and i wonder, still i wonder, who’ll stop the rain

I couldn’t manage to get a shot of the sky outside, through the window,
without capturing the reflection of the light shades inside!
Kind of looks like there’s lanterns in the trees

It is forecast rain for the rest of the week. Which I usually don’t mind. However, today, I had to run some errands and get some groceries. I was wearing shoes like this. The rain was so heavy that it was flooding the sides of the road, and gushing down the carpark (the shopping centre is on a hill). Walking to the shops, my shoes got full of water. So I squish squishy squeek squished all through the shops. On the way back home I got even more wet, struggling to hold a huge umbrella and bags of shopping at the same time.

So I don’t mind rain, but I have to say, it sure can make you feel a bit cold, squishy, and miserable at times. It does make getting home a lot nicer though. Everything seems warmer, dryer and happier.

drinking chocolate - best brand?

Both of these brands of instant drinking chocolate are on special at Coles at the moment, though the ‘La Bella’ brand (~$4) is about $1 or so more expensive than the Cadbury brand (~$3). Earlier this week I bought the La Bella one, but today I saw the Cadbury was on special too so I thought I’d try that as well and compare them.

After trying both brands, the only conclusion I’ve come to is that both are in need of improvement. La Bella is better for its chocolatey-ness, but you have to use a fair bit and it doesn’t have much sweetness, so I ended up adding some sugar (which I find annoying because I don’t want to have to do any work - I just want to put it in the cup and have it taste good - not have to adjust the sweetness myself).

Cadbury’s is Ok - you use less, but it has a sweetness that, if not used wisely, could be sickly. And it’s not very chocolatey compared to La Bella.

My solution so far is to put a spoonful of each brand in a cup. Top with hotwater, stir, and add milk.

My longer term goal is to try the other brands of drinking chocolate and see which is better. I think Vittoria might be better, but at ~$8 a pop it’s pretty pricey. Granted, the container is about twice the size of the brands I’ve bought so far, but I’d hope it was good for that kind of price. Anyone tried it?

it’s a cats life

I’ve noticed recently that when I go shopping I end up spending more time trying to choose flavours of food for my cat than I do for myself. The choice is overwhelming. When I didn’t own a cat I assumed all cat food was stinky stuff with sardines in jelly, or miscellaneous cubes of meat in a gravy-like goo. Now the stuff doesn’t smell too bad at all (as far as cat food goes) and comes in flavours like ‘Seafood and Chicken Mornay’, ‘Fine Salmon Mousse’, ‘Tuna Fillets and Whole Prawns in Seafood Sauce’, ‘Tender Lamb Morsels’, ‘Turkey Morsels in Mousse’, and so on. The other day I even spotted one that had ‘Foigras’ in the title!

At first I thought they were all probably the same kind of thing but just in different forms and textures. But there does seem to be differences in flavour between them all. Some Fritz loves, some he won’t touch.

When we first got Fritz we researched what was the best thing to feed him and everyone recommended food brands that are stocked at pet stores (Hills Science Diet, Advance, Royal Canin, etc.). Although these are supposed to be healthier than supermarket varieties, the price is just ridiculous. And as much as I love my cat, I refuse to spend more on his food than I would on my own.

Ironically, too, I’ve tried feeding him the more expensive food and he doesn’t touch it. His favourite food is the Dine wet food range, especially the mornays. For dry food he loves the Optimum range, but he also surprisingly chows down ‘You’ll Love Coles’ dry cat food (in the orange packet). When he was a kitten we gave him wet & dry food from the Whiskers Kitten range, but he’s gone off Whiskers since. We also occasionally cook him up some fresh meat so he has something warm to eat - we just put it in a bowl and microwave it. Which was a bit of a mistake actually, because now when we microwave anything containing meat he catches a whiff of the aromas and runs over, sits patiently, eyeing you off, waiting to be fed.

Ah, it’s a cats life!

baked bean brunch for the vegetarian soul

It will probably come as a surprise to people out there who have noticed the heavy meat content on this blog, but once upon a time we were actually vegetarian. I was vegetarian for about 6+ years, while the other became vegetarian when he met me - for a couple of years or so. We even tried being vegan for a year. When I was vego I used to eat stuff like this all the time. It’s simple but very yummy, and quite healthy. Here’s what you’ll need to make it, and how. Serves one ravenous person, or two hungry people.

Ingredients

Bread, sliced
Cottage cheese
Lettuce leaves
1 regular can of baked beans
2 field mushrooms, sliced into medium-sized pieces
6 grape tomatoes, sliced in half (you could use cherry tomatoes instead, or even a normal sized tomato diced)
a little olive oil for frying

Method

1. Put some olive oil in a pan, and fry the sliced mushrooms until nicely cooked. You want them heated through to the point they aren’t raw anymore, but not overcooked so they shrink and get really small & dark. You want some juicyness to burst out when you bite into them.
2. Add the tin of beans to the pan and stir.
3. When the beans have heated through, turn down the heat to low, and add the sliced tomatoes & stir through. Stir occasionally and allow tomatoes to heat through & soften a little.
4. Meanwhile, toast some slices of bread. When done, put them on a plate and spread with cottage cheese.
5. Rinse some lettuce leaves, drain, and place on top of the bread.
6. Give the bean mixture a stir, then spoon onto the lettuce.
7. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!

beef, veg and blackbirds baked in a pie

Recipe coming soon.

country fish cakes, chunky chips and garden fresh greens with sour cream and mustard dressing

Sometimes the most basic of foods can be just so good. Pictured is the great dish we made for dinner tonight. All the ingredients came from the pantry and the garden, though its fresh, wholesome flavours were reminiscent of a country bistro. These fish cakes could be made bigger and turned into burger patties, and I think you could probably pour this sour cream and mustard dressing on anything savoury and it would taste good. The greens were a mix of homegrown mizuna and baby green mignonette lettuce leaves, with some thinly sliced baby radishes scattered through. We haven’t tried growing mizuna before but it has bolted over the past few weeks in anticipation of spring, so we currently have a lot of it and decided to give it a try. It tastes fantastic and could be described as having a mild lettuce-y flavour with a similar crunch to rocket but without the bitterness. The chips were cut with a hand-held crinkled potato cutter into about 1cm thick slices then deep-fried in oil at medium high temperature for about 15 minutes. The heat was then turned up to high for about another 5 minutes to give the chips a good browning. They where then tossed in a mixture of salt, chicken stock powder and smoked paprika. Here are the recipes for the fishcakes and the sour cream and mustard dressing…

roast chicken thighs stuffed with parmesan & green pea risotto

We had some leftover risotto from a previous meal and decided to use it up in this dish. We won’t give you the full recipe for risotto here because it’s very long and, when written out, comes to appear a lot more difficult than it actually is. So we recommend either using leftover risotto of your own (any flavour would probably work), or seeking out a general risotto recipe and adding similar flavours to what we used - i.e. primarily chicken stock, Parmesan cheese and a sprinkling of frozen green peas.

For this dish we used about 1 cup of cooked risotto, mixed well with an egg, and about 8 or 9 de-boned chicken thighs with the skin left on. We placed a small amount of risotto in each chicken thigh, rolled them up, and seasoned them with salt and pepper. We then placed them in a greased baking dish and cooked them at 170C for about 45 to 50 minutes. The skin was then crisped up under the grill. We served this with some of the juices from the baking dish and steamed veges.

Enjoy!

chilli corned beef with dumplings

We noticed tonight that over the past 48 hours we’ve barely eaten anything. If you count a burger and fries from Hungry Jacks as food (kindly shouted by Mum on the way to the concert last night) then I guess we did technically eat, but there was no breakfast or lunch yesterday, and none today either - time just disappeared somehow. So, tonight, our grumbling stomachs called on something more substantial to feed on, namely chilli corned beef with dumplings and steamed broccoli. This meal was delicious served with a drizzling of maple syrup and some fantastic honey dijon mustard we picked up on special at the shops the other day.

garlic honey mustard roast pork with three veg

Here is a pork forequarter roast that we put together tonight. We won’t give you the full recipe but here is the general method we followed to make it.

homemade pork sausage recipe

Here is a picture of some pork sausage I made today, drizzled with curry ketchup. We are not blessed with all of the whizz-bang sausage making equipment available, so we made some rather large sausages by wrapping the mixture in cling film and poaching them in water at 80C for one hour. If you have a sausage maker you could certainly pack this in to casings and make some pretty good standard-sized sausages. We sliced the resulting thick sausage into medium-sized discs, fried them either side and served on toasted bread, hamburger-style. If you like the idea of using this recipe as a hamburger filling but don’t want to go to the trouble of forming it in to a sausage shape, you could alternatively just form the raw mix into patties and fry on either side. Enjoy!