Sunday digest

Hey, it's only been 3 weeks! Here's the latest news from around here:

Work/school We are deep into Term 2 and everyone is working hard. DP has started teaching his intensive master's program; I'm trying to help launch a major organizational initiative which is taking a little longer than planned; and Miss B is into her second round of Year 7 electives - which involves cooking!

Last weekend I helped her with her first Food Tech assignment - designing a recipe for and making a salad. I managed to capture a few action shots; here's Miss B chopping celery:

And here's the final result:

Miss B's personal tweaks to the standard salad recipe included chopped salami and pickles - surprisingly delicious, since guess who ended up eating this salad for lunch all week?

Recreation Hanging around our local places playing cards and board games; streaming lots of movies now that we've finally figured out how to work our cable system (it only took 18 months); and indulging Miss B's renewed interest (not to say fangirling) in Doctor Who.

Food Two sets of dinner guests in the space of a couple of days this week meant thinking of ways to be efficient in the kitchen. For the first round, I made my favorite slow cooker chicken recipe, served with potatoes and peas; then, for today's guests, I used the leftover chicken, sauce, and peas as the base of a chicken pot pie:

I rounded out the filling with sauteed bacon, red onion, carrots, and celery, plus a few porcini mushrooms, then stuck it in the oven to heat through and combine. I made a variation on my Emergency Scone recipe for the topping (swapped out sugar for rosemary salt, and some of the cream for olive oil to make it more savory), cooked it separately (I don't like a soggy bottom on my pot pie topping), and slipped it on just before serving. It made a great and frugal late-autumn Sunday lunch (with bread and salad and brownies for dessert) for four adults and three children.

Weather As I may have already mentioned, it's late autumn here: fall foliage, warm days and cold nights, flannel sheets and hot water bottles. And my latest discovery about this season in Australia - native flora are back in season:

 Hope you're having a lovely weekend wherever you are.

Eight weeks (part 2)

April arrived in Canberra complete with an April Fool's Day joke from Mother Nature:

...making our local landmark, Black Mountain, topped by the Telstra Tower, disappear in the morning...

...and reappear in the afternoon.

Other highlights of the month included our quarterly care package of American goodies from sister/aunt L...

...two weekends at the coast - one to Kioloa...

...and one to Durras Beach in Murramurang National Park...

...where we got up close and personal with some of the locals...

...and admire some of the oldest gum trees still standing anywhere in New South Wales.

Most of the rest of April was taken up with a combination of school holidays and solo parenting, which meant juggling work with activities around Canberra - and Miss B's and my now-traditional Sunday breakfast of crumpets when DP is away - making the batter the night before is definitely the key to success.

And my latest foray into flower arranging brings us up to date, with autumn taking hold in Canberra - the heat is on, the nights are drawing in, and the slow cooker is getting a workout. What's happening where you are?

Cranberry lemonade

Despite the fact that it's officially autumn in Australia, March in Canberra so far has mostly been unseasonably stinking hot - record-breakingly hot, in fact. That means that, instead of breaking out the slow cooker, I'm looking for ways to keep cool and stay hydrated. There's only so much ice water you can guzzle, and I'm trying once again to restrict my Pepsi intake. This is my latest inspiration to seek out alternative options.


Cranberry lemonade
The cranberry part of this comes from the leftover syrup in which I made sugared cranberries at Christmastime - essentially simple syrup infused with cranberries. Simple syrup keeps forever in the fridge, and I usually have a jar on the go. The tartness of cranberries and lemons complement each other, and the sweet simple syrup balances them out - plus you don't have to dissolve it in drinks the way you would sugar.

Fill a glass halfway with ice. Squeeze in 1/2 lemon (about 30 ml/1 oz/2 Tbsp). Add an equivalent amount of cranberry simple syrup (if you're using plain simple syrup, you might not need this much). Fill the remainder of the glass with fizzy water and stir to combine. Drink immediately.

Serves 1. Can be multiplied to share with a friend or two. Would probably also make a nice cocktail with the addition of a shot of gin or vodka.

Silent Sunday

Spring in bloom in Canberra (anyone know what this flower is?)

August wrap-up

How can it be August 31 already? Tomorrow is the first day of spring in Australia! Not that winter has been much of a hardship; we've had quite a few grey days, and more rain than I remember in the previous two winters I've spent here, but also plenty of bright, sunny weather for Miss B to put some miles on her new birthday scooter. Some other items of note from August:

Here's a preview of a recipe that is under construction: sliced chorizo glazed with a mixture of red wine, wholegrain mustard, and maple syrup, baked in the oven, and served as an appetizer. I'm still fiddling with the measurements, proportions, and cooking times, but the first couple of trial batches were a hit. Then the chorizo I was using disappeared from Costco, and I've only just found a replacement. So more on that shortly, I hope.

Or I could just start making my own, I suppose, since I signed up to take a sausage-making class earlier this month at a local butcher shop - or, as the butcher called it, "Salami Academy." I learned all kinds of interesting facts and tips, had a chance to use the professional sausage-stuffing machine pictured here, and am now seriously tempted to plunge into the world of charcuterie - two years after everyone else, just as I predicted during my Year of Canning in 2011.

The second half of August has been another round of solo parenting, which means more cooking experiments that hopefully also double as treats for Miss B (and me!). This experiment is crumpets, which went down a storm. I used this recipe, and although they were delicious, they didn't turn out quite as I expected. I'm going to have a go at Delia's recipe next, so more on that later.

More fun with cross-cultural food terminology: the substance pictured here is known as fairy floss in Australia, candy floss in the UK, and cotton candy in the US. I'd love to know if it has yet another name in, say, Canada or New Zealand. (Full disclosure: I loathe it no matter what it's called and always have, but Miss B devours it at every opportunity.)

Did I mention that tomorrow is the first day of spring?

Saturday digest

Long time no update! I think we need a quick round-up of recent events to bring things up to date here.

Work/school DP is working a lot of 12-hour days, but at least hasn't had to do any traveling lately. Miss B has just finished Term 1, so the next two weeks are holiday for her, juggling for me. I'm pretty well over trip lag and back into my regular work routine, and we're all already deep into discussions and preparations for our next in-person meeting - in September, which seems alarmingly close when I look at my To Do list.

Recreation We finally got a car! Which I think I forgot to mention - it happened just before I went on my overseas trip. We've never had a car in Canberra before, just rentals, so we're still adjusting and figuring out places to go in it. I'm looking forward to having it for a few school-holiday jaunts during the next two weeks. In other news, Miss B has joined the Chess Club at school and has really gotten into playing; we even had a game over breakfast a few days ago.

Food Between Easter brunch and dinner guests a few days later (I made the short ribs again), I feel as though all I've been doing for the last two weeks is trying to figure out how to use up leftovers creatively. I did clean out all the leftover vegetables in one go with a yummy Friday-night vegetable soup made using my soup spec; and I made DP the biggest batch of egg salad ever. And today (having finally finished all the tarrale earlier this week), I made a batch of browned butter chocolate-chip cookies.

Weather Autumn in Canberra is well underway; the trees are changing color, and nighttime temperatures are down in the 40sF (single digits C). We turned the clocks back last weekend, so no more dinners outside. But daytime temperatures are still t-shirt-and-sandal-worthy.

That's about all the news from here; what's happening in your neck of the woods?

Early autumn

In the northern hemisphere, the change of seasons is always associated with the celestial event which correlates to its appearance – equinoxes for spring and autumn, solstices for winter and summer, sometime around the 20^th of the month, four times a year. In Australia, I’ve noticed, the first day of the month in which the celestial event occurs is generally designated as the official change of seasons. This meant, most recently, that March 1 was the First Day of Autumn.

I had been mentally dismissing this as some weird Australian quirk and figuring nonchalantly that I still had another 3 weeks of summer. Then, over the last week of February, we had more cloud than sun, with plenty of rain mixed in, and the temperature dropped about 10 degrees (or 20, in Fahrenheit). We woke up on Friday morning to cold winds, grey skies, and temperatures in the low teens (50sF).

Okay, I’m convinced – March 1 really is the First Day of Autumn in Canberra. Which means it’s time to break out the slow cooker again.

Braised short ribs

I didn’t use a recipe for this, so I’ll just describe what I did do. Braising stuff in the slow cooker allows for leeway on various things, as you’ll see. I started this at about 10:30 am, in preparation for serving dinner at 6:30ish pm.

1. Turn on the slow cooker to start heating. (I usually turn mine on high to get going and then turn to low after about 30-45 minutes.) Put a medium-sized cast-iron skillet to heat on the stove over low-medium heat, and add 2 Tbsp olive oil to warm up. Add 1 anchovy to oil.
2. Chop up 2 pieces of good-quality bacon and add to skillet. Peel, quarter and chop 1 red onion and add to bacon.
3. Cook mixture in skillet, stirring regularly, for about 5 minutes, until bacon begins to crisp and onion to brown.
4. Dump contents of skillet in slow cooker. Spread out and lay 5-6 beef short ribs on top.
5. Put skillet back on burner and fill halfway with about 2 cups red wine. Heat the wine and use it to deglaze the skillet.
6. Empty the skillet into the slow cooker and check the liquid level. If the short ribs are not at least partially submerged, add some more wine (or stock) until they are. Cover and leave to get cooking.
7. Decide that this concoction also needs some mushrooms and tomato paste, neither of which you have in stock. Go to the store.
8. After returning from the store, turn the stove on again and return the skillet to the burner over low-medium heat. While it warms up, clean and quarter about 1 dozen mushrooms. Add to the skillet to cook, along with 1 clove garlic that has been peeled and cracked. Cook mushrooms, stirring regularly, until they have released their liquid and shrunk to about half their original size. Add to the slow cooker.
9. While you have the slow cooker open, scoop out a ladleful of cooking liquid into a small bowl. Into this stir 2 heaping Tbsp of tomato paste. Add the mixture back into the slow cooker, stirring to disperse through the cooking liquid. Put the cover back on.
10. Leave alone until about halfway through your estimated cooking time, at which point turn the ribs over. Cover and leave be again.
11. The longer you leave these, the better they get. I took the lid off for the last hour of cooking time, to allow the cooking liquid to thicken up a little.
12. I served this with blue cheese polenta and braised kale and carrots. Made enough for 3 adults and 1 child, plus leftovers.

Silent Sundays: Spring in Canberra

Sunday recap

Today the high temperature in Canberra was 77F/25C, and we had invited friends for lunch. So we re-christened our Midwestern patio furniture, now unpacked and adorning our Canberra backyard, with our first Sunday lunch al fresco in our new house. We started off in the kitchen with drinks, minty pea dip and pita chips while I finished prep, then moved outside for braised pork loin, pasta and green salads, homemade bread, and a nice bottle of NZ pinot gris. Later, after a suitable interval for digestion and chat, there was pavlova. It was very lovely and relaxing (aside from the inevitable momentary, surreal internal realization that it’s November 4 and I'm sitting outside in short sleeves – I wonder how long it takes before that stops happening?) and felt like a nice return to normal life after an awful lot of upheaval since we last lounged on those chairs.

Recipes to follow later; right now I’m going to go enjoy what’s left of my Sunday. Hope yours is equally delightful.

Wordless Wednesday

New slippers from the dollar store - because mine are in a container somewhere and flip-flops just don't cut it in Canberra in June!

How's the weather where you are?

Final harvest

Last Saturday was the last local farmers’ market of the season, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the last of my own garden’s produce as well. There should be enough to can one more batch of tomato sauce, and I’m thinking of roasting some of the sweet peppers and stashing them somewhere to use over the winter. Freezer? In glass jars in olive oil? Must do some research on that. (Opinions welcome also.) I’m going to dry the chili peppers; that’s only about a quarter of my yield (from one plant, no less!), so I should be well equipped to make any amount of spicy stuff for months to come.

I will miss the farmers’ market, but on the other hand it will be nice to sleep later than 6am on Saturday for a change. Silver lining yadda yadda.

Applefest weekend

Autumn is festival season here in the lower Midwest; everyone comes out of summer hibernation, turns off the central air conditioning, and enjoys spending some time outside. Winter and summer are harsh and extreme, and spring is fickle and unreliable (you never know when a thunderstorm might brew up and send forth a twister), but autumn is placid, sunny, and beautiful. You could probably hit a different festival every weekend in September and October without going too far from home; our town’s big one is the annual Apple Festival, which was last weekend.

I really don’t like the summer hibernation, and autumn is my favorite season anyway, so I get a little hoopy when it starts to cool off. I certainly have this year, probably because this summer was even more intolerable than last summer. Or maybe it just seemed that way because this year I had patio furniture which I couldn’t use without getting a) melted or b) devoured by mosquitoes.
In any case, when last weekend rolled around I suddenly realized that I had invited a rather large number of people to a) park on our street, b) wander downtown with us to Applefest, or c) eat a meal at our house in conjunction with said wandering. In many cases, all of the above. And as the weekend shaped up to be bright, sunny, and mild, it became apparent that all of them were going to take me up on it.

Wordless Wednesday

Is it time to go out on the front porch for a popsicle yet?

Wordless Wednesday

Come on spring!

Wordless Wednesday

February thaw, NW MO

Wordless Wednesday

Snowmageddon, MO edition, February 2011

Wordless Wednesday

Change of seasons, Missouri, October 2010

Autumnal equinox

Before I started writing this post, I checked on when the autumnal equinox (or vernal equinox for those of you in the southern hemisphere) of 2010 is happening. It’s not officially until September 23, but I’m already ready and waiting.

I’m really looking forward to autumn this year (or fall, the term to which I must return now that I’m back in the US). I haven’t had a proper North American fall for more than a decade, and as much as I enjoyed autumn in Canberra, the fact that it was happening in April and May (and that the major holiday of the season was Easter) gave the whole experience a surreal edge.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Come on spring!
Hydrangeas, Canberra, Australia, December 2009