May 5th, 2010 | Category: Cats |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (2)

As part of the Noice-ities theme week, Leigh and Laura are asking about your favourite winter recipe. Generally speaking, I tend to eat the same foods in winter that I would in summer. This is probably because I lack any kind of repertoire which extends to seasonal cooking as much as it has to do with a lack of a proper winter like they have down south. I have about 10-20 things that I can cook with any degree of success and fortunately, none of them seem to be any less edible in winter than they do in summer. So this makes it a bit challenging for me to pick a favourite that is more wintry than the rest. Not to mention, Rah already stole corned beef – my all time favourite comfort food that I can actually make.

So, inspired by my dinner for tonight and that it could probably suffice as a winter recipe – I vote for Chilli Con Carne. I didn’t come up with the recipe myself – it was sent to me by email and was vouched as being tried and tested many times. An email which I have stored somewhere on my computer. For reasons unknown to me, I can’t find it right now so I’ll have to make do with what’s in my memory and hope that it is right. I hope it’s right – it’s that particular memory which I’m using to make tonight’s dinner.

Cherie’s Chilli Con Carne

April 26th, 2010 | Category: Home and Lifestyle, Internet, Nowhere Near Nigella |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

Personally the only thing I consider a bit of a downer about going on holidays is leaving the cats behind. I would never consider taking them with me on a holiday that involved more than going from this house to another house and just hanging about there for a few weeks. And let’s face it, if you are just going to go and hang out in another house, you might as well stay home.

I’m in the midst of looking at different destinations for an overseas holiday in a few years time and I was surprised to find this story about a couple who travelled some 15 000km with their kitten. They are French, so the entire website is in French. My knowledge of the language from my high school years is now fairly residual….I know enough to be a bit dangerous with it. But from what I gather, kitty travelled with them from Miami US to some place way down the bottom of South America, Ushuaia.

I think this is one of my favourite photos that they have shared from their trip. Cuteness!! There are plenty more in the Portfolio section of their website Turn of the World.

April 26th, 2010 | Category: Cats |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

This weekend has been perfect weather – not too cold but not too hot in the sun either. Our fruit trees have been suffering in tiny pots for far too long so we’ve finally given them a new home in the ground. They are meant to be balcony size fruit trees so it will be interesting to see how they go now that they are in the soil and have room to grow. I only hope they don’t perish now they are not root bound.

If they are anything like the frangipanis, they will do a lot better. They seem to be kicking along okay, even with the clay base soil we have. If anything, they seem to like it because their leaves have stopped dropping and they are even getting new growth. The three frangipanis should form a nice bit of screening foliage at the front of the house and although I did plan on putting mainly natives in the ground here, I do have a soft spot for the fragrance of a frangipani tree in full bloom. I saw a lovely teddy bear magnolia at the garden expo, so it has a home in my front garden too.

The plants between the two are a mixture of grevilleas and banksias, all in their juvenile state. Tomorrow I plan to add in a dwarf variety of callistemon that I got from the nursery. I’ve also got a heap of plants to put in that sandstone rockwall, mostly small bushy plants and ground covers. It may not look like much now but I’m hoping that in another six months, there will be a fair bit of progress.

After all, look how much my woollie bush has grown in six months! All I can say is it must be really happy where it is….I sure haven’t had do too much for it to grow as much as it has in such a short period of time.

April 25th, 2010 | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning

We will remember them.

Lest we forget.”

April 24th, 2010 | Category: Special occasions |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

This weekend, in an effort to avoid doing some much needed domestic work, we headed off to the ABC Garden Show at the Brisbane Convention Centre. I have mixed success with plants – the majority of exotic plants (excepting frangipanis) tend to fade away in my care. As does anything that requires an extensive regime of watering, fertilising and pruning. I guess that’s why native plants have become my best friends in the plant world. They seem to take all forms of abuse and while they may not thrive, they certainly have a fair bit of survival instinct, particularly if they are chosen for the soil they are planted in.

The only herbs I’ve ever managed to grow are rosemary and oregano in the kind of soil I have. I don’t know why I have an obsession with herbs because I rarely cook anything that I can put them in. But I like the way they look and I love the way they smell. Plus when I do get that urge to make a roast of some sort, nothing quite beats having the fresh herbs at your fingertips.

So when I saw this nifty little stacking set of tubs, I figured I had to give it a go. They are called Stack-a-Tubs and they can be used indoors or outdoors for anything with a relatively shallow root system. I have herbs in mine mostly, with some lavender and strawberry plants in the bottom. I imagine annuals would go nicely in them as well. Just place your water loving plants up the top and the ones that tolerate more dry soil down the bottom and away you go. When you give your plants a drink, all you need water is the top tier because any water unable to be stored in the bottom of each tier simply drips through to the next one.

Now I just have to remember to water them and I should have a thriving little herb garden on my patio.

April 17th, 2010 | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (5)

It’s been a very uneventful few months around here, at least as far as the moggies are concerned. Plenty going on in our lives but they are just doing the usual – lounging round the house and waiting (somewhat impatiently) for us to decide what form their cat park is going to take. We still have components from the one at our old house (the new owners didn’t want it) but it was designed to fit that site. Where the new one will go is relatively flat and the modules we have don’t really lend themselves to this kind of terrain. I’m even going to and fro about whether we will go for a CatMax kind of enclosure or another CatNip inspired creation.

In the meantime, they are just chilling out inside. I snapped this photo of them from the front door as part of the My Place & Yours Theme for this week at Hello Owl. One cat on the kitchen counter waiting impatiently for dinner, the other curled up on the recliner and most likely reluctant to give it up. Now the cooler months are here, I imagine that it will be even harder to extricate Rosie from her cozy spot there. There’s no doubt about it – she is an expert lounger. She could definitely give Zoe a run for her money.

April 15th, 2010 | Category: Cats |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Sometime, in between going to Billy Joel last year and last night when I saw Kelly Clarkson live, I do believe I aged approximately 45yrs. I loved Billy Joel – it was loud, it was rock and it was completely awesome! Last night, I left Boondall feeling an odd sense of discontentment because I had spent a fair portion of the night irritated at the volume of noise pumping out of the speakers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret going. If I hadn’t gone, I would have missed out on what I considered the surprise of the night – a fantastic set by Eric Hutchinson, one of the supporting acts.

So I can pinpoint my mental time warping into geriatric years to being the interval between the conclusion of his set and the start of Kelly Clarkson’s time on the stage. I don’t know what they did to the sound mixing in the interval but there was something distinctly not good about the balance during her performances with full production (i.e. synthesisers, guitars, drums, keyboards and the works). My head felt like it was about to explode and I couldn’t hear her clearly. I couldn’t even understand what she was singing. She could have been singing a Chinese traditional song to the backing music and I would have been none the wiser because the band’s volume was that loud. The only time I felt they got the balance between backing music and vocals right was during the acoustic or almost acoustic songs she sang.

When I could hear her, I was reminded of why I went in the first place because I do enjoy her music. It’s just a shame that  whoever was responsible for the sound mixing thought that all the audience wanted to hear was maximum volume noise I momentarily turned into a geriatric last night.

April 14th, 2010 | Category: Special occasions |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

I think I must have been bored this weekend because I started looking for trouble. Or maybe it’s because I was sick of being woken up in the middle of the night by a cat rummaging shopping bags out of the bottom of the little tube they were stored in. I’m sure most people either have one or have seen one – a mesh or cloth bag where you stuff the plastic shopping bag in the top and then when you’re ready to reuse them, you pull them out of the bottom.

Whoever came up with that ingenious design obviously didn’t think that cats would be remotely interested in pulling them out or they might have done away with the hole in the bottom altogether. Mojo probably wouldn’t give a rats about them but Rosie thinks that plastic bags are the best toy. She will find them in the most unusual of places and the noise of them being ripped apart in the middle of the night irritates me enough to wake me fully up.

So I decided that I could make my own. After all, I made my own stuffing for a DIY camera bag (let’s not speak of its dismal fate after we returned from Tasmania) and it wasn’t overly challenging. It wasn’t overly neat either but it served the purpose at the time. And what with Rah whipping up all sorts of things with her sewing machine (with varying degrees of sucess),  I figured I could probably make my own dilly bag. I made one of these things in high school and I’m pretty sure it only took a double period of classes – so it should be a cinch right? Well it would have been – if I was still 12yo and remotely knew how to thread a sewing machine. Fortunately, my machine caters for complete dummies like me and prints the threading instructions on the machine itself instead of in the instruction manual which is probably lost by now.

It took me about 2hrs to make one simple little dilly bag. Sewing bloggers all over the world are probably laughing right now. Even Rah is probably laughing at me. But that’s ok, because in the end, I finished what I set out to do. Here it is, hanging nicely on my pantry door from its far too long draw cord.

April 11th, 2010 | Category: Home and Lifestyle, Sewing for Dummies |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (4)