Entries from March 2009 ↓

Yes I’m here … got so caught up in work it’s taken me days to get back to post about the WONDERFUL hot line (because I couldn’t get the dough stuff to form a cross) buns!

In the end I dumped the bubbling mixture (the yeast was *very* active having sat in the warm bread maker for a while) into the food processor, churned it up, and put the dough in a bowl in the hot water cupboard for an hour a la manual dough rising method suggested in an alternative recipe that I had on hand.

It rose up then I was back on track…

Roll the dough into a long sausage and cut into segments

Make a piping bag out of a snap lock bag and ‘pipe’ crosses onto the top of each bun (my flour/water mixture was too thick to easily manage crosses so we went with lines instead!)

Take out of oven and let cool on a wire rack

Then we just had to scoff one down before rushing out to the movies (they were supposed to be for lunch but by this time it was 10 past 3) and didn’t have time to have the top/bottom argument so we got half each cut vertically!

They’re delicious and not too dense and definitely taste like the real thing! We’re still eating them for breakfast each morning.

Hmmm, it’s sat there whirring and clicking for an hour and a half and when I opened the lid to get out the dough it was a pile of bubbling unmixed ingredients. I thought it might be too good to be true to get the machine out of the cupboard after 4 years of not using it, or ever using it on the dough only setting, and expect it to work. Or it could be as the Mister just dared to suggest on the phone just now that I put the mixing blade in the wrong way up. I don’t know! That’s his department, it’s his bread maker, and he went off to work to leave me to play Mrs. Hrumph. Will now try to mix by hand. Eeuuwwwww.

Am now armed with knowledge of foods low in sodium. More bad news. No more date scones. Baking powder and baking soda are bad. Very bad. And there’s 3 heaped teaspoons of baking powder in the 6 date scones we make each week. And in fact lots of home baking is out. Poor Mister. So we’ve got the bread maker out of the bottom of the pantry and we’re going to attempt homemade hot cross buns instead.

And I just had a pre-dinner snack of plain corn chips. I’m not much of a fan of corn chips anyway and the plain ones were very unsatisfying. It’s only been a day of trying to cut down salt and I’m craving already. And I thought I had a fairly low salt diet in the first place.

Got stuck in a queue in the Mt Vic tunnel this afternoon and when we got out on the city side we saw that a nose-to-tail accident was causing a bit of delay. A rather well-loved white Subaru was parked up on the footpath and the Mister reported that the front was definitely dinged – no other cars in site so probably wasn’t that bad except for the rather large number of police and an ambulance that were in attendance. And then we drove by the entrance to the high school a little further down and 2 cars were parked in there with police all around – it’d been a 3-car concertina and one of them was a beautiful new black Porsche 911 Carrera. My God. From the whip-around glimpse I got the guy looked horrified. The guy in the white car on the footpath looked ruined. Imagine ramming the back of a Porsche. Not long after when we came out of Moore Wilsons, what did we see parked 2 cars down from us. The Porsche. They guy and his ballerina daughter had just got out of the car. The guy looked back at the damage and they walked off into the shop – he looked sick. We hung back and surveyed the damaged. The spoiler was in-tact and the boot was still able to shut but it was totally banged in. With white paint all over the place. Yikes. Watch your following distance.

Just went to the Geonet site to find out the magnitude of a small quake we felt during breakfast this morning only to discover that we felt the 7.7 (yikes!) quake from the undersea volcano erupting in Tonga at the moment. Stuff.co.nz is reporting that New Zealand is on a tsunami alert – *if* it comes it will get to Fiji around 10am and then here next I guess. Wonder if I should go home and pack.

Look! It’s The Very Hungry Caterpiller helping to spell ‘Google’ this morning in honour of the first day of spring. Takes me back to my childhood – that big hardcover book with holes in the pages.

Hmmm, guess that means it’s first day of autumn on this side of the world.

Just found out today that the place I go for yoga is closing after 15 years (not that I’ve been going that long) due to a ridiculous rent increase AND I have to go on a low sodium diet. What a day. Obviously I’m nervous about finding somewhere else to go for yoga, I’ve gotten to trust the guy with hanging me upside down, making me stand on my head, pushing my leg over the back of head where it just won’t go etc etc. I don’t want to go somewhere else with strangers where you have to pray or chant or drive there. And as for the low sodium thing. It appears that sodium doesn’t necessarily equal salt and it turns out that my major (because they’re my favourite) food groups all contain sodium – bread, peanut butter, potato chips and caffeine. God. Caffeine. However, the specialist said that if I do good on getting salt out of my diet then I won’t have to give coffee up altogether. Am allowed decaf though. Yum Yum.

In the short term it’s going to be a life of fruit and nuts with in a body in the shape of an office chair. Sigh.

The whole grab-a-seat, seat auctions, cheap-as thing on the AirNZ site can be inFURIating. Have just had a squiz ahead a couple of months for flights to Blenhiem. Apparently cheap-as seats are $68pp (a far-cry from the $39 I used to be able to get them for when I was going there regularly) and even though usually only available mid-week, a couple of months out you can get them around a weekend (albeit at strange times).

That is unless you are trying to find 2 seats. GRRRR. Am I supposed to do 2 separate bookings to get us both down there at the same time, and cross fingers that in the meantime the $68 seat for the 2nd person is still available? Or risk that it might jump up to the normal $89 per seat (which is still a better deal than booking both of us at once at $89) or worse yet jump up another price band putting me in a worse position than if I’d just bitten the bullet and paid $89pp)? Sigh. Might just have to hold out for on-the-day grab-a-seat deals and hope that everyone’s home at late notice that weekend. Sigh.

Just realised there are only 3 episodes of ER left. Ever. This week. Next week and the week after. Waaaaaaaa.

Bum. XRO just dipped near lowest ever to 0.67 – don’t know why I look. The novelty of being involved I suppose.