Om nom nom nom nom

This week has been a bit of a slow one - after the walk on Monday, we have been very lazy, just pottering round the house (more job applications!) and the greenhouse.

I did have an interview with a temp agency on Thursday - I'm really not going to hold my breath that they will find me work, but at least I've managed to get out there and brush up on my interview skills.

We also had our first house inspection today - very easy, given that we don't have that much yet to clean up!

And I've been playing with my netbook - it is a Linux based system, and I'm still not very confident about using it. However, I had a few major browser crashes earlier in the week where the whole browser froze on me. The only way of getting rid of it was restarting. So, after doing this a few times, I got fed up with the fact that I couldn't just go into a Task Manager and End Process, the way you can in Windows. A quick Google later, and, actually, yes you can! It's almost as easy - you need to open up a terminal, but then it is a couple of quick commands and you can kill any process :-D So, I'm learning slowly but surely. It's not as easy as I'd hoped it would be, but I now have some very helpful websites to look at (thanks, Ben!) and am getting used to shifting back into a way of thinking which is very similar to MS-DOS.

Our cake-man wasn't at the market this week, so I decided to make cookies so that we could have an afternoon snack:


However, I realised after I had done this that the cookies took up the eggs that I had bene intending to use to make an omlette for tonight's supper. I did have a couple of quick and easy options (fishcakes, doing another stir fry), but I fancied trying something different...

The breadmaker (which has been doing stirling work making a loaf every couple of days - and the bread is *so* much better than the shop bought stuff!) also has a pizza dough setting... We haven't had pizza since before we left the UK...

So I mixed the ingredients as per the bread recipe, chucked it all in, and got myself a nice lump of dough after an hour and a half.

Then, with the addition of a bit of tomato paste, cheese, onions, pepper and kumera (NZ sweet potato), and rolling the crust around some cheesy garlic butter (well, if I wasn't going to have any garlic bread to eat with it, this is the next best thing!), I got this:


and after twenty minutes or so in the oven, it looked like this:


and it didn't take very long to turn it into two empty plates!

Very yummy, and I'll definitely be doing that one again! Even better, the bread machine has a "delay" setting, so I can even mix the ingredients before going to work, and have the dough ready for me to turn into pizza when I get in :-D

Christmas social life!

We've had a very busy few days - unusually for us!

Christmas Day dawned bright and sunny; we started the day with a Skype to my family (I love this technology!), and, after a leisurely morning of opening presents and having our lunch, we took advantage of the free rail services that we had in the Valley.

First was a trip down to Petone and the beach.



The beach was really quiet - just a couple of dog walkers and a few paddlers around:


The water wasn't too cold, either:




We took a trip along the pier - it's a lot barer than a UK seaside pier, and is mainly used for fishing off, and for the ferry across to central Wellington and the island in the bay.




Then, after a trip along Jackson Street so that John could get some interesting architecture pics, we headed up the train line to Upper Hutt, and had a wander round up there. It was absolutely deserted! The main high street was like a ghost town, and we saw very few cars on the roads. Whilst I know it was Christmas Day, it felt a lot emptier than UK Christmases, I think because with the dark winter, all the houses have lights on, so you can see that there are still people around. With the bright sun and the warmth, you had no indication of whether there was anyone in the houses at all.

The park was deserted...


We had been aiming for a nice regional park, however, between us and it, there was a dirty great highway and a water filled ditch, so we headed back to the station.


We did go and have a look at the other side of the train tracks, and it was a bit of a shame, because if we'd gone that way first off, there did seem to be a regional park on that side, too, but we didn't have time to explore that way before the train left.

We then headed back home for Christmas dinner. Whilst it was not quite the feast that we'd have had in the UK, it was still very nice (though I don't think I will buy the turkey again - something that is only 75% turkey doesn't really taste the same for some reason!). We did have a slew of roast veg, plus stuffing (rosemary, lemon and onion, as I was using up bits from the fridge, and whilst there is tons of rosemary in the garden, there isn't any sage!) And I did find some Christmas crackers, too...



Our Pohutakawa in the front garden has flowered just in time for Christmas:


and I am gloating over the two new additions to my plant family (thank you very much, John!):
an olive tree with little baby olives already growing:

and a feijoa tree

We'd never even heard of these before we saw them in the garden centre, but they apparently grow very well in NZ (our South African neighbours were telling us that their neighbour on the other side has a tree which is covered in them, and has a real autumnal glut), so I am really looking forward to trying these (the top appears to have a couple of flower buds, so it may flower this year...)

Boxing Day was a normal heading out to the market day (though there were depleted stalls - I was very surprised that it was open at all, to be honest), and a food shop, then we headed into Wellington itself (on the bus unfortunately, as there was line work on the tracks, and will be right up until the first week of January), in order to meet a friend of one of my university flat mates. It was a really interesting afternoon - we had a lot in common, and ended up nattering whilst sat above the sea wall, watching the children (young and old) play in the sea (I am really looking forward to getting my swimming costume back from the shippers!)

When we got back, I got to play with the new toy that my parents gave us - I am now the proud owner of a bread maker! I'd bought the ingredients during the food shop, and this was the result:

I'd slightly overdone the improver, so it tastes a bit citrussy, but absolutely fine when toasted with cheese on top! I'll be making the next one tomorrow :-)

Sunday, we were invited over to a friend's house; this is the lady who has been very generous and lent us a whole load of kitchen crockery, a duvet and a mattress whilst we are waiting for our own stuff to arrive. We had a brilliant day - playing games, both board and computer, and watching comedy DVDs. They rent the most gorgeous house up on the hills, overlooking the bay. It has fantastic views (when the cloud cover isn't down!) and, if it wasn't for the 10 mins or so of driving up hairpin bends to get there (didn't do my travel sickness any good!), it would be amazing!

Today has been incredibly lazy; we didn't get to bed till 1 on Sunday night, and were up reasonably early on the Monday morning (I don't like sleeping late when I'm in someone else's house), so we had a definite lie in this morning (well - we didn't set the alarm. We were both still awake by 9, and it was only by the dint of enormous effort that I stayed in bed until 9.40!) And it's back to filling out job application forms (I have to keep reminding myself that no-one is working at the moment, so I shouldn't be surprised that I'm not hearing anything back!!)

5 Minute Chocolate Cake

This one isn't my recipe; I got sent it on an email on Friday. I had to try it out over the weekend - I'm not a big microwave cooker, using it mainly for reheating or defrosting, so I was a little sceptical on how this would work...

5 MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE
4 tablespoons self raising flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
Chocolate syrup (optional)
A small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug (MicroSafe) (I used my large Starbucks mug, and the mixture rose about an inch above the edge)

Add dry ingredients to a bowl, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.. Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again.

Pour a little chocolate syrup into the bottom of the mug; just enough to coat the bottom. Pour the cake mixture in.

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts (My microwave is 800 watts, and 3 1/2 mins was enough to cook it through). The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed! Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired. (though I ate it directly from the mug with a fork whilst it was still steaming hot :-) )

EAT! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous).


This is an amazing recipe - incredibly easy, and makes a very good sponge. Without the chocolate chips and the syrup, it might be a bit dry, though...

Music and Ice-Cream

We had a fantastic concert last night with the Longwell Green Orchestra - we were playing as the opening event in a music festival organised by one of our members. The venue was a glorious church, which had the best accoustics of any place I've played in. We had quite a 'serious' classical first half, with pieces like Borodin's Polovtsian Dances (with a lovely oboe solo in the intro and first piece played by yours truely), Bizet's L'Arlesienne, the overture to Peter Schmoll... These pieces all had Grand Pauses (i.e. where the whole orchestra shuts up for a few beats), and the echoes of the notes we had been playing soared up to the rafters. I discovered that it is very difficult to play the oboe and grin at the same time! The second half of the concert was much lighter (including medleys from Duke Ellington and Leroy Anderson; the theme from Jurassic Park), and ended with the Can-Can - such a fun piece to play, particularly when you don't announce what it is (it was our encore piece, so we didn't have it in the programme), and you can hear the audience catching on during the introductory ten bars or so... All in all, a wonderful evening, and I really hope that we get to go back and play in that venue again.

My other success has been in making icecream - I always thought that an ice-cream maker was fairly mandatory, but a couple of recipes have convinced me otherwise. I played around with a very basic banana one from the BBC Good Food website, and came up with this:

Ingredients:
For every banana used (I used 3)
100ml whipping cream
100ml double cream
30g dark chocolate, broken into chips
30g sugar
Splash of lemon juice (about 5ml but I didn't measure)
Splash of Irish cream / Baileys (optional!) (about 10ml but I didn't measure)

Method:
Mash up the bananas, add lemon juice.
Pour on the creams
Mix well (I used my blender)
Add the chocolate, sugar and Irish cream
Mix again
Taste - add more lemon / Irish cream if needed.

Pour into a tub; 3 bananas three quarters filled a 2 litre icecream tub.

Put in freezer - every hour or so stir to break up the ice crystals.

It doesn't come out soft scoop (there was a lot of hacking!), but it is very nice :-) As the weather gets warmer, I suspect that I will be making more...