The Knitting Revolutionary

The weekend of heppy!

I have had a WONDERFUL weekend!

It started Friday night when Liz and Chelle came to stay with us for a night, and I went out to have nyummy asian food in Dickson with them... mmm. Laksa. How can you go wrong!

We got up reasonably early, and despite the fact that Canberra isn't very big, Chelle got lost going for a walk. It might not be big, but it's hell confusing - all the streets are curly and curvy, and because Canberra has no billboards (yeah, it's a bit Pleasantville) and the burbs aren't that old, it's actually quite difficult to find your direction because of the distinct lack of landmarks. It's all curvy roads and dry roadsides and rather conservative looking homes, and poor dehydrated drought ravaged gardens. (Well except for the parliamentary circle and anywhere near the lakes, which are divinely green and rather lovely). Anyway. I go rescue Chelle, who was half way back to Sydney, and we all took off to Belconnen fresh food markets and had brekky at the organic cafe there. Pretty nice. The eggs are amazing, though the quality of their roasted veg has gone down - no zucchinis or other greens, just sweet potato, pumpkin and carrot. Other than that it's a gorgeous little cafe with really good organic coffee and incredibly indulgent chocolates, and lots of hippy-chick sorta things like ear candles and organic sushi ingredients and stuff. We were having so much fun that we forgot to take photos. Always a good sign :D

Then I took off to work for a few hours, and after that the foody joy continued.

I was wailing away a week or so ago about how it's a bit sucky that Lebanese food is so luscious, but takes so long to prepare, so a few girlies put their hands up for the experience of coming over and making stuffed vine leaves. If you do this alone, you need about 3 or 4 hours. If you have girlfriends and a bottle of wine, you can knock it over in 2. And the 2nd hour is when they're cooking on the stove top, so it's an hour of rolling spliff-type munchies, and an hour of hanging out, drinking wine and gossiping enthusiastically about all sorts of silly stuff.

Divine, wonderful, beautiful way to spend a Saturday arvo! There will definitely be repeats of the experience, next time I'm doing stuffed zucchinis. *droool* The recipe for the stuffed vine leaves is very accessible, you can find it in this little Woman's Weekly book. A lighter, more traditional lemon-flavoured style can be found elsewhere, but I love this one because it's so sweet and rich with the tomato sauce.

And finally, the roast of doom later that night. Need I say more? Despite a no-show (silly boy doesn't know what he's missing, nor how sought-after a seat at the Doom Roast is), it was a raging success, especially with Maddi's home made margarita ice cream. Mmm.

Could it have been any better? Not in a million years. Bring on the 4 day week, I feel like a million dollars :D Now I'm just hanging out with a glass of rose and reading Jane Austen by candlelight. *heppy heppy heppy*

Yumminess galore

This is definitely not a weight watchers type recipe.

Fry up chicken breast, onion, bacon, then when the pan is nice n hot, add some garlic and seeded mustard. Then you push everything to the egdes, and let the middle of the pan get hot and splash in some white wine, which will bubble and mostly evaporate, mix it up and repeat the wine thing once or twice. Yummmm. Then all you have to do is let it get nice n hot again, and add a little thingy of cream (I used "lite" cream and it was great, I have a feeling full cream might be too rich) and then chuck in a bit of cornflour to thicken it (maybe a teaspoon) and let it simmer til it's just right. I also added a bit of salt and a tiny bit of nutmeg. I would have used lovely chunky mushrooms if I had any. Ah wull.

Then I got a cute little measuring cup and I made little rice sandcastles! How cute is that?

Gourmetsqueak!

Pot pies

How to make a yummy-yummy pot pie! It's very easy, and it's one of those things that I don't really have a recipe for, I just sort of make it. Luke used to do beef and guiness ones for the bistro, and I watched him and adapted the recipe to include things I liked, which is probably the best way to do it.

Start off with a biggish saucepan. Um, this recipe has no measurements in it, so I apologise for that. My mum taught me to cook with instructions like "and then add a nice big healthy squirt of salt" (salt comes out of the big plastic saxa bottles in a squirt, LOL), so if that sort of description drives you crazy, you're gonna hate this. BUT! Every time I do the pies they turn out different because I throw in whatever's in the house/fridge, and keep tasting/sniffing it until it's about right.

So you get your saucepan and throw in a chopped/wedged onion or 2 (I use 2 because I like lots of onion but you probably only need one), bit of butter or oil, some garlic if you like. Fry it up a bit until the onion is as you like it, pop it aside in a little bowl. If you really want to go all out, you can fry some bacon up with it at this stage too. I was going to but forgot, didn't make much difference cos it still tasted amazing. Hehe.

Get your meat, (I used about 500g, made three pies) I like chuck steak because it gets that lovely stringy effect when it's made into a stew. Fry it up over a fairly high heat, and when it's sealed and looking good, and the saucepan base is nice and hot, throw in a heap of red wine. You can put in enough to sizzle and evaporate, but I like to put a good dose of it in, because I like my pie sauce rich. Then add stock, I put in a beef oxo cube and about a cup of water, generally (more wine + less stock = richer sauce); (more stock + less wine = lighter sauce). It's up to you what you like. If you use chicken meat instead of red meat, you can use veggie stock and white wine. The variations and the possibilities are quite literally endless. Throw in a few tablespoons (more or less) of worcestershire sauce. It should be quite runny and soupy now, but never mind, that'll change.

Then I start just throwing things in at random. I put in some cornflour to thicken it, some sweet soy sauce to make it nice and brown and rich, a big dose of dried herbs (I used a heaped tablespoon of the masterfoods italian blend this time which is just dried oregano, thyme, rosemary, marjoram, basil, sage and something else i can't remember), I put in some bbq sauce I think (LOL), um, salt and pepper and maybe even some gravox powder. Then I put in a cup of frozen peas and corn, and some sliced carrots, you can use whatever veggies you want. If you put diced potato in it, cook the potato first, and don't put as much flour in because the starchiness of the taters will thicken the mix a bit as well. Put the cooked onion and garlic back in too.

In winter, when you really need warming up, I put in cayenne pepper and sweet chilli sauce as well, so this makes it spicy as well as hot, and warms you up two ways! Red capsicum is nice thrown in as thin slices, it sweetens it up. Yum. I often put in a tablespoon of tomato paste and a very ripe chopped tomato, but again, it's up to you. You can also use beer instead of the wine. Experiment.

So mix it all up, and taste it. No, not the meat! Taste the sauce, the soup, on a spoon. Add pretty much whatever you like (I threatened to throw Phoenix in at one stage but she really wouldn't have a bar of it.)

Preheat your oven to about 220, 230 degrees C (you may need it hotter if you dont have an oven fan), and grab a tray to put the dishes on.

Then you want to reduce your mixture so it's the right thickness, as it's likely to still be pretty runny, you want to let the cornflour do its thing. Turn the heat right down to a slow simmer. This is where if you were clever, it'd be first thing in the morning, and you'd throw it in a slow cooker and leave it on all day. But if it's a weeknight and you've just gotten home from work, let it simmer for 30-60 mins, if it's really runny, leave the lid off the pot; if it's almost there but not quite, put a lid on to keep the moisture in the  pie mixture. Stir it every now and then, it will stick.

At this stage I like to do mash for serving with it while the mixture is simmering. Up ta you.

Then you cut little circles of frozen puff pastry, and get the pie mixture off the stove, ladle it into your pie dishes (dont over-fill them or they'll spill everywhere in the oven) so that the mixture is almost to the top - i leave about 5mm at the top), put the pastry on top of the dish and press with your fingers around the edge to seal. Brush with milk and chuck it in your nice hot oven until the pastry is puffy and golden brown.

I like to serve it with my mash and some fresh steamed greens or a salad.

Yummmmmmmm. Hope you can make sense of this. Enjoy :):):)

Getting off my bum

I've been getting of my bum and Doing Shtuff. It's quite a good feeling.

I'd spun this stuff months ago, and finally got round to navajo plying it:

Then I plied this too (with my tres coo andean plying tool):

Now with a few more bobbins freed up, I thought I'd use up some of the plain cream stuff that I had lying around the place and spun a nice fluffy lofty chunky wool. I'm going to dye it and make a chunky scarf/dickie type thing:

THEN! because I was on SUCH a roll, I thought I'd spin up the floofy ball of sliver which had been dyed in my Jenny Greenteeth colourway. Yum. Sooooo delicious. I'm still trying to decide how I'm going to ply this but I'm tending toward navajo so I get the nice boldness of colour accentuated. Self striping handspun. Oh yeah.

And I didn't stop there. Oh no! One of my favourite winter dishes is pot pie, and I'd just bought 6 little ramekins for making PAH. So I made a rich thick gooey stoo, and stuck it in little pots, and put pastry over the top, brushed it with milk and baked it good. Mmm, pah. Spinning and eating. It doesn't get much better than this for a lush, laid back weeknight. Add a few glasses of rose and a couple of Gray's Anatomy episodes in there and I'm in heaven. *puurrrrrr*