New Arrivals

A photo of our new arrivals, one week old, so cute :)

I can't believe how quickly they have grown in a week.

We are having the most beautiful weather here at the moment.

Enjoy your weekend.

Shirley :)

Snaps in the Garden

Here are a few snaps of what is going on in our garden over the Easter Break.

After purchasing a delicious red pawpaw, I planted the seeds, today I transplanted many of them into small pots ready for spring planting.

 A trombone pumpkin maturing on the vine.

 The vegie garden getting a re-vamp ready for winter planting.

Removing worm castings to add to the vegie patches.

 An Ice Cream Bean tree, the rains over the summer months have really helped this look the healthiest it has looked in years and it is providing great shade.

 An old bath tub filled with water chestnuts ready for harvest, we will add these to stir-fries for the extra crunch, this is the best harvest we have ever grown.

Enjoy the remainder of your Easter break.

Cheers Shirley :)

Energy Bars

This is a delicious healthy recipe, I used to make it a long time ago, you know how recipes get used over and over and then one decides to give them a break, well I came across it yesterday while looking through a much used recipe book and gave it another go.

4 Cups of Wholemeal Flour
3/4 cup sugar (I used raw)
1 Cup Non-fat dried milk powder
1/2 cup wheatgerm
2 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
2 cups water
3/4 cup polyunsaturated oil
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup molasses
2 cups raisins
1 1/4 cups dried apricots (chopped)
1 cup sunflower seeds.

It makes a huge cake, so use a very large bowl to mix your ingredients and to bake it in, I usually use a roasting tin lined with baking paper.

You can substitute different dried fruit if you wish.  This time I used raisins, cranberries, apricots and sunflower seeds.

Place all the ingredients into a large bowl and mix well.  Pour into a lined and greased large baking tin and bake at 180 degrees C (350 degrees F) for 45 - 55 minutes.

Enjoy.

Cheers Shirley :)

Freshly Ground Wheat

For ages now I have wanted a Grain Mill, a couple of weeks ago one came up on ebay, hardly used, perfect and I missed it.  I was so disappointed.  I was having a look at the Skippy Grain Mills website and contacted them to see if they had any demo models or used mills for sale.  I got an email back later that day saying they had a demo model that had only had about an hours use that was for sale at quite a reduced price compared to a brand new one.

I thought about it for a few days and then decided to purchase it.  So here it is, like brand new, works wonderfully, I am very pleased with my purchase.

It has many settings from coarse to fine, I have ground some wheat into the most beautiful fine flour and made a couple of sourdough loaves.  They taste so much better than any bread purchased and I know we are getting all the goodness from whole grains.

Absolutely delicious and I know it has been made with the freshest of flour.

More baking on the weekend.

Cheers and have a great weekend.

Shirley.:)

Waking up to Horror!!!!!!!!!!

Over the last week I have been building up my sourdough starter, feeding it morning and evening and was planning to make a loaf this morning. So a weeks work is ruined and will have to be thrown away!

Well look what I woke up to this morning, I could not believe my eyes, the cloths that were covering it are in the bowl and there are signs of what has happened.

 Here is the first clue, can you believe it!!!!!!!!!!

 The tea towels are sitting on top of the sourdough and there are the calling cards of a rat.  

We have never had a rat in our house before, so now today's task is to clear out the pantry, repair the flyscreen in the window and make sure I have nothing that it can eat into and try to find the rat.  I am horrified.

Shirley :(

Qld Not so Sunny

Here in S.E. Qld, Australia we are have a huge weather event, it has been pouring nearly all night and all of today too.  The weather forecast is for us to possibly receive between 200-400 mm of rain within the next 48 hours.

Bucketing down with rain, our very soggy garden, looking down to our Orchard, hopefully they wont drown.

Have a super day Shirley :)

Kitchen Reno

For a while we have been wanting to give our kitchen a renovation.  The cost of kitchen renovation is sooooo expensive, we needed to replace our doors as they were Vinyl Wrap and it had started to peel off and my oven wasn't working, a Kleenmaid that was installed when the house was built had a couple of problems and as Kleenmaid in Australia no longer exists we had to purchase a new one.

This is a photo of what the old kitchen looked like, not too bad but on close inspection lots of things wrong.

You can just see on the cupboard door above the oven that the Vinyl Wrap is lifting, this was happening on many of the doors and I had taped them back on to stop them peeling any further.

We got a couple of quotes to replace the doors which came in around $1500, quite a lot of money, then the panels would have looked odd around the cupboards, end panels etc.  

What we decided to to was get the doors 2-packed, professionally spray painted, so I got a few quotes to get that done.  My husband stripped the kitchen down, the Vinyl wrap literally peeled off with no adhesive holding it on, took out any large panels that would show, the company came, picked it up and a week later returned it to us 2-packed.  So the week before Christmas we were madly trying to reassemble our kitchen, purchased a new Westinghouse Oven, being careful to ensure it would fit in the existing location and a new matching stainless steel range hood, new tiles.

Here is the finished kitchen, we are so pleased with it, it is clean, bright and looks brand new and at a fraction of the cost of a new kitchen.