I was picked up from work this morning to take Grandad to hospital, a couple of hours later, Grandad was in the surgery waiting room waiting to go under for more skin grafts on his legs and I was back at work. I went back to the hospital a little ago to see him after he came out of surgery and he was safely tucked up in his hospital bed -> it is very handy living sort of semi across the back fence from the hospital he is staying at. It means I will be able to visit him each day after work. Don’t know how long he will be in there for yet but last time it was two weeks. So we shall see.
Last night, I picked up my first Food Connect box, I had ummed and ahhed about various fruit/veg boxes for a couple of months now but kept on coming back to Food Connect in that they seemed to provide not only a good value for money, but I liked the newsletter they supply to let you know what is happening with the farmers they use and the office.. Last week though I decided to give it a whirl and called the office, I spoke to a very friendly lady who answered my questions. I settled on the mini mixed box for 4 pick-ups over 8 weeks. This is what I got.
I got 3 avocados, 5 bananas, 2 onions, 3 potatoes, 4 apples, 1 broccoli, 1 celery, a few leaves of silverbeet, a bag of snow peas, a punnet of sprouts, 6 tomatoes, 2 carrots, 5 mandarins and half a cabbage. I think that is all. I am pretty impressed with the swag of produce. It will be interesting to see how it suits me. I know just from my first box that it will force me to eat more fruit, eat a bigger variety of veg and mostly get me to use things I wouldn’t normally buy.
Last night for dinner I made a pot of lamb shanks with lentils, peas and tomatoes. I haven’t eaten many lentils over summer and I had forgotten how much I like them 😀 Dinner was yum.
We went to The Farm (as we do) yesterday and I had a glorious time basking in the sun, taking photos and reading. Matthew cooked a veal roast, which was quite a treat. Grandad has two pecan nut trees planted in the lawn and currently they are in season so to speak. Each week I methodically work the lawn picking up the nuts. Yesterday I made a heart with what I had collected.
Whilst I was collecting the pecans though I got a little side tracked though taking photos. These are the photos I took.
This is the Fried Egg tree otherwise known as Gordonia. It is named as such because when the flowers fall to the ground they look like eggs sunny side up.
Aren’t they so pretty?
Then these balloons caught my eye. They are from Christmas Day, when the trees were full of streamers and balloons. This trio had long lost their air but had stayed hanging on a branch, fused together in the sun, swinging in the wind. Then I pulled the branch down.
Between the two pecan trees is an African Tulip tree, it is also flowering at the moment.
This is my hand and the sky. My fingers look quite slim and long for some reason in this photo.
I know Mum will hate this photo when she sees it when she returns from Africa. I was laying on the grass looking at the world upside down and out of focus and took this photo. I strangely like it.
One plant that I closely link to The Farm is crucifix orchids. A large mass of them grows on a tree stump outside the kitchen window.
This is Matthew, yes that is true, a photo of Matthew. He was on the lawn finding the strongest wireless signal. He didn’t know I took this picture. 🙂 He is in his final year of uni this year and had dived into this honours year.
This little frog gave me a scare as I was putting stuff into the car, he jumped from the tree, over the top of me and onto the bonnet. He was such a little darling of a frog.
This photo is from the week before but I will share it today. The passion fruit vine at the farm, is not just on some joe average trellis or fence, but it runs wild over the avocado trees, a gum tree and some other trees in the same patch of land. These passion fruit grow high in the canopy, metres off the ground. When they are ripe or a wind has gone through, they fall to the ground below, finding little homes in the leaf litter till they are collected.
Oh what a day that was.
There was rain, sword fighting, food, laughs, food, turf adventures, swimming, french cricket, food, water fights, lots of photo taking and generally just a fun day.
Matthew and the girls came in my car for the trip to The Farm and oh what at trip that was. Seven odd weeks later, I still think of that trip with a smile on my face.
As has always been done, you take a selection of your Christmas presents to The Farm. Matthew took his gas mask and the girls took their SuperSoakers. The journey was spent with the gas mask rotating between the three of them and scaring/getting a laugh out of other cars as we drove past. It was classic.
The Christmas Table.
Even before I started suggesting “Christmas at The Farm 08” I had wanted to have a meal on a long table with a white table cloth out on the turf or under the pecan nut trees. This Christmas I had that long table with white tablecloths.
Another thing I had been thinking about for a long time was having my glass hurricane vase, filled with glass baubles filled with beads. Christmas Day, saw the girls and I sitting on the floor of the garage filling the baubles and trying not to spill too many beads on the floor! Once they were filled though they looked gorgeous!
One of my other ideas was a large stack of pinecones on Mum’s 21st platter. Al and Ash collected the pine cones for me a couple of days before Christmas but come Christmas Day, I left the platter at Mum’s. Instead the girls had fun wrapping the pinecones with ribbons etc
After morning tea, it was time for the Christmas Tree. There were a few silly gifts given between families as well as the regular gifts intra-family. One of those silly gifts was from Karl and I. When we were in K-Mart getting presents for the girls we saw these foam swords and went “sweet” We bought the four that Chermside had in stock and then when I went to Toowong, I emptied their shelves and got another eight – one for all the grandkids and two extras in case of damages or if partners/wives/the girls wanted swords as well. The foam swords ruled the day.
Once the sword fights waned. It was time for French Cricket. For Christmas, Matthew and I gave the girls a Kanga Cricket bat and ball as they had loved playing French Cricket with us. We only gave them the ball on Christmas Eve and had planned on putting the bat with their stockings for Christmas morning, however I forgot to put the bat out so I wrapped it and took it to The Farm. But! I left the ball at home, so we used a tennis ball. We used to play a LOT of French Cricket at The Farm when we were younger. I don’t remember Grandad playing it when we were younger but Grandmum always did.
French Cricket with eighteen odd players is one hell of a game. When one of the boys got in, they would field out so they could slog it and then get in nice and close when it was one of the girls. It was all fine till James slugged the ball into the sweet potatoes… We only had one ball. That was a good sign though that it was time to start getting lunch organised.
The table was re-set, the BBQ was lit and the snags were been turned and then it started to rain. Luckily, it comes in pretty handy to have a large shed round the corner and with plenty of people it is easy to just move the entire set-up.
Aunty Susan and her girls (and Ian) had made the bon-bons for Christmas Lunch. Inside each of them was a gorgeous beaded Christmas ornament, a scratchie and the other usual goodies
After lunch we had a Turf Tour with Max
The girls were total posers and had a great time posing for photos of each other sword fighting on the turf.
When the Turf Tour was over, we retired to the front lawn to prepare ourselves for dessert. For some this meant more sword fighting
comparing hair length
or just having their photo taken
Dessert was a treasure trove of yummy food.
Trifle from Erica! Plum Pudding from me! Pavlova from Lisa! mmm so much dessert.
With our stomachs filled with sweet treats, a realisation came upon that the light was not going to last much longer and we had not yet taken the family photos!
All the family minus James who had gone visting
We know how to fight
With the fall of darkness, Iceland, Mum and Pabbi returned to Brisbane. The Howie kids, Karl, Matthew and I moved onto The Block where the Williams were staying to chill out in the pool. We had a lot of fun making whirlpools (walking in single file round the edge of the pool as fast as you can) and hypothesising why it is that some people get more pruney than others in the water.
Christmas Day was the highlight of what was an incredible Christmas season and I am looking forward to the next big family Christmas when or wherever that might be.
Friday night, after a day and a half of rain, I received a call from Mum inviting me to go waterfall hunting the next day. Most people who reads this most likely a) know Mum or are Mum or b) know enough about Mum to know that she has a thing for waterfalls. It was lightly raining when Mum picked me up from my house yesterday morning and it continued to rain all the way to Binna Burra/Lamington National Park. As we drove up the range we hit a large bank of low flying clouds which made the place look so mystical. There is not many things as beautiful as watching the sun try to shine through a cloud filled eucalypt forest. The straight, tall trunks of the eucalypt standing tall.
As we drove further up the range to Lamington we came out above the clouds. In the car park whilst we were kitting up, we met a lovely couple from Boulder, Colorado. Louisa and David came up to us in the car park and said to us, you look like experienced bush walkers, how do you remove leeches? After Mum demonstrating how to get leeches off and a little bit of a talk, we invited them along on our waterfall hunt. They were great walking partners as they are both scientists and liked stopping to look at all these strange and wonderful Australian rainforest curiosities.
The curiosities included jelly fungi, what we believe were bio-luminescent fungi (they glow in the dark), walking stick palms, little finch like birds, a Christmas Orchid in full bloom, a cluster of earth stars, a massive puff ball, trees with foam coming out the bark, a perfect land snail shell, lots and lots of strangling fig fruits on the rainforest floor and of course one of the highlights a Lamington Blue Spiny Crayfish.
Christmas Orchid
Lichen
Fern
Fungi
The falls were incredible, there was soo much water gushing over the lip. Yarrabilgong Falls were just as spectacular, the water was actually spurting over the lip and going out a metre or two before falling. From the Coomera Falls lookout we actually continued up the track to the next creek crossing where we saw a few more waterfalls coming into the creek and the Coomera Creek was just gushing with water.
Mum had a great time exploring more with her camera (she got a Canon G10 about two weeks ago and is loving it :)) and I am looking forward to seeing some of the photos she took. We ended the day with drinks and cake in the tea house before parting and heading back to Brisbane. Louisa and David, fly home today to a very different climate from what they have had the last few weeks.
Leeches of all sizes were out in force yesterday, I lost count of how many I picked off before they started sucking my blood but I did end up with eight of the suckers going undiscovered. I now have an itchy leg that I am doing my best not to rub as I haven’t gone to the chemist yet to pick up some Telfast.
“Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.†Mary Ellen Chase (1988-1973)
This year/last year (Christmas 08 is what we are talking about here), instead of getting a Radiata Pine from the farm, we got a farmed Radiata from Real Christmas Trees. Oh my lordy what a tree it was. It was just packed full of branches and it was shaped like a real Christmas Tree! In saying that in hindsight, we would have done some selective pruning as since the tree was so bushy, the ornaments were to a degree buried in the pine needles.
Karl, the girls and I decorated on the afternoon of the 23rd. Well perhaps it is more true to say Karl and I decorated the tree whilst the girls had fun with the tinsel and taking photos. What follows are photos, lots of photos. IF the photo has Silja in it, it was taken by Birta, if it has Birta in it, it was taken by Silja, that applies for most photos, but pretty much the first half were taken by Birta, the next half were taken by Silja and then the last handful and the first few were taken by myself and then a handful near the end were taken by Karl. Does that make any sense? probably not.
Eventually the tree was covered with ornaments and then out came the magic texters and the girls gave tattooed our legs. I went to the doctors that afternoon to see about my leech bite with one leg covered in doodles 🙂
Karl
Wrapping the tree in tinsel
Birta and I doing silly faces
Due to the sheer number of photos to share from this day, here is a slide show again 🙂
I’m moving house in a week today and one of the things I hope to have done by then is to have finished blogging about Christmas 2008. So here is another post to bring me a little step closer to the end of the 2008 Christmas Extravaganza.
I have wanted to make chocolate truffles for quite a while now and on more than one occasion I have brought cream with the intention of making truffles but ended up using it for something else.
For Christmas I made two types, the first where Peppermint Dark Chocolate and the second where White Rum, White Chocolate. They were rolled in a mixture of toppings, crushed Candy Canes (any idea how hard that is?), coconut, cocoa and sprinkles. I was not 100% happy with how they turned out so I won’t be sharing a recipe but here is a link to a search on FoodBlogSearch where I got my basic recipe from. My main problem was getting the consistency right and looking back now, I can also tell you that the Brisbane weather might have a little bit to do with it as well.
The truffles were rolled over two sessions. The night that I made the mixtures Karl and Matthew came over for a little gathering. We tasted one of Karl’s beers that he brought with him. By far the best tasting beer I have ever had, if I could get a case of it I would. We sampled different liqueurs and port with ice-cream and then we rolled truffles and we rolled till the mixture warmed up too much and the table warmed up as well.
The next truffle rolling session was the day that we picked Erica and Ash up from the airport. Having learnt our lessons we knew how to roll them now and Mum’s house has air-con which made it a bit easier to roll them 😀
The following photos were taken by Mum.
and this is how we roll
They were a lot of hard work but oh my they were pretty tasty and they do look pretty!
FYI for the future though. Crushed candy canes absorb moisture from anything and turn into liquid candy canes. Eat them shortly after making them.
I’m thinking that this year truffles will be made for winter celebrations not Christmas!
And speaking of Candy Canes, here are photos of the girls with candy canes they were given by the Station Master at Albion train station. Anna, the girls and I went into the city before Christmas to do some shopping and check out my office – the idea was to look at the view but I think they had more fun having their height and weight measured by one of the nurses who is my work mum #1 (I have two work mums at work :D) and listening to everyone gush at how cute they were. 😀
