Head in the Clouds – Feet in the Dirt – Page 121 – Traipsing through life in NW Tasmania

Chocolate Covered Raspberry Ice Cream Bites – Almost!

Hello!
I did a nice healthy pick in the garden yesterday – I see some more tomato relish and sweet chilli sauce coming up! (Not to mention a boat-load of cucumber relish)

I am a little disappointed I didn’t finish my ice cream project today. Seems the mixture needs WAY more than 4 hours in the freezer before I can finish off the final steps

I saw this fabulous video-recipe pop up on my facebook page and decided that I needed it in my life.
I can’t add videos here, but will share it on my facebook page for those who are interested. I will certainly write down the instructions but the video made it look incredibly easy.

So – a 395g tin of sweetened condensed milk into a pot and stir in a pack of white chocolate melts – 225g

Once melted and mixed, pop it into the fridge for 15-20 minutes to chill

While it was chilling I went to scavenge what was left on the raspberry canes (Seriously – be nice of people to share this stuff at the BEGINNING of the raspberry season!!)

Take mixture out of the fridge and add in a 250g pack of Philly spreadable cream cheese (I am sure any spreadable cheese will suit)

This went into the mixer until smooth then I added 300ml of cream and kept beating until fluffy

I threw in the raspberries and mixed them in by hand. I then added some of my frozen ones just because I could

I lined a square tin with baking paper, put the mixture in and added a few strawberries into the top layer

Even a heart shaped one – I just noticed it has ticked over into Valentines Day here 🙂

Anyway, enough of the romance.
I put this into the freezer which was supposed to be ready in 4 hours for the last step.
Nope – A short while ago I stuck my finger into the very soft mixture and decided it could stay there until tomorrow.
Basically you take it out, cut it into squares, dip each square into melted chocolate and bung them back into the freezer. (Like thats going to end well… haha)
Anyway, can’t wait until I finish these off, re-freeze and taste test!

Then I will have to get off the frivolous cooking train and get my sauces made!

Cheers!

Visiting Cousins

Jeff & I ducked out yesterday for a drive to visit our cousins Fiona and Paul. One of their sons Beau is (hopefully) house sitting for us when we go for our hike across Cradle. They are keen bushwalkers and campers and have kindly lent us a few very handy items. (Bushwalking tent for one which will cut down on weight and volume significantly!)

They have a beautiful bit of land – lots of natural bush, plenty of wildlife and peace and quiet!

Fiona has been working hard – splitting and stacking wood!

Such a lucky find! A Black Cockatoo feather!!! Fiona found it but gave it to me! I love the Black Cockatoos… they fly over us often and they are loud and funny. I think they always must be having a great time with life!

One day I will get a more decent photo – like, with the bird attached!

Love the huge manferns!

A good walk through the bush is refreshing for body and soul! We saw lots of great plants, sniffed some ‘pungent’ ones and found fungi, berries and bird nests!

Native blueberry – some are fine to eat… but we didn’t risk trying this one

The creek bed was not running but it wasn’t empty!

I cannot remember the name of this bush fern…

This is kind of cool and kind of sad – Vines grow on some of the trees and wrap around trunks and branches. Sometimes the branches grow around the vines giving it this twisted shape. Sadly, eventually the vine strangles the tree

Beautiful colours in the timber that Fiona has been splitting

Back to the house and we had to go see the new little black lamb before we left…

Everyone goes along – including Alice the dog and the chook that thinks its a person!

It was nice to get way out of the house for a change – seems like a while since we escaped!

Hope your weekends were fabulous!

Cheers

Muesli Bars

Hello! There is Friday gone! Hope everyone has some excellent weekend plans.
Clearly my Saturday plan will be something to do with sorting/cooking the plums Jeff brought home from Ruby’s that he helped pick!
So happy – my upcoming plum jam crisis has been averted (for now)

Well… my husband is getting a bit more daring in the kitchen! (proud wife moment) He looked up how to make muesli bars (or granola bars) and went off on his merry way.
The first batch was excellent, so we did another lot today

I will add the recipe at the end of the blog for anyone that is interested in giving them a go

Some of our dried apples from last season

Since you can get a bit creative about what goes in them, I started having thoughts about strawberries

Pickings are getting slim, but I put these on to dehydrate today as I reckon they will be awesome in the next lot of muesli bars

I can’t tell you how good strawberries smell as they dehydrate!

And here is a Jeff-Action shot, just for his parents to see 🙂

Half an hour in the oven and ‘Voila’

Tasty and will be excellent to take on our 6 day hike across Cradle!
The plans are all coming together!

Cheers!

RECIPE FOR MUESLI BARS

9×9 inch pan – criss cross with wax paper going up the sides and also grease paper

Preheat oven to 165C (325F)

INGREDIENTS

2&1/2 cups oatmeal (we used rolled oats)

1/4 cup desiccated coconut

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1/3 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Then – make up one cup of whatever you like to add to your bars. It can include, crushed nuts (we have used almonds and cashews) dried fruits – so far we have used apple, apricot, sultanas, – choc chips.

METHOD

Mix well all ingredients and press down into your tin really firmly

Put in oven for about 30 minutes

Allow to cool COMPLETELY in tin. Once cool, you can remove and slice!

Travel Plans Piling Up

In the interests completely over doing things in 2017, I just booked our flights back to Japan for November. They had some really good prices and we had been discussing with my parents for a while about taking them over and showing them about!

Now as well as topping up the Texas Fund, I also need to super-budget for our actual spending money while in Japan.
I am not daunted – I am excellent at saving. (Just a moment of self-praise there 🙂 )

It would be mega-helpful if summer would put in an appearance and sort my vegetables out so I have something to sell. It rained all day but at least it wasn’t cold.

If you have followed my blog for a while, you would know I am very fond of Japan. I am really excited to go back for a whole swag of reasons.

It will be wonderful to catch up with friends. We will be (hopefully) staying in Kyoto for most of the time with my parents and doing day trips. Most of our friends are within easy reach.

Food – oh the food.
Looking forward to grazing our way around the Kansai Prefecture!

So many amazing temples and shrines to see

I intend to have as many baths as humanely possible while I am there! (I LOVE Japanese baths!)

I am so looking forward to getting back into the humdrum of the Osaka Streets!

Its loud, crazy, busy and a whole lot of fun

But as crazy busy as the cities are, you can always find some peace close by.

Anyway, I am excited to be taking my parents around, and with luck, maybe Jeff’s parents can come over from Canada and meet us for the last two weeks we are in Japan so we can take them on a tour as well!! (Told you – not doing things by halves this year!!)(My parents are staying two weeks and we are staying one month)
My head is spinning… perhaps its time for me to get a book to write in all my ‘to do’ stuff.

Cheers!

Who doesn’t like cooked fish on a stick??

Granny Squares

I completely failed to capture the gloomy, windy & cold nature of today.

This summer I am officially awarding a 3/10. Disappointing to wade through the dark and gloom of winter to not get your proper summer!! Seems every second day is cold. We are still getting stuff from the garden but it should have been a lot better. (and earlier) Happy to be feeding ourselves, so I can’t whinge and complain too much. We are halfway through the last month of summer and it doesn’t feel like it at all!

The saving grace of the garden really is the hothouse

The heirloom capsicum are coming along really well. They don’t have the same shape as what I grew last season – but I am looking forward to trying them.

The ones outside have started showing some fruit which is nice!

In among the tangle of the rockmelon plant I finally found ONE little fuzzy fruit!

The sunflowers enjoy living in the hothouse too

Is it weird to find their dying phase more interesting?

These ones look like they have had one drink too many!

Despite trying other non-chemical methods… looks like our apples are full of codling moth again! Damn. Jeff seems determined to break out the non-organic pest control next year and drown them! (We shall see)
We still eat the fruit – its just a pain cutting around the grub

The girls are being slack! Three eggs from 11 birds!!!!

I was trying not to do too much today – so I got onto youtube to see how to crochet granny squares. I have been watching Mavis’s (from 100 dollars a month) adventure of learning to crochet and I was also keen to see how to do one.

Then I got carried away

And now its after 2am with a small granny square explosion

Its going to take forever to make a blanket, but I like them!

Pip says go to bed

Cheers!

Pip wrapped up in the knee rug Ruby made for me! I love it! So proud I have something she has made – will wrestle it back from the cat now!

Relish

Hello!
Not a lot from me today. I am still doing things in slow motion thanks to my shoulder which is still not playing nice at all.

But I did get my relish made! So happy to be restocked! (See bottom for recipe if you are interested. Its a lovely old fashioned one from my Nanna)

I hung out some washing and then got sidetracked by shoveling some dirt around the ‘boardwalk’ and putting some rocks back at the front to try to blend it more… then figured that was a worse than bad idea. (not what I did but because it wasn’t really helping my shoulder much)

I played with my garlic scrapes – just trying to put them all in a bowl to do something with

Someone had suggested making garlic infused olive oil which I was keen to try – then read there is a high risk of botulism from the process, so I got nervous and abandoned the idea. Still not sure what I will use them for

I did do some housework – but didn’t get all that far. So I sat down for a bit and finished Miss Emma’s late late late Christmas present

Done! (again – night time not the best light for the colours but you get the idea!)

So… looks like I might achieve an early night tonight!! You never know!

Cheers!

Recipe for my Nanna’s tomato relish:

Ingredients

6lb tomatoes (3kg)

2lb onion (1kg)

2lb sugar

Vinegar (you can use white, malt or cider vinegar)(Avoid malt if you are keeping it gluten-free)

2 tablespoons curry powder

3 tablespoons mustard powder

Cornflour to thicken

Salt

Method:

Chop tomato in to approx 1cm chunks (You can peel if you want to but I don’t)

Dice onion

Put both in large pot, mix and sprinkle top with a handful of salt and leave overnight.

In the morning, drain off excess liquid.

Pour vinegar over the mixture until covered/saturated.

Add in your sugar and bring to boil… then let cook slowly for an hour or two.

Prepare about 10 good sized jars by washing and sterilising in the oven at 100C

In a separate bowl mix your curry & mustard powder along with a couple of heaped spoonfuls of cornflour add some water and mix into smooth, runny paste. Stir into your tomato mix and cook for a few more minutes.

Pour hot into your jars and seal with lids. (Apron good – can be messy and splashy!)

Enjoy.

Garden Produce and Cooking

Hello!! How has everyones week started? I have done something annoying to a muscle under my shoulder blade and ow ow ow – I can’t turn my head easily and its a general pest! Things got done slowly with a lot of whinging. (Jeff was asleep so I had to whinge to myself)

Anyway, I had a really nice time picking things today. A silly amount of cucumbers were ready – hoping to sell these but if not, will have to break out the cucumber relish recipe and make up a batch or 10.

I got into the kitchen to start processing – sweet chilli sauce was up first. We ran out a while back and I finally had enough chillies to make a batch. It takes a lot of chillies to get 300 grams! (about 10 ounces)

(recipe here )

Midnight in the kitchen not the best time for taking photos – oh well

I also had enough tomatoes to make up a batch of tomato relish! I think we are close to being out of that too – its one we use a lot! (as well as the usual use on meat and sandwiches, it makes an excellent pizza base sauce)

So I made a start by chopping 6lb’s of tomatoes and 2lb’s of onion. It has to be sprinkled in salt and stand overnight. Tomorrow I will pour off the excess liquid and start cooking

During the chopping, I multi-tasked and set the ice cream maker going (I had pre-made the first bit earlier in the day) then added the pureed cherries that I did the other day.

I enjoy taste testing

Anyway, got some bread baking now for my breakfast tomorrow. Best get myself to bed. Its horribly late! 🙂

Cheers

One Year Ago

Hi there – slow, cool & rainy Sunday for us!
Thought I would have a quick peek at what was happening February last year. This season is waaaaaay behind in comparison!

This time last year I was gobsmacked by a photograph of a potato that sold for over a million dollars. So I had a go at taking my own potato photo – sadly no-one even offered me twenty bucks for it!!

Our cat was still cute (I think) and we were starting to stock up on firewood

And the vegetables just kept on coming!

I dabbled in a bit of selling out the front

Its annoying I just don’t have enough to put out the front yet – my Texas Fund needs topping up!!

And of course there was lots of pretty stuff too!
Hope your weekend has been excellent and relaxing!

Cheers!

The Start of the “Boardwalk”

Hello!
Lovely day here today. We took advantage and made a start on the garden boardwalk (clearly I convinced Jeff it was a great idea!)

Eventually we need it to continue up over the stupid concrete filled barrels, but for today, it was a small start at the bottom end, to see if the
Dodgy-Brothers-Millar-Team could actually make up something that would work.

Starting point – rocks to be removed, weeds to pull and look – my ~~container of collected crap~~ treasures!

Gathered materials (all the free wood we have collected)

Lets take a moment to pause and admire these excellent sawhorses that my mother made!! She is an amazing dressmaker and all around crafty person – but she did a stint in woodworking while I was in high school. The sawhorses were one of her projects. We were lucky enough to be given them and they have come in very very handy many times!

(And my husband is also awesome at sawing 🙂 )

Spacing out the slats. (Flies were really bad today! Hence the fly veils!)

Aaaaand it pretty much looks like a table

Tomorrow after the cement has set, I will go about building up the rocks around it so hopefully the first part will fit into its place a bit more naturally.
Now that we have done one small section, we are a bit more confident on moving on to the next bit!

There was still plenty of daylight left by the time we had packed up the tools, so we decided a hike around Anniversary Bay would be good for us and the upcoming trek

The views along the coast never disappoint

Game time – spot the echidna:

Spot the wallaby:

Tide is a lot higher today than when we were last here

The tide being high, we had to walk over more rocks in this section than usual

Hope your weekend is going along fabulously!

Cheers!

Weeding (again)

Here we are! Friday, weeks end and time to get into a little work in the garden today. Those weeds won’t fall out by themselves!

Actually I like weeding. Its satisfying and its not something I have to make extensive plans with or overheat my brain on 🙂

Wasn’t a bad day – its been rather cool for February though…

It was also lawn day – the chooks get a bit displeased because I lock them up in their coop area while all the gates and fences are open for Jeff to mow and whipper-snipper everything.
The girls are so excited when they are finally set free again!

A decent afternoons work! I suppose I need to go stock up on seaweed again!!

All flowers, not many beans! You can see the potatoes in the background that have really yellowed off. This worries me. I think its way too early for them to be dying off. Suppose I should check my photos from last season to see how they compare. I know I harvested in March last year… just can’t remember how long before that, that they had started dying off.

Cucumber flowers keep coming and going – this one going.

Corn is really starting to form up well! I have my hopes up…

I also saw another couple of man-fern fronds unravelling!

Hope your weekends are awesome!

Nighty night!

Day nicely rounded off with a kilo of raspberries!