Lesson learnt

Don't leave bags of chicken food pellets shut up in the car overnight...the car now smells like a feed supply store. Have needed too leave doors open to let it air to try and get rid of the smell (although I guess chicken feed smell is a much better smell to have in the car than chicken poo smell!).

Have a cold...

(and so does Peter and Ben)

And as all mothers would know, this hasn't dramatically affected my activities for today. Still had to drop Ben at kindy, did 2 loads of washing, put away other clean washing, did grocery shopping, cooked, fed...just did it all with that 'under the weather' feeling. The one major difference was that I didn't go to the gym this morning.

Feed

Bought pellet chook food in preparation for getting our chooks next weekend. Because apparently, although you can feed chooks food scraps, they have little nutritional value for them.

What happens when you wash a disposable nappy in the washing machine?

You get little balls of jelly goop covering everything!

Some how one of the girls huggies disposable nappies ended up in one of their nappy buckets and therefor got washed with all their cloth nappies. I had to put the whole load through the rinse and spin cycles again.

(And now I'm putting the washing machine through it's 'bowl clean' cycle as there was still bits of goop lurking around in the bowl!)

Cluck cluck cluck!

We're getting chickens! Soon. We just bought some off Trademe, hopefully to be picked up next weekend. In preparation, we've been constructing some accommodation for them - a chicken house. We've used (free) palettes from Mitre10 for the timber, along with some plywood and corrugated iron from Demolition Traders. The house isn't actually quite finished yet - I still need to make some nesting boxes and a ramp so the chooks can actually get into their house. Maybe next week we'll have some pictures of our first family pets...

Pastry first...

Yesterday I made my first pastry from scratch. Inspired by MasterChef and now that we own a food processor; along with Ben voicing the desire to make a nut tart/slice, I decided to give it a go.

Conclusion...making pastry is pretty easy and straight forward, if I plan ahead enough to have enough time to do all the fridging/cooling that is involved. And the nut tart that Ben and I made together tastes good and the members of today's morning and evening Bible study groups have/will get to enjoy the result! (Ben also got to have a slice too)

Pavlova success...

I made my first full size pavlovas on the weekend. Now I've made plenty of meringues in my life, the little small bite size ones; medium disc ones (that you make in to a stack layered with creme and fruit, for a modern take on the traditional pavlova; and large discs (for a large scale version of the individual ones). But after making a double batch of Feijoa curd, I had 6 egg whites to use up, so decided to challenge myself to try and make a successful full size one (I've been afraid up until now as it can be a fine art to get it crispy, but not burnt on the outside; cooked in the centre and not runny; for it to stay risen and not flop when it cools down...).

I used a recipe I found in a book I'd recently bought - NZ Gardner-Homegrown: Berries. The weird ingredient that it used that I would never have thought of putting in was - Vinegar! And it turned out great - the soft meringue on the inside is a smooth almost marshmallowy texture. And you don't taste the vinegar at all. Because I had enough egg whites to make double quantity of the pavlova mixture, I made two - one we took to church on Sunday for shared lunch, the other we are making our way through at home for dessert each night.

And if you are interested to know (and didn't already) - New Zealanders' claim to be the original creators of the 'pavlova', so as an Aussie living in NZ I really should be able to make one!

It has arrived!

Our PVR got delivered today. Now need to do a bit of TV wrestling (our TV weighs a tonne) to connect it all up etc.

And the product of the week is...

Blackberry jam!

Well it was last week for Ben and Joanna. Whenever we had toast for breakfast and for every sandwich at lunch time they had Blackberry Jam. Luckily I had bought the large size jar, so we didn't run out!

It did remind us of a Mr McGee story (written by Pamela Allen - we love her books!).

Full speed ahead...

A new month = a replenished download quota. So now I can get around to watching that final episode of MasterChef NZ...