Picnic-ing

Hi there again!

Well the other day the boys and I had a little afternoon tea picnic seeing as it was such a beautiful day! (unlike today which is dreary, but good for other things, like a bonfire of all our paper rubbish)

So here are a few pics from our nice time outside ..

The view is grand from our house - we are so blessed to live in such a beautiful country (and IN the country - as opposed to city!)

Our picnic - mainly healthy, banana, raisins, muesli bar and a little treat of licorice allsorts with water to drink .. (the allsorts are hidden in a cup, due to K stuffing them in his mouth in 2 seconds after he has seen them haha)

The aforementioned raisins..

We were serenaded by the whines of this doggie (he was tied up due to his super energy, and us not wanting to get sat on/pushed over/our food eaten by him!)

The blanket got a little wet when K pushed his cup over .. in his words "oops-ay"

Dog got let off later on when the food had gone

(this is him with his usual 'throw the ball, throw the ball' face on)

I LOVE this plant (toitoi - not sure if that's how you spell it) esp against the blue sky

(and WHY has this typing become underlined again?!)

Shadows of me and J (with his 'harpoon')

There. Picnic - check. Feeling like a good mother - check.

And to answer my question from the last blog -

YES, Jacksta and Weza, you are RIGHT!

I personally don't ever remember seeing one of these before, but it's a purple coloured cauliflower?!

From our garden no less.

We left a random plant to grow, and when it came time to dig up the garden for planting our spring crop we came upon this! And it even tasted good (as far as cauliflower goes). Can't say I'm a fan of cauliflower - I made a cheese sauce for it so it tasted okay haha :-)

Sima J

Weekend Stuff

Hi there! I had my blog all written in out in my head this weekend, and now I’ve forgotten all I had to say! Anyway, my pics give me clues – this weekend was lovely and SUNNY! I do love a bit of sun. (and can’t wait for summer – I am NOT a winter lover!) After an early hockey game, I returned home to chill out in the blissful sun with a vino on the deck ...

...and got to peruse this beautiful view..

Well, I didn’t really look at it that much to be honest, because I was either reading a book, or checking K wasn’t getting into trouble, or getting pestered by this friendly face...

(the reason half his nose isn't in the picture is because he'd stuffed it so close I couldn't get it in! He'd be on my lap if he was allowed!)

He has a one-track mind “throw the ball, throw the ball, throw the ball”

Nice shot of a trike begging to be ridden on.

Also, can you guess what this is ... ??

I will post the answer in my next post!

Hope you had a grand weekend too!!

Sima J

p.s. and I even washed my car yay!

Berry choc pudding delish dish

(ok to start with, for some reason this post is all underlined, I can't be bothered figuring out how to fix it - so let's just call it a great design addition!)

Mmm mmm

I keep seeing yummy recipes that use frozen berries lately, so I decided I’d grab some when I did groceries last time.

Of course, when I came to look for a recipe they were hard to come by for some reason?! Lots of berry smoothies, berry icecream, berry slushies – but no warm, winter-loving berry anything! Until I found a little gem of a recipe here! (I did embellish it a little, adding a handful of chocolate buttons with the berries) (FYI - 2oz butter = 50g)

Mmmmm and it tasted GOOD! After I served it up with a (large) dollop of icecream, I was going to take a photo. But then I couldn’t be bothered because I just wanted to eat it!

So this is what your plate would look like AFTER you’ve eaten it - tehe.

And this is what it looks like in the dish.

So there you have it. A DELISH pudding full of chocolate berry goodness! Great for a winters evening (or a summers evening, or any evening for that matter haha!)

Sima J

p.s. just as an aside - check out the size of this garlic!! Ok, so the onion IS small, but still - it's HUGE!! I think they call this 'elephant garlic', which is usually a lot milder, but this sucker was potent as well as huge! YIKES!

one-day-sales

Dangerous. That is one-day in one-word!

Luckily for me I’m a bit of a frugal person and will only buy stuff I really need and would have bought anyway! Mostly.

A friend introduced me to this wonderous site a while back and it has become a regular habit to check what’s on sale every day. Living where I do (in the middle of nowhere)

I like to think I’ve actually saved quite a bit of time and also petrol $ from this website! Presents/clothes/treats are all purchased and then you get the fun of opening them after they arrive – it’s like your birthday!!

I love it! The internet has actually become a main place for me to shop for stuff now.

MightyApe has been a favourite site (although a while back they had rather shocking service, which seems to have been a one-off)

and Felt.co.nz has been a great place for present buying.

I have heard of people getting their groceries online

– Probably not such a good idea for me seen as I don’t think they’ll make it up the drive!

(this isn't actually my drive by the way)

What do YOU buy online??

Sima J

(p.s. if you want ink cartridges computerfood is the best site I've found yet - and they deliver SO fast to you PLUS they put in little sweets AND if you're buying ink they send it FREEPOST! AWESOME!)