Hot.

I’ve been running around crazily buying food etc. for camp. We start tonight at a campsite and run over the weekend. We have 15-16 kids and 7 (not all at one time) leaders. Someone else was supposedly doing food but they aren’t coming up until later. So now that’s for me to deal with. It takes quite a bit to feed 25. It’s also fun shopping when you can do it cheaply. Extreme delight when I go up to the registar and the supposed mental minimum isn’t even met.

Yes I shop with lists.

No I don’t touch much that isn’t on the list.

Perhaps in moving out the whole budgeting thing won’t be that much of an issue.

I started laughing in the car on the way to the shops with the odd realisation that I am soley (with the exception of throwing a few ideas at Geoff and watching them come back with an, “okay”.) entirely responsible for something. Other than you know, just keeping me the way I’d like to be kept.

Cooking Ministry

jolly crocI’m still not quite sure what came over me last night in giving away my secret hand-lust (freak out and leave now!)… anyway disregarding that and proceeding somewhat more normally:

From the other end of my glorious, silly brainwave, I can now claim that ‘pie night’ was a roaring success!

Very happy with the outcome, sure a few minor cooking glitches but people hardly noticed (best of all me) I was having too much fun!

I think I might take to saying, “As happy as a croc with a lawnmower” there’s something absurdly appealing about it (alternatively I’ll just get a little more sleep)!

“More on thanksgiving as an informal-mantra (not the holiday) tomorrow and why I had to recant this morning for being a horrible cynic…”

Cooking General Life Relationships

donepie.jpg

And voila! One cooked, brilliantly smelling pumpkin pie. The tasting is yet to come.

* 3:05pm Oh yeah, I can cook! Tastes superb!

Cooking General

Using this pumpkin pie recipe (Wycliffe Cookbook):pierecipe.jpg

This bit of Jap pumpkin:

pumpkin.jpg

The rest of the ingredients:

piestart.jpg

And some pretty standard pie dough (also Wycliffe Cookbook):

piedough.jpg

I am in the middle of cooking:

piebec.jpg

A pumpkin pie:

pieandmiddle.jpg

Here it is uncooked:

uncookedpie.jpg

And… I’m still waiting for it to finish.

Cooking General

pumpkin pieIt is not autumn, it is spring. This is Australia, not America. Hence my current dilemma.

The other day I had some ridiculous brainwave to have a mock thanksgiving (ie: devise some excuse to make and eat pumpkin pie, because I like it).

Having grown up with American families I’ve been exposed a couple of times to the excited uproar of turkeys and pilgrims (or Chicken and kids dressed up in paper hats – ahh the benefits of the Pacific) otherwise known as Thanksgiving, which is on the 23rd November. Infact, I think my little sisters may have even been Indians in a Thanksgiving play.

The simple fact is. I have now gone and invited four people (plus Geoff – because we’re having it at his house) for dinner on the 26th. Which means I have to cook a roast, which I can do, but also a pumpkin pie.

Here is the problem.

Australians don’t eat pumpkin pie. This means that they don’t sell ‘pie pumpkins’ (which I’ve deduced as ‘sugar pumpkins’ – thank you Google) or pumpkin puree in a can – not to my knowledge anyway. Apparently when cooking from scratch, pumpkin pies are very easy to stuff up.

You can attempt it with Butternut Pumpkin (which was the only kind of pumpkin I knew about before today) but it’s not the ‘best’.

I’m now thinking that I should follow my parental’s advice and give it a trial run… so it’s off to the supermarket for me and I shall keep you posted.

*11:34am: latest findings suggest Jap pumpkins

Cooking General Life