What I ate while moving house

It wasn't all just takeaway, thank goodness.

Hello! I’m Celine and I write about books, cooking, gardening and surviving life in the city, when you have a wild heart. Subscribe for free posts like this one, or join the community for other exclusive writing. Either way, thanks for your support!

I moved house last week, from a place that I’ve been living in for almost five years. In a week, around work, which I absolutely do not recommended attempting yourself.

It’s an absolute endeavour to leave a place you’ve resided in for such a stretch of time (it may not seem like a lot to some, but this is the longest I have lived in one place as an adult… and I am 35. The feet! They itch!). Especially during the Covid Years® where it just became all too easy to accumulate piles and piles of crap, which is really fun to move about when you have been living in a 100 year old house and happen to be severely allergic to dustmites. Yay (I thought about including a dustmite GIF here, then realised no, that’s incorrect behaviour, saving us both the misery).

I really tried to find a balance between cooking easy meals (mostly to empty out the fridge as much as possible) and having a ‘final meal’ at our favourite restaurants around our ‘hood. Okay, we’re moving like ten minutes down the road, but still – they won’t be easily accessible on foot.

Here’s a bit of a diary (because we like our diaries) on what my partner and I ate during this busy and stressful time. Spoiler: we started with good intentions, before things deteriorated.

Delicious cheesy pizza and some mulled wine. Yummo.

The week before the move

This was the week where we were still maybe having an okay time – beginning to plan and pack, not quite in the muck of it yet.

I had planned to pack up the kitchen last, so I took advantage of having all my utensils available to make a few easy dishes.

First up, I tried Home Food’s tofu rice bowl, doubling the amount so we had about six servings to see us through the week. This was eaten with avocado and fried egg (although I am somehow finally successfully growing coriander, I always forget this, as I’m used to its rapid and dramatic death in my garden. So, I don’t add it to dishes it would complement really well because in my mind, it doesn’t exist) in front of the telly while it was still set up, mindlessly watching Grey’s Anatomy (which I’ve somehow never watched before – I’m on season two and have no plans to see it through to season 20).

A friend of mine came over to help pack, and to say thanks, I roasted a chook. We don’t tend to eat a lot of meat, but I find roast chicken to be super versatile.

The rest of the meat was used for wraps at work and then cooked with a quick butter chicken blend from Melbourne spice brand Gewürzhaus, which I have recently purchased. Safe to say it will now become a staple of my pantry. The chicken bones and leftovers can be incorporated into a delicious stock, but I already had frozen stock lying around and by the time we’d got through these meals, couldn’t contemplate making a soup. I plan to use the stock to make a potato and leek soup (or maybe pumpkin?). It’s one of my favourites, and we’re somehow almost at July without me having made it yet. But, you know. Many other things have been happening.

To see out our time in this area, we ordered from the local burger place, which can either hit or completely miss, depending on the night and what you get. I got the fish burger, which usually slaps and thankfully, they delivered on it this time round.

I was hoping to get to my wine bar for one last oyster martini, but alas. Time and budget constraints said otherwise. Not really the season for it, anyway.

The weekend of the move

This was always not going to be a fun time, so no cooking was happening.

The night before moving day was midwinter, so we toddled down to our favourite local trattoria for pizza and mulled wine. I was desperate for vegetables by this point, so we ordered a romaine lettuce salad as well. It was drenched in dressing and covered in parmesan, so the nutritional value was quite low, I imagine. Yet, it was tasty and I was just so happy to be eating lettuce.

Over the weekend, I essentially turned into a carb. I got a salmon bagel from my favourite bagel place for brekky, then a veg pastry from my favourite bakery for lunch. Dinner was pizza from our new local pizza and burger shop – it’s the kind of dirty and easy pizza that you crave after say, a big night out on le town, and really hit the spot after a day where I think I drank at least three Red Bulls, just to get by.

The Sunday night we collapsed, exhausted, with Thai from a restaurant in our new neighbourhood. We have eaten here many times before and used to like it, but then they changed up the menu, or got a new chef or something, and it just isn’t as good. RIP yummy Thai food. Especially the satay peanut sauce, and we live in an area with really superior sauce offerings, so if you wanna be a player, you gotta lift your game.

Rituals for a new home

As routinely stated, I love a good ritual. For a new place, I like to try out the local cafes and restaurants within walking distance. Here we have the aforementioned pizza and burger place (must sample the burgers now) and an establishment which is a cafe by day and a bar by night. Intriguing.

I also like to smudge a new house; what can I say, I’m basically a wannabe herbalist. It’s nice to walk around a fresh abode with – can’t believe I’m about to write this – intention, and ask politely if you can have a nice time while living there. I haven’t quite done this yet, as I’d like to get everything unpacked first, mostly for access purposes… but my sage is ready and waiting. Somewhere.

Moving is obviously stressful and it’s nice to conduct a ceremony that essentially smokes some of these anxieties away. It’s a practise I like to engage in for a new year or season; if I remember to do it, that is.

Audiobooks to help with the move

Of course, while packing and unpacking I needed a distraction to keep the boredom at bay. So, I cycled through a series of audiobooks.

I had my monthly book club the week before the move and decided to listen to the book, rather than read it, due to time constraints (and still managed to not finish it in time, ha). It’s Long Island by Colm Tóibín, the follow-up to Brooklyn. I’ve neither read nor watched the film of the former, but Long Island worked as a standalone novel. It’s a very quiet book; you could say not much happened, but I enjoyed being with the characters for this wrinkle of time in their lives.

I’ve never read Eat, Pray, Love and for some reason, decided I wanted to listen to it while I packed. Look, I know this is a divisive book generally and it hasn’t really aged well, but I thought it was fine. Just fine. It fit the criteria of something mindless and not challenging, that I could listen to while I packed box after box of my worldly possessions.

I also listened to Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and as I said in last week’s newsletter, I really do prefer her older work to whatever confusing thing she is doing now. Can see how this particular book was considered groundbreaking for the time and it comes across as a totally honest book about how hard it is to be a mother, then and now (as I’m skeptical regarding how much has changed for women and people who give birth, despite its publication of 23 years ago).

As I unpack and get my life sorted, I’m listening to Sarah Wilson’s This One Wild and Precious Life – a reread, but one I felt called back to. I’m diving back into physical books too, to read before bed. My last Friday Night Thriller® was Robyn Harding’s The Drowning Woman and I’m currently embedded in Joyce Carol Oats’ newest Butcher. They’re both perfect winter reads. And still on the EmHen train, with Happy Place next on the list.

Wrapping things up

It’s an interesting time, moving house – the end of one chapter sure, but the start of another, hopefully better one.

Even if you’re not leaving the city you live in, it can be an emotionally wrought process. You’re not just wrapping up your possessions; you’re packing up memories too. The good and the bad.

Allow me to momentarily gush, as there are a few people who read this newsletter who helped in some way – with packing, offers to help move things, providing boxes, listening to me rant or rave in person or over the phone, and looking after our dog. Even simply checking in to see how things were going, or being understanding with last minute changes in plan. It’s all very much appreciated.

Anyway. Thanks for reading to the end of this slightly naval-gazingish post. And apologies for last week’s missive if you happened to read it in your inbox – I somehow managed to schedule it out without giving it a reread and edit, because my brain is broken, so it had typos galore. This is why it’s safest to open any newsletters in browser!

I’m off to do more unpacking, because it apparently never ends. Catch you next week. Haven’t quite got to the ‘first meal in the new home’ phase of things, as the kitchen is a bombsite, but I know exactly what I’m going to cook and would like to share the recipe with you, too.

‘Til then, stay well and well-fed.

-Celine

PS. Like this? Read other posts like this:

Writing & cooking when things are hectic

A missive from the mountains

A Moroccan meal kit review

Some links in this missive will take you to YourBookstore.io. This very handy website allows you to shop and support independent Australian bookstores. Give your local some love, or request a copy from your nearest library.