Been pretty quiet lately.

Last weekend was super quiet - we only left the house to do some food shopping on Sunday.  But even though I didn't get a super huge amount of stuff done, at least I had a mental break, which I relished and felt the better for.

This week has been somewhat busy at work, but a couple of bouts of insomnia made things challenging.  Tuesday night I just couldn't get to sleep and so was a zombie on Wednesday.  Wednesday night I got to sleep around 9:30 but then woke up at at 1:15 and stayed awake for two or three hours. *sigh*

Also made these the other night:  Jamie Oliver's Asian fish cakes.  They were pretty should.  Should try them again some time.

Tonight it's 8:30pm and I totally feel ready for bed.

All up a pretty decent year.  Nothing too life shattering.  Quite busy as always.

We didn't manage to get overseas this year.  Stu's work was being a bit special and didn't want to give him one of the weeks off in November.  We could have pushed a trip back a week, but then would have started missing Christmas parties, so we decided to postpone.  The only flying holiday we did was to Queensland to visit Chay and David which was a lovely relaxing long weekend as always.  We did get down the coast a couple of times.  Firstly in March, where we also went down to Bermagui, and over the June long weekend as well.  I only went to Sydney once this year - in May to inspect my flat, go to a body corporate meeting, and stay with mum.  We also did a weekend in Junee to visit the little brother.  And did a two night trip to the snow in September, after a failed proxy upgrade, and I was so flustered I forgot the charging cable for the GPS, *and* couldn't find the android.

At work I started the year busy but "comfortable" - in that I knew what I was doing most of the time.  We changed proxy vendors in May - and traded one set of problems for another.  At least the performance of the new ones is generally a lot better (I was still sad when we finally turned the old ones off for good).  At the end of June our team was restructured out of existence, and I lost most of the work I'd been doing to another team (I could have gone with the work to the new team, but decided I'd rather pick up new work with a more local team). Neil was away for the first month after the restructure, which mean I was literally the only person doing half the work of our old team.  So that was a super stressful month.  Then I moved desks away from Neil which made me feel even more isolated.  I spent several months in the new team really having no idea what I was doing.  But towards the end of the year I've been fairly well immersed in some new firewalls and am starting to get the hang of them.  Just before Christmas I organised a BBQ for fifty people which was pretty cool.

Healthwise I've been ok, but starting to notice the whole getting old thing.  It seemed I blogged quite a lot about insomnia.  Not able to get to sleep for no good reason, or waking up and not being able to get back to sleep.  I had a one-day cold in April, and a one-month cold in October.  I was at home for a full week in October, and was coughing for another three weeks after that :(  I started monitoring my blood pressure again, and noticed it was high *all the time*.  I tried a low-salt diet for a time, and it did come down, but it was pretty much impossible to maintain.  Go out for dinner?  High sodium.  Go out for lunch?  High sodium.  Pretty much anything in a jar or can?  High sodium.  Cheese?  High sodium.  I started taking my lunches into work several days a week which helped for lunches.  And was a bit more careful about dinners too, as well as buying low-sodium breakfast cereals.  But I was getting sick of the same boring stuff all the time, and let's face it, I can't live in a world without cheese, so I went on medication.  Still working on a dosage that will suit, although what I'm on now I think is causing some skin issues, so will see the doctor again in the new year to see if it's related, and maybe try a different medication.  I also realised in March that my bottom two wisdom teeth have finally fully erupted.  And my eyesight is getting worse.  Next year will definitely be an eye/teeth/skin/blood pressure sorting kind of a year.

We spent a lot of time with our "whisky" friends earlier in the year - dinners and movies etc - but less later in the year.  We only saw Nat and Andrew once this year in January which is a bit sad-making.  We had games nights at Mishi's in March, June and November, with a special party for her in December.  Met up with @phonakins when she was in town for Eat, Drink, Blog, and @Chrispycon and Anne when they were back from Hong Kong briefly.  Doc came over in September for some MarioKart and Singstar, but the TV died in the middle of a race, and we still haven't gotten it fixed because we're slackers.  Had dinner at the Dumpling Inn with Damien and Amanda in September.  Various people came to stay including Jo and Marc, the little brother several times, Chrissie a few times, and Mum in January and December.  Chris applied for a job and had moved to Canberra (in stumbling distance of us) within the space of a month, so that's pretty cool.  We've spent quite a bit of time with Kit and Ben over the year too which is fun.  It's nice having cool neighbours.  And finally we've still been enjoying our visits to "the club"  and going to the social occasions.  The pool exploded there earlier in the year, and we helped build the new one.  We also provided a Christmas in July feast there, and did pork again for the proper Christmas party.  Any excuse for me to do a big roast pork with crackling ;)

In the fishy world, I've been making better attempts to maintain the health of the fish and the fish tanks, although not until a bunch of disasters (and still had disasters after).  The original AR-620T had some small angels in it, but they had died over summer.  The last one had been in there a couple of days, and we only pulled it out just before putting in the last remaining duboisi and sucking catfish in there.  They died within two days which upset me rather a lot.  Tank of Death living up to its name :(  So the big four foot remained empty for a while.  My AR-620T also remained empty for a while.  I gave it a good cleaning out, and left it running with just plants for a couple of months to try and stabilise it.  Eventually I got five danios for it, which have survived, and later four baby angels which are also still alive.  That tank is actually looking really good at the moment, and I'm keeping up the regular water changes in it (it helps that with all the heat the potplants need a lot of water, so fish tank water goes onto the plants).  Stu gave his four foot a cleaning out and later in the year, and has set it up with really bright lights, and a soil-based substrate to make a planted tank.  He has some native fish in there too and it's looking pretty good.  The two foot tank has massive issues with this black slime algae, and I think it's pretty toxic.  The two nine-year-old black neon tetras and five rummy-nose tetras are still going ok in there.  I had five new danios in there which I've since taken downstairs to avoid the worst of the heat.  And then I bought five cories for that tank, hoping that maybe they'd eat some of the algae.  They started dying off pretty much straight away. :(  I moved the last two into the angel tank.  One continued to deteriorate and die, but the other one recovered and is still going strong in there.  The light in the two foot also just died the other day, so I'm going to completely clean that tank out and start again.  Downstairs the ten-year-old krib is still going, but she's looking pretty old.  I put five danios from upstairs in with her for the summer.  When Chris came down from Sydney she had nowhere to put all her platies, so I filled a spare tank for them.  I put four of them, and the big sucking catfish, in with the krib and the danios and the rest are still in a small tank awaiting their new home to be ready.  Stu also has two small tanks on his desk.  One has two endler guppies and a cherry shrimp, and the other has four teeny shrimp he just got the other day.  So currently seven tanks with animals in them at the moment!

I got two Lego sets this year - both from the Lego Movie.  I got the Double Decker Couch and SPACESHIP!!  I also made mosaics of the Ingress Enlightened logo in two different sizes (32x32 and 48x48)

I continue to do jigsaws.  I seem to have a never-ending supply of them.  Once they're done I usually give them away.  I still want to have some sort of jigsaw exchange going in Canberra, but I'm allergic to organising people, so good luck with that.  I finished a paint-by-numbers set of a fox earlier in the year, and bought a much larger one which took me months to do, but looks really good.  At the club I finished a longstitch that I'd inherited off Nana *years* ago.  It looks pretty good too but I've not done anything with it, it's just sitting downstairs.  I spent December evenings filing digital photos from the past year into folders by subject.  With a clean slate, it might now be time to start tweaking the folder filing system a bit.  Really the goal is to make it easy to find stuff, and obvious what things are in case I go and cark it.  Although if I go and cark it, noone will care about *any* of my photos .. or mum and dad's .. Speaking of which, I scanned three of mum's photo albums, and so far nearly a thousand of dad's photos this year.  All of my own scanned photos (from my own cameras) are all now digitised, labelled and renamed to include the date, roll and frame number.  I haven't filed those into folders yet though.

Weatherwise, the pool didn't fully freeze over much, but did form some beautiful ice flakes a couple of times.  It snowed once in September.  We've already had some quite hot days this summer, and I'm somewhat worried about the fish over January in this El Niño year.  I'll be doing a bit of fish tank rearranging to try and minimise casualties.

New food/recipies I tried this year included honey mustard chicken, made with actual ingredients, not out of a jar (except the mustard); duck breast fillets which are expensive but yummy; chicken kievs made from scratch, which were nice enough, but lacking the *salt* of the pre-prepared stuff (why does everything that tastes good have to have so much salt and fat???); a failed attempt at a lemon meringue pie, which was still tasty, just very goopy; various recipes trying to use up a kilo of white beans, the best being a cassoulet (salt and fat anyone?); a chocolate cake to celebrate Neil working at the same place for forty years - I haven't baked a cake in years!; a couple of things using wombok out of our garden (well, a planter box, to keep it out of reach of snails); and gingerbread cookies.

Didn't eat out as much this year.  We went to Kinh Do a couple of times.  Tried the degustation menu at Mezzalira which was pretty awesome.  Discovered Italian thick white hot chocolate in a hug mug at Max Brenner.  Finally got back to the Dumpling Inn after it had been closed for like a year.  Had dinner with Stu's dad at The District in Crace which was pretty good.  We tried the Wig & Pen at its new premesis, but it lacked the atmosphere of the old place.  Also tried its offshoot - Bentspoke which was nice enough.

Shows:
* Of Mice and Men

Movies:
* The Imitation Game
* The Theory of Everything
* Citizenfour
* x+y
* Cinderella
* Jurassic World
* Spectre
* Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Books (I really stopped reading because I pretty much never catch the bus anymore, and tend to just play on my phone before bed):
* Conqueror of Darkness by Phyllis Garlick
* Letters to Karen by Charlie W. Shedd
* Pollyanna by Elanor H. Porter
* Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Other stuff:
* Started the new year at the club but weren't very inspired by the whole evening and struggled to stay awake til midnight
* Started doing the FridayQ again for a while. Stopped when I got stumped and never took it back up again :( 
* Spent the summer watching Dad's documentaries while doing jigsaws and the like
* Finally fixed up our wedding photo book and had it reprinted
* Watched all three seasons of Veronica Mars
* Went to Costco for the first time
* Wandered around Mount Stromlo with the sweetie
* Almost quit Candy Crush in February, but took it up again.  Am currently within seven levels of the end (until they move the goalposts)
* Accidentally siphoned a huge amount of water out of the pool. Twice.
* Japanese culture night with Stu's Japanese class, which he has since stopped going to
* Came second in a work trivia night
* Went to the Balloon Fiesta on Canberra Day
* Got Netflix
* Scotch Malt Whisky Society tastings in March and in June
* Watched all three seasons of Rake
* Got Israel trip photos from three years ago online
* Finished scanning all my analogue photos
* Lost our really cool number plate and had to get a new set
* Watched all of Sherlock
* Got frustrated that you can't buy quality denim anymore for ladies' jeans
* Been with the sweetie for ten years!!
* Saw Nick Davies (investigative journalist who exposed the News of the World phone hacking scandal) at the Library
* Went to Whisky Live
* Chris and Zac came to visit in July. Went to the curry festival and went ice skating in Garema Place
* Cleaned out the "winter" hobby room in July, although didn't actually use the room
* Whisky night at work in July
* Cooked a Christmas in July feast the club - including four kilos of pork and two kilos of turkey, which all got eaten
* Watched all the Harry Potter movies
* Played through all the working maps I have for Unreal Tournament
* Celebrated turning 21 again, and recreated a photo taken on my 21st birthday
* Won a work trivia night. Busy planning the next one.
* Started a new blog for my Australian holidays, but haven't added much to it yet
* Saw "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson at the library
* Freecycled a bit of stuff, but still a lot more to go
* The watch I got for graduation died, and Mister Minit in Belconnon could not fix it, even after replacing the movement three times. Still pissed about it.
* Stu bought a battery-operated whipper snipper and a hedge trimmer and spent many evenings attacking the weeds
* Upgraded my phone from 6.1.4 to 9.1. There's a couple of things I like about the new OS (most especially the logical numbering of the photo directories when you attach the phone to your computer, photo sorting in general, as well as being able to manage attachments in SMSes), but mostly things are uglier and clunkier and it makes my phone chug, especially after unlocking the screen.
* Went to an Ingress First Saturday event
* Saw First Dog on the Moon at the Library
* Did a first aid course. Apparently now I'm qualified.
* Went Go-Karting for a vendor event
* Wore a dress to a wedding
* Hosted family Christmas lunch here
* Hosted a Christmas day lunch here
* Used the holiday break to do some thorough cleaning of the garage and fridge

So there goes 2015.  Have a happy and safe 2016!

I never bake cakes.  Just not overly interested in eating them to start with, let alone making them.  So I don't have any go-to recipes.

But I decided we should have one for Neil's 40th.

So it was either raid the books, or try the internet.  I tried one book first, but it wanted complicated things like baking powder and baking soda, and while I think I have them, I'm always a little scared of them because I don't know the difference, and am worried about using the wrong thing.

So internet to the rescue!

In the end I used this recipe - http://www.kidspot.com.au/kitchen/recipes/easy-chocolate-cake-1971

• 1 cup (150g) self-raising flour, sifted
• 1/3 cup (50g) cocoa, sifted
• 1 cup (220g) caster sugar
• 1/3 cup (80g) butter, softened
• 1/2 cup (125ml) milk
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten

• 1. Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan-forced). Grease and flour or line a 24cm cake tin and set aside.
• 2. Place all ingredients into a bowl and using a mixer and mix on high for 4 minutes.
• 3. Pour into cake tin and bake for 35-40 minutes or until the cake springs back when lightly touched in the centre.

I've cooked cakes in the dim dark past, and had greased tins before, but never thought to lightly dust in flour.  So that was something new for me.

Surprisingly, the cake actually worked!  It might have been a *teeny* bit dry, so I'd go towards the 35 minutes end next time.

The icing on the other hand I didn't even consult a recipe for (actually I lie - I did - but only for approx measurement of cocoa, and from there got the idea to use milk instead of water).  Point is, I could probably make icing in my sleep, I did it so often growing up (where we used to make lemon icing to top mum's peanut slice every week or so).  So it was about that much icing sugar (which, incidentally was inherited from my nana, with a best before date of 1997 - shh! don't tell anyone!), a spoon of cocoa powder, a teeny bit of butter, and milk - added in super small amounts at a time so as not to drown the icing.

Tada!

Then I piped a message to Neil using the icing from the gingerbread kits from a couple of years ago.

The other week I had a hankering to cook Chicken Kiev - from scratch.  I'd never done it before.  So I researched lots of recipes, and averaged them together into something I thought would work.  I did this for four chicken breasts - I could easily halve that for two. 

So starting with the garlic butter.  I've got here half a pack (125g) butter, a quarter of a bunch of Coles parsely, and four cloves of garlic.

Chop up the parsely, mince the garlic, and soften the butter.

Mix it all up

Garlicky, buttery goodness!

Lay it out on some baking paper

And roll into a sausage

I stuck this in the freezer for a couple of hours - and it had pretty much frozen.  Didn't stop it all leaking everywhere during the cooking process though!

So now onto the chicken.

We have four chicken breasts, some flour, eggs and breadcrumbs.

Here's the chicken after stuffing with the garlic butter.  This was just a matter of cutting a small hole with a knife and expanding it a bit with my fingers.  Next time I'd sew the hole shut with a toothpick, as they leaked.

Pictured here is 50g flour (seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper), three beaten eggs and 50g breadcrumbs - but I used at least double the flour and breadcrumbs, and you'd probably want even more for a nice thick coating, and probably another egg or two too.  Next time I'd also do the flour and breadcrumbs on a plate, as the chinese containers were a little small.

So the coated chicken.  My fingers got very sticky and I kept pulling bits of crumb off.  Next time I'll definitely do a full two coats of crumbs.

So then fry them for a few minutes each side on a reasonably hot frying pan and a goodly amount of oil to get them golden.

And bake for about twenty minutes.

Served here with asparagus caesar and herbed potatoes.

Definitely a winner of a dish, and I'd like to get a bit more practise at it!

Recipes referred to:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/666649/chicken-kievs
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4748/modernday-chicken-kiev
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/wild-garlic-chicken-kiev
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/jun/07/how-cook-perfect-chicken-kiev
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/chicken-recipes/chicken-kiev/#xDvrhzbwy01Xu8ez.97
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/29207/classic+chicken+kiev

Friday, August 20th 2004...

FQ Topic: Culinary

FQ1: In addition to the dearly departed Julia Child, who is your favorite food personality?
Peter Russell Clarke!  Where's the cheese!?  ok so it's been thirty years since I watched anything of his.. 

FQ2: What meal would you have this culinary genius prepare for you if they asked?
Anything with cheese!

FQ3: If they refused, and you could eat at any restaurant you wanted as a consolation, which one would you choose?
Gosh.  Um.  I've still never been to Tetsuya's but always wanted to try it.. 

FQ KITCHEN: Share with us a favorite recipe or cooking tip.
Recipe: other than roast pork, one of my favorite recipes is potato bake - sliced potato, cream, cheese, bacon, cheese, garlic, more cheese
Tip: you can never have too much cheese!

Compare with last time ...

So 2014. We survived.

Probably the most significant event of the year was that my Dad died in February. Mum handled it fairly well, as she'd gotten used to the idea over the course of nearly a year. And in the end it was a relief of sorts, knowing that he was out of his misery and in a much better place. I continued doing trips to Sydney to help clear out the garage of all dad's stuff. We took many car loads to metal recycling and made a couple of hundred dollars out of it. We also freecycled quite a lot of stuff. In October mum got accepted into a retirement village and the next two months became a whirlwind of trips to Sydney, a trip to Hong Kong and Taipei, a trivia night that I had to prepare and run, a work ball I had to prepare for as well as life in general to be lived. I only just survived til December 16, then was able to collapse in a heap. It was pretty sad saying goodbye to the family home of forty two years.

So I actually had three big holidays this year. The first mum and I decided to go on when it was pretty obvious dad wasn't going to last much longer. That was for two weeks in Turkey. That was a pretty awesome trip and we saw heaps of amazing stuff. Then I did another trip with my mum in September. That was an Outback Spirit tour from Cairns to Brisbane via Mt Isa and Longreach. It was a good trip, but hideously expensive - as expensive as the Turkey trip, but didn't include international airfares, fancy hotels every night or restaurant quality meals for every meal. At the end of that trip we spent nearly a week with Chay and David which was a lovely chance to chillax after being go go go for two weeks. And the last big trip was to Hong Kong and Taipei for two weeks. I was in the middle of chaos at the time, so Stu did all the planning for it. That was a pretty good trip too, although we did struggle at times to find the best balance of going and seeing things and doing nothing and relaxing. Other than that, we went with DC to his coast house in January, to Bermagui in March, and also stayed at the coast briefly to go to Scott and Kerry's combined 40th.

Had an ok year at work. Spent a good amount of time "cleaning" - decommissioning old services and doing massive cleanups of firewall rules. Also got chucked in the deep end on a couple of projects that required extra assistance, so they were a bit stressful at times.

Healthwise I was pretty good this year. I got a cold during the Turkey trip (a pretty nasty flu thing had been going around the whole tour group so I got off pretty lightly). And it seems I got a cold probably at the movies the other night as yesterday I started sniffling. Other than that I've been pretty healthy.

We've spent heaps of time with our "whiskey" friends this year which has been awesome. But we've not seen nearly enough of Nat and Andrew as I'd have liked. We had a few games nights at Mishi's in January, August and December, with lunch at Damien's in December. My Sydney visits meant lunches (Peking duck!!!) with @StuartCRyan which was awesome, but sadly that won't be happening anymore. We saw Josh and Ally a couple of times, and Gaelian and Stef as well. A Sydney trip for George's 40th. A fair bit of drinking with the neighbours and playing with the animals. Various people came to stay over the year including the little brother, Chris and Zac, and Marc and Jo a couple of times. We're continuing to enjoy our visits to "the club" and went to many of the social events on during the year.

Pretty quiet year for the fish. All the zebra danios in the angel tank have finally died. I got five rummy nosed tetras for the two foot, and they're lovely little fish and drew out the black neon tetras which otherwise just spent their life hiding up the back of the tank. A couple of the duboisis died, which threw off the dominance balance, so one of them became dominant and picked off the rest of them one by one, so he's the only one left in that tank now with a sucking cat fish. Most of the kribs and multis downstairs are gone now too. Really would like to get rid of a lot of our fishtanks and crap ..

I didn't buy any Lego this year, but throughout January I got to play with all of Jake's Lego - around eighty sets of it! Building and dismantling and checking for missing pieces, and documenting. Sooo much fun! Also dismantled the Star Destroyer which had been out for four years!

Continued doing a lot of jigsaws at home during the summer, and some at work, although not anymore there which is a shame. I finally finished the 24000 piece "Life" jigsaw, but still haven't gotten around to taking it to work to document it all laid out. Not much else in the way of hobbies, other than part of a paint-by-numbers which I got for last break but still haven't finished.

January had a run of very hot days which required lots of icing the fish tanks to keep them cool. But the rest of the year was surprisingly mild. Winter had some very cold nights, but the pool only partly froze over a couple of times. We've had some very hot days too, but again generally it's been fairly mild. In fact this whole Christmas break has been *lovely*. Because of all the travel and chaos, the pool was a mess until just before Christmas, but because it hasn't been super hot since then, we haven't gone in yet.

Tried a surprising number of new recipes during the year - almost one a month by the look of it.
* two different lasagnas - both awesome
* black forest slice - needs some modification
* Boeuf Bourguignon inspired by Julie and Julia
* Coq au vin
* various vegetables
* breakfast raclette - trying to perfect a recipe
* white chocolate caramel slice
* duck breast
* harissa roast chicken
* zucchini and cheese fritters

We ate out a bit. I didn't think all that often, but still a fair amount. Our favourites are still Dumpling Inn and Pulp Kitchen. Bella Vista as well, although only once this year (maybe twice?). Went to Grazing a couple of times and it was awesome both times. Went to Ace Sushi a couple of times when doing shopping at the markets, but it's pretty average. Revisted Asian Cafe, Wig and Pen, Iori. New this year included:
* Grazing - awesome
* Ellacure - not fussed
* Edgar's - ok
* Bellucci's - pretty good
* Mocan and Green Grout - interesting
* A Baker - good
* Kinh Do - good
* Beijing House - meh

At work, other than the mall, tried out Altitude Cafe (meh), got thoroughly pissed off at Samiuz, went to Sanurs for an after party dinner, 2 Yummy a couple of times for after drinks dinners, and Outback Jacks a couple of times for team lunches/dinners (quite impressed with their feasts). Probably lots of other places too undocumented.

In Sydney our regular for Peking Duck was Super Bowl, and Tako Tuesdays were at Sushi and Grill on York Street for takoyaki - not fresh, but better than other places I'd tried, and it was just downstairs from work.

Also found a couple of speakeasys. The Baxter Inn in Sydney which is awesome. Went there by myself first up, then later with Luc and again later with Neil. Went to Molly with the sweetie as well.

Movies:
* The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
* The Lego Movie (x2)
* Lucy
* The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Books:
* Deadly Décisions, by Kathy Reichs
* The Earthsea Quartet, by Ursula LaGuin
* The Delinquents, by Criena Rohan
* Fatal Voyage, by Kathy Reichs
* Animal Farm, by George Orwell
* *batteries not included, by Wayland Drew
* Palomino, by Danielle Steel
* Star Wars Episode I, by Terry Brooks
* Dewey, by Vicki Myron
* A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle
* Thunder Dog, by Michael Hingson
* Star Wars Episode II, by R.A. Salvatore

Other Stuff:
* Multicultural Festival aka meat on a stick day!
* Hall Markets for first time
* Mapping Our World exhibition at the National Library
* Balloon Fiesta in March
* Inherited Dad's camera
* Inspected the Sentinel apartments in Belconnen
* Inspected my flat in Sydney. Got depressed over deadbeat tenants who don't take care of other people's property
* Won another work trivia night. Ran the next one
* Airport open day - flying visit as could only spend an hour there
* Went to the War Memorial but was disappointed the WWI exhibition was closed for renovations
* Whiskey Live - 44 whiskeys oh my!
* Stu's Japanese classes cultural nights twice
* Poultry show at epic
* Had to buy a new lens because I'd smashed my other one in Turkey. Bought the same one
* Drama with cooling problems with my car. Found a new mechanic who I think might have fixed it
* Had to buy a new dishwasher as the last one burnt out
* Fired up Stu's old Android and started playing Ingress. Got a sim for it seven weeks later but the damage to my iPhone battery was done.
* Took a random day off and cleaned half the garage
* Zone 3 with work
* Bought Stu a new car on a very good finance deal - cheaper than our mortgage!
* BBQs at @CLBradley's. On one of them I borrowed Frozen and have been slightly obsessed with it ever since
* Chucked out years of receipts
* Birthday dinner of Chinese takeaway in Sydney
* Whiskey tasting night on my birthday, Bella vista for dinner
* Skiing in August
* Chickens and duckies next door (and lizards and frogs and cats and dogs)
* Total lunar eclipse
* Pulled off a semi-convincing Queen Elsa at our work Halloween Ball
* Mum tried to electrocute herself but thankfully failed
* Carols service at Como Church

So that's 2014 done! I know some of my readers have had a tough year (especially my brother). Hope things improve in 2015.

Happy new year!

I actually thought about creating a whole new blog for this.  Well not this specifically, but for all the recipes in the Women's Weekly French Classics book I bought the other week.  Much like in Julie and Julia, but a lot less complicated!  But for now it can all stay in here.

The first recipe I made from the book was Boeuf Bourguignon.  We'd planned to make it on the June long weekend Monday night, but then we remembered we were already going out that night, so decided to do in Sunday night.  But this was while we were out shopping on Sunday afternoon and there wasn't going to be much time to slow cook it.  We decided to go ahead anyway, and invite people over to share it. 

The recipe is *huge*.  It called for 2kg meat!  So much food it wasn't going to all fit in the slow cooker.  So I decided to split the food into two.  One lot to be done in a big saucepan on the stove, and the rest in the slow cooker for leftovers.

So here's the starting ingredients.

Beef, mushroom, shallots (recipe called for small brown onions, this sufficed), bacon, garlic, parsely, thyme, bay leaves, butter, oil, wine, stock and flour.

Here's everything prepped (except the parsely).

So next we're cooking off the butter, onions, garlic, bacon and mushrooms.  The recipe said to cook until the onions browned, but there was so much stuff in this pot this wasn't happening.

Meanwhile, brown off all the chunks of meat.

Since the recipe wanted the onions browned, when all the meat was browned I fried up the onions a little as well.

So then you add some flour til it thickens, then the wine and stock.

At this point I split the meat and the onion/bacon/mushroom mix.  Half into the slow cooker and half into the saucepan.  The slow cooker half was looking a little empty of fluids, so I added the rest of the bottle of wine and a bit more stock.

So I cooked the stove version on as slow as the stove would go, which was still a pretty decent boil.  It was there for probably four hours.

And oh my!  It was amazing!

The onions had their bottoms kept on so they'd stay whole while cooking.  But that didn't quite work out.  The onions completely disintegrated, as did much of the meat.

The finished product, served with the parsely, and a some rice to soak up all the lovely gravy.  Doesn't look like much, but our dinner guests were pretty impressed :)

We left the slow cooker version on low overnight, but probably should have turned it off earlier.  It still tasted great, but the meat was a little dry.  I'd topped up the liquids too before leaving it overnight, but they didn't really boil away, so it was a lot more watery than the stove version.

I'd definitely make this again, but I'd halve the recipe and just do it in the slow cooker all one afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon (after doing our food shopping) we headed out to the club.  Chris did some rather nice soup, and some amazing jacket potatoes with a whole slew of wonderful toppings.

Oh and Peter may have done a nice salad :)

We .. well we did desserts :)

The caramel slice was from a recipe I saw in the newsagent last week.  Snapped a photo of it and attempted to make it on Friday night.  But after taking it out of the oven it was completely solid on top and I thought it was an epic disaster.  Saturday morning I topped it with chocolate anyway, thinking if it was a complete failure I'd make a Violet Crumble Cheesecake Slice.  But as I cut it up I realised it wasn't such a complete disaster after all!  And in fact people liked it!

I also made an apple crumble from an untested recipe I found online.  Actually I only used the topping from that recipe, I used another recipe for the apples.  But it was untested so I had no idea if it would work.  But it did!  Hurrah!

After dinner we played Geoff's version of "Crazy Whist" which was very silly but a lot of fun.

Didn't sleep too well in the caravan.  Not really sure why, I was warm enough even though it was freezing*.  I disturbed some kangaroos at 6:30 going to pee .. hrmm.

J&H did bacon and eggs from breakfast and we used the leftover potatoes as well so that was pretty nice.

We were going to do some stuff with the caravan, but in the end just came home.

* I mean freezing in the figurative sense as it wasn't freezing *inside* the caravan.  Apparently people aren't clear on the difference between my figurative and literal speech.  However it did in fact freeze outside overnight, and there was plenty of frost on the ground to prove it.