Choc Chip & Walnut Muffins.

Did you see these muffins we made Saturday...?

I only bring it up because I am munching on one right now & MAN. They're good. I mean, really.

Choc Chip & Walnut Muffins;

1 3/4 cups plain flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup extra light olive oil
1 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
3/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 180 & place paper patty cases in muffin tin (our batch made 18 smaller muffins, but that was with batter filled right to the top of the patty cases & several stray dollops of batter around the kitchen...).

Mix together sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla & olive oil in a large bowl until well combined. Add flour, baking powder & salt & again mix until combined.

Fold in chocolate chips & walnuts.

Spoon mixture into patty cases & bake for about 20 mins or until cooked.

Y. U. M.

The Saturday That Was - Just Punky & Me.

Reading.

Baking.

Munching.

Playing in the sun.

Thank you for a beautiful day little Punk,

Love from Mummy. xoxoxo

Cheese Bread

A little afternoon baking - just the thing when you're hankering for a quiet cup of tea and something to nibble and there just ain't a thing in the house...!

Cheese Bread (From Better Cooking; A year in the kitchen)

2 cups plain flour

1 tablespoon caster sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper

60g (2 1/4 oz) butter, cut into cubes

2 cups grated cheddar cheese

2 spring onions, thinly sliced

1 cup milk

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees, lightly grease a large loaf tin and line the base and sides with baking paper. Put the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and pepper into a food processor. Add the cubes of butter to the dry ingredients and process until the mixture is like fine breadcrumbs. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl, add the cheese and spring onion and stir until combined.
2. Whisk together the egg and milk. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients. Add the combined milk and egg and mix with a table knife to form a soft dough. Do not over mix.
3. Scoop the mixture evenly into the prepared loaf tin. Bake for 30 - 40 minutes or until the bread is golden and sounds hollow when tapped. Remove from the oven and stand on a wire rack in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out. Cut into slices before serving.

What I did differently;

Tasty cheese instead of Cheddar, a handful of garlic tops (from the garlic growing in the garden - you could use garlic chives), chives & parsley instead of the spring onions & since I don't have a food processor I just mixed all the stuff in step 1 & mushed the butter into the flour with my fingers until it got all crumbly like breadcrumbs. Next time I think I might use Parmesan too - for some extra cheesy bite.

Punky and I had a slice each, not long from the oven, for afternoons'es.

Scrumptious.

Father's Day is on hold....

...until The Boy gets home this afternoon. He works every weekend, so we knew he wouldn't be here today, but it's still kind of sad.


The upside is however, is that I have had ample time to get things done for his return as today's honoured guest.


His one (reasonable) request was for me to make him a Lemon Meringue Pie. I have never made said pie, or any dessert pie as far as I can remember. My most successful attempts at baking have all been in the vegan arena, not, for example, in baking requiring copious amounts of eggs. Having said that, and also being aware of the notorious reputation this pie has for it's difficulty... I was quietly confident.


I have a tendency to be blissfully unaware of things that can go wrong with undertakings I have never attempted. I have the odd problem of being more nervous about things I should know I can do or have done many times. Take labour, for instance. No matter how many times I was asked if I was nervous about giving birth, or even warned about it, I thought to myself; "Piffle! Birth is a natural part of life! As if it COULD hurt THAT much!". I went to calm birth classes where I learnt to visualise my happy place & breath deeply.


Needless to say, I was quite surprised by the actual event.


Lucky for me, making Lemon Meringue Pie & giving birth are not at all alike, and it seems my confidence this time was not unfounded... it looks damn good! I went just a *little* bit snap happy when I got it out of the oven, as proud as punch as I was, but here is just one of the photos....




Looking at the pie all nice & puffy like it is, I entertained the idea that I was a super wifey after all, and then I realised;

a) I'm not, officially, a 'wifey' at all and
b) Super-wifies are probably still not in their PJs (sorry FLYLady!) while whipping this & boiling that... (underwear on the outside of their clothes maybe, but not PJs...)


All that remains is the taste test, cross your fingers for me! It has to live up to that fabled childhood pie, you know the one, the dreaded pie that "Mum used to make..."!


Have also wrapped everything in Le Punk's gorgeous hand painted wrapping:

(See that big fat red package? Shhhhh.... don't tell anyone, but that is 'Drop Dead Beautiful' Jackie Collins' latest adventures of Lucky Santelago.... he LOVES those books! *guffaw*)

All that AND I managed to win a prize... ;)

I have been drooling over this book online & was super lucky & managed to win a copy! Thank you to Justine over here!

I actually feel quite blessed to have won this book, as I do to have won the purse & tote - I have only entered giveaways which I really, really, would like to win. I don't enter just because I can, or because I love the thrill of winning, but because someone is giving me the chance to own something I quietly, or not so quietly, covet, and, in all honesty, I wouldn't own otherwise.

The truth of the situation is I really couldn't afford to buy this gorgeous book, that stylish purse or original tote, but they are coming to me all the same... that is just amazing to me! I feel so incredibly lucky - and as I wrote in my email to Justine @ mixtape earlier, I have never thought myself a particularly lucky person. I am having to re-evaluate my luck status!

I hope everyone is having a gorgeous Fathers Day with the special Daddy in their lives.

xoxox

Wow. I Suck at This!!

So... my last post was in March?!

Time flies when you're having fun with a little Punk, let me assure you. It is now August... AUGUST!!! I can hardly believe it but it's true. Just over a month until I turn 28. It's funny you know... I remember a time in my teens when I couldn't even IMAGINE turning 25. 25 sounded ancient and anything more than that just didn't bear thinking about. That was when I was 15 maybe, 16?

Where did I think I would be when I was 27, all the way back then...?! Well, having established that 27 was too old to ever want to be, I'll settle for where I thought I'd be at 25. What and who I thought I would be.

There were a lot of dreams. Dreaming is one of the things I do the very best. Most dreams saw me living in the city, in an apartment. I remember fantasising about driving (small car, hatchback perhaps, red) home to my apartment & getting out & walking up the stairs wearing a business clothes. Don't ask me what sort of job I would have had... somehow I never got to that part. The most important part was to be living in a city. At 16 I lived in a tiny country town which I hated with a passion, nothing seemed more exciting that city life.

And here I am. Recently returned to another country town. Not as small as that one from my teens, but certainly no city. The time for city life and apartment living has come and gone (and I did love it, just as much as I always knew I would), as has the time for living in a shack on the Hawksbury River with an outside bathroom, the time for living in a boarding house on my own in an unknown town, the time for living by the beach with salt in the air, the time for living in a unit amongst hundreds of others with paper-thin walls, the time for living in an old house in the mountains where it occasionally snowed, the time for living on a well heeled street in the suburbs... now is the time for renting a house with an abnormally large backyard, keeping chickens and playing with toys, while saving ever so slowly to buy a house with an abnormally large backyard for keeping chickens in and lots of room for playing with toys.

I can't say I imagined this life... not a 16. Later I definitely would have dreamt of a simpler life... I have a dirty little hippie buried deep inside somewhere, but I was never one of those girls who dreamed of having kids and living happily ever after. I can't honestly say why - whether I thought that 'happily ever after' was an unobtainable myth, or whether I just couldn't imagine meeting a little child that didn't annoy the hell out of me... Definitely I was extraordinarily selfish and self absorbed, I think you'd be hard pressed to find too many teenage girls that aren't, so that could be why. Perhaps even then I realised that to have a child or even a handsome prince, would mean that the story wouldn't be all about me anymore.

It's a cliche to say that I love my life even though I never planned it this way, but cliches are cliches because they occur over and over again in life, and for something to keep happening like that, well, there must be a reason. You just cannot imagine the impact of having a child of your own until you have one. Even when you're expecting a child, when there is no escaping your massive belly, constant heartburn & aching legs, you have no idea. You are still you and for you, albeit much heavier and with more erratic hormones. You don't know even when you are in the throes of labour, the pain (and it is pain, no matter what they say... I tried that calm birth visualisation hoodoo... bah humbug!!) is yours and yours alone.

You know, the moment you hold your baby. You know that from then on, your life is not your own. You know that the tiny person you have clutched to your breast will hold your heart in their hands for the rest of your life. You know that their pain will be your pain and that their joy will be your joy, and you could not be happier about it.

So. This is where I am. Sometimes I miss city life. Sometimes I miss the unfettered life I had before I was a mother. But, the more I take the time to enjoy the little things in the here and now, the more I forget about that time, and I would not, even for a second, give up what I have now to go back. Instead I look towards the future, with a sticky little hand in my own. (Take that 16 year old me! :P)

Right! What have we been up to in those missing months...?!

Hibernating, mostly. It's been so cold here & The Boy got his licence which meant we got a car and walking everywhere was no longer necessary. Unfortunately that has meant that we walk hardly anywhere, that goes for riding the bike too. It's just so cold all the time, and not only that, it looks like it is going to rain almost every second of every day... Sometimes it does & sometimes it doesn't but the problem is you never can tell.

For the most part I don't mind hibernating. Punky seems happy enough with a run around the yard, a bout of drawing, tickle matches & a session of Yo Gabba Gabba, which is just as well as we gave up on the swimming lessons for a term and a half. First lesson again tomorrow - we've already missed 3 this term so I can honestly say I am not entirely looking forward to tomorrow mornings inquisition about where we've been and why we've not been attending. I don't think the truth (I am a lazy slob) will go down too well. Perhaps I should invent a tragic imaginary illness for a tragic imaginary great Aunt or something.

I thought I would post here again because funnily enough, while trying to start an entirely different blog to do with my solely crafty exploits, I revisited this one & enjoyed reading it, the little there is of it to read mind you.

For instance, I'd forgotten all about making the sushi... that wasn't terribly fun but it was an experience & I'm glad I wrote about it.

Another experience I don't want to forget; A couple of days ago Punky and I decided we needed to use up some of the eggs our chookies are so graciously supplying for us, so we emptied the cupboard of anything and everything we could possibly use for baking; flour, sultanas, dates, sugar etc and scoured our op shop rescued old school cookbooks & found a recipe for Date Loaf.

Date Loaf
(From a cover-less, yellowed, water damaged, "crispy", copy of The Commonsense Cookery Book, compiled by the Public Schools Cookery Teachers' Association of NSW, reprinted in 1957, with some of the best cooking related advertisements I have ever seen)


Ingredients.-

• 2 cups flour.
  
• 1/2 cup sugar.
  
• 1 cup dates.
  
• 1 level dessertspoon baking powder.
  
• 1 egg.
  
• Small cup milk.
  
• 2 level tablespoons butter.
  
• Pinch of Salt.
  

Method.-

1. Beat butter and sugar to a cream.
   
2. Add well-beaten egg.
   
3. Add milk gradually.
   
4. Add chopped dates.
   
5. Stir in lightly the flour, baking powder and salt sifted.
   
6. Half fill greased tin.
   
7. Bake in a moderate oven 3/4 of an hour.

What we did differently; Well, firstly, nothing was "beaten" more sort of "squished" together by The Little Punk's courageous mixing efforts. The dessertspoon measurement was taken to mean an actual dessertspoon but it was later discovered that it was something like 1/2 a tablespoon... why they wouldn't just write that I don't know... Baking paper instead of greasing the tin and a moderate oven was probably not wholly achieved. By and large however the experience was a good one and we ended up with a delicious, if not terribly photogenic, date loaf.

We also made a half dozen sultana cupcakes but they were even less photogenic & even more yummy... ;)