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And here it is.

I must admit to being slightly surprised that I own a red teapot. It’s not the “red” bit of that statement that is surprising me, it’s the the “teapot” bit.

To be honest, it’s not the first teapot I’ve owned.  I did once have a conical stainless steel one (for all I know I still do have it packed in a box somewhere), but it has been over 10 years since I’ve used one.

Why have I got one? Well oddly enough it’s all to do with coffee really. In this flat we have an espresso/latte coffee maker built into the kitchen. Why? I have no idea. I guess the building company thought it would be a great USP (unique selling point) or something when showing the latte set around the showflat and might get them an extra sale or two. It’s actually more of a pain in the butt more than a good idea. We would much rather have had the space that it takes up as cupboard space to store more goodies, but as it’s there I have been making quite a bit of use of it.

It makes a pretty good espresso type coffee, which is about all I’ve ever used it for. But sometimes it seems like I’m at it’s beck and call, rather than the other way around. It should be so simple. Hit the button that says (helpfully) ‘cafe’ and get a cup of coffee. But no. More often than not it says ‘add beans’, ‘add water’, ’empty trays’, or the dreaded ‘calc’ (which means it needs a deep clean that demands more than half an hour attention and needs some relatively expensive tablets stuffed down it). And sometimes, even when I’ve just emptied all the trays it still says ’empty trays’ until I smack it a bit, then it seems to think about it and grudgingly decides that yes, I can have a coffee after all and belatedly changes its display to ‘cafe’.

Even with all of that grief, and because it does make a reasonable cup of coffee, in the early evening or when working at home I find I tend to wander up to it quite often whenever I’m thirsty (or have some difficult or boring work to do) and hit the ‘cafe’ button, and more often than not drink the coffee (I do, however, often not drink the coffee, as I’ll go back the ‘puter’ and get engrossed fixing the problem that I originally walked away from to get the coffee, and by the time I remember I’ve made a coffee, it’s stone cold…)

Drinking all that strong coffee seems to lead to the usual effects of too much caffeine which in not that relaxing or enjoyable, but is only evidenced a reasonable time after the last cup.

Right, so back to my teapot (as this was about my little red teapot after all)… In order to find an alternative to drinking too much coffee, for some random reason that I could not explain to myself even if you asked me to I seem to have taken up interspersing the coffees with a few cups of Chinese jasmine tea.
Close family will understand my slight concern that I might be turning into my grandfather!

Anyway, originally I was making said tea in a pyrex measuring jug and tipping it through a huge sieve (like you drain your pasta in), which possibly really wasn’t the best approach to tea making ever invented. Then I managed to buy myself a small sieve which was a huge improvement on proceedings, but still apparently left far too much of a mess on the bench for Bec, so she insisted we got a teapot.

So. Here we are. I now have a little red teapot!

(but no lemon balm handy so far, so don’t tell Pop!)

I think it might be stretching things just a little bit too far to call this a “news round-up”, but as we’ve been a bit quiet lately I thought I may as well chuck up a few little bits and pieces of stuff, just so you don’t think we’ve fallen off the planet.

First up. Some rude people came and parked their boats in our back yard the other week.

We didn’t complain too much, however. The big guns on the front and the attack helicopters on the back made us think complaining might not be a good idea!  They only show up for a week every 2 years, so we can probably put up with that. Putting up with all the other fences that go up around the place for no apparent reason, and all the self important people in flouro jackets was a bit harder, but we managed again.

Next up, a BBQ in honour of some friends long departed these shores who came back for a flying visit.  They had a wedding over this side of the world, and managed to fit in a couple of days in London to catch up with everyone. Sounds like our normal itinerary when we trip back to NZ (except for having to fit in the nap times for the sprog)! It was made even better by the fantastic weather that we’ve been having lately. Very much an extended summer. Calm days, sunny skies, warm without being to hot… perfect!

It also gave me the chance to try out a coleslaw recipe I’d been wanting to give a go (that’s it at the front in the slightly purple bowl). Now in my experience a big bowl of coleslaw at a BBQ tends to stay a big bowl of coleslaw at the end of the event, but this one seemed to go down pretty well.  From memory it was celariac, savoy cabbage, walnuts and a secret sauce (only secret because I can’t remember it right now).

Friends, food, great weather, the wine cellar… All in all a fantastic day. (Only slightly marred by the nightmare that is weekend tube travel. But we’re almost used to that by now.)

Which leads me on nicely to item number three. Another day out with stunning weather the week before. A local premiership rugby game at the new Wembley stadium. If you have a particularly good memory you might recall that the last time we went to a local rugby game we just about caught frostbite on all extremities. A huge contrast this time! Wearing just a T-shirt to a rugby game just doesn’t seem right!

And the game itself was a much more interesting game, even for a non partisan viewer. And a great chance for us to visit the new Wembley stadium. Though the stadium management really need to start to understand that a rugby crowd just really doesn’t need a steward sitting on a small stool every 1.5 metres around the entire ground. All that does is piss people off. When was the last time there was ever any trouble at a rugby game?! Annoying and stupid of them.

So that almost brings you up to date with any goings on. As the weather has continued to be so fantastic we spent another few hours on the bikes and wandering around. We took the camera with us wherever we  went too. We just didn’t take any pictures.  That’s not unusual, but we figure that the camera likes going for walks. So you can have this last image.

That’s us spending some time on Sunday restocking the freezer with some freshly made Asian chicken stock, and a red pepper, chilli and tomato sauce made with our own balcony grown red peppers and chillies.

Oh, and one last titbit of news. Much to Bec’s relief I finally got a haircut.

On Thursday night last week we took in a bit of culture for a change. As you might be able to guess from the poster above, it was Ben Hur, the live show, on opening night.

I’m not quite sure how you define what type of entertainment it was. A bit of a mix of theatre, circus, musical… All in a big arena in the middle circus like with various props and sets and animals coming and going. Entertaining enough stuff, always something going on somewhere.

And of course there was the live chariot racing! Four teams of four horses all charging around. Great fun.

Tonight was my first attempt at cooking chicken ramen.  And my first experience of actually using oyster mushrooms in cooking (not that they are hard to cook, it was just the first time we had purchased them and cooked with them at home).

I think I might have my cooking mojo back, though it’s coming back slowly… Some chutney last weekend, a Thai curry the week before… And yep that’s about my cooking spurt lately!  Other than that I have been summoned to help Mike with prepping or watching most nights to help here and there. So to Mike’s delight he is secretly excited that I might be keen to get back in the kitchen.  However, he might like to note that it was the weekend and when I get home during the week after work I just can’t be bothered (and the fact that he is quite happy to cook most of the time – who am I to fight with that. Hmmm, “dinner is served, my lady”. Sounds good!)

Anyway, how was the chicken ramen?  I would cook it again, it was nice for a change.  What would I do differently?

• Not overcook the chicken, by flattening the breast to make it more even
• Try to have more soup mix with a less salty stock
• Not sure it needs the egg (perhaps Jo you can tell us if this is a normal Japanese thing in ramen?)

You might be thinking we didn’t like it, but I think we did, well I did anyway.  And I am sure Mike did just for the fact that I could actually be bothered cooking.

Now all that is left, is for Mike to do the dishes.  And if you know him you will know how he loves to do dishes,  NOT!

Today we went for a walk in what was  a nice sunny day at the time, we are trying to make the most of the end of summer (we’ve really notice how much shorter the days are getting already)!

So we toddled over to the local ecological park, which is about a 30 minute walk from here and on the way home we stopped off at the local basin which is apparently a bird sanctuary.  The park would be even more peaceful if it wasn’t right beside the train line.  But its nice enough.

Today’s theme for pictures was apparently berries…  so we walked and stopped and took a pic of some berry tree/shrub/bush, oh look then another type and then some more… and so on. It kept Mike entertained, got us both out of the house, gave us some exercise and we got to enjoy the sunny weather.

[Hi, it’s Mike here.  Just a note to say that the reason today’s theme was berries is that within a very short time on the walk I noticed that there were soooo many berries around. It reminded me that one of the women at work that lives in the Countryside (she does seem to manage to say it like it’s got a capital C) and goes horse riding was saying that all the blackberries and apples around the place have got ripe so much earlier than usual this year.

There were also a lot more types of berries that I took photos of, but I got pretty bored cutting them out and sticking them together… Sorry!]

The local Asian food place we found the other day has some fantastic sea bass and sea bream for less than half the price of our usual supermarket, so we’ll be making some use of that as we like both fish. We’ve been getting a bit stuck in a rut though and normally have it baked whole with something like chilli,  ginger and lemon grass stuffed inside, with some lime juice in a paper parcel.

But last night we decided to try to do something different, and opted for sea bream fillets with warm salsa verde potatoes. Great! Except we had whole sea bream, not fillets.  Gulp! I can’t remember the last time I even had to fillet a fish!  I’m sure there must have been one.  I think. Maybe?…

With the help of a couple of video clips on the net, and a pull out guide we’d saved  from an old Olive mag I don’t think I did too badly! By the forth one I was definitely getting the hang of it. Nowhere near as good as the guys in the videos, but ok!  Helped having a really sharp, flexible knife on hand though. We’ll just have to keep buying fish so we* can practice.

(* I say we, but I think it’s going to take a lot  to get Bec to have a go. She was “eeew”ing a “blech”ing all over the place…)

Megan seems to think that we’ve thrown down the oven-glove, and we’re now in a battle of the preserves. Let the battle begin!

Our effort  today  was a chilli and tomato jam.

It was a bit of a fluke that we had this on hand ready made though. I’d actually pulled the page out of our massive folder of recipes as it told me what type of spinach that we could plant his late in the year. A few hours later Bec pointed out that it had a chilli jam recipe on it. I have no idea how I missed that! Good job we had all the ingredients on hand…

Over to you Megan, beat that!

We always like to cook ourselves something yummy on holiday weekends we spend at home (to make up for not tasting exotic cuisines from a foreign city while on a weekend break). That meant a trip to the posh supermarket on Saturday morning to stock up on completely unnecessary but yummy things to get us though the long weekend.

On the way back down to the tube on the escalator Bec was standing on the higher step behind me. Suddenly I hear this voice full of absolute glee say…

 “Do you know, I think you’re getting a bit of a doughnut to go with your receeder! [ni-eghhhe-heeehe!…]”

That’s right, kick a man when he’s down!

The thing that’s really hard to get across in the written word is just how much glee was in her voice at the time. If I said “lots”, it would still be a massive understatement!

And she wonders why I refuse to get a haircut… Sigh.

We refuse to let Megan try to score any bonus blogging brownie points by documenting the making of jam.

So today we managed to use up all the courgettes that we would otherwise have thrown out in a few days by making another batch of courgette chutney.The fact that we had to go and buy a whole lot of apples that we’ll probably end up throwing out in a few days in order to get the one apple we needed for the recipe  is beside the point!
Actually, I’ve just  looked back and found out that it was at exactly the same time last year that we made the last batch. I guess we are as boring as we think we are! No puzzles were done this year though, so maybe we’re slightly more exciting than last year.

Or maybe it’s just that the  weather’s been a bit better this year!

Whatever. Anyway, this batch of chutney has turned out a heap darker than last year’s, but I swear we did nothing different. I guess we’ll just have to wait a few weeks to see how it’s going to taste!

As we’d gone to all the trouble to get the steamers yesterday we thought we’d better use them!

We’ve passed what we worked out was another Asian supermarket close to here many times on our local bike trips, but never gone in to see what they had.  Today we did, and got a few dim sum type dishes for our Sunday brunch along with a few other bits and pieces. Most of which needed to be steamed. Perfect!

Yum! And now we know it’s there, we might be making more use of the local Asian supermarket….