38 posts tagged “food”

I'm still doing my photos but I always forget to post them. So to the week that was whenever it was.

This is a little bottlebrush that grows in our front yard. Its a pretty little thing. The flowers just curl out of the buds over a day or two.

 

 

Lol. This is something that I think Kimba made for me about 12 years ago. I sent them to pottery classes over one lot of school holidays and now I have all these strange pottery creations about the house. This one sits in the kitchen. Always gives me a smile.

 

 

One day I woke up, turned my calender and found this. It really wasn't enough information to know what I was meant to be doing. I can't remember what it turned out to be.

 

 

Bacon is always good.

 

 

Betty having a nanna nap

 

 

The cook at the old peoples home I volunteer at makes the most beautiful cakes. She has two lucky sons. I think Lloyd would have liked to have grown up in that kitchen.

 

 

And this was yummo. It was a strawberry/kiwi fruit salsa that we had with salmon fillets.

 

I woke up yesterday morning and I think I heard my liver crying. It said

please don't hurt me anymore mummy.

So I decided I'd start this 7 day detox today.

Then I went to the doctor and got shot up with Hepatitis, Typhoid and Swine Flu.

I'm feeling fairly toxic and not sure if today still counts.

I'm fairly sure I won't last 7 days because I seem to have lost my willpower. I used to have loads of it and I'm not sure where it went. As Bob Dylan said - I used to care but, things have changed.

I'll probably go ok until Friday but then I think I'll have lunch with my daughters. Because that seems a bit more important somehow.

I did today have fennel for the first time though. A baby fennel sliced in a salad. Was ok, but a bit liquorice like.

It's not so much a detox as no processed food. I don't do low fat or low carb, but I do try to do low processed. So lots of fruit and vegetables. I was supposed to have a beetroot/ carrot juice for afternoon tea but I just couldn't be bothered with all the cleaning up afterwards. There's always a lot of work involved for 1 cup of juice.

Speaking of no processed. A couple of weeks ago I was looking for some bread to go with dinner and I saw these rye wraps and I thought they'd be ok, rye is always raved about, wraps are popular. Then I had a look at the ingredients and found this.

 

Now that is processed food.

I'm addicted to sushi balls.

I made them for dinner sunday night and now I can't stop eating them.

I just had four.

I wasn't a fan of the sesame and poppy seed ones myself. I always feel like seeds aggravate my weird undiagnosed throat problem, but they look pretty. 

 

 

break it open and you find smoked salmon, cucumber and wasabi, and a dash of mayo

 

 

Its the plain ones I can't stay away from. Sticky and yummy. I guess the seeds stop your fingers from getting sticky.

 

 

But thats easily fixed with a fork

 

We love our condiments here in Australia.

I mean this little selection is out on the bench at the chinese restaurant.

Who knows when you might feel like a bit of potato salad dressing on your fried rice.

 

Isn't that just the way it always happens!!

Years ago, almost 20 years ago, I gave up eating red meat.

I left home and started shopping for myself and discovered meat came in little black trays with plastic over the top.

When I was a kid, one day, every week, my father would jump over a fence, jump on a sheeps back and cut its throat. Then I'd stand around with my sisters and my brother and the dogs and we'd watch him skin it and then hang it in the "meat room" for a few days until we cut it up and ate it.

One of the dogs would get the head and the chooks would get the stomach bag. Usually after I'd jumped on it a few times to try and break it.

Believe me, they're tough. But if it breaks, the smell is eye watering. But the chooks love it.

So anyway, we'd all stand around with little bowls or tupperware containers, waiting to collect the offal that we'd take up to the kitchen. I mean it was nothing to open the fridge and find a tupperware in there with a label on it saying -  Emjays Brains.

And look, when I say the meat room, what I mean is a hot tin shed with gauze walls. My mother always told me not to take too much notice of the use by date of lamb at the shops. Basically if its not green, it's ok. Dad would hang them by the back legs in this shed to let it.....ripen?.....mature?.....flavour?  whatever you want to call it.

So when I left home and started buying meat, I started wondering how many hands the meat had passed through before it reached my plate. And what conditions had the animals lived in before they ended up on that tray.

So then more recently I started thinking, well if I don't eat meat for that reason I shouldn't eat chicken either. Because they live in atrocious conditions before they are killed. So I try to only eat organic chicken. Because I like to think my chickens were happy and running free before I ate them.

So I thought, well I need to eat more fish. But the problem is, I don't like fish. Unless its salmon, or ocean trout. And these days, with the prices they are, you just about need to trade one of your children in for a nice piece of either. So today I was standing at the deli and I saw they had a fish called orange roughy, and I thought, I'll give that a go. So I bought some home and cooked it for dinner and it was beautiful. It was about the nicest white fish I'd ever had. And I decided there and then that I could live on orange roughy. I could eat it every day.

So then I went and researched it.

As you do.

And I discover that the Australian Marine Conservation Society has just listed it on the endangered species list due to overfishing. (Which is why mine came from New Zealand I guess). And that even there it has been over fished and the stock is severely depleted. And the Australian Marine Conservation Society has a notice out saying DON'T BUY OCEAN ROUGHY. And because I suffer from severe environmental guilt about everything, I'll never be able to eat it again. And not only because of that, but because I read that they can live to 125 years old. And I just can't stand the thought that some little fish has been swimming about happily for 120 years then all of a sudden he gets caught up in a net and ends up tossed in flour and on my plate.

And isn't that just always the bloody way.

Daz and I went to a fete a couple of weeks ago. Every country town has a fete or a cake stall going on somewhere on a Saturday.

We'd heard there would be mulberry pies there, so we set off to get our hands on one. But when we got there, they said that they had sold out of pies!!

No pies, we cried.

But, they said, we have this tray of mulberrys you can have. You can cook them up and make your own pie. So we took them home and I did just that.

I put them in the pan with some lemon juice and sugar and a bit of sherry type stuff and they turned into a sweet sticky mush of yum.

 

But you have to be careful when you test it because it is holds the heat. I had to do that thing where you scrape your teeth down the spoon and not let your lips touch the hot mush.

 

And then yesterday there was a knock on the door. I open the door, and standing there is the lady who makes the mulberry pies and she had a pie for us. She's made us a pie because we'd missed out at the fete.

How cool is that.

Thats what country life is all about.

There are not many things more australian, than a sao biscuit with coon cheese and tomato on it. It's right up there with football, meat pies, kangaroos and holden cars.

I'd say just about every kid in australia grows up on either sao's or vita wheats. In our house it was sao's. I myself actually prefer a vita wheat, but I guess Mum and Dad were sao fans.

So a sao is just a plain dry square biscuit. Sort of like a giant water cracker. Once you bite into it you can't inhale again until you've mushed it or you're in danger of choking on the crumb dust.

So here he is.

 

And here he is dressed. With Coon cheese. Vintage.

 

Now I'm more of a vita wheat girl. Remember when the holes used to actually work. And you could squeeze your two biscuits together and all the butter and vegemite would ooze out the holes. They don't really work any more. They're only decorative holes, not functional ones.

So here's my naked vita wheat

 

And here he is dressed. Yumm. Much better as well because I usually only eat cherry tomatoes. Or baby romas are even better.

 

Must add that the cheese I used on this was very nice as well. It was Mainland Club Cheddar Vintage.

And I'd also like to add that I don't really eat vegemite, I eat bovril, but hardly anyone knows what that is. But it still used to squeeze out the holes well. Better actually because it's kind of runny.

But in the end what I really prefer is a rice cake. I have them every day for breakfast. With cottage cheese and chilli sauce on top.

My stomach is rumbling now.

Thank god daylight savings is finally over. (We had an extra month of it here this year). At last I won't feel like I'm getting up in the middle of the night when the alarm goes off. And doesn't this day, when you turn the clock back, always feel like the longest day of your life. Here it is 5pm and I'm ready for dinner.

Daz and I went out to the pub for dinner last night. I said I'd have the caesar salad with smoked salmon. She said - we're out of smoked salmon. I felt like saying - how can you be out of smoked salmon, there's a supermarket across the road. I can probably go stand at the door and look at the smoked salmon hanging in the fridge. But I didn't. Instead I said - ok, I'll have the caesar salad with prawns.

And it was just wrong. It was all wrong, prawns in caesar salad. And the dressing was not caesar enough. It wasn't all garlic and parmeson and oily yumminess.

So that was disappointing.

And they ripped Daz off. He ordered a dozen oysters and only got 11. When he said to the guy - I only got 11, the guy said - oh yeah, we found one in the sink but we didn't know whose it was. I find that hard to believe when I look around the room and see daz is the only one eating oysters. He said he'd bring it out. I don't know if he meant the actual one that'd been rolling around the sink or a new one.

Didn't matter in the end.

He didn't bring one out at all.

So whats the go with leeks these days?

I'm picturing small very rare elves of some kind, chained up in an underground cave in Siberia, they could even be blind, growing and harvesting leeks to be sent around the world. Maybe the cruel captors only use the elf urine to fertilise the leeks.

Thats the only thing I can think of that might justify them being so expensive. I have a cold. A terrible head cold. Surely there is nothing worse than a head cold on a 100 degree day. Well, there probably is, but I can't think of it at the moment, (unless I was an elf). Who knew the body could produce this much snot. However, I felt like a bowl of potato and leek soup, so took myself off to the the supermarket to buy my leeks only to discover they were $5.00 each! And I needed four, but I decided I didn't want soup that badly.

So surely there is a leek substitute. Aren't they just a glorified onion? Could I use onion instead - or shallots even, maybe a bunch of srping onions. Any ideas? Because I'm thinking I do want the soup actually. Even though I am just about to suffocate from this opressive heat. The air is thick today.

Anyway, this is my bruise. From climbing through the - not quite as big as I thought it was, dog door. Its joining nicely in the middle.

 

 

And my friend Jem has just started a vox blog so go over and be neighbourly. Don't worry, I'm sure she won't write about me every day.

jem

Ok - here are a couple of things we made to sell at the carols by candlelight

Coconut Ice. Which I don't like at all, but it looked pretty

 

 

These are a cool idea. Mini puds. (As in christmas puddings that you USA lot don't eat.) Just dip the marshmallow in melted chocolate, then put a jaffa and a spearmint leaf on top. Kids love 'em. Karen - do NOT tell me you don't know what a jaffa is. They are those red lollies. But the original ones had an orange flavoured shell.

 

And the one true christmas food as far as I'm concerned. Rum Balls. We always make these the week before christmas. I used to make them for the kids to give to teachers as gifts as well.

 

 

 

1 x pack of milk arrowroot biscuits - crushed

3 dessertspoons rum - I usually add a bit more, we like 'em strong

3 tablespoons cocoa

3 dessertspoons coconut

1 x tin condensed milk

Mix them together then roll into balls and roll in some more coconut

Do we only have milk arrowroot biscuits here in Australia I wonder. If so just replace them with a plain biscuit. Like something you'd crush to use as a base in a cheesecake. But no ginger, or sugar coated, Just plain biscuit.