Do you like pina coladas?

I do. Especially when they are made with beautiful sweet pineapples, coconut sugar and loads of fresh mint…and on holiday…

Every year towards the end of winter, we flee Orange a week or so and head north to one of my favourite places in the world, Noosa. We returned a fortnight ago and it’s taken that long for me to put this post together because since coming home Tim, Alice, Tom and I have all been suffering a touch of ‘the Noosa Blues’.

I love where we live but ten days of warm weather with nothing to do but play, read and eat was heaven and hard to give up.

Today I posted a few recipes (including all the dishes photographed here) from this break over on the Olive & Clover blog, which is run by my friend and style guru Prue Hufton. I’d asked Prue to pick out a couple of summery pieces for me to buy from her online shop and wore all of them constantly while away – her stuff is gorgeous and I highly recommend a little browse!

The past few months have seen us hosting quite a few events at the Farm Kitchen and me writing lots of new recipes for my book so it was really nice to be able to shop at the markets and cook very simple food with and for for our family and friends, including the beautiful Elise, pictured above and  the Nuthall family from Dutton Park Ducks.

One of the best parts of our holiday was a trip to the weekly Noosa Farmers Market. We rode our bikes there, shopped, sat and had coffee and bought the kids treats – just like normal people! It was so nice to be at a farmers market and not be working. And particularly a market like this one with such a different selection of produce to the ones we are used to. Noosa market is bursting with tropical fruits and seems to have a really strong health focus with loads of stalls selling sprouted, cultured, ‘living’ and ‘whole’ foods.

In between the inevitable fish and chip suppers, we bought lamb, yogurt and vegetables from the market for a big easy lunch of wraps stuffed with slow cooked lamb, tzatziki and tomatoes, picked up a bunch of pineapples and discovered the joys of coconut sugar which found their way into pina coladas pictured above. For the kids, and because I have an unchecked baking addiction, I also made  a few easy chocolate loaves.

I had promised Prue that we we’d take a photo of all of us in our Olive & Clover garb, so put Tim behind the camera for a moment and the results are a series of ridiculous pictures which I love.