Bon voyage! Next stop? The unblogged, unplugged life!

I recently planted about 20 pumpkins in the front yard in an attempt to grow a pumpkin jungle to cover the weeds. The bugs have chomped most of them though, leaving blank holes in the mulch like that above. There are probably about 6 left! Oh well, someone got fed!

This afternoon we made a thai chicken curry for dinner, with potato, zucchini, diced fresh tomatoes, freshly picked silverbeet and spring onions, some homegrown kaffir lime leaves, and homegrown loquats! Being from our own garden, the latter 4 ingredients were completely organic, which makes me chuckle — I know someone who sprays their silverbeet with confidor to keep off bugs, and the leaves still have bite holes. Mine hasn’t been sprayed with anything, and only one leaf had bug chews! We hope to make many more thai curries over summer, and by then we’ll hopefully be able to recreate tonight’s meal using our own zucchinis.

Aren’t they beautiful! These are off the smaller, second loquat tree we have here. It seems to be a different variety, because the fruit is bigger, a darker orange, and has a longer point on the end. Our trees are absolutely loaded this season — we plan to pick them tomorrow, and make loquat jelly. Stay tuned for recipe & photos

Mmm.. baby silverbeet… so tender.

Great bunch of spring onions. We bought a couple of huge bunches of spring onions from the chuck out stand at Coles for about 99c. We brought them home and planted them in a row in the vege patch, and gave them a good feed and drink. They were very wilted and sorry looking. A bit of liquid chook poo fixed that! They’ve bunched up nicely.

Recipe

Ingredients

1/2 jar masaman curry paste (approx 6 heaped table spoons)
a few tablespoons oil
2 large potatoes, cubed
3 spring onions, roughly chopped
10 young silverbeet leaves, roughly chopped
6 loquats, peeled and stoned & sliced into quarters
1 tomato, diced
1 small/medium zucchini, cubed
400ml water
1/4 cup fish sauce
1/4 cup sugar
420ml can coconut milk
6 fresh kaffir lime leaves
600g chicken thigh meat, cubed

Method

1. In a large pan, heat the oil. Add the curry paste & potatoes and fry for about 5 minutes, stirring often so the potatoes don’t stick.
2. Add the kaffir lime leaves, cubed chicken, the white portion of the spring onions, and the water, fish sauce and sugar. Mix well and leave to simmer with the lid on for about 30 minutes.
3. Remove the lid, and add coconut milk, loquats, zucchini, tomato, and the green portion of spring onions, and silverbeet, and stir in well.
4. Simmer for an additional 10 minutes.
5. Taste it and adjust seasoning if necessary by adding more fish sauce.
6. Serve with steamed white rice and lots of the curry sauce.
7. Enjoy!

Little hen is set to be reincarnated as a pumpkin.

We suspect a dog got into our yard sometime on Friday while we were both at work, and knocked off two of our chooks. One was half buried near the apricot tree. The other is missing in action — yet to find a body – alive or dead – after searching the backyard. The damn dog knocked off the two healthiest chooks – the big chook, and the littlest chook that had recovered so well.

The middle chook – Lavender – is still kicking. Don’t know how she managed to escape the dog but she’s a champ. A very lonely champ, but we’re trying to go out often to say hello.

A bit battered, but still going strong. Lavender enjoys some afternoon sun.

We plan to get a better system going. Although we’d like them to have free range of the entire block, it’s just not safe enough when we aren’t home. We’re going to have to knock together some kind of large chook tractor that they can live in, which we can move around the backyard. A pity, but it’s our safest bet, and a lot easier than constructing a dog & fox proof coop (which we’ll have to dismantle when we move anyway).

So for now poor little Lavender is a bit lonely, but hopefully I’ll be able to con my Dad into going for a trip to the tip & helping me to weld something together, and after that we’ll start looking for some chooks.

I’m keen to get some Australorps this time because we saw some recently and they were so cute and had a great temperament, but we’ll see what finances permit. Maybe I’ll ask Mum for an early Xmas present

R.I.P. chooks, we miss you!

What a historical moment not only for the US, but the world.

Congrats America! and thankyou!!

lights noise city fun
hot woks fry tasty noodles
worries disappear

the starless highway
bus meanders homeward bound
happily in love

my silent stomach
the clock ticks out the wrong time
discomfort moves me

1pm

belly full of food
mind at ease – body at rest
time for spring sunshine

6pm

stillness overcomes
sleepy river flat and calm
work waits till tuesday

For my 2nd attempt at knitting, this worked out really well! I finally got some knitting needles from the op shop the other day, and some yarn. I googled ‘how to knit’, and used some simple instructions to learn the basic technique (i.e. my 1st serious attempt at knitting). My Mum gave me a heap of yarn and some needles the other day, including this multicoloured yarn. I thought it looked great when I started to knit with it, so decided to make something with it. Something I’d been wanting for a while was a thick headband to slip over my head and keep my hair out of my face. This does an awesome job.

I’m not sure the type or grade of yarn (label was missing), but it was a fairly small ball of wool and multicoloured. I used 3mm needles for this, which gave it a small, tight weave. I started by casting on a row of 20, but then it gradually blew out to 30 because I accidently picked up some stitches over time. When I figured out what had happened (probably about 20 rows in), I was careful to stay on 30 for the rest of the time. Then I realised that I’d run into a problem when it came to attaching the two ends together, being two different widths. So toward the end, to taper it back down to 20, I started picking up 2 loops here and there for a few consecutive rows until I got to 20, and then did approx 20 rows of 20. I then used a sewing needle and a length of same-coloured yarn to connect the loops attached to the knitting needle to the loops on the other end. Anyway, hard to explain, but the result is something shaped vaguely like this:

Imagine the narrowest ends connected together so it’s a circle. I just kept knitting until the length of what I had fit around my head. It worked out well in the end. The bit that sits under my hair is less wide (20), and the bit over the top of my head is the widest part (30). I did drop a few stitches here and there, and will have to get a crochet hook and learn how to pick them up again in future projects. For this project I just used some yarn & a thick sewing needle and stitched over any holy bits. Most of those errors are under my head though as I made most of the mistakes early on. Adds character I figure

The result is surprisingly stretchy and fits over my head perfectly.

Sorry for my poor attempt at knitting lingo! Pretty chuffed that it actually worked though and I made something really practical from a small ball of yarn in around 2 days (max 6 hours an evening in knitting, and a little bit in the morning and afternoon if I had time). Worth a go if you’re a fellow beginner knitter and want an easy project to start off with.

This weekend was the last weekend of October, and as such we thought we should fit in a late Oktoberfest-style feast over the weekend. We must have been busy mid September, because we completely forgot about it!

This weekend definitely made up for things! Friday & Saturday saw us devour a couple of kranskis & viennas each along with some bread rolls, sauerkraut, mustard & ketchup. Saturday night I knocked back a lovely homebrewed Candi Lager too, 2007 vintage. Very very good inbetween mouthfuls of kranski & kraut.

Today Canaan marinated a turkey hindquarter in homebrew, honey, wholegrain mustard, salt, pepper, dried thyme, dried sage, and fresh garlic. Some potatoes were thrown in a baking dish and cooked until the skins were nice and brown. He also cooked up some sauerkraut with onions, diced ham, garlic, chicken stock, white pepper and white sugar. The sausage component was a couple of sliced cheese kranskis lightly fried, and a couple of sliced viennas (we’d been eating them for a couple of days now so didn’t have too many left!). Salad-wise he made a delicious apple & cucumber salad – chunky diced apple, chunky diced cucumber, salt & pepper, and a yoghurt & mayonnaise mix (50/50).  Everything was served with a big green salad each, consisting of cos lettuce, roma tomatoes & diced carrot. Some sliced bread and a glass or two of Bundaberg ginger beer, and we were all very content!

I’m not quite German-ed out yet — I’m looking forward to some tasty turkey & kraut leftovers tomorrow for lunch I think I’ve eaten my fill of cheese kranskis though for a while — time for some leaner meaty options!

Our local op shop rocks – amazing what you can get for practically nothing. They probably don’t even know how valuable EG magazines are, information wise. When the lady went to add everything up, she counted the magazines as 30c each!!