When you have two kitties both of whom like to get up close and personal with, well, everything, finding a place to burn candles can be a bit of a problem.
This location is very high up and there are no places where the kitties can make their way up here, no steps to make a kitty ladder. In fact, it is probably less than half a meter from the ceiling. Tealights can be safely burned here, and this is the location where I burn my wax melts.
I also burn a tealight in the Dusk Spinning Butterfly tealight candle holder. It puts a gorgeous spinning golden glow on the ceiling which is somehow comforting to me. The thermals that the candle throws out magically turns the turntable and it spins. Depending on the candle you use and the heat given off, it can spin at different speeds.
You might ask – why two different kinds of tealight candles? Well first of all, they have different burn times. The IKEA ones are regularly 4 hours or so, which makes them perfect for an evening burn eg 6pm-10pm. The Dusk candles are 6-8 hours which is a good daytime burn time. Combine the two and you cover the entire day – 10-6pm or so, then 6-10pm or so, and I can light them and forget them, because they will burn out before I have to think about snuffing them.
The spinning butterfly tealight candle holder can still be purchased from Dusk, though I do not see any purple ones or the teal green which I really wanted to get as well. I will cross my fingers that maybe our local store has one in teal when we next visit – we are nearly out of chicken, so we will be heading to Shellharbour and Warrawong next weekend. If no teal, maybe this gold owl version might come home with us.
Below I have put a couple of videos – they are just 10 seconds long each, you get a closeup of the spinning butterflies in the first one, and you can see the reflection the spinning holder puts on the ceiling in the second.
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.
Last week I had the flu, and I spent a couple of nights staying up so the other half could get an uninterrupted sleep, so my body clock is all out of whack again. Even so, we planned a few things for Saturday. I wanted to go over to Berry to take some photos of the place I’m planning to go to in the event of the Zombie Apocalypse, and I also wanted to drop into haven and space and Candleberries – two great shops you should not miss if you ever go to Berry..
First we dropped into haven and space where we picked up a replacement coffee mug for one we had broken, and two new designs. These mugs are gorgeous and they last a very long time. Priced at $4.95 per mug, they are also great value. The candles pictured were $4.50 each.
As it was past two, we decided to get a snack as well. We didn’t want too much as we were going out to dinner at 7. haven and space have opened up a cafe behind their new store called Sakana and I’d eaten there before when family was visiting, so we dropped in for a bowl of chips and a couple of iced coffees.
The iced coffees arrived in these magnificent tall glasses with my favorite colour blue around the rim. If you are reading this post here on my blog, see how that blue matches my blue background colour? :) ——> over there?
We dropped into Candleberries and picked up some wax melts and a new candle for The Other Half. Why yes, that melt set is scented salted caramel popcorn, and it does smell exactly like that. There’s also Home Sweet Home which will stay here and Black Cherry which will go off to my aunt in the next package along with the salted caramel popcorn. By the time she receives it, her cancer treatment will be nearly finished.
On the way back to the car we spotted these cows in a window. It is lucky the shop was not open, is all I can say.
We went out to dinner at our usual Chinese restaurant with my parents, my Uncle and his wife, and two other friends my parents know from work. When we arrived at the bowling club there was quite an impressive band setup including a sound desk and a proper drum kit which said “The Villains” on it.. Little did we know at the time what an amazing performance would come to us as a surprise.
The club was absolutely packed with people – I think it is the last weekend of School Holidays here and it is always packed in school holidays but not usually to this extent. My uncle reported back to us after one of his smoke breaks that he was talking to someone outside and that they had said this particular band had people coming from places somewhat far away – they had groupies following them.
Who knew Darth Vader was also a musician?
After dinner we could not get a seat out in the club, every seat was taken. We ended up in their function room off to the back, and we could see the band members in costume. They took to the stage a little after 8:30 and we all headed out into the room to see the band kick off with a performance of an Icehouse song called Walls which sounded more like a Pink Floyd song, it was just amazing. The sound setup was brilliant, the music was incredible, and the band was engaging and captivating.
The singer was dressed as The Riddler and he had a microphone stand with a question mark in it. I believe we had The Penguin as the keyboard player, The Joker as the bass player, The Devil as the drummer, and the most notable mention goes to Darth Vader as the lead guitarist. His costume must have been a total sweatbox, but he never removed any part of it, and he played in it for over 2 hours – with a short break in the middle. Plus instead of heading directly outside on his break, he took off into the crowd to let them pose for photos with him – and his lightsaber.
I have for you a short video clip of the Darth Vader guitarist. :) This was taken during Down Under by Men At Work. You will notice he is marching, despite being wrapped in much quilted fabric. This is some serious costume dedication right here.
When they took a break, we talked about leaving because one or two had an early morning the next day, but we all decided this band was too good to leave. And in the latter half of their show, even The Other Half got up and danced which happens so rarely I cannot recall another such incident!
I completely understand why they have groupies following them, and I could see myself doing the same thing. They are due back at our club in August and we will definitely be there. None of the videos on their website do true justice to this band. You have to be there in person.
When they left the stage we were among the very vocal crowd shouting for an encore, and they came back on with two band members in white coats and performed “She Blinded Me with Science” – a bizarre choice but we all loved it.
The final song they played was Underneath the Radar by Underworld, a song I have always disliked, but they made me love it. And that speaks many volumes. Most of the music was songs from the early 80’s and music I had on records, back in the days of records, music we played on Saturday mornings to clean the house, and music my friends and I used to create dances for.
They played music from bands like Depeche Mode, Madness, Split Enz, the ever wonderful and unforgettable “don’t you forget about me” by Simple Minds made famous by The Breakfast Club movie, and even a song from The Cure! It was one of my favourites too, Inbetween Days. There were a couple of newer songs, most notably Pretty Vegas which I knew from Rockstar: INXS and Mr Brightside by The Killers.
By the time we got home, I was so tired I went to bed at a reasonable hour for the first time this week. And can you believe, entry to the bowling club is free. We pay the tiny amount of $11 each year to be a member, and that allows the member many benefits, such as using the boat ramp, the courtesy bus, and various other awesomes.
The official name is the Tuffsteel Forge 32cm Roaster Pan. 32cm is the interior dimension – with the handles it stretches out to nearly 39cm wide.
I love this thing. Seriously adore it. At the moment I use it every second day – my meal plan has been planned out that way, so I can use the next day to get it in the dishwasher and clean again. I’m actually planning to buy a second one of these for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is in case anything ever happens to the glass lid. Glass and Snoskred is not a very good match.
Some of the reasons I love this amazing cooking unit include –
– Keeps all the cooking inside the roaster dish.
– Whatever liquid you add eg wine, lemon juice, chicken or vegetable stock, just plain water, steams up and cooks the food faster.
– Whatever liquid you add circulates through the food beautifully.
– Keeps the oven clean – we’ve had issues before with cooking food in a regular ceramic baking dish and having a mess all over the oven. This way all the mess is safely contained inside.
– I can make entire meals just using this one pan.
One Pan recipes I have cooked inside this roaster pan –
– Chicken Mini Roast & Potatoes
– Chicken kievs, potatoes, cauliflower
– Chicken kievs, cheesy baked potatoes
– Chicken filos, broccoli, pumpkin
– Roast Beef, potatoes, pumpkin
– Roast Pork, potatoes, sweet potatoes
– Pasta Bake
– Fake Lasagne
– Quiche
– Bacon and Leek Mac and Cheese
Soup recipes that use more than the roaster pan – eg you take the roasted items out, pop them into a plastic container, add chicken or vegetable stock and milk or coconut milk and whiz up to make them into a soup.
– Roasted Red Capsicum and Potato Soup
– Roasted Potato and Leek soup
– Roasted Potato, Leek and Pumpkin soup (recipe coming soonest!)
– Roasted Cauliflower Soup
I am planning more soups for winter. :) Especially a mixed veg one with swedes, turnips, pumpkin, potato, sweet potato, capsicum, leek, and anything else I can fit in the roaster pan.
I found this roaster pan at DFO in Canberra while I was looking for yet another ceramic baking dish. We’d had multiple bad experiences with ceramic baking dishes cracking and breaking, and I’d just lost our most recent somewhat trusty Ikea ceramic dish, leaving us with only one baking dish large enough to cook the things that we regularly cooked.
This roaster pan was found in one of those kitchen stores with every possible thing you might ever use in the kitchen and I figured – at least it can’t crack and break – I’ll give this thing a try. It has seriously changed the way I cook in our kitchen.
Unfortunately it is not so easy to find online. Deals Direct do stock it but it is presently out of stock. According to other sites when it was in stock it retailed around the $45 mark. Mine cost me $80. At that price, I might even buy two extras and put one away for later on.
You can get roaster pans with a lid that is not glass – however I do prefer to be able to look inside and see how things are going without having to open the oven and take the dish out. Plus, our convection microwave is a Solardom which uses a halogen heater to cook and that does not work very well if the food cannot see the “light”. The pan has a true non stick coating. As in, nothing ever sticks to it, for reals.
The oven in this house has never been used by us due to absolute dirtiness from the previous homeowners. Seriously, I turned it on once and it smelled so bad, ew. The design of this house means cooking smells congregate in the main bedroom, walk through robe and bathroom, so using the oven again was not an option. The landlord has finally agreed to replace it and I intend only to use this roasting pan in it – that way I will never have to clean the oven.
We have a bit of a rodent issue in our yard. Some people would say that chooks and rodents go hand in hand – in our case we have two very elderly people who live at the back of our block and their block is completely overgrown, full of weeds and rodents. If we can’t fix that, it is very unlikely we are going to fix the rodent issues on our own.
If you go out there at night, you can hear the rodents scampering and squeaking on what was once a tennis court belonging to the elderly people but is now an overgrown mess..
Traps do not work for these creatures, either because they are way too smart or they don’t like what we’re putting in them. Usually peanut butter has worked for us in the past. Maybe we’ll give cheese a try.
However the other half bought an ultrasonic pest controller which might be stopping the rodents from going near the traps at all.
What we are catching instead – without even trying – is some very poisonous arachnids. And here I will put a read more for those who do not like eight legged creature tales to come as a surprise. Click through to read a fascinating yet terrifying story. Continue reading →
So, here’s a quick and somewhat hilarious arachnid story.. without images because I don’t want to see pictures of an eight legged creature and neither do you. :) I’m putting it behind a read more for the arachnophobes. :) Click through to read it.
So, yesterday, I was watching Judge Judy on Channel 10 at 3pm, as I sometimes do when it seems like the wait to 6pm double episodes of Judge Judy on Arena is too long to wait..
I should point out that I had my little cordless headset on, and I was actually in the kitchen trimming up 1kg of bacon which was purchased on the weekend. I guess that is more like listening to Judge Judy. I got 5 lovely packages of bacon bits, 1 package of bacon bits for dinner that night, and 2 packages of offcuts which we like to grill up in the oven till they are super crispy.
One of the downsides of not watching a lot of free to air tv is missing out on local ads. Sometimes they are not very interesting, but today I heard that Spotlight was having a 30% off sale. My little ears connected with my shopping brain, and the message I heard was THIS SALE SEEMS NICE!
I did some maths in my head, working out that 30% off takes $9 off a 29.95 candle. I should go to Spotlight and buy some Yankee Candles, I thought, as I drove to my 4pm appointment to see my amazing psychologist.
And a couple of hours later, I did go, because Spotlight were open till 8pm. They told me that in the ad too. I got a couple of the “medium” candles in Black Cherry and Vanilla Lime and 4 wax melts, 2 Mango Peach Salsa and 2 Pineapple Cilantro.
Apparently the 30% off is for Tuesday as well, in case you did not catch an ad and you want to go get yourself some Yankee Candle, or something else.. :)
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. :)
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.. :)
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.
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..
