I made this random meal in January using up stuff that needed to be used up.  Some little pita pockets I'd gotten off Potty a year ago, some cheese, prosciuotto, tomatoes and possibly Kit's tomato sauce.  Stu wanted me to make more the next day so we got through all the little pita pockets.

This was a zucchini and cauliflower bake I made to use up a couple of big zucchinis we'd gotten off Kit or Serena

And this was a zucchini, potato and sweet potato bake I made to use up a couple of zucchinis we'd gotten off EffanC

Other than going out on Saturday to do some clothes and food shopping, pretty much all I did all weekend was work on our next trivia night.

And tonight was finding images to make it all pretty.

Except Open Office is completely retarded.  It crashes spectacularly when it runs out of memory.  But it doesn't just crash, it corrupts the file as well, so half the slides will lose their background, or all the images will disappear.  Super frustrating and I lost maybe half an hour or an hour's work when it did that to me - twice.  So I've got fifty thousand backups of backups in the hopes that further corruption won't lose too much work.  At least it's pretty much finished now, so hopefully won't have to change much more on it.

The other week we finally finished watching Star Trek: The Original Series.  Last night we started watching Star Trek: Voyager.  I tried getting into Voyager when it was on tv twenty years ago, but after a season and a half I lost interest.  So watching them all again now.

In other news.  Saturday morning was up for a few hours in the middle of the night thanks to hurty.  So had a very late start.  Did house and hobby type stuff in the morning then headed out for lunch and then out to Fyshwick to have another go at going to Material Pleasures.  There was barely anything in the way of evening wear, and the few things that I did try on looked pretty hideous or just didn't fit.  So left in tears, further cementing my hatred of clothes shopping.  Did our food shopping on the way home.  Stu wanted to go to Aldi.  We always spend a lot less there, simply because they just don't have much.  They're ok for meat and cheese and maybe frozen food, but that's about it.  They're absolutely terrible for fruit and veg and anything that's a little bit non-standard.  Like you can't buy a single cucumber, you have to buy a whole tray.  And you can't buy a single brown onion, you have to buy a whole bag.  They don't have rice bran oil, or any of my toiletries.  Really don't like going there.  So I went next door to Coles to pick up all the essentials.  And a cucumber.

Today went with Chrissie to the Beer and Meat on Stick Festival (aka the Multicultural Festival).  The last time (and first time) I went was the morning after dad died three years ago, which made for a very strange day.  Today we had beer and meat on a stick.  And potato on a stick.  And fetta/spinach pastries.  And gozleme.  And cider.  It was pretty crowded, but there was seemingly a lot more food and drink stalls (including at least three potato on a stick stores) so you could always find one with a short queue (a couple of stalls did have very long queues, we just avoided those). 

Came home and did papercraft and we cooked Scotch eggs for dinner and watched more Voyager.

Had a pretty quiet Australia Day.  I had hurty that kept me awake for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.  Did a little bit of house stuff.  More hurty for a couple of hours in the afternoon.  For dinner we took some sausages and salad down to Kit's and had a bbq with her.

Friday I took a Random Day Off and Got Stuff Done.  Piled up a bunch of stuff and took it out to the Green Shed.  Only came home with a jigsaw, four small candles and some cookie cutters.  Did a bunch of errands and shopping all over the place, and final stop was food shopping.  Coles have now introduced coin trolleys which is a pain in the @$$.  They've always needed trolley return bays at that carpark, but now they REALLY need them.  Painful.  Cooked roast beef for dinner and watched Z for Zachariah in the evening.  Ok, but introduced a whole new thread that the book didn't have (I read the book in high school so don't remember a huge amount about it, but the things I did remember weren't in the movie.

Saturday was another quiet day doing mostly house stuff. Chris and Zac came over for a swim in the afternoon.  Cooked lemon ginger chicken for dinner from a recipe I got out of the Coles magazine.  Watched the first Hunger Games in the evening.

Sunday yet another quiet day (although two quiet days I didn't really get that much done :( ).  Ben came over for a swim in the afternoon.  The sweetie cooked Scotch eggs for dinner which were pretty good.  Watched the second Hunger Games.

Last night I just couldn't get to sleep - too hot and uncomfortable, so was a bit of a zombie today :(

Ok so last Sunday wasn't all that social.  Dave and Kat went home and we just had a quiet day for the rest of the day.

We did do some food shopping, and I used up one of the pizza bases I'd inherited off Kerry a year ago to make a "six cheese, prosciutto and pepperoni" pizza.  It was pretty good.

In fact the next Monday night after an epic crappy day, I used the other two bases and repeated the process for dinner on Monday night.

Yesterday Rob came over for a while in the morning to talk club stuff, then we went over to EffanC's for lunch.  After lunch we played Cards Against Humanity for a while.  Stu won, I came third.

Didn't really get anything much done yesterday arvo or evening.  Oops.

Last Friday night, the little brother and Kat came up.  David brought his big ladder and supplies and moved the pool flood light from its annoying position at a low height that just got in your eyes whenever it was on to a position under the eaves facing down on the pool.  He got it all installed on the Friday evening before it got dark so we could try it out.  It worked really well - much better than the old position.  Kit actually had a swim in the pool during the proceedings (rare for her!) and there was pizza involved.  Have I ever mentioned that my little brother is awesome? :)

Last night we met up with Chrissie and "the fella" for dinner at Dumpling Inn.  I love Dumpling Inn but their service as always been a bit lacklustre.  But last night it was just plain awful.  Took a full fifteen minutes before I could get someone's attention to get a drinks order (by wildly waving *both* arms) and then it was another half an hour before we even got all our drinks.  Food service was relatively slow too and we ended up being the last people in the restaurant at 21:20 (by which time the table next to us *still* hadn't been cleared from when other people left an hour before us).  They really need to hire a professional waiter or two to make things a bit more efficient.  Chrissie's dude seems nice enough and we had another glass of wine back at her place before calling it an evening.

Last Thursday night we met up with Jenn for dinner at Chong Co.  Had a lovely night and some lovely food including an awesome duck salad.

At one point in the conversation Jenn mentioned that new episodes of Sherlock were available on Stan.  We don't have Stan but you can get a 30 day free trial.  So we did.  And watched all three new episodes on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday nights.  Annoying thing about Stan so far - haven't found an easy way to rewind - which we need to do sometimes on account of our crappy internet causing dropouts which means you miss critical words which is super frustrating.  

But Sherlock was awesome.  I really enjoyed the first episode; I thought the second episode was super trippy; and the third episode was really tense but I didn't really buy the ending.

Would need to check out the titles on Stan before considering keeping it or not .. I wonder if there's any overlap with Netflix or if the different companies have different contracts for content..

We had a very quiet day today.  After having to socialise Every Single Day of the break, we decided to avoid people.  I didn't get much done though, partly because I was feeling a bit blah about the end of the holidays.  We did do a bit of gardening though, and had a swim.  I cooked a nice big roast pork for dinner, because we missed out on getting much crackling or leftovers at Christmas.  Our fridge is stuffed full of food again now, so now the fun part begins of getting through it all :)

New Year's Eve night we had Ben and EffanC over.  Hung out in the pool for a few hours, ate lots of cheese, then came up and watched Ghost in the Shell (I had no idea what was going on) and then most of the second season of the Katering Show, then watched the Sydney fireworks.  We paced ourselves nicely and had a lovely evening.

Today was just trying to catch up on life (I'm nearly done with the year in review post) then the hoardes descended - all of Stu's family came over and there was much loudness and chaos.  Annie brought a banquet of Turkish food, although I ended up eating very little of it.  

After everyone left we had Ben over for a relaxing swim to destress.

A couple more food things from later this year.

This was a cauliflower pizza I made in October.  It turned out ok, but lacked structural integrity so you couldn't pick up the slices (but it did cut very easily!).  I made two huge pizzas with the recipe, but should have made three smaller ones.  Stu liked it but I found the texture a little odd.

This was a "chicken carbonara" I made in December.  Just chicken thighs, with bacon, garlic, mushrooms and cream.  Simple but oh so tasty. 

At lunch at Grill'd the other week, Neil accidentally bought a sharing plate of chips, which had sweet potato, potato and zucchini chips.  Pretty good, although I still like the potato chips the best.  I nearly got the hiccoughs from that hot sauce though!