Entries from October 2007 ↓

I just looked around the bit of the office I sit in. 4 of the 6 people here today are eating their lunch with one hand in front of their computers. Is it this industry? Is it our company? Is it that there’s no time in our lives to stop? Is it because we’re watching our dollars and don’t want to eat out? Is it because we’re becoming very anti-social?

When I glanced at my task bar just now I thought I had my blog open twice … but no, the second is the blog of my new orange friend in Chicago – SNAP!

I told people at work (especially the American ones) that I wore orange today in honour of Halloween but they didn’t really believe me …

My orange-haired friend sent me this link to a geek discussion on the orangeness of their dev tools … you know I’m a wanna-be geek so I had to put the link on my blog – I mean just check out the URL!

http://www.secretgeek.net/OrangeX.asp

And it’s not just dev tools – I’m running XP and whatever version of MSN & Skype I have flashes orange in the task bar when somebody’s sent something …

And my desktop is orange …

In fact my whole entire ‘office’ is orange … and I have many orange email addresses …

I know Halloween isn’t that big in New Zealand but it *is* orange after all – so I made Halloween cupcakes! Couldn’t get orange food colouring for the icing but my mix of red and yellow seems to have worked out ok

The finished product! Looks better than last year’s thanks to the time taken to cut all the fruit up. Now we wait for pie time. Not sure whether to keep the fruit mince in the fridge or pantry. I kept it in the fridge last year but it seemed to make it quite hard and sticky. Might have to ask Mum.

Went for a walk around the waterfront this morning seeing as it was fine and reasonably calm. The fruit & veg market by Waitangi Park seemed far more upmarket than I remember – fresh bread even! We saw the jumping fish again - signalled by a huge flock of birds floating in wait in the harbour and then all scrambling to flight when the fish started jumping. Judging by the size of the fish (we saw a few that had been caught flapping about on the walkway) I doubt the birds had a chance to actually catch any but they sure were trying!! We went around by the lagoon as that’s where we’d seen the fish a couple of years ago but all was still – did see a couple of ducks having a lovely snooze in the sun though.

Man it was cold yesterday! The 10 degree cold snap was very unseasonal and caught us by surprise so we stayed inside and cheffed! Made something new and warm.

Festive Vegetarian Chilli
Cornbread

Was delicious and filling. The cornbread went *so* well with the chilli. The Mister has had it at Ernesto’s down the road a couple of times and said it tasted just like that. (Yes, again the meal was inspired by the Mister …)

Also made the Christmas mince and am going to put it into jars today. I did get the Mister to help with the cutting and we have a lovely fine mix.

As we were away last weekend when I would traditionally do my Christmas fruit-based baking I’ll probably do it this weekend. I’ve been mulling over what to bake.

Christmas Cake – made this for about 7 years in a row and stopped a couple years back to try something different. For me this is the ultimate in tradition which is one of the reasons why I bake for Christmas – neither the Mister nor I are actually into fruity baking. The cake is pretty big, and rich, and we can never get through it.

Pan dolce – I tried this once the year before last. It was cool. Needed orange blossom water which was a first for me. Our friends came over to have some and that’s another reason why I bake for Christmas – I want people to come over for ‘coffee and cake’ so we can say Merry Christmas to each other and look at my lovely Christmas tree laden with only orange decorations. I’d rather do this than presents to be honest. The pan dolce dried out a bit. The Mister wasn’t too keen on it because it was quite crumbly.

Fruit mince pies – had my first attempt at these last year and they went pretty well. Mince was a bit bulky though so it was quite hard wrestling plump raisins and bits of apricot into the tiny pastry cases. However, I know that now, and we have our chef friend’s set of Global cooking knives so I can get the Mister to help me cut up the fruit this year. The pies were quite easy to transport to baking-deprived friends at work and our American friend Jiff was impressed. The Mister liked them quite a lot – probably because there was more sweet pastry than fruit.

So I think it’s going to be pies again. Whilst I bake for my own enjoyment and idea of what Christmas and tradition is all about, it basically boils down to what the Mister will eat! Aaahhhh – the true foundation of a solid marriage!

Hmmm, just did a search on Google to see if Superfino had a website for my previous post and the parameters Superfino Ghuznee turned up a couple of pages of results with an orangeblog post on page one!! I’m still *very* unsure about being so out there. I know that’s a ridiculously hypocritical statement given that I have a blog, and I know I’ve said and blogged this before. I still feel like I want to have control over who reads my ramblings. Haven’t quite figured out why yet. It’s not that I’m afraid of identity theft, and in fact as a friend of mine said if you’re out there with a blog and are actually getting known through it, then identity theft is pretty hard. For me it’s something else but I’m still working on what.