I have surrendered

After a 10 year standoff, I have finally played my first ever game of risk! I enjoyed the game but after playing for 2.5 hours nobody was anywhere near achieving their mission - which confirmed my original assessment of the game 10 years ago that it involves sitting around for ages getting nowhere.

Crackled chocolate cookies

Tried making these today. They are really good...taste and texture of a choc-fudge brownie in biscuit form!
Highly recommend if you really like the edges of brownies.

(recipe out of the may 2012 issue of cuisine magazine)

Morning ride

This weekend is a long weekend for us, and the weather forecast for sunday and monday wasn't particularly good. So we decided to go out on saturday morning instead. Only trouble was, saturday morning was rather cold and foggy, which meant it stayed cold. By the time we got to the lake it had managed to get above freezing, but only just - probably 1 or 2 C. We'd brought bikes/scooter for everyone (I'd actually ridden because all the bikes plus me don't fit in our car) and rode round to the Innes common side. Three hot air balloons were just inflating, which made naomi's day! The kids had a bit of a play there before we carried on round the lake. A fun morning, just a bit cold to start with!

Beware the jalapenos!

On Monday evening I cooked up a batch of apple chilli relish, using some of our jalapeno chillis that we have stacks of in the freezer.  In an attempt to make it kid-friendly, I halved the quantity of chillis that the recipe called for... but didn't count on the potency of those jalapenos.  I had a taste after it had cooked for a little while, and it nearly knocked my socks off.  So I doubled the quantity of apple.  And we've still ended up with a relish that has a decidedly large kick to it.  Definitely not kid-friendly.  I guess I'll have to try with some less potent chillis...

This is the season for

SOUP!

I made my first soup for soup season last week.  It was spicy sweet potato and chickpea soup.  Now I will need to try hard to not overload the weekly menu with soups (I find them so quick and easy).

PYO Raspberries

We got given some raspberry canes in autumn last year.  We had been wanting to grow raspberries for a while, but at $15 per plant it was going to be expensive to get enough.  Anyway, I didn't expect to get any raspberries until next summer as they only fruit on the new canes which grew the year before.  So I have been surprised that this autumn some of the canes have been fruiting!  Only a couple so it means only 6 or so raspberries are ripe at any one time, but it is nice to be able to go out and munch on a few, when fresh raspberries are no longer available at the markets.

OUCH!

I hurt my back packing the car to go camping at Easter...After living in pain for a few weeks, I finally got around to going to the physio a couple of weeks ago.  My pain/back is better than it was, but it still isn't back to normal.  As a result I'm not allowed to do any back flexion exercise/movements...so I basically can't do any lower body weights, and vege gardening is virtually a no go zone.  Any high impact exercise also increases the pain, so I currently can't run or do anything except the lowest intensity in step class.  The physio got me to do a 5min test run on the weekend to see how my back would cope...I didn't sleep much after 3am as my back was so painful and the getting ready routine this morning was also done in much pain.  The physio has peeled away the layers of pain/injury so that it now seems to be a sacro-illiac joint issue.  I've been given more stretching exercises to do for the next few days and I have to go for another 'test run' on Thursday so I can tell the physio what the pain is like when I see her on Friday!  (At this stage I'm not looking forward to that, if the pain is going to be like it is after the last 'test run')

Going out... just because!

After church today, Mel commented that it would be nice to eat outside - it was a beautiful sunny day.  The trouble was, our outdoor table was still inside from the games night on Friday, and Mel was wanting to do some stuff on it this afternoon, so we didn't have a table to sit at, so we had to go somewhere else.  So, we got fish and chips and ate down by the river instead.

Games games games...

We had a games night at our house on Friday night - we'd been meaning to do something like that for a long time, and finally got around to it.  So a game of RISK and a game of Settlers of Catan were played - lots of fun, except I won RISK.  Which meant I, as the host, was destroying our guests.  Ooops.

Canning

That's what we've spent the past couple of evenings doing.  Friend from church rent a house on a fruit orchard and we were out there for lunch on Sunday and got to pick a stack of fruit.  Mainly apples, but some pears and  feijoas too.  So we've been learning the art of canning to preserve the fruit without having to freeze it.  And it will help us have a supply of fruit over the cooler months when there isn't as much fresh fruit around.