First harvest

Passionfruit is my favourite fruit. This is the first passionfruit we've had off our vine. It was sublime.

A week of freezer: day 7

Zucchini lasagna

One of my favourite recipies. It is from Bill's food and is so quick to put together. I used lasagne sheets from the freezer, zucchini from the garden, spinach that needed to be used up and tomatoes left over from our felafel dinner. Healthy and delicious.

A week of freezer: day 6

Felafel with fresh tomatoes, beetroot relish, tzatziki and spinach

I bought Larder Fresh felafel at the market. They are very yummy and are free from almost everything: preservatives, dairy, gluten, wheat, chickpeas... joking.

5 minutes in the oven and they are done. I reckon dinner took me 15 minutes to cook and that includes chopping up the tomatoes, make the tzatziki and put everything together.

A week of freezer: day 5

Rustic winter soup

In summer. I gave #1 two chicken nuggets for lunch (from the freezer of course!) and after putting them infront of him, he turned to me and said 'can I have soup too?'. Now, for those of you out there who have children who hardly ever eat, you'll know how I feel when I say - this is music to my ears. So one little container of soup promptly defrosted. Win-win. One more thing in his tummy and one more thing out of my freezer.

A week of freezer: day 4

Spaghetti with spinach pesto and prawns

When we went to the market a lovely lady from Verde Provedores gave us two containers of spinach pesto. She saw that we had a newborn and figured that cooking great dinners wasn't really a priority for us right now! She suggested that we pop the pesto in the freezer and stir it through pasta when we needed a quick meal. I decided to go a little up market and team it with some prawns and mushrooms. I pan fried the prawns and mushrooms in a bit of butter and then scattered some basil from the garden over the top of the dish. It was definately the nicest freezer meal we've had this week. If you see the Verde pesto's around, I recommend them. The spinach one is delicious.

A week of freezer: day 3

Image from Grill'd

Another day, another freezer meal. Today we had homemade hamburgers from patties I'd frozen a few months ago. And quite fittingly for Australia Day, we made them on the BBQ. This pic is not the burger I ate. It is a representation of what I made but ate too quickly to photograph. My all time favourite burger is the Mighty Melbourne (with beetroot) from Grill'd. It is absolutely delicious and I wish there was a Grill'd in Northcote so I could get my fix a little more often.

A week of freezer: day 2

Pancakes with lemon and sugar

The Mr is the Pancake King. His pancakes are rather legendary. #1 is a very keen helper now too (egg cracking seems to be one of his favourite things to do). We have a lemon tree in the backyard that is FULL of lemons but all of them are green at the moment. Luckily I had some frozen lemon juice in the freezer.

A week of freezer: day 1

My freezer is bursting at the seams. We are at the point where you put something in and close the door quick smart before everything comes tumbling out.

I've decided to post A week of freezer. Every day this week I'll be making a meal using frozen ingredients. The aim is to have lots of room in the freezer by the end of the week!

Day 1 was soup. I had three different vegetable based soups in the freezer left over from a big winter cookup. Popped a container of each in a saucepan and voila! Dinner done.

A better blind

Now that #2 is here, #1 is in his big boy room. The Mr spent some serious time in there transforming the mission brown wardrobe, pinky/creamy walls and blue ceiling to a much nicer color scheme of white (sorry - Lexicon) walls and ceiling, and charcoal for the window frame and wardrobe. It looks so much better and bigger too.

His room faces has the best view in the house, it looks straight over our backyard. The sun streams in and it is a really nice space. But not too good when you want your toddler to have a day time sleep. So we had a crack at making some roman blinds. I chose the fabric, a beautiful Echino print and the Mr did a series of complex calcs to come up with a plan. It took us forever to make them. Roman blinds have ALOT of boringness in the construction. There is hardly any sewing - just straight lines. The most important part of the process is the measuring and the marking up. Ours was double trouble: the window is really big - over 2m wide- so we needed to make two identical blinds.

Now the blinds are up and we use them every day. I love them, the print on the fabric is great. It isn't too kiddy so should last for a long while yet.

Here is a closer look at a small part of the pattern:

Aren't the colors great? The zebra is my favourite.

Before

Very much looking forward to posting the after photos of our laundry.

Frenchy window

When we travelled to Paris I saw so many window boxes overflowing with geraniums. I loved the color of the flowers and the big round leaves. My window box is a little work in progress. But I love it all the same.

Update on crappo project

The good news is that the stupid window shade did eventually get finished. I threw a bit of a tanty (blaming it on the pregnancy hormones - not the bad measuring) so engineer husband stepped in and saved the day.
The second piece of good news is that the shade blocks out all that 5am sun. So no more waking up to sun in the eyes.
Later this week I'll show you a really good craft project.

Almost a year goes by

Last year I mentioned a craft project that took me to hell and back. Well it has taken me 10 months to post the pics of this little ditty.
Our bedroom has a small window that is quite high and faces east. In the morning, the sun shines through the frosted glass and tends to wake me up. I don't like a light room. So I decided to do a quick crafty fix. I wanted to make a blind for the window and I thought it would take me an hour or so to whip up....HA. The craft gods were not smiling at me that day.
A seemingly simple (too simple) process:

• measure window
• measure fabric and blockout
• sew fabric to blockout
• insert wooden rod
• hang

First I measured wrong (how??), I cut the incorrect amount of fabric (of course, I only had JUST enough fabric in the first place). Then I cleverly thought that I'd use viseoflex to stick the fabric to the blockout - yes, I thought, that will save me pinning it. Well that did not work. At all. I had bits that were stuck on, bits that were bubbling, bits that couldn't be unstuck. GRRRR.

Ripper Christmas

This Christmas was lovely. It was our first Christmas as a family of four. It was a really special time and great to spend it with our loved ones.

Boy #1 is 2.5 so is now plenty old enough to know what all the fuss is about. Although, he is a bit afraid of the big man in the red suit. He strictly told me that 'Santa is not allowed in my house Mum.' And then instructed me that the protocol would be as follows:

• Santa to ride up our street on the sleigh
• Reindeers eat the food that we left out for them on the driveway
• I meet Santa on the footpath and tell him what good boys I have
• Santa to hand over the gifts to me and I must take them inside and put them safely under the tree

Everything went to plan and Santa delivered two lovely gifts for each of the boys. Alas, boy #1 did not get the Lightening McQueen skateboard that he'd be hankering for. Santa said he was a bit little for that this year (but was quick to add that boy #1 is a VERY BIG boy).

Boy #2 is not so big, only 8 weeks old at Christmas. He still had a great day and much to boy #1's delight, Santa delivered #2 a Percy of his very own.

This year the Mr delivered. Big time. He took boy #1 on a journey across town and bought me a beautiful salad bowl and salad servers. Very very spoilt. The bowl is pictured above with a lonely grapefruit from the market. The macro pic is my favourite section of the bowl.

Want to know a sure fire way to get more salads into your diet? Buy yourself a gorgeous salad bowl.

To market

Depsite the hot weekend, we decided to spend Saturday morning at the farm. Boy #1 is obsessed with 'clip clops' (horses, donkeys, ponies - you get the picture) so we bundled both boys into a hot car and went in search of said clip clops.

The farmer's market was on and for those of you who haven't checked this market out - it is well worth a visit. The fresh produce is beautiful, heaps of organic stuff and lovely stall holders (who must have melted, it was so bloody hot). We bought some delicious oranges, grapefruit, peaches, nectarines, falafel, honey and icy poles.

Back to the horses: after our market sojourn, we discovered that the farmers had put the clip clops in a different location that was just too far to walk in 36 degree heat with two babes. Of course we couldn't tell that to the boy so instead I did what any good mother would do - I lied. Those clip clops had gone to the beach for a swim in the hot weather. Yes they had.

Hot days, warm nights

image from www.alwaysmod.com

It is going to be 43 degrees in Melbs today - too hot to do anything except sit on the couch and whinge about the heat.
In more crafty news: I'm thinking about my next big project. My sister just got engaged (!) and I want to make her and her hubby-to-be a quilt. I'm struggling to pick a pattern that will stand the test of time. This will be their wedding present and I don't want them to look at it in a few years and think 'Oh gawd! How 2010 is that?!'
She recently bought this beautiful Marimekko fabric and plans to turn it into a spot of wall art. So I'm thinking that I'll use Scandinavian-esque fabrics in the quilt. Anyone out there with some good ideas for a pattern, please let me know! I'm keen to get cracking on this project, the sooner I decide on the pattern, the sooner I can shop for fabrics...