Quiet day today.  Had a bit of a sleep in and a slow start.

Achieved almost nothing on my todo list. Did do some vacuuming.  And cleaned the kitchen.  Twice.  Did some photo sorting.  Water changed the two foot.  Did food shopping (by myself, the sweetie was studying).  Cooked salmon for dinner.  Did most of a jigsaw.  And watched some House with the sweetie.

Ok, so a *few* things on the todo list.

Had a reasonably quiet weekend.  Stu has been sick since last week, so didn't go out Friday night.  

Saturday was the club AGM, but we only went out for it and came home again after.  I cooked duck for dinner and we watched The China Syndrome, which Stu had never seen.

Today Stu studied and I did jigsaws.  Correction.  The same jigsaw, just the other side.  All will be revealed soon.  And housework.  Always housework.  And started setting up another blog for all my Australian holidays (since I'm scanning all my old holiday photos and would be good to get some of them online).  Tonight I did a lamb roast (we have sooo much food in the fridge it's not funny) and we watched Highlander.  I don't think we've actually seen it since we went to Scotland in 2010.  Been theres! :)

So we just had a lovely long weekend in Queensland (longer post to follow soon).  We were both inspired to eat better.  For Stu, he's trying to be more strict about low fodmap.  For me I'm trying to be more strict about sodium.  At least for a week or two to see if it makes any difference to my blood pressure.  To that end, we went shopping tonight, mostly for our own food.  And then I came home and cooked.  A kilo of chicken thighs, a scotch fillet steak, rice, mushrooms, potatoes, frozen veggies, and snacks.  I was cooking all fricken night.  Blerf.  At least I won't have to cook again til the weekend.

So that's my official recipe, which I now have printed out.  I adapted this to fit nicely into my square baking tray which is 20cm x 20cm. 

And here's the pictorial story .. :)

Everything laid out

Mostly measured out

The dry ingredients and the butter for the biscuit base.  I use a food processor to blitz the rolled oats and coconut until fine.  You could achieve a similar effect with a packet of biscuits, but I think this has less salt so would rather do it this way.

The caramel filling is simple - just sweetened condensed milk, golden syrup and butter

The base pressed into my baking tray.  Cook that up for ten minutes

Mix in all the filling ingredients

Simmer for a few minutes til it thickens a bit

Pour over the cooked biscuit base, then bake this for fifteen minutes

After baking, allow to cool.

This is with the chocolate topping.  The oil helps keep the chocolate soft and not super brittle.  I think I overdid the red/green colour correction here.

And underdid the red/green colour correction here.  It takes probably at least an hour for the chocolate to set, depending on how much you let the filling cool before topping it.

I really should make more effort at my food photography.  Like made this nicely squared off... 

Oh well.  It still tastes pretty awesome :)

ok well I wasn't really.  But I did realise I'd never blogged that we went to a SMWS tasting evening on June 30.  Five different whiskies to try, as well as food (sort of) matched with it.  Lovely evening.

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

Monday morning last week I moved desks.  I moved into the team I've joined, but I'm still doing the work we brought over with us, but now I'm separated from Neil so I felt even more alone.  Not being able to see the sky and being in the dark certainly doesn't help.

Tuesday morning the pool had started to freeze over.  So there were small (and huge) snowflakes growing all over the surface!

Tuesday and Wednesday nights I made good progress on the "winter hobby room" - sticking plastic sheeting on the bookshelves to protect all my models from dust, vacuuming, organising, purging, tidying.

Thursday night was whisky night at work.  My favourite was the Glenmorangie.  Such a lovely sweet smell, and very smooth.

Then we picked up C and all went back to their place for a nice dinner of fish and green stuff - real food I called it.

Driving home Thursday night was super beautiful because of all the fog.

Friday night we were back at EffanC's for another nice dinner, and then we watched Life of Pi in 3D.  Such a beautifully filmed movie, and probably the first 3D movie where I've actually appreciated the 3D.

Saturday morning we did a shopping run to pick up a Christmas in July feast - which we prepared at the club for Saturday night.  We cooked four kilos of pork, two kilos of turkey, there was a ham that someone else brought, and we did potato bake, potato, sweet potato, parsnips, brussel sprouts, jerusalem artichokes, eggplant, minted peas and honeyed carrots.  And there was almost no leftovers.  Pretty amazing.

And there were real live lambs!  Two and three week old lambs rescued from the abbatoir.  Apparently some dodgy farmers will sell pregnant ewes which is illegal.  These lambs were at full term and actually born there and now they're being raised by a couple of members of the club.  They were so adorable.  And happy to be picked up and cuddled.  I even had one start to fall asleep in my arms, until he became to heavy to hold heh.

Sunday we came home and had a pretty quiet day.  Went and saw Annie and Stu's new car.  Made pepperoni pizzas for dinner and watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

So this week I was literally the only one in our team to do our work.  Although Dave5 did help me out which was very much appreciated.  Being the only one to do the work would be fine, as one person could probably do it.  But.  Not when everything happens at once.  Like I'd be looking at one problem when four others came in all at once.  Or the stupid.  I couldn't deal with the stupid.  The first three nights this week I came home completely stressed out with work.  And then depressed.  Thursday I was so depressed I didn't even go to drinks. 

*gasp*

Had a beer with Aquila on Friday night which was nice though, and Saturday, on account of not having to go to work, I felt much better.  My body responded to the drop in cortisol (maybe) by giving me a cold sore.  Yeah thanks body.  And in a place I haven't had one in probably thirty years.  So it's either something new I picked up, or my immune system was really shot to hell this week.

So we had a pretty quiet weekend.  I spent the better part of Saturday cleaning and tidying the house while listening to movie soundtracks.  We watched Babe while eating duck (there's gotta be some irony in that) and then The Rock (the soundtracks of which I'd listened to that day).  Today was nothing much other than food shopping.  I made chicken kievs from scratch which turned out pretty well, and we watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Frozen.

So I think the mission for tomorrow is to stay depressed.  At least that's better for the blood pressure than stress.

Very quiet weekend.  I had a Getting Things Done kind of weekend (including housework, sorting holiday paperwork, photo and email sorting, and cooking), while the sweetie had a Hide From the World kind of weekend (including sleeping and uni work).

We also watched all four Indiana Jones movies on Friday and Saturday nights.

Did I mention the food?

That tin of water chestnuts has been sitting in our pantry for *years* and I wanted to use them in something.  And for me any excuse is a good excuse to have hoisin sauce.

Fry duck breasts til golden, then a minute or so on the other side, then into the oven for eight to ten minutes.

While that's happening, heat up some snow peas and the water chestnuts.  Serve with rice.  Yum!  Delicious!

Today I started cooking dinner this morning.

For today's version I'm using four lamb shanks (not huge ones), two slices of bacon (we're trying to cut down on our processed meat so less bacon than usual, a small bag of your favourite mushrooms, a couple of potatoes, a couple of small onions, garlic, a bay leaf, tomato paste, about half a carton of stock, worcestershire sauce, a third of a bottle of red wine, several large spoonfuls of cornflour to thicken the sauce, and a little pepper.  I think that's all.

Chuck the shanks, potato, tomato paste, corn flour, worcestershire sauce, stock and wine into the slow cooker.

Fry up the bacon, garlic, onion and mushroom

Add everything in

Get really impatient with the cooking process.  Pretend to be healthy by eating a large salad of rocket, tomato and feta for lunch.  Topped with kewpie mayonnaise.  Double mayo after the photo is taken.  Resist the urge to eat salami all afternoon because, *hunger* (I ate a bit of cheese and some almonds).

Hurry up!

By 6:30pm it's looking good.  In a messy bad sort of way.

Pull all the meat off the bones.  Turns out there's quite a bit on four lamb shanks.  Who knew?  

Mix it all back in.  Maybe we'll get more than four servings out of this if the meat is split up.  (We'll probably get six)

Serve.  Devour.  

So fairly busy week this week.

Monday night the little brother came to stay.

Tuesday they finished off the white chocolate caramel slice.  David also replaced the light in our study which had blown on the weekend so that was nice.

Wednesday we went to the movies to see Jurassic World.

Thursday the little brother couldn't help himself and replaced half the lights in the house with LEDs :)  I also made another white chocolate caramel slice.

Friday was a swim night.

Saturday was a club night which turned out to be a bit of a wedding reception.  The shed was done up nicely and we had a lovely evening.

Sunday was just food shopping and not much else.

And so there goes another week.  We did two jigsaws over the course of the week as well which was cool.

And now back to it again ...