Around Our House Lately

Things have been busy. I celebrated my 30th Birthday last Thursday (Yay!!!). I was truly not worried over the whole 'turning 30' thing. I think I've always felt older than my years anyway, so 30 isn't a big deal. My new friends made it a big deal though by organising a morning tea and cake at the park! It was such a lovely surprise! There were soooo many kids but they all get on so well it didn't seem like that many at all. We played Duck Duck Goose, a wonderful musician friend taught us a new song, we had Chocolate Cake decorated with strawberries, there was so much laughter and fun! I didn't take my camera (bummer!) but a dear friend did and put some pics on her blog!

Now, to the super exciting bit!!!! I get to introduce another addition to the family, along the same lines as Kenny but even more exciting, if that is indeed possible! Introducing .... Freida!

Freida is a Pfaff Expression 2.0 and she is just lovely. It was a surprise, but not a complete surprise if you know what I mean. I had suggested a sewing machine as a dream present a while ago but forgotten about it. Then a little while ago when we were having a weekend in Brisbane, Matt said he needed to go shopping for my present, but he came home empty handed. I said "Oh well, if you're getting me a sewing machine the shop in town sells them and you get free lessons". Anyway, about a week later he made a massive production of walking through the house with a massive box wrapped in a blanket and 'hid' it in the cupboard. Like I wasn't going to have just a little peek. And then some googling. And then some more staring at the box and wondering how I could re-wrap it so he didn't know I'd peeked. Then Elliot let the cat out of the bag, in that 3 year old way, that they couldn't find a sewing machine at the shops.

I put Freida straight to work whipping up a pair of pants for Elliot. Unfortunately I let the 3 year old loose in the fabric shop and he chose a lovely aqua colour. It wouldn't have been my choice, but anyway, they're his pants, he's the one that's got to wear them! I haven't sewn since high school Home Ec, where it's fair to say I was terrible. I was so nervous, but I'm really pleased with how they've turned out (besides the colour obviously!) They took a full afternoon, and that includes a good 30 minutes of Matt and I trying to figure out how to thread the machine, and then realising about a million times that we'd gotten in wrong and re-doing it.

Anyway, enough typing. Here are some pics from my birthday celebrations! They're sure to continue next weekend when my parent's, brother and Archie's Godmother and her sister come up for Archie's baptism! Yay for extended birthday celebrations!

Party hats all round!

Hip Hip Hooray!!!

 Touched the bottom, better kiss a boy ...

or two!!!

 Why eat chocolate cake when there's garlic bread?

Elliot was quiet in his room for ages and we found him playing a board game with two of his Postman Pat toys. He was having a turn for each of them as well as rockin it out in his lairy pants!

A wonderful day full of family, friends and cake!

Making Do With What You've Got

Elliot has been really interested in playing shops lately. We take turns going shopping in the play room buying books and puzzles and train engines. The boys have a little cash register that Archie received for his first birthday that came with a few coins, so Elliot 'beeps' the purchases past that and then packs the shopping in the bag for me to take on my merry way. Or, as he once said "No Mummy, you pack your own bags at this shop!". Righto then!

Making money while munching on a sourdough pancake, yum!

I've been meaning to get some proper play money for him to use, so that he can understand all those early money concepts, each coin has it's own value that stays the same, you need to use different types of coins to equal the correct amount, if you give the shop keeper too much money they'll give you some back etc etc.

Then I saw all these offcuts from the chicken coop Matt is building and I thought they'd make great play money! We got a texta and wrote on the dollar amounts and then he was off! Setting up the shop for me to go shopping! We then spent an age working out how much money we'd need to buy things at the shop, using our fingers to count on.

 Searching for a $2 to make $12 ....

 .... found it!!!!

He does so love his numbers, my beautiful wee man!

Random Recipe Review

Well, we ended up having last week's Random Recipe last night after some unexpected take away on Friday. As a result everything on the plan got bumped back a day. The Random Recipe for last week was Pasta Primavera from Rose Elliot's The Classic Vegetarian.

As is my usual with recipes that aren't baking and don't call for exact measurements or ingredients I changed it up a bit in terms of both ingredients and cooking technique. If I followed Rose's instructions I would have used 5 different saucepans to cook 5 different green vegetables! I don't think so! I also added garlic and spring onion to the butter sauce. I omitted the broad beans because I couldn't find any anywhere, as well as the chives because our chive plants are too small yet to harvest any. I added broccoli and frozen peas too.

So here is my take on Rose Elliot's Pasta Primavera!

250g long pasta, spaghetti or fettucini

60g butter

2 cloves garlic, crushed

2 spring onions, sliced

handful of frozen peas (Rose gave exact weights for all the vegies, but I just chucked some in!)

handful of green beans

handful of snow peas

small head of broccoli, stalk and flowerets chopped

small bunch of parsley, chopped

In a large pot of boiling water, cook pasta and broccoli, adding green beans and frozen peas after a few minutes and adding snow peas just before the pasta is cooked.

Meanwhile in a frying pan saute the garlic and spring onion in butter, adding parsley at the end.

Drain pasta and return to pot, stir through the butter sauce and season with salt and pepper.

Serve with parmesan!

It was a big hit, especially Elliot who requested it for dinner again tomorrow night! We were doing our meal plan for next week at the time so I told him that we'd have it another night later in the week.

Speaking of meal plans, here is our plan for the week:

Monday

Roasted pumpkin risotto

Tuesday

Boiled chicken with aioli

Random recipe from The Mediterranean Collection p72

Wednesday

Pasta primarvera

Thursday

My birthday dinner - surprise!

Friday

Lamb and spinach curry, brown rice and steamed veg

Saturday

Fried rice with egg and veg

Sunday

Pepper steak with mashed sweet potato and steamed veg

My Creative Space (a day late!)

I've been living in a bit of a 'what day is it' bubble the past week or so. I've been about a day behind the rest of the world. I swore Tuesday was Monday, I forgot Book Club on Wednesday night and even thought to myself that evening 'book club tomorrow night', and I completely forgot about My Creative Space Thursdays.

So this post is a bit of catch up for yesterday, not that anything exciting has been happening, creativity-wise. Just keeping on going with the cardigan. I'm really getting there, the end is in sight! I've now done the back, both fronts and one sleeve. The other sleeve is very close to being finished and then its just making it up and knitting the bands ie all the tedious bits. I have made one (kind of big) mistake that I'll have to unpick, but it should only be a few rows (all going to plan, fingers crossed!).

Oh, by the way, do any other knitters end up with bits of paper or notes all over their patterns that look like this? This one is exceptionally neat for me, it is usuall scribbled all over the pattern but that can get confusing the next time you want to use the pattern!

Don't forget Thursday's regular My Creative Space at Kootoyoo.

Cucumber Pickle

A friend recently told me about a fruit and veg wholesalers in town that also sell a little bit of retail to the public. Their regular prices are more expensive than most fruit and veg shops and definitely more than the markets. They do however do 'throw out' boxes of produce that is getting close to being unsellable, bruised or just doesn't look quite right. These boxes are really cheap and earlier this week I picked up two, one was $3 and the other was $4! They were full of lovely produce and it's really forced me to think of some different ways to use it all up so it doesn't go to waste. At the moment we've got a crisper drawer full of apples! Apple crumble anyone?

In one of the boxes were three cucumbers and we're not big salad eaters. The boys would much rather have a plate of vegies than a plate of salad! I just knew we wouldn't eat three cucumbers so instead of them going squishy in the bottom of the fridge I thought I'd have a go at making cucumber pickle! It turned out to be really easy, just a bit dangerous with kids around cause there is hot liquids and hot bottles involved, but the boys were playing happily on the verandah for that bit thank goodness! I was getting the DVD player all warmed up!

Cucumber Pickle

3-4 large green cucumbers, unpeeled, thinly sliced

3 large onion, thinly sliced

3/4 cup salt

1 cup water

3 cups vinegar

2 1/2 cups sugar

sprinkle of pickling spices

Layer the sliced cucumber and onion in a bowl, sprinkling the layers with salt.

Leave to stand for 3 hours.

Bring remaining ingredients to the boil, stirring to dissolve sugar. Boil for three minutes .

Drain cucumbers and onions and add to pickling liquid. Bring near to boil but do not boil.

Bottle into hot, sterilised jars and seal.

Recipe from NMAA Cookbook, one of my favourite recipe books!

Here Comes the Sun

 Go on over and check out some other Wordless Wednesday posts here!

Random Recipe!

I'm sure by now you are all aware of my love of menu planning  but I've decided to mix things up a bit. For one dinner a week I'm going to randomly choose a cookbook and then randomly choose a recipe from that book. Matt, in his infinite numerical/computing wisdom has informed me that just 'randomly choosing' a book and then 'randomly choosing' a recipe is not in fact random. His suggestion was to assign each book a number and then use a random number generator to pick a number, then do it again for the page numbers. Sounds like a bit much for me so I just closed my eyes and ran my hands along the shelves! He did 'pick a page number' for the actual recipe though, so that bit was random.

This week the random recipe is Pasta Primavera from Rose Elliot's The Classic Vegetarian. It's not really my favourite cook book, focusing too much on only a few different types of dishes that I'm not really interested in cooking, roulades for instance. Who makes roulades? And savoury ones at that? Anyway, I don't think I've ever actually cooked anything from it so Saturday will be a first.

Am I dicing with disaster? Maybe. But I'm hoping it will add a bit of zing to our weekly meals which have become a well-known round about.