The Mister fronted a handy-cam recruitment video for Xero this week. I got a part waving in the background. Bit of a laugh!

Over the last week of working ridiculously long days we’ve made sure to cook at the end of each day. Put a few different things in the fridge to create speedy dinners and have to say, they were pretty impressive!

Last Saturday, we had a bit of a working dinner after a long long day and into the night working on the presentation I was to give at the stock exchange on Thursday. It was supposed to be bulghar wheat-based tomato & herb tabbouleh but it just wouldn’t soften so we rummaged in the pantry and found emergency couscous.

Then early in the week we had ricotta and tomato pies that we’ve had before, just made them a bit bigger with some fantastic new season asparagus.

Then more pastry and ricotta as we didn’t want to waste any! Adapted the recipe a bit and made a kind of broccoli pie with it.

And tonight, after spotting a Ruth Pretty recipe in the paper this morning we felt a bit of the Christmas spirit with chicken and cranberry and bruscetta. Really tasty and something we’ll remember for a quick summer dinner in the coming months.

While at Nikau last Saturday we were quite excited to see a helicopter land on the grass just near Civic Square. It was part of a civil defense exercise, pretty impressive.

Some notes from our road trip up to Palmerston North for the night 2 weeks ago so The Mister could speak at a geek club meeting.

• Nice drive up. Coffee at Brown Sugar in Otaki and got to pat the cat.
• We cruised a few restaurants finding one to stop at for dinner – as is often the case in small town New Zealand, the vegetarian choice always seems to be ‘ask staff for daily special’ – the fettuccine cabonnara I ended up with was fantastic although I wasn’t too keen on the raw egg yolk on top. Scraped it to the side instead of mixing it in as I guess I was supposed to.
• Went for a nighttime walk around The Square after dinner and it has certainly been spruced up, quite safe, blue & green lights, bridge, fountains. There were ducks sleeping right there on the grass. We saw one duck warming itself up by standing over an uplight in the grass but then noticed she had quite a crowd of ducklings sitting on it! Smart way to keep everyone warm.
• We stayed at the Coachman Hotel which was pretty dated and unfortunately had rather a lot of WiFi dramas which I certainly didn’t need given the crazy last 2 weeks I’ve had at work.

Here’s the best of my arty Square shots.