Entries from December 2009 ↓

So to finish of the year the wind dropped, The  Mister cooked steak (not often cooked at our place and he said it was the best steak he’d had in a long time), the clouds moved along and we sat out on the balcony on top of Wellington for dinner as the birds came to roost in the trees below. Happy times.

It’s New Year’s Eve. I don’t really have anything profound to say and am not doing anything out of the ordinary although today I am wearing my singlet on the outside and have some strange idea that I will work like the wind up until midnight to get all those things done on my To Do list that have been lingering for what feels like the last year so as to not carry them forward into the next.

This year has pretty much been more of the same for us, trapped in the routine of long hours at work and feeling too tired to spend time with family and friends or try anything new. Our choice, and one that I’m sure said family and friends don’t understand but apart from often asking ‘when will it be over?’, seem to accept. Same old same old which probably strengthened our resolve to make our move to New York next year – not a permanent one – but 4 of the most looked forward to months of my life. It’s been a strange year of living part of my life even more publicly than this blog with the adoption of Twitter all the while keeping other stuff completely inside. New York will be the welcome shift in life I need as I realise I’m about half way through mine.

I just scanned back through this blog at the last year’s worth of entries, all 35 pages of them. Some classic one-liners, great food, precious family times, unexpected trip to New York and lots of date scones, coffee and orange – reading it made me smile many times and it still intrigues me that I find so much non-work stuff to drivvle about!

God, this post isn’t supposed to be depressing, just a reflection. I was just thinking about the year as I came across the Mayfly Project – where in this culture of brevity we should be conscious that our snippets give us a very full life of lots and lots of things rather than reducing it to something like the tiny bio of the mayfly that only lives for 24 hours … “born, eat, shag, die”. So as part of this project where you reduce your year to 24 words, you actually realise that there’s way more to your life than this as you think of your 24 words. Actually I didn’t think very hard at all – in manner of often hitting exactly 140 characters on Twitter I walked out of the front door of our apartment building this morning and this phrase came into my head. Strangely, right on 24 words!

2009 was long hours for Xero, no salt, New York plans, Blenheim trips, date scones; spiked with MRI, first conference speech and Webby Awards.

Right, I’m off for a walk to meet The Mister and eat our sandwiches outside in the sun somewhere.

While we’re enjoying what passes for summer in Wellington (oh the wind), Mia and Holly are all smiles in the snow in Chicago.

Everyone who knows us knows we’re city folk who stop by New World Metro or Moore Wilson’s quite a bit to get provisions during the week, eat only loaves fresh baked white bread and usually have a bare fridge and freezer.

So we’re pretty proud of our efforts over the 4 or 5 days of Christmas when we’ve eaten left-overs and ‘cupboard meals’ (we’re especially proud of these – in manner of Mother living in rural area with chest freezer and pantry of spices and bottled fruit we’ve made a few meals without have to go to the shops to get anything!)

Boxing Day and the day after was pretty much all left-overs from the mountains of food Sara & Lucy brought over on Christmas day – we’re still getting through the meringues for dessert every night and I just don’t know how I’m going to give them up! Then we made a zucchini flan that lasted a couple of days.

One day we make pikelets for lunch and had them with coffee and jam & cream. What!? It was raining and a holiday!

But then our carefully rationed loaf of fresh bread for breakfast toast came to an end. So The Mister baked bread. Forgot that we halved the recipe last time (from Patricia Cornwell’s Food to Die For) so we had a rather giant loaf (which lasted 3 breakfasts and a grilled cheese lunch!) and was a teensy bit uncooked in the middle but toasted up just fine!

And we made another batch of spinach lasagne last night which we wanted to make last for more left-overs so after we’d seen a Twitter Friend’s (@TheNoviceChef) recipe for beer bread The Mister decided he was on a bread-making roll so we made that to go with it.

Cannot believe I poured a whole bottle and a bit of beer into it! (Yes he was making it but I ended up in the Santa’s Little Helper apron when he got nervous of the instructions ‘blend until just mixed’ … )

And then you pour a whole lot of melted butter over it!

But it came out great, didn’t taste of beer, was very sweet and buttery and went very well with our cupboard spinach lasagne. (Then we had meringues for dessert!!)

Found these frozen balls of spinach at Moore Wilson’s when getting the ingredients for spinach lasagne to make a couple of times these holidays. Didn’t know you cold buy spinach like this and it makes it so much easier to just get out however much you want and put the rest back in the freezer. Genius.

Even in an apartment without a real Christmas tree you can have the smell of Christmas with a few branches of pine …. mmmmm! Although it does look like some kind of triffid!

Twitter made Christmas interesting this year – loads of people spending time with family but still all on Twitter airing their lack of enjoyment of family tensions to their online friends and followers. And from all over the world so we all had a kind of international Christmas! Glad to say no tensions in our day – a few repeated conversations and kids being chided – but that’s pretty normal stuff. It was also truly special to spend some time in our own home on Christmas Day with friends and their family from overseas that we’d never met.

We started out at the beach house with a mountain of gifts for the kids

Happy niece #1 – got to see the mysterious beados that’d we’d searched long and hard for – they were at hit and the gift that Amy chose to play with straight away!

Home at lunchtime to start preparing for guests, with a quick sandwich lunch under the tree & some gifts from Mother & Father as we didn’t get to see them this Christmas

Enjoyed receiving photos from Father, documenting their very sunny Bay of Plenty Christmas Day – here he is in their vegetable garden (something they now have since retiring!) picking peas for Christmas dinner

Here’s Ryan who we just met that day (Sara’s brother) being put to work in the kitchen already

Lovely happy Christmas dinner with the urban family and actually we didn’t provide much of the food in the end – our guests came laden and it was wonderful! I can’t stop staring at this photo – to me it’s a perfect picture and we really did spend the afternoon and evening eating and smiling (our fridge is bulging with left-overs)

Happy niece #2 – then right on cue at bedtime I received a picture text from my sister of Georgia in her Christmas pjs – she loves them, she (& everyone) was really impressed that I’d sewn them and they fit!

And thanks to my Secret Santa for excellent gifts – Patricia Cornwell novel, Williams & Sonoma voucher (to spend in America yipeeeee!) & Obama paper dolls

Also got this completely unexpected and fabulous luggage tag for our travels from Lucy (probably a more polite thing than I’d say so useful to have it written on a tag!)

Christmas 2009 was great.

The spinach lasagne & white chocolate rocky road were very well received this evening.

Now lots of rustling as grandparents get out bags & bags (& bags) of presents! Almost spilling out in front of the milk & pinky bar & gingernut the kids have left out for Santa!

Just watched a fabulous sunset.

What great weather – hopefully it lasts! More Christmas spirit this morning at Moore Wilson’s but what a crowd! We knew it would be a time for patience and we targetted the specific areas we knew most likely to be popular first but we did well to delay our arrival because produce was still arriving and being unpacked when we got there.

However Cafe L’Affare were there again making free coffee out the front and people were handing out nibbles and glasses of bubbly in store. If you know it’s going to be like that before you get there it makes it so much easier to just go slowly and take it all in.

Raspberries and salad were popular, but we got some in the end

Waiting patiently in the lines that stretched back passed the fridges

Put the raspberry layer on the trifles before heading into work

Started the Christmas cooking for the next couple of days tonight. So with Christmas food cooking smells coming from the kitchen, a slight pine fragrance coming from the branches we have in a vase, Christmas cards and gifts under the tree it’s beginning to feel pretty festive.

Cards on the table

The Mister making dinner & cooking up his delicious tomato base for the Spinach Lasagna on Christmas Eve at the beach house

Whoops goes the brandy onto the individual trifles for Christmas day, then onto melting the chocolate for the white chocolate rocky road to have on hand

Off to Moore Wilson’s with the 6am crowd tomorrow morning for the fresh stuff.