Met lovely friendly Lola in Aro Park on our walk today. I chatted briefly to a girl with a bag of vegies on her way back through the park from the market and she said Lola is quite often there, so we’ll probably walking that way again soon!

Got some photos from the Blenheim family today.

Check out Aidan reading to himself.

And loves avacado and can feed himself too!

Over the last couple of months the building at the uinversity that’s being built up in front of the house with the orange roof is beginning to look like a real building. Glass panels are going up on the front of it and we can no longer see the house.

We decided to go on a walk up through the university today to see if we could find it. The building is not as high as it seems once you get up there, it’s near the rec centre part of the university but it looks deep going back towards Kelburn Parade. We took in the view back over the city from up there. Didn’t realise how big that apartment building on Taranaki Street is going to be but it’s blue shroud certainly dominates the view at the moment.

Walked back down Devon Street into Aro Valley and down Aro Street. I’d forgotten how steep and curly Devon Street was and how shabby some of the student flats are.

Had some friends over for dinner last night for ‘burgers’ seeing as one of them has just spent a few months living in the States. I say ‘burgers’ because we made again our gourmet burgers with onion jam from our New York book, and they certainly don’t look like McDonald’s burgers. Complete with homemade caramelised onions, aioli, pate and some chips on the side, they looked just like the picture in the book and were delicious.

And whilst the vegetarian option was essentially a glorified sandwich it had a couple of extra treats and was reported to be delicious. (It’s the one bottom right Steph.)

The experimental part was dessert. I watched Tyler make apple tarte tatin on Food TV a week or so ago and he made it look so easy and it looked like something that might impress guests. I had to make my own caramel and it was proper caramel made by boiling sugar and water, not the caramel sauce I’d made before to go with sticky date pudding that I’d done with brown sugar and cream. I saw it on the telly turning from a bubbling clear liquid to a beautiful amber brown caramel sauce, yet there was a knock on the door and the ‘about 10 minutes’ Tyler had said it would take the caramel to brown had passed.

However, lucky for me it was my brainy friend coming to dinner and he tried to console my worrying at the pot by informing me that caramel is nothing but a chemical reaction and that it would turn brown if I was patient. And it did!! Except I think it took too long getting there so while it had a blippy mud-pool consistency when I took it off the heat it very quickly became rock hard caramel. It did come out of the ramekins, mostly, when it was time to upend the ramekins to serve ,however it was a marathon effort by the Mister cleaning the wooden spoon, knife, bench and pot and I haven’t yet tackled my little pottery pot where I poured the left-over sauce to have with ice-cream the next night. It is absolutely rock hard. I really don’t want to have to throw away or break the pottery pot as it’s one I made.

So, success with apple tarte tatin. The caramel soaked into the apples wonderfully giving mouthfuls of sweet tart richness. Will be making that again!