Entries from May 2009 ↓

Still on the chicken and rice theme – it’s a winter for it! – we’ve also had a couple of roast chickens for weekend dinners recently. Like proper roasting the way Mother used to do it – no bag! We do cheat and use the meat thermometer just to make sure it’s properly cooked and we have one of those cool silicon brushes that is amazing for basting the chicken – I don’t know how the brush manages to both attract and repel juice at the same time.

Anyway, might seem a bit festive but we’re stuffing it with the wild rice and cranberry stuffing because cranberries are in season at the moment. Finally have the cranberry sauce nailed – it’s very sweet and very cranberry-ish. Not as savoury as what you get in a jar.

• 1/4c water & 1/4c brown sugar brought to the boil
• 1 cup cranberries added & simmered for 10 mins, stirred occasionally to make a pulp
• About 1/4 orange rind & a dash of nutmeg stirred through for flavour

The sauce also makes a great accompaniment to left-over chicken in a sandwich the next day even though it does look a bit like a chicken and jam sandwich!

He’s walking! Check him out on the move in some groovy orange jeans – insanely cute little guy (39 secs).

Saw this great photo on stuff.co.nz just now – we have a few lonely big mountains in NZ and they look stunning when they stick straight up out of the earth covered in snow. This is Mt Taranaki – if this is covered head to foot then it must be really white in the South Island.

While Nikau is closed, they’ve started up a blog, medicine for those of us that are pining!

I’m so excited to see that I’m featured in their list of ‘Stuff we like’!!

Our favourite winter comfort food at the moment is a pilaf – we usually do a great pumpkin/almond/ginger one but this is a bit more ‘pilafy’ in my mind because it’s got currants in it. It’s from the Quick Smart section of this month’s Cuisine - Chicken Pilaf. The Mister was a bit dubious at first ‘what are currants anyway?’ and I thought the turmeric might remind me too much of dinners at my student flat but it’s delicious (as an aside I never realised until now that there was another ‘r’ buried in tuRmeric!) A big old pot of rice, chicken, carrots, pine nuts, currants, onions, garlic, chicken stock. If we could get a small apartment-sized packet of celery, not some huge trunk of it, then we might include the celery as well but to date have left it out!

It’s very important to do as the recipe says and leave the lid on the full time and not lift it under any circumstances!

2 weeks until we leave for New York – WAAHOOOOOOO! I’m getting to that point where I get struck by waves of excitement as I realise it is truly happening again. Plans are emerging, especially as we’ll get to play tour guides for a day to friends from work – we’re loving feeling like New Yorkers!! Some things on the list for us this time:

• Cafe Grumpy (supposedly *the* best coffee, won the TONY Best Coffee Award this year)
• 9th Street Espresso
• New York baked cheesecake (mmm, must make one again soon)
• Chinese in a box
• Shake Shack in Madison Square Park
• Empire State Building
• Friday night baseball – the Mister FINALLY gets to see his beloved Yankees
• Aveda store
• Scarpetta and Bones books

And that doesn’t includes shops and movies and walking all over … we’re only there 4 days!

I’m not very good at being sick. Just getting over a head cold now – thankfully no more than that but it was still a pretty awful one to bear. My head (not my nose, just my head) felt so blocked and aching. Couldn’t even work for a day – gasp! I just lay on the couch and watched re-runs. I never realised CSI Miami is a totally ‘pretty’ version of CSI – everyone in clothes that matched the office, flawless makeup, slow-mo forensic analysis shots and David Caruso being all moody and mono-syllabic in his sun glasses. Was a bit of a laugh really.

I’m not very good with the drugs either, just lemsip and vitamin C. Only lasted 2 days but the weakness will hang around for a while.

On the way to work this morning I saw that someone had tried to pretty up the road works that seem to be taking permanent residence outside our office – they’d made a paper flower to adorn one of the marker cones!

After my excitement about the first ever marigold seedling last spring and the subsequent transformation to a small marigold bush, imagine my excitement with what’s in the pot at the moment – an absolute explosion of seedlings! Just in one half of the pot mind you.

I discovered when I pulled out the one dead plant (that grew from the aforementioned seedling and bush) that the dead flowers are actually all new seeds so they all fell down into the dirt as I was getting it out. So I used my tiny apartment gardening fork to scratch them into the dirt, even though it’s not the recommended planting time according to the back of the marigold packet, and wa la! More plants. Hopefully they’ll do the full cycle but there might be too many in there. Might have to transplant to the other pot …

Can’t believe some of the pictures on the TVNZ website of the hail storm that hit the Bay of Plenty today! Mother said on the phone last night that a pretty big storm and hail had been forecast but hadn’t yet arrived – it did today. The pictures look like snow! And this is a coastal area where it’s never white on the ground let alone right on the beach! Check out this photo – the normally sandy coloured sand is WHITE! Poor Nanna – she lives right along there somewhere!