mosaic road

"I am not a Paper Cup"

I drink take away coffees and quite a few of them, so do my family and friends. We all throw away dozens of paper cups a year. I am trying to reduce my footprint so have purchased some plastic look alike coffee cups. The idea is to use them for your take aways , wash them and re use for ever more. One cup instead of dozens, hopefully. There are lots of designs and variations available, I chose these for the colours. I have seen them with black lids but feel they look like rubber and I just don't want to drink from a something black and rubbery. The baristas at all the local cafes are happy to use them and lots of cafes sell them with their logos. Now I just have to remember to take it with me !!

A Fascinating Tour

Here is my youngest daughter about to tour a mine. It is an old mine somewhere in the Dolomites. She has some Italian but says she must have missed the textbook chapter containing all vocabulary pertaining to mines.  What she did spot was groups of people dressed in huge polar fleeces and discovered that they have respiratory therapy in the mine. They enter a sealed room in the centre of the mine for two hours a day for two weeks. The air in the room is at 100 % humidity and as clean as air you find at an altitude of 2000 meters. They get big reclining beds to lie on for their designated two hours. I quite fancy the idea of reclining for two hours a day. I am even happy to pass on the sealed room in the mine and do my reclining at home breathing home air !!!

Banana Bread Crumb Pudding

Bananas are a luxury item just currently. The supermarket has them for about $13.00 per kilo. They are outrageously priced as so many crops were wiped out by floods and cyclones earlier in the year. I have certainly not purchased them at that price but when bags of sadder looking ones were selling for about $4 a kilo I snapped them up. They were a little imperfect and so ideal for cooking. This bread  pudding recipe called for mashed bananas but I sliced them up so there was a better texture and threw in a generous handful of raspberries, more for colour than anything. Very yummy !!

Shabby Chic Storage

Deperate to find a suitable dresser I wandered into a shop called Buried Treasures. I had trawled Ebay and the Ikea catalogue and nothing appealed or it was too expensive. I did not think for one minute that an answer to my storage crisis would be found in this funny old shop. All the furniture in there was covered in ornaments and other odds and sods. But there sat an ideal shabby chic dresser and what music to my ears when the lady said she had just dropped the price from $250 to $180 !! It was lined with yellowing newspaper and is on the ricketty side but I loved it immediately !!

Guests Welcome but.......

You are welcome to come and stay the night but you will need to share the space with mounds of boxes and belongings. At least the bed is made up and is cosy and inviting but that's where it ends. This room is tiny and is ultimately going to end up as storage cum study cum guest bed. Currently the storage bit reigns supreme but it is early days and every weekend will see more progress in making this house a home.

Chef in the Making

 Here is my little girl all in her chef's whites. She spent the day with the pastry chefs and even made ganache. She is a hospitality student and this just gave her a taste of life in the pastry department of a big city hotel. She loved her day and is tempted to do her pastry diploma although it takes three years. I would be overjoyed to be on the receiving end of her homework.

Inner Peace

 

Inner Peace: This is so true! If you can start the day without caffeine, If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it,  If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time, If you can take criticism and blame without resentment, If you can conquer tension without medical help, If you can relax without alcohol,  If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,    ...Then You Are Probably ...            The Family Dog!

... and you thought I was going to get all spiritual

Winter Fruit Crisp

After a trip to Costco I had a freezer full of frozen berries and lots of tins of peaches plus some fresh rhubarb in the crisper. What a delicious combination, I thought. A perfect melange, I thought. So my winter fruit crisp was born early this morning and eaten straight from the oven. 

 

Baby Broccoli Quiches

These were just way to easy to make and tasted wonderful, vegetarian heaven in fact. Very quick to cook too with the new fan forced oven. These little quiches are perfect to eat for really any meal. I made up the batter, greased the muffin holes with spray olive oil and whipped them into the oven. There are 12 holes on this particular muffin tray. I gave the visiting grown up child the oven timer and headed off to the gym. All went well, the cooking time given was spot on. There is no doubt in my mind at how successful the result was as on my return the 12 quiches had become 6. I was gone for one hour. Cooking time was 20 minutes leaving 40 minutes for cooling and scoffing !!!

The New Oven - Trial & Error

With the new house came a new improved kitchen and a newish oven - probably 5 years old. It is an Italian one, the brand is Technika. It is fan forced and has a light and a timer. My old one had none of these attributes so I am now in baking heaven. Last night I made choc chip cookies and there was a certain amount of trial and error. The first batch were a little weeny bit singed but till chewy. the second batch way better. I did encounter a major issue though when I went to put the cookie tray in the oven - oops, it did not fit ! I had to quickly slide the baking paper onto the base of a  large casserole dish. This means I better do some measuring and make a shopping expedition to buy some trays that I can actually get into this oven so the cookie monsters in this house can be fed.