To the point(s)

Today's post is an 'easy-read' summary of pics and random bits from my brain that have been lurking around and prodding me that they want to be blogged.  Here we go!:

* My cat is on Prozac (I must be a terrible cat mama....). Razzy's stylish new vet with a sexy Euro accent has diagnosed an anxiety disorder. Maybe she has a diploma in cat psych? Perhaps I should have checked before I let her label him a nutcase?  The quakes, the cold, and (possibly) me disappearing for a month, then returning to reclaim my side of the bed; this has all been too much for his traumatised little mind. Side effect of the happy pills: increased appetite. Oh my gosh, the ceaseless yowling..

* I had a massage at Smile Spa. This was gift from a friend and it was every bit as fabulous as their interior design would suggest. Jo, I owe you a jar of almond butter.

Having trained as a massage therapist, I am usually sorely disappointed when I pay for a massage. Not this time. Karina (?) may have looked 15 but she had the chops. I walked out of there a new person and, quite literally, smelling of roses.

* Something is happening at the supermarket site. For those at the back, my local supermarket, the best supermarket in the world, was trashed by the February 22nd earthquake. I've been restlessly checking on progress toward the new one.

The site has been completely leveled, which can't have been easy considering it had been turned into 'undulating hills' by mother nature.  I am not sure what this giant corkscrew thingy is. We speculated that they may be taking samples to ensure the ground stability.

* I made a quick frozen banana soft serve and it actually improved my life. Ingredients: 1 frozen banana and half an unfrozen one. tbsp erythritol, tbsp unflavoured WPC, pinch of stevia, vanilla, sea salt. Pummel into submission using the food processor. So good.

* Salad! A major salad moment to celebrate the 'spring is in the air' vibe that has just (maybe temporarily) arrived. Lacking greens I went scavenging in the grass for dandelion leaves.

* I did a 'walk by' The Dux de Lux, much loved Christchurch pub/restaurant/band venue. Still closed, still freshly festooned with little paper ducks and messages of support.

I took this pic while I was in 'town' (what passes for it these days) for an important and exciting meeting that I can't say much about just yet in case it comes out to be a big nothing. It's one of those 'if I talk about it, I might jinx it' things. 

* Ordered a couple of hundred kg's of Psyllium (as you do).

* Took delivery of new batches of cacao beans and maca. Fresh cacao always smells indescribably wonderful.

* Attempted Power Vinyasa Flow 5 from yoga download. *wide eyes*.  If that is a step up from Power Vinyasa Flow 4 it is a very big step. Side crow? I - don't - think - so. In the spirit of positive affirmation, let me revise that to: 'I'm not quite ready for that just now'. I did manage to 'attempted side crow' myself into a giggling fit though and laughing is therapeutic, so it's all good. :D

Source

Foodie Finds

I just got home from a fantastic lunch to celebrate my Grandfathers 82nd birthday. That's a lot of years, but he still goes dancing every week, maintains a large garden and flirts with my Grandma. Something keeps them young - maybe the veges, maybe the naughty sense of humour, who can say?

Apart from hanging with the NZ fam, I'm putting in a serious effort toward an essay on Cyclothymia. This is one of the Bipolar disorders, and is also the condition that a doctor once suggested I suffered from, so I might learn something about my crazy brain.  Or not. Judging by the number of my friends that were on the happy pills, I feel that particular doctor was overly keen on prescribing antidepressants to adolescents. Perhaps in medical school, it was not well known that teenagers are supposed to be moody and lazy?

Last semester my study mojo was lacking, which I blame on the relentless, distracting aftershocks. After a break in Europe, I am a little behind, but at least I'm feeling the study-groove, man. This is the last semester of my undergraduate degree and I'd like to finish in a blaze of glory, rather than just sliding into graduate status with a half-arsed effort.

I started the day with some superstar leftovers:

I tried to make a pancake with leftover roasted pumpkin from last night, but it fell apart in the pan.  The ingredients were: pumpkin, cinnamon and eggs and it still tasted fine. I plopped some raw honey and greek yogurt on the top. There may also have been an espresso on the side.

I've been making a few foodie discoveries since I came back from Liechtenstein in the mood for pizza and strong cheese. I was not hopeful to find unpasteurised Parmesan in Christchurch, but lo, it found me while I was being nosy about earthquake repair progress at the Arts Centre. Canterbury Cheesemongers is the place for actively practicing cheesoholics. You can sample the cheeses, ask all sorts of cheesy questions and spend a months cheese budget on 200g of delicious, fragrant, imported, raw Parmesan.

$16. This is not a typo.

My other nostalgia-driven discovery was the Purebread pizza bases, which are made from fermented grains for ease of digestion.

They are a bit crumbly and need to be kept in the fridge or, preferably, the freezer. However, when baked, they are thin and crispy, just like a real Italian pizza base. Now all I need to replicate pizza in Verbania is some warm weather (pleeeeease). Today has been hail and rain. Fore-casted is snow. Yes, snow. Also, if the Moon Man is to be believed, earthquakes. Snow and earthquakes. Tomorrow may be especially exciting for a Monday!  

Pimp my banana bread

Yesterdaz (gah! foreign keyboard.. the y and z are interchanged from the kb I am used to, so just ignore any yz boo boo's, ok?)..

As I was saying.. zesterdaz, I looked in the fruit bowl and found that nobody had been eating the bio-banana's. Out loud, I mused about making a banana bread and heard a distinct 'ooo, yuk', from the lounge. Miss J is not a fan of baking with fruit in it. So, I revised my statement to 'chocolate loaf', which resulted in an interested looking pair of eyes appearing over the back of the couch.

We went shopping for chocolate chips. Look what I found at the Migros! A little piece of home, export quality ('scuse skanky red nail polish fragments, what can I say? I'm on vaycay). 

Speaking of little reminders of NZ, I've also been hearing Bic Runga, Brooke Fraser, The Exponents and Crowded House on the radio a lot more often than in New Zealand.  What's with that?  No wonder our muso's leave home. They just want to feel the radio love.

Once back zu hause, I distracted all non-fruit-loving persons and secretly pimped my banana bread recipe with chocolate.

This was groan-inducingly good: super moist, really chocolatey and a big hit with everyone. Here is the recipe, which was originally based on this one:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of flour (I used organic white this time, but have made it with rice flour also)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 150g butter (the original recipe perplexingly calls for 1/2 cup butter,  so I made an estimation using this site)
• 3/4 cup sugar (brown, white, any sort will work)
• 2 eggs
• About 2 cups of mashed ripe bananas
• Cocoa powder and chocolate chips to taste - I used 2 tbsp cocoa and 150g dark choc chips

Do this:

Preheat oven to 175 C and line a loaf tin with buttered baking paper (this step is well worth the time investment).

Combine the flour, baking soda, cocoa, chocolate chips and salt in a bowl.

Cream the butter and sugar - I do this on low heat on the stovetop. You just have to watch it carefully and it is easier if the butter is a bit soft when you start (i.e.  not solid from being in the fridge).

Mash the banana with a fork in a bowl and use an electric whisk to combine the banana and eggs.

Add the butter/sugar to the eggs/banana then add the butter/sugar/eggs/banana concoction to the dry ingredients and gently mix until all the ingredients are combined and moist. You want to do this a bit gently, for example with a wooden spoon. Do not overmix.

Pour the batter into the loaf tin, reserving some for eating with your fingers.

Bake for an hour or until a knife comes out relatively clean. As there are choc chips in there you will always get melted chocolate on the knife and will probably have to use the force to predict when it is ready. Generally if you gently touch the top and it bounces back, it is done. Mine took just over an hour.

Once it is ready, turn it out and let it cool. A baking rack is best for this, but I didn't have one and it was fine just cooling on a plate.

Makes 12 fairly hefty slices (or up to 20 less substantial ones)

Stats per slice, for those that like to do food maths:

Calories: 341

Fat: 17g

Protein: 5g

Carbs: 45g

Note: replacing half the butter with applesauce will bring the calories down to 300 per slice, with less fat. It's up to you. I prefer the full butter version and just eat less of it. Considering that a slice of chocolate cake is usually around 500 calories, I do not find this too bad in terms of a dessert or 'serious snack' for those ultra hungry moments.

It had to happen one day....

Tonight I did something that made me unreasonably nervous. I let someone else organise the Monday orders for Sana Direct.  I am heading overseas for a month and the business has grown up to the point where I have to accept that it actually can function without me. Usually when a core team member goes frisking around the world, we just shut the webstore for a bit. However, with the number of customers we have now, this is no longer a viable option. Our little business is growing up and getting independent and I feel a bit... conflicted about that. Like someone who's baby doesn't really need them anymore.. except in an adolescent crisis, naturally.

I have pulled out all stops to ensure that things run smoothly in my absence. I have a fully documented set of operating procedures.  The order entry and dispatch one is four pages long.  I made sure to add that invoices must be inscribed with a handwritten smiley face and accompanied by an organic lollypop, so let me know if you don't get one and I'll raise hell by Skype.

Instead of hovering, I occupied myself by playing with the new label printer that I bought today:

It's speedy and efficient and much smaller on the desk than the previous monolith. Now I've got SO much more room to fill up with piles of paper! Yay!

The other exciting discovery of the day was.. fishcakes! I know, it's a bog standard easy meal but one that I hardly ever make.  

What's great about fishcakes is that they don't strictly require any terribly perishable ingredients, although you can use fresh fish if you want. Tonight that was such a bonus because I've been so many kinds of crazy-busy that I forgot to defrost anything for dinner and the vege bin was looking a bit depressing.

These fish cakes have:

* One large kumara (sweet potato) - about 300g

* Some kale, scavenged from the patchy winter garden

* About 30g of goats cheese

* Half a massel chicken stock cube

* A large can of organic, imported Alaskan Salmon - pricey, but worth it for my peace of mind since I'm really wary of ocean fish at the moment  (for this we can blame that toxicology paper, oh yes).

I simply steamed the veges, then whirred everything into submission using my food-processor-o-death.  Formed into balls, mine were baked in the oven and The Programmers were fried. Mine came out better. His kind of fell apart: I think the steamed veges were still holding too much water. He still told me it tasted amaaaaazing though. you can't go wrong with feeding men fried, salty stuff.

That's a homemade tartare sauce on the top of mine.

After this has digested, I am planning to turn it into yoga energy. Last night I did a 20 minute David Farmar Baptiste Power Yoga from yogadownload.com.  David Farmar is an amazing teacher, even on video and I am, at this very moment, downloading the 45 minute version of the class. I love it when he gets all new agey, endorsing the yogi to 'drop your head, your day, and while you're at it, just go ahead and drop your childhood'.  Maybe tonight he will tell us to drop our control freaky behaviour as regards our businesses?  That, I could use some of.

Some of my favourite things...

I've spent a lot of time in the last week waving people goodbye at the airport (and battling traffic to get them there!). Today I saw my brother, his lovely partner and The Squishies off. My littlest niece is an airport pro. She understands that when leaving you must attempt to kiss everyone to death. So cute.

Also, thanks so much everyone for the **BIRTHDAY WISHES**. I do seriously love getting older, or maybe it's just that life keeps getting better? It could also be that I'm just too busy to think too hard about the length of my telomeres.

I wanted to introduce you to a kitchen favourite of mine. I have a few essential devices. One is my high-tech Kenwood device-of-everythingness and another is this exceedingly low-tech ceramic garlic crusher, so please take a moment to say 'hello'. It crushes the garlic and squeezes the garlic juices out of it, which flavours cooking with garlicky wonderfulness.

For exemplar, tonight's prawn and pumpkin curry, as below. Can you tell I've been reading waaay too many scientific articles? Tired of saying 'for example', many authors resort to 'as an exemplar' or even 'as a most stirling exemplar'.  I'm telling you, published scientific people with multiple advanced degrees; I'm starting to get the giggles every time I read 'stirling exemplar'. Please cease. It's just not necessary.

Disclaimer: I do realise that sometimes 'exemplar' IS the correct and only word to use, I'm not talking about those times...

To celebrate my new maturity, and because he is secretly worried that I'm going to get empty nest syndrome now that the fam has flown, The Programmer came home with a really pretty bunch of flowers.

Yesterday Mamasana did the same thing. My house is all floral and I've only got one more article to read before I am finished the second to last assignment of the semester and there have been no aftershocks to speak of for days. All is good at Sara HQ.

What I'd like to know: what are your most essential kitchen devices/implements/gadgets?  Please share, even if this means giving away the secret to your culinary successes.  I won't tell.

A guest post from the crazy cat lady (within)

Today there was an apparently quite large aftershock at 1.30pm. I didn't really feel it though because I spent most of the day ferrying felines around to their various appointments.  I just thought it was a large gust of wind that made the car sway, plus I was distracted by the yowling coming from the back.

Yesterday I made the decision that Monty had to go to the vet. Remember his sore foot? Well, it seemed to improve a bit but then wasn't really getting better. It was very guilt inducing watching him sit with his foot held up, and this feeling was intensified x 1,000,000 when the xray revealed a broken foot.  So he was in cat hospital for a day getting a flouro orange cast applied. There are no pictures of it though because he managed to pull it off about two point five minutes after getting home. Not only that, but we had been plotting heavily how to keep it dry and he foiled that plan too by peeing all over himself and The Programmer on the way home.  

He had been in a cat bag - porous, naturally, on The Programmers lap.  Also, and you need to know this, if you release a wound up and cat-pee covered cat in your house, you will have cat-pee everywhere.  I've cleaned up and am burning incense, but all I'm getting is eau de cat-pee with a slight tinge of jasmine.  Mmm. 

So, here (pic below) we have Monty wondering why the catflap is locked and he can't get out. This is when I was about to try and stuff him in that bag in the foreground - which is in itself an act that should only be attempted by a contortionist.

Here he is, in the bag, probably already planning a complex system of revenge, involving cat pee and cat cast evasion.

While I was there with Monty, the vet told me that they only had a few free microchips left, so I booked the others in and spent the rest of the day stuffing perplexed cats into bags or cages and letting the vet stab them in the neck with an enormous needle.  To be fair, only Miranda seemed to notice this and gave a little growl, even though it looked horrendous.  So, I'd say microchipping is fairly painless. It certainly relieves my mind of the anxiety of losing them permanently if we have another big quake. It also gives the cats the ability to skite about being registered companion animals. I'm sure that will impress their frenemies.

In between the cat-chipping performance, I did a 20 minute workout that was sufficiently difficult to make me realise that I need to increase my CV fitness quite a lot. I used a Tabata timer and did intervals of things like jumping squats - 20 seconds jumping, 10 seconds rest, for 15 rounds.  Try it.. it's not as easy as it sounds.

Now it is time for a nice glass of red and a stovetop tagine. That's not the traditional way to make it - however, the proper traditional way is to bury the whole lot in sand, so we do what we can.  Something with Moroccan spices in it is just what I need after subjecting all my pets to a day that will live in infamy. 

Today...

I have a toxicology assignment that has to be finished and submitted by tomorrow evening, so please excuse the lack of actual words in this post.... I'm all worded out...

I did manage to get out to the organic shop, which is busier than ever because people are getting smart to the fact that supermarket shopping in post-quake times is just a recipe for insanity:

I only needed a few things. Being Friday, Mamasana was coming over for din-dins. She bought the vino. The plastic glow on the bottom right is a bag of mushrooms, which I used to make a mushroom and red wine sauce.

Tomorrow, I've got a little situation to deal with:

Monty has hurt his foot. I've given it two days because cats are really quite good at healing but he doesn't seem to be improving. I've grabbed him for a good squeeze and it's clearly not broken, doesn't seem to have anything in the paw pad, but he won't walk on it. Pfft. This already looks ex-pens-ive....

Also, I am taking ALL the cats next week for FREE MICROCHIPPING. This is courtesy of the SPCA and they are doing it out of the money that was donated after the quake. So THANK YOU BIGTIME to anyone that sent funds. Microchipping is really the best, and sometimes the only, way to reunite pets with their owners in a disaster situation.

Now, I need a few opinions on this one. To harvest or not to harvest, that is the question. The photo is not very well edited, but can you see my shoe to the left? I'm not sure it can get any bigger... but it is an 'American Giant' pumpkin and I have never really seen how big they can get. I know I have some American readers. Does this look fully grown to you?