country life

Our Grande Dame Chicken Rosie

22 Comments Posted on November 16, 2015November 13, 2015 by Snoskred

Rosie Rosecomb is the sister of a prize winning show chicken. When we first got her, she knew nothing about being a chicken. If I had to guess, I would guess she spent her previous life in a small enclosure with sawdust on the ground and a small amount of food and water available. She certainly had not lived in a flock situation before.

You might be able to spot it in the photo – her nails were incredibly long and so was her beak. There was the terrible time I tried to cut her nails – following the correct instructions – which resulted in a bit of a disaster as it was very difficult to spot the quick in Rosie’s nails..

Thank the deities for the internet, where I discovered step number 3. Lucky I had some corn starch handy! That was the one and only time I ever trimmed her nails – soon she was keeping them the right length on her own. The beak is also now kept to the correct length without any assistance from me. Amazing what happens when a chook can be a chook!

When Rosie arrived here, she quickly took up her place at the very bottom of the pecking order. She did not mind being there. She was just happy to be a part of the flock. And so the process of learning how to be a chicken began.

She started out by watching the other chooks. The first truly chicken-like thing she did was learning how to dust bathe. Chooks prefer dirt to any other ground surface, it is a fact. If you give them a grassy enclosure, they will not be truly happy until all the grass is gone.

Rosie took her time mastering the dust bath. She much prefers it to the *other* kind of bath she was used to, which would have been the water bath with soap and probably a hair dryer, to get ready for shows. Rosie does not enjoy water – she is always the first one to take cover when it rains and the last one to walk into a puddle on the ground looking for bugs.

When Redcomb was nearly taken by a hawk, Rosie was nearby to her. We are very lucky the hawk did not grab Rosie because everything I know about her personality tells me that she would not have put up a fight like Redcomb did. At that moment, Rosie became the look out chook. When any kind of bird appears in the sky, Rosie squawks up a storm.

Rosie was already a very talkative chicken – whenever I would see her, she would be making this little bup-bup-bup-bup noise. You can bup-bup-bup back to her, and hold a real bup-bup conversation. I have no idea what she is trying to say to me, but I always enjoy our conversations.

After Redcomb was lowered in the pecking order due to being injured, the two of them became very close friends for a while. They went everywhere together. They had happy bup-bup chats. They shared treats. Rosie would keep the look out while Redcomb explored the garden, looking for bugs. They are still friends, though not quite as close. Rosie made a couple of new friends once the Pekins arrived.

It was apparent to the Pekins that Rosie is a Grande Dame chicken. They took Rosie into their confidence and accepted her as an equal, even though she is considerably smaller than they are. This could be partly due to the fact that the three game hens look alike, and Rosie has black feathers like Lizzie does.

Rosie eventually stepped up to third in the pecking order with the three game hens at the bottom. This does not mean a lot to her general lifestyle, though it does mean she will take a treat and hold her ground if one of the Pekins tries to steal it from her. Rosie does not peck at those below her. She is not that kind of girl.

Rosie is always the first one to put herself to bed at night. She has laid one egg in her lifetime that we are certain of. It was the size of a pigeon egg. She is a very small chook so this was not surprising.

She always loves to tell the world one of the other girls is in the nest laying an egg. She is a lovely chook and I paid $10 for her, so she was also quite a bargain. She was worth every cent and then some. Watching her learn to be a chicken while I was learning about chickens has been an amazing experience.

I hope to have many more years of bup-bup conversation with this particular Grand Dame.

Chickens, country life

Kitty VS Chooky

15 Comments Posted on November 4, 2015September 24, 2015 by Snoskred

Little Kitty is still a chaser of chooks if she gets the opportunity. When the chooks are free ranging she will watch them intently and hope someone opens the door.

You can see Red Comb is giving her the evil eye. And her proximity to the cat grass pot with the freshly raised sunflower seeds is why that particular plant pot now resides on the table out of reach of the chookys.

Chickens, country life, kitties

Woolworths, We’re Breaking Up.

18 Comments Posted on August 28, 2015August 30, 2015 by Snoskred

Its not me, Woolworths, it’s you. It has been you for a while now. It began with stock I wanted to buy not being on the shelves even though there was a space and a price ticket for those items. It continued with mouldy fresh food – from the “fresh food people” that is especially disturbing.

Then, you never had enough staff on the checkouts, and after waiting more than 20 minutes to check out on several occasions even though I had less than 12 items each time, I was deeply annoyed.

You kept sending me offers which clearly your marketing boffins are behind which were nowhere near as good as the offers that Coles were sending me – I was offered $50 credit at Coles in return for spending $70 a week for 4 weeks.. which = $280 -50 = $230 @Coles VS $300 -30 = $270 for 3 weeks @ Woolworths. A big splooshy raspberry to that!

At this point I was more than ready to break up with you. The one reason I went back – Coles only stock small Twisties packets and I wanted the larger packet.

But then, the final two straws.

Did you know your catalog now sucks?

Each fortnight, when I shop, I look at the catalog for Coles, then the catalog for Woolworths. I do the main shop at Aldi and then visit Coles and Woolworths for items on special which cannot be purchased from Aldi. Woolworths decided to change the catalog.

With this new catalog, to view *all* of each page, you have to use the scroll bar on the side.

This is extremely annoying, especially when so often the bit you scroll down to see is boring advertising junk that has NOTHING to do with shopping! And then, they fill double page spreads with this junk!

Well, Woolworths, I DECLINE THIS CONCEPT. Even so, I thought I would still give you a chance to earn some of my $$, by using the *paper* catalog which arrives in my letterbox. But no.

You don’t want me reading your catalogs, online, or paper. You had to send me the clearest possible message.

Message received. Content noted. We’re broken up, for good. KTHXBAI.

Annoyed Snoskred, bitches, country life

Snoskred Holidays

12 Comments Posted on August 17, 2015August 15, 2015 by Snoskred

So, will you like to know what Snoskred got up to on her holidays? I can tell you more about this now!

We got a new oven installed. We turned the old one on once when we first moved in here, and the amount of stinky smoke which bellowed forth stopped us ever wanting to use it again. We were not bothered, because we had our LG solardom convection oven, grill and microwave. But recently that unit has begun to misbehave, and it was time to replace the oven.

There was quite a bit of writing blog posts – taking a break inspired some new posts.

There was some fun with ice spheres but that is a post in itself.

There was some colouring in.

There was some shopping and eating of baked goods. There was some purchasing of chicken in bulk – 11 chicken roasters, plus a bunch of filos and kievs. Lenards have some new items available none of which we purchased this time but I wouldn’t mind trying the Chicken Cobs.

There was plenty of cooking, and some recipe posts will be coming to you as a surprise soonest!

The Villains were seen and greatly enjoyed. There was dancing, singing, and much fun had by all.

I did not take very many photos, preferring to live in the moment and enjoy each moment when it was happening rather than try to capture moments to share here later.

The concreting was completed and sealed and the cars were finally put away safely. We deeply appreciate the vast vista of concrete we now have to enjoy. :)

What have you been up to?

Anything interesting? Let me know in the comments!

country life, Happy Snoskred, shopping

Planning A Caper

6 Comments Posted on July 27, 2015July 26, 2015 by Snoskred

Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman celebrating the awesomeness of magnets.

One of the reasons I am such a fan of Breaking Bad is the fact that so much of the show is what I like to call “Planning a caper”. As in, making crime plans.

While 99% of the capers shown on the show are things I would never, ever, not in a million years attempt, there are two local capers I would consider planning, if I were at all inclined towards being a criminal.

Of course, the fact that I am sharing them here tells you everything you need to know about whether I would actually do any of these things. I’d need a personality transplant, plus, installation of a more criminal bent of mind, plus, for one of the capers, I would need to be more physically fit.

If I could commit a caper, these are the ones I would attempt.

Caper One

Within 2km of where I live, there is a field where they do athletics. They have a speaker system there. It is very, very loud. Starting around 8am on weekend mornings, an announcer starts making announcements. This goes on all day. One of the two regular announcers has taken to calling the races, like you’d hear if you were watching a horse race. It is disturbing to everyone who lives within earshot. That is a lot of people!

To fix this, I would need to plan a caper. It would likely involve “casing the joint” first – then some climbing of fences in the middle of the night – never going to happen! – and then, if possible, the cutting and removal of speaker wires. Sadly, my feeling is this would not disrupt the noise for very long.

Caper Two

They installed a new roundabout here recently. It is the only roundabout in town where you can turn right from two lanes. The amount of times I have seen someone nearly get themselves killed turning right from the left lane..

One day someone will get killed there, and then I’m gonna kick myself for not actually going ahead with this caper – which would involve going out in the dead of night and painting the turn right arrow out with black paint. Like this –

I’m thinking summer would be the better time to do this particular caper so that the paint would dry faster, however, there are some major problems with this – most problematic would be the fact that the roundabout is on a high traffic road, even in the middle of the night. I’d need some witches hats, and maybe a yellow flashing light, a high vis vest, and a ute type vehicle.

The Breaking Bad Caper

So what is the 1% of caper from Breaking Bad that I would attempt? Magnets. In the first episode of the 5th season, a laptop has been impounded by the police as evidence. That laptop happens to contain some incriminating evidence, so Walt, Jesse and Mike plan a caper. And thanks to Sony posting two videos on youtube, you don’t have to watch the whole show to see it. Here is a discussion of the possible caper –

Here is a test of the caper, which features one of the most epic Mike Ehrmantraut lines of all time, including Miller time.

And here is the actual caper itself. The music makes this all the better.

bitches, country life, television shows

Long Weekending

17 Comments Posted on June 7, 2015June 7, 2015 by Snoskred

The June Long Weekend is a time to get some shiznit done around the house. I kicked it off on Friday, cleaning my DVD shelves and one of my collectible cabinets. Last week there was an incident, where I fell off my little yellow stool I usually stand on to light my candles, so some sturdy steps are now in place.

I love my DVD shelves but I do not love the dust that tends to collect on them, not at all. I sometimes think maybe I should just make them all into digital files and then pack them away, but that is a lot of effort to go to, and dusting them is probably simpler, quicker and easier.

I still have more cleaning to do -there is another glass cabinet full of awesome – I really want to photograph everything that is in these cabinets one rainy day soon.

but as Saturday was a sunnyish afternoon, we headed outside. Me to pick up fallen branches and sticks after some windy weather, the other half to mow the lawns.

I also spent some time pulling down branches from the top of the chook pen. There is an entire ecosystem going on up here which would never have existed without my Redcomb meeting that hawk. There are orb weavers, leaf spiders, silk worms and caterpillars making homes safely away from pecking beaks. If the chooks could get up here they would have a fantastic meal. Unfortunately – well, fortunately for the ecosystem – they can’t, and those branches are pushing the chook wire down and needed to be removed, or at the very least, some of them did.

I tried to remove the webs and spiders first in the hope of not getting them on me.. :) Also so they would not become barbecued spiders later in the day because a trip to Bunnings to buy a fire pit was on the afternoon agenda. Nobody likes a barbecued spider!

First we stopped in to pick up a new SodaStream as ours broke. We don’t use much in the way of syrups at all – I am much more likely to throw in some fruit and call it awesome. I’ll have to do a post on some of my favourite combos. They were on special for $48 at Harvey Norman which was pretty decent and it came with a c02 bottle, a new reusable SodaStream plastic bottle for the water to chill in, plus two syrups – lemonade and cola – which The Other Half might use.

The Other Half has wanted a fire pit for a while. Of course by the time we went to buy the one he liked, they were all gone. We’ve ended up with something slightly more expensive but he is happy and this will mean a lot of the fallen branches can feed that caveman fire desire rather than heading off to the dump in the ute, and keep The Other Half warm while he’s outside with his telescope at dark time.

Over to You –

Is it a long weekend where you are? What are you up to? :)

country life, shopping

Vale White Sussex

7 Comments Posted on May 2, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

White Sussex was taken to the vet this morning and the difficult decision to euthanize her was made.

For a long time, White Sussex has been the queen of the chook pen. Top of the pecking order, and she was the girl who made a lot of BagerK-ing whenever one of the girls was laying an egg. Her Bagerk-ing could raise the dead, even me when I’d been on night shift and was dead to the world sleeping during the day.

She was also an excellent broody chook and when the time came to kick the broody out, she took it like a good chicken, not trying to remove your hands with her beak, just meekly accepting that you were going to pick her up and kick her out and take the eggs from under her.

She was the most enthusiastic bug eater and loved the white curl bugs I would dig out of the garden and throw to her. She was a wonderful chook, and she will be greatly missed. Even her Bagerk-ing!

As I always post when this happens – there are 6 other chickens in the yard for whom life continues. They live minute by minute, sucking the most joy out of each and every moment, whether it is a dirt bath, finding a bug, eating a treat from the humans.. all we can do is love them while they’re here, protect them the best we can from predators, know when it is time to let them go, and remember them when they are gone.

Chickens, country life, Vale Pets

Meal Planning

3 Comments Posted on March 16, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

This year, I’ve been using this great free meal planner found at #4 on this post – High Five for Getting Organized! – from kelly’s kinda crazy.

The meal planner comes with a grocery list – Above you see Carter – my trusty skeleton friend – holding it. I’m thinking from now on he will get to hold the grocery list each fortnight so if I need to add something he will remind me to add it when I walk past. :) Here is a closer view with this fortnights shopping on it.

When I write my shopping list, I mentally walk around Aldi in my mind and I write things on the list in the order they appear in the store. Thank the deities, unlike Coles and Woolworths, Aldi rarely changes their floor plan. Both Coles and Woolworths have recently re-arranged their stores and now I can’t find anything in there. :(

I also sit down with my laptop and the shopping list and go through the Coles and Woolworths brochures and write down any items which are on special that we need to stock up on. I’ve been doing this for so long now that in general we never run out of things that we regularly use.

I’m loving the cute design of the meal planner. I used to do meal planning on my whiteboard which was not so pretty, nor could I take it with me to other rooms of the house which, on occasion especially when writing the shopping list, was mildly inconvenient. It also means I can keep copies of the old meal plans on the clipboard and review them when making the next meal plan. This way, I tend to notice meals we have not had for a while and add them back in.

Just be aware the file prints out an entire year worth of meal planning – you can choose to print just one or two pages at a time but you’d have to do it manually. I printed mine out at the start of the year and I’ll have enough to last until the end of this year..

This meal planner runs fortnightly and so we have been planning our menu fortnightly and shopping fortnightly as well, with just a quick stop at the shops on the second weekend if we need to pick up something fresh. Most of the time we don’t need to, because I am getting very good at planning meals which have the fresh ingredients closest to the shopping trip – and also very good at freezing things we need for later.

This past weekend we made our regular trip to Lenards at Warrawong which is roughly an hour or so drive from here, depending which way you go. We took a little detour past Albion Park to catch a glimpse of the Grand Old Lady VH-OJA at the HARS museum. If it wasn’t too busy we would have stopped to get out and take some photos, but as expected the place was absolutely packed and we just drove past. So, my apologies, I have no pics of that for you.

I also have no pics of Chicken Young Lad who has served us on our past 3-4 trips and who is starting to remember that we are the Crazy Bulk Buying People. Even so, after each item he asks “Anything else today” and we’re all.. YEP, give us 4 of those and 8 of those.

Meat wise, we eat quite a bit of chicken in the house. When we lived in Adelaide we had a Lenards close by and we could drop in and pick up chicken on the same day we were going to cook it. We really grew to love their chicken and moving here we discovered two things –

1. It is super expensive to buy pre-prepared chicken here eg kievs & filos.

2. Even though it was super expensive to buy, none of the local options tasted anywhere near as good as the options from Lenards did.

So we make the trek to Warrawong every 8-12 weeks, and we stock up on our chicken, we bring it home, then we food-save it and freeze it. We have the Sunbeam Foodsaver. I’ve tried other methods in the past including freezer bags and ziploc bags and we find the foodsaver to be the better option.It ends up looking like this –

The red chicken breasts that you see paired in the foodsaver packets with Chicken Kievs are the pocketed breast with baby spinach, dill, fetta and ricotta. They are my favourite – so tasty! I don’t mind a chicken kiev, either, but I deeply love these little red thingies.

We took every single chicken mini roast that they had prepared and we would have taken more if they had them out the back – sorry everyone else who wanted one. I normally pre-order but this time it did not happen, for a few non-interesting reasons. I foodsaved 6 roasters but we got 7 – one went into the fridge for tonights dinner, which looked like this –

We also stopped in at Dan Murphys and bought enough cask wine for cooking to last the next 6 months or so. I use Banrock Station Cabernet Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc for cooking and they are routinely $5 or so more expensive locally so if I need them and we’re already up Shellharbour way, I like to stock up.

Last fortnight, I ran out of white cask wine and had to use red wine for our white sauce chicken, bacon and leek pasta. When you use red wine in white sauce, you end up with a delicate light purple sauce. Not that either of us minds that because it still tastes great, and I find the merlot has some interesting flavours which the sav blanc does not. I really do need to put my white sauce pasta recipe up here sometime soon. :)

If you enjoyed reading this, you might want to take a look at this post – some things I know for sure about grocery shopping.

None of the companies or products mentioned gave me anything or paid me to say this stuff, and of course if anyone did I would make that very clear right at the top of the post and it would not change my opinions on things – I call it as I see it.. :)

So, over to you..

Do you meal plan?

Carter, country life, food, get organised, Home, shopping

Plane Spotting

13 Comments Posted on March 9, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

This jumbo will NOT come to you as a surprise!

Ever since I was a baby, probably before I was even aware of it, I have been a plane spotter. I had grandparents who lived under the flight path in Adelaide, and the head office of the family business was also directly under the flight path – as in planes flying over so close you could almost touch them. My Nanna and Poppa were both crazy for planes and every single member of the family inherited this craziness.

There is just something special about a plane flying. The magical scientific mystery that it is even possible at all – that tonnes of metal can be lifted into the air – is awe inspiring and breath taking to watch.

So, Qantas were retiring the first 747-400, and they decided to donate it to a little known outfit known as HARS – or the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society – little known unless you are a plane spotter like me and thousands of other plane geeks in Australia to whom HARS is a well known awesome band of volunteers who have kept the Connie and many other planes flying or in tip top shape to be displayed to the public for many years now.

HARS have an excellent museum at the Illawarra Airport which will shortly be made all the greater for having the 747-400 VH-OJA “City of Canberra” on display.

This event was hyped up in the media and full respect to HARS because they deserve every single bit of media attention they can get.. but unfortunately, people are crazy and what happened was an example of sheer and utter lunacy.

It is not HARS fault, they had a plan. And they announced that plan very clearly in the days leading up to the event – where people could and could not be. However plans are just that, and there was no way in heck that anyone could have moved these people from the spots they had arrived at in the early hours of the morning.

We also had a plan, thinking that every man and his dog would want to be close to the end of the runway, we were going to the carpark of Hungry Jacks at Yallah. But when we got to the Yallah turn off? Gridlock. Nobody could go anywhere. The exit from the highway and the road that leads to Hungry Jacks was a carpark.

Though you cannot see it in the image, there were cars and people stopped on the bridge that goes across the highway there. It turned out that there were cars parked all through Haywards Bay – I bet the residents there were super pleased! People parked their cars and then walked off in search of what they thought was the best vantage spot.

Cars were just parking wherever they felt like it, including in the no stopping lane on the highway, or like this one we spotted as we were leaving – that black car there is parked, there is no owner with the vehicle. SRSLY?

I hate to be the one to tell these would be plane spotters – many of whom arrived at the airport this morning from 3am onwards in order to secure a decent vantage point – just one hour down the road in Sydney, large planes like this plus the A380 are landing all day every day, and you can get a lot closer and it is not nearly so crowded.

Anyway, we ended up next to a field in the middle of nowhere and yet not very far from the end of the runway, and we did get a couple of semi-decent shots.. though we had a lot of electrical wires to shoot around.

I’ve been flown over by all kinds of planes many times, so I was perfectly fine with not being right at the end of the runway for this one. We will go back to see the plane close up once they open it to the world. HARS estimates this will be in a month or so. I will be able to fulfill one of the items on my bucket list, which is to stand right next to a 747.

While we were there to see the plane fly over, my parents were at home expecting to be able to view this on news channels who had spoken about bringing the landing live to everyone – and when it came time for the landing? Nothing. They were airing a speech by Barack Obama instead. KTHX Obama, I know you are fascinating and all, but this was a special local moment which should have gone live to air.

Later on they discovered the landing was on Sky via the multichannel where you press red to see extra channels, and all you get is a tiny image and you can’t record it. Not cool, media people. Not cool at all.

Here is a video – they actually closed the highway for the landing and I think that was a good idea not for plane safety reasons but for people safety reasons, because there were just SO many people there.

It might be just me, but I still have great concerns about the apparent inability of people to enjoy a moment without having to use their phone, iPad, or various other means to capture it. And another video which gives you an idea of the large amount of people –

For other shots from the day –

This photo here sums up the absolute insanity of newbie plane spotters.

This is a great shot here.

HARS has a photo album online which you can view here.

Here is the HARS Facebook page – there are quite a few videos linked from there.

About Snoskred, country life, New South Wales, photography, photos, planes, Who Is Snoskred

Heading Into Autumn

2 Comments Posted on March 2, 2015June 1, 2015 by Snoskred

Red Curry Noodles from Nan Tien Temple

Today is the second day of Autumn here in Australia.. Therefore you might want to make some soup. I know I will be!

Here is my Roasted Red Capsicum & Potato Soup. Also for this recipe, you could use any vegetables you like. Roasted Leek and Potato is on my to-do list this season..

Here is a great post – 50 Light and Healthy Soup Recipes

cooking, country life, food, recipes, Soup