salient points I had taken from them. Then I needed to grab my recipe books and my notebook where I write down every precious new recipe as I test it from making perfume to baby wipes and blueing powder to make those sheets whiter than white!

Every recipe in this book has been tested by me and will work, I guarantee it (as long as you follow my directions). Too often the recipes you can find on the internet or in the old and new books just dont work and need substantial adjustment. It may be that the ingredients Nana used are different now, the recipe is American where raw products are different or as I think happens a lot with recipes someone just wrote one up and never actually tested it. Testing is half the fun for me and few visitors to my house get away without clutching a pot of something I need them to use for a week and then report back to me on.

I want this book to change the way people think about the world we live in, while still being reasonably entertaining! We need to remember that before the early 1900s we all ate organic food. The chemicals we live with every day in our food, our cleaning products, our beauty products and our work environments have only been around for about 90 years. And as a result we are suffering the consequences with a global water shortage, toxic waste dumps, global warming and shocking rises in the rates of asthma, diabetes, obesity and cancer.