2014 and Stuff

Looking back over the last year I realise that I haven't done a lot of things that resulted in Finished Objects. Slow and happy crafting beat rapid gratification.

Oddly this seems to be the only pair of socks I have knitted this year. Could that be true? It's the only photo I can find, anyway. I think it was with a New Zealand sock wool. I call them Clown socks but I can't remember if that was the actual name of the colourway or not. I didn't even get round to putting them on Ravelry. For George, who wears them regularly.

Now this is on Ravelry. It took a VERY LONG TIME. Hence the reference to slow knitting! It finally got finished on holiday in the middle of the year. It is so fine that it fits through my wedding ring - which wasn't intentional but is a good party trick.

This is also on Rav. I haven't worn it yet, as I finished it just before Christmas and it hasn't been cold enough since then, but I look forward to getting the chance. It is greener/bluer than in the photo, which accentuates the purple which is in there but is less dominant in real life - it was very hard to photograph.

As well as slow knitting, I have been embracing slow cooking. Some of the slow cooking is actually quite fast cooking, but I'm using the term to mean more emphasis on fresh ingredients and home cooking and a lot less on processed food and lazy shortcuts. (Using a barbeque is the sort of the shortcut that I consider to be smart not lazy!) Most nights dinner is barbequed protein with salad and nuts. No, we have not gone paleo, and bread or potatoes feature with some of these meals. Risottos, simple Asian dishes with rice, the occasional couscous salad all get a look in from time to time too. The winter saw many hearty casseroles/pot roasts.

There were also holidays.

To Adelaide, where we saw in the New Year at the Hilton, and visited the Hans Heysen museum among other places, where I photographed this plant.

To the Gold Coast over Easter.

During the winter, a trip to Central and South Australia taking in Coober Pedy, Alice Springs and ending up back in Adelaide again.

And then a week in Merimbula to wind down in December.

Most of the year was spent studying for my first year of a Bachelor of Letters at Monash University. I studied Medieval and Renaissance History, and two literature subjects. This year I am doing all literature, a total of six subjects, and I cannot wait! And this year I will try to blog a bit about my studies instead of leaving the blog lonely for months at a time.

To State the Bleeding Obvious...

Clearly I have not been blogging for months.  In large part this is to do with starting a Bachelor of Letters at Monash University - a sort of second Bachelor of Arts for people who already have one.  Though only doing two subjects (a full-time load is four) it has been rather time consuming and energy sapping.  But goodness is it fun! I have now (almost) completed the first semester, doing Medieval History and a Literature subject. There is still a Lit exam to come in about ten days time.

We went to Adelaide for a week straight after Christmas, spending New Years Eve on the beach at Glenelg to catch the early fireworks, and then at the midnight festivities in the Hilton where we were staying. It was a very pleasant trip. We went to a fab Argentinian restaurant where I had some amazing food :


Anchovies straight from the tin, with lemon and parmesan chips.



Oysters with a light Asian sauce, very fresh and delish.



Moreton Bay Bugs with citrus butter - honestly one of the best meals I have EVER had!!!!

There were other nice meals throughout the trip but this was the only one I photographed!

I am resolving to blog more regularly again. And read other people's blogs - that has also fallen by the wayside. I hope to catch up with you all soon!!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Coat of Arms Pizza

I have so many photos to go through from my Central Australian holiday that I haven't got round to blogging a fraction of them.  Not that I will inflict the whole lot on the public, but we did visit some very interesting places that I would like to share.

After spending over a week unable to choose pictures because of brain fog every time I looked at them, here is just one to be going on with.  This is a Coat of Arms pizza that we ate for dinner in Coober Pedy.  It has cured kangaroo and emu on it and it was DELICIOUS.  We ate quite a bit of 'bush tucker' on our travels.

About my last post - they are all photos of Kata Tjuta, formerly known as The Olgas, taken during the hour leading up to sunset.  None of them are retouched.

There will be more posts with more pictures as I get myself more organised.

Wordless Wednesday

Blogtoberfest 4

Sadly, the painted car in yesterday's post is not mine :(  It's in the Pro Hart Museum in Broken Hill, NSW, and was painted by him.

This is Rocky Road made from a Coles supermarket magazine a few months ago, obviously designed to use a new product as it included a particular, newly released jelly sweet in it.  For once I made it exactly as the recipe said (something I rarely do!)  It didn't last very long!  

The next Rocky Road I make will probably be the one that was on Masterchef last year that included fresh raspberries.  It looked amazing at the time and I have the recipe now.

The dress, by the way, turned out quite well, and I will post a photo when I have downloaded the latest ones from my camera.

A new project?

This doesn't look very exciting, but it could be. These are a collection of handwritten recipe books, plus some torn from newspapers, mostly from my mother in law's mother, some from my MiL herself. The earliest goes back to 1913.

I have started slowly going through them and identifying recipes to try out. I find them fascinating from a social history point of view as they show a different way of life going back a century.

There is a lot of duplication, of course, and stuff that doesn't suit most modern tastes, plus recipes that one or the other of our immediate family members would not, or could not, eat. But I thought it would be fun and instructive to work through some of them, test cook them and turn them into modern day recipes.

Progress reports will be posted here. I am still in the very early stages of picking out potential recipes so there won't be photos for a while though.

Seasons of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

When we bought this new house we inherited a productive vegetable garden.  Over time it will probably be expanded, at the moment we are working out what to do with what is in there.

There was a lot of basil on the verge of going to seed, so of course I turned it into pesto.  That was fun.  The jar (please ignore the label, it did once have commercial pesto in it, but be assured that that green stuff is all mine!) is approximately one-fifth of what I made up last weekend.  The rest is in the freezer.  This jar is now almost empty, having gone into soup all week.  (A favorite Italian-inspired cafe I visit frequently put me onto the idea of a decent dollop of pesto in many soups being a wondrous thing).

I had planned to cook a pressure-cooker lamb thing with roasted rhubard last weekend.  And George was delighted because he (a) likes rhubarb and (b) wanted me to use up what was growing in the garden.  So I went down and cut the rhubarb.  While cutting it I politely asked him if he was 100% sure that it was rhubarb and not ruby chard grown bigger than it should have been allowed it.  He was adamant (and he is the gardener among us, I am the cook).  So I dutifully threw away all the leaves, rhubarb leaves being poisonous of course, and roasted the stalks with butter and sugar.

Roasted ruby chard stems with butter and sugar does not taste bad, as such, it just doesn't taste of anything except, well, butter ... and sugar.

And a large bunch of squeaky fresh ruby chard languishes in the bottom of our green waste bin :(

The house is coming together, slowly.  There is still all the stuff in storage.  When that comes out, I will be able to organise my craft stuff to some extent, and we will have thousands of books to reshelve.  I think we may need some new bookcases, too, but I'm not sure about that.  We have decided that the books of my dead father are going to the nearest book sale - I feel that I have been cursed ever since they entered my life and that it is no longer worth trying to value and sell them.  Some we are deliberately keeping, happily, but the bulk of them will not even be entering the new house.  We all need to move on.

It needs a lot more tidying and organising and finding places for things but it feels like home and we love it.  Yes, it was worth all the angst!

And work is even feeling a bit better.  I had a three-month review yesterday - I am on a 12 month contract (we all are, it gets renewed so long as both sides still want it at the end of every 12 months) but with a 3 month probationary period). I wanted to discuss some things I was not happy with, and obviously my boss needed the opportunity to say anything he needed to say.  Everyone who matters is happy with me, so I do still have a job!  And I was able to air a couple of grievances and establish myself on a bit more of a professional footing.  And I am possibly the only person in living memory to ask for more work to do!  What I actually said was that my allotted duties did not fill in the time I worked, and I was unhappy with the perception that I should spend the extra time doing the work of people below me in the organisational structure.  This was agreed upon, I have more interesting things to do now, and I am going to embark on a training course in designing and delivering information literacy programes, paid for by the college, which will help bump up my CV no end.  So I am still tired all the time, and I would still rather be at home crafting, but at least I feel a little more appreciated now.

What Really Happened When Darth Vader Retired

With profuse apologies to George Lucas...

Mr Dark Vader married, lived happily ever after with Mrs Darth Vader and a couple of little Darth Vaders, and on a sunny Sunday afternoon he indulged in some gardening.

Mrs Darth Vader decided to bake some biscuits.  She baked coconut macaroons, because they are a favorite of L from Death Note.

Using this cookbook.

Then choc chip Anzacs.

Using the recipe from this book, which half a cup of choc chips added to the mix, which was originally Wombat's idea and makes for particularly wonderful Anzacs!

Meanwhile the Darth Vaders' dog came

 and went.

Then she started to make basic butter cookies using the recipe in this book

 to which she intended adding mixed nuts and Craisins.  Some visitors popped in to see the Darth Vaders at this point.  Three large glasses of wine later, the biscuits were finished, but she forgot to put the vanilla essence in them so they taste a bit nothingy, and the photo came out all blurred!

And Mrs Darth Vader was going to do some gardening too, potting out some herbs and petunias, but by the time the wine had been drunk, the visitors farewelled and the last batch of biscuits cooked, it was time to cook dinner.

So much pleasanter than rampaging around the Federation wheezing at people...

Sort of a recipe

I accidentally created a new recipe the other day.  It was so nice that we have had it twice since.  It barely deserves to be called a recipe, but it was so nice that I am going to put in here anyway.  And I went to the trouble of taking photos!

I often bake large chicken fillets in the oven with variations of teriyaki type sauces.  Nothing original there.  But the other day I had some blood oranges and decided to see what blood orange juice and soy sauce did together.

Forgive the pun, but they are BLOODY MARVELLOUS together!

Of course you can only buy blood oranges for a brief season, though you can get blood orange juice sometimes in bottles.  It is expensive though.  I expect that ordinary orange juice would be yummy too.

I juiced a blood orange.  It gave about 1/4 cup of juice.  Fish out the pips if you can be bothered - I did get rid of most of them.  Then add soy sauce to taste - the first time I added another 1/4 cup of kejaps manis, which is the thick sweet Indonesian style soy sauce that we love in our family.  That rather overpowered the juice, so the second time I used slightly less than 1/4 cup of ordinary soy sauce and that was better.

I used two large chicken fillets to feed four of us, accompanied with a big salad and bread rolls.  Cooked vegetables would also be nice, and the carbohydrate of your choice - rice, noodles, potatoes, couscous, whatever.

They take about 45 minutes in a moderate oven, turning them halfway through and basting.  Serve sliced nicely and with the sauce spooned over them (a couple of spoonfuls each).

I used my wooden juice pokey thing because it makes me feel like Nigella.  It is of course entirely possible to juice an orange in a far more boring and utilitarian way.  Also, the wood stains when you use it with blood oranges!

Bobby also fancies himself as Nigella.  Wrong gender, mate!  And wrong in so many other ways!

The dog loves nothing more than home cooked chicken, in any guise.  So when I am cooking it she hangs around in the kitchen looking hungry and adorable.  She usually gets a mouthful when it is being served..

Blogging Changes

I have decided to give up on my five-days-a-week blogging for the moment. Things are possibly about to change dramatically at Sheeprustling headquarters in the near future - good changes, but disruptive ones if they do come off. So I will continue to blog about stuff, and include pictures of stuff, but not to a regular timetable.

Of course, maybe nothing will happen, and then things will return to what I laughingly refer to as 'normal'.

Since starting writing this post, developments have occurred, but in the backwards sense. Our house is dissolving around us and we either need to rebuild or move. After a lengthy period of looking around, we finally got into negotiations with a building firm recently, but had our third meeting with them yesterday at which the costings came out at way over our budget. If they had come within budget, there may have been a flurry of moving and rebuilding almost immediately, as we have to fit in things around Baby Bear doing Year 12 next year. While we still have to find an alternative, it looks like nothing with be happening quickly now. I was pulling back on the blogging because I thought I might have to do a lot of immediate packing and organising. But I have decided to keep to random musings for a while rather than the previous organised structure, which was fun for a while.

I went to the Bead and Gems Show at the Melbourne Showgrounds last week. I was looking for some specific stuff and won't post pictures. Lacey's Stiff Stuff is brilliant stuff for bead embroidery, and hard to get in Australia, but makes for very boring pictures when it has not yet been embroidered upon - for those who don't know, imagine a heavy white interfacing. I was also looking for cabochons that made me think of certain things, and I got quite a lot, but a pile of cabochons in various colours isn't necessarily very interesting either. Otherwise I don't think I would go to that particular show again just to browse - I went for the first time last year and it was interesting, I went this year because I was looking for these specific types of stuff, but for general browsing it wasn't really my sort of thing - nice to look at all the sparklies but most of what I do is in seed beads and, although they were on sale there, I tend to buy a themed selection online for a specific project when I want them, rather than wanting to right through crowds and then not find everything I want.

I may have a plan for a series of bead embroideries. Well, rather, I DO have a plan, but I;m not sure now exactly how it will pan out. It may also include small art quilts and be a long time in the making. But it is an idea that will not go away in my mind and it will still be there when I actually want to do something about it.

I have been knitting mindless stuff, even more mindless than socks. I am using up some of my novelty yarn collection (bought in single balls for things like scrumbling) to make mini ponchoette type things. They are good for keeping the shoulders warm and adding colour.

. I am not quite sure why I think it would be more efficient to store these yarns in made-up items in my overfull wardrobe, rather than as balls in my overfull yarn collection, but it made sense at the time.

Cooking has occurred. Well, living in a family of four, plenty of cooking has occurred, but only one recipe from the 'test the cookbooks' thing. I seem to have a million little pamphlet-type cookbooks, many of which come free with magazines and things. This one came from one of them: Easy One-Pot chicken Bake from Australian Good Food Italian Favorites. It's so good we have had twice! Of course I can never cook a recipe without tweaking it, no matter how much I swear I won't (except for baking, where I leave the general proportions strictly alone and only ever alter flavours). I used chicken breast fillets instead of thigh fillets, rosemary instead of thyme (it's the only herb I've got growing at the moment and it is wicked with chicken and potatoes), and this time I only had green olives, though the first time I made it with the black olives stated in the recipe.

This post has been in the making for two or three weeks, interrupted by the events related in the last post. I am going to post it now otherwise it will never happen.