Craftlove

Dudecraft can be kinda silly, but often kinda awesome too. I love his retro style original posters though.

Yay for crochet.

local?

This piece makes selling craft on etsy.com seem like being your own personal outworker. And I wonder why whenever someone makes something really great we all join a chorus of "you should sell them?"

reading, reading, reading.

Okay I have to admit I don't read a lot of food blogs at the moment. Still loving occassional updates from the pie queen. And I did score a great pizza dough recipe from Bread and Honey. I drool a lot over at Melbourne Gastronome. And then go out and spend a whole lot of $$$ based on Claire's musings..

Mainly though, I am quite into reading about gardening on blogs lately. It's odd reading northern hemisphere stuff with all that crazy wondering about frost that they do but it's still good fun.

I'm particularly inspired reading about gardening projects that get beyond the backyard so I love the manic posts at the free farm stand in SF, where all the produce is gleaned, grown in squatted gardens or scavenged and given away each week. Yay for free stuff. And how much energy does this guy have?

This week I was also hunting for info about different potato planting methods and I was very amused to find this highly geeky aproach to gardening. This computer science student has been doing all sorts of comparative experiments to see where his chillis grow best and the diagrams are great!

So of course this leads me to reflect on my own little blog.. so much fallow digital dirt. And what to sow?

footy fever.

Last weekend we had finally had the Westside progressive dinner we've been trying to get happening for months. It was a lot of fun, though it's not that relaxing to know that you'll have to leave wherever you are as soon as the course you're eating is over.

We let little Jimmie (my 18 month year old housemate) choose the theme. She did this by running around the kitchen and eventually picking up the football. So, footy it was.

Dinner started at Lauren Kenny's with a tuckshop theme. Mini-burgers! And they came wrapped in greaseproof paper which really got us excited. The tinnies helped too.

My house had main course so of course we had to go with pies, the Aussie footy classic. I made a faux-meat pie filling with some soy protein, mushrooms and gravy and we put it in mini-pies. I have to say it was authentically gross. But kind of delicious. I tried putting the stalks from dried shiitakes in to see if they stayed tough like gristle but nobody spat them out.

For the main pie the filling was a bit more classy - roast vegies in a mustard bechamel. The pie dough I used for this one was a vegan version of my favourite russian pastry. It's a yeasted dough which makes for a pretty crazy pie. It actually flattened out a bit in the baking, maybe the filling shrunk. Mostly though, I was just happy the way the lacing and valve looked!

oh dan you make us crazy

The yen didn't favour Dan when he was in Japan so we were very very stoked to get some presents. It was just strange that both the presents involved making food star-shaped.

I thought the bread tin would be a disaster - how to make the bread rise enough to fill the points of the star? What if it spilled out the ends?

But no, with help from the missus I whipped up a batch of baguette dough and it worked to perfection. So so satisfying when guests realised we hadn't just cut the bread slices into these shapes...

baby steps

I keep thinking of so many things I want to tell you about. Garden things. Food things. Things about the whole big rest of the world out there. So it's baby steps - photos I've been meaning to show you for ages.




Me and tal were very taken by these toadstools when we saw them in the Russian cookbook and had to make them ourselves.