Fifty-Two Tasks - AND - In which Ginger becomes Running Girl

ello kiddy-winks!

As I write this I have my First Ever pickle on the go: the pickling/preserving being my Task for this week. I'm making a Bread and Butter Pickle from my Nanny's* recipe that my Mum had copied out for me years and years ago and that I found shoved down the back of a drawer. My Nanny made the best pickles and preserves and jams, I kid you not. She passed away when I was fourteen and it's such a shame that I only exhibited an interest in the Womanly Arts when I moved out of home because I could have learnt so much from her! As it is, she taught me how to knit - a skill that I am so so so happy that I have. Also, I like it that she passed that down to me.

Anyways, here is the recipe for you:

Bread and Butter Pickle (Ginger's Nanny's Recipe)

4kg medium sized cucumbers
6 medium onions
2 green peppers
3 cloves of garlic
3 tbsps plain salt
1 litre water (cold)
5 cups sugar
5 cups cider vinegar
2 tbsp mustard seeds
1 1/2 tsps turmeric

Don't peel cucumbers, just slice them finely, and place with finely sliced onions and peppers and garlic cloves in muslin. (NOTE: I didn't actually do this, I just put them in a ceramic bowl). Make a brine with salt and water and soak all vegetables in it in a basin for 3 hours. Drain them well and put in a preserving pan with the remaining ingredients. Heat to boiling, stirring gently to dissolve sugar. Remove garlic. Pour into warmed, dried jars and vacuum seal immediately.

I halved the recipe because I didn't have heaps of cucumbers, also I was a bit freaked out as to how it was going to turn out and I didn't want to overcommit with the ingredients.

 

 

I'd fallen behind a bit last week with my Tasks, so squeezed an extra one in this Saturday: I cleared out the books on my bedside table. I'd initially wanted to sit down and read the lot of them from where I'd left them off,  but after some long discussions with Katherine and with the Boy, I realised it just wasn't going to happen. There is a bunch of books that I still want to read, so I have taken out the incriminating bookmark and placed them back on my bookshelf for another day. I resigned myself to the fact that some of the other books (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Gift) are Never Going to Be Finished, so I have put them in a pile of stuff to take to Arty Bees and sell (or, more likely, swap). I FEEL FREE! We're in between books for Book Club at the moment so I'm sitting down to read one of the books that had been glaring at me, partially read, for over a year: First Catch Your Weka. It's a history of New Zealand through cook books and it's pretty awesome. I wonder why I left off reading it the first time around?

If you follow me on Twitter you already know this but... I have taken up running! When I say running, I mean, that I'm in the early days of this Couch to 5k programme and am running/walking to get my fitness up. I have new shoes and they have really cool bright orange/pink bits on them! The shoe manufacturer calls this colour mango which makes me giggle quite a lot while I am running. Also also, I made myself a little armband to wear my iPod in so I can listen to I, Claudius while I run. I AM the Literary Runner, pounding the streets of Wellington. When I told Mum she informed me that running causes cellulite because all the jiggling makes the fat cells squish into one another. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, PEOPLE.

 

 

*When I say "Nanny" I mean "Nana" or "Grandma". Not like, as in, I had a Mary Poppins type to look after me when I was little.

New glasses, the extended family, and a delicious Steak and Kidney Pie

Hello my darlings!

Did you have a good - nay, LOVELY long weekend? I did. I rushed most of the time but managed to get some serious luxuriating in on Monday morning. Also on Monday, I made the black cotton lycra skirt that I intended to make before I began the Six Items or Less Challenge. As promised (in an effort to make myself feel better about my flakiness), I swapped out the woollen place-holder skirt for the Lycra one, but I had  tweaked the pattern so much when I made it with the cotton Lycra so it wasn't as much of a fair swap as I'd earlier imagined. On the other hand - NEVER MIND. This is my arbitrarily imposed challenge and I can do what I like! (I can do what I like in my own house!)

And other than that, SIOL had been going really well. I've become very fond of having a kind of uniform, and having hardly any clothing to choose from saved my neck on Sunday when I only had fifteen minutes to get ready for a family lunch at Shannon's Dad's house. If I had had to make a decision there would have been no way that I could get dressed so quickly - however, because I had only two things left that were clean I just grabbed and ran.

The topic of arbitrarily imposed challenges brings me to - the delicious Steak and Kidney Pie that I made on Saturday night. It was my last week's challenge (from the list of Fifty-Two) to make something delicious with kidneys or liver but the week seemed to hurtle past and it was Saturday before I'd had a chance to do it - 24 hours after the self imposed end of the challenge! I still count it though, because I'm like that. Did I mention how delicious the pie was? It was AMAZING. I am fully planning to make it again, because there were too many people around to fully gorge myself.

The recipe was a mash up of the Edmonds cook book recipe and a recipe for Steak and Kidney Pudding in a book called (imaginatively) Beef, so I feel totally entitled to share the love around.

crazy delicious steak and kidney pudding that will make your skirt fly up


Filling:
800g - 1kg steak and kidney (which I bought combined, from the butcher)
2 tbsps oil
2 onions
4 sticks of celery
1 tbsp plain flour
1 cup stock
400g can tinned tomatoes
bunch parsley
3 stalky twiggy bits of sage (our plant looked really sad so I just grabbed whatever I could)
salt
pepper
Soooo... heat up the oil in the pan and quickly cook the steak and kidney so it's sealed on the outside. Remove the meaty bits with a slotted spoon, throw in the onions and celery, and cook the lot until the onions are clear. Stir in the flour and cook for 30 seconds (I'm timing you). Gradually add the stock, stirring constantly, and bring the pan to a boil. Return your meaty bits to their happy home. Add the can of tomatoes and the herbs. Cover the pan and simmer for an hour (probably longer - closer to two?) until the meat is cooked. It's best to try a bit of steak in order to make absolutely sure that the meat is cooked through. Badly cooked cheap cuts suck the most. Also, you'll want to check the seasonings at this point, so it's imperative you try it, really. Then try it again because it's too delicious for words.

Pastry (adapted from a basic lard pastry recipe):
200g butter, at room temperature
400g self-raising flour (or 400g plain flour with three tsps of baking powder)
1 pinch salt
180ml cold water
Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the water and mix to a dough, then rest for 20 minutes.

Assembling (the business end of the pie):
Roll out the pastry 1cm thick, and line a 30cm pie plate. Carefully scoop out the meaty bits from the filling and put the meat and vegetables into the bottom of the pie case (you might want to fish out the bits of sage stalk though). Carefully spoon over 1/4 - 1/3 cup of the liquid the filling was cooked in. Roll out the pastry lid until about 2cm thick and put over the top of the pie; pinch the edges of the base and the lid together. Make a wee hole to let the steam out and brush the top with a mixture of an egg yolk and a tablespoon of water. Bake in the oven until the pastry is golden (about 40 minutes). You'll probably want to let it set for a bit before you cut in.

Serve in enormous delicious slabs with the reheated cooking liquid. Amaze and astound your friends and family.

 

Which brings me to: the topic of my extended family, as they were the people who were eating my pie! My Uncle Terry and Aunt Sue came over from the UK to visit my cousin Michael who now lives in Auckland, and they all came down to Wellington to visit us (the NZ branch of the fams). This was the first time I'd seen them since I was tiny. Dad and my littlest brother Luke joined us for dinner, and then Michael went out to Bea and Chap's goodbye party with Shannon and Jo and me. Apparently he fell off the bed the next morning due to hungoverness. Lightweight? Or having two tiny children?

The new glasses that I have been 100x excited about have finally arrived. I am wearing my favourites right now but I'm also getting that weird thing you get from new prescriptions where you a bit ill as your eyes adjust. Also, when I'm walking around my legs feel all long and stretchy which is a bit weird, and when I rode my bike home I felt like the tallest bicycle rider in the world. WOOOOOOOOO.

Here are the glasses, in all their many splendoured glory. And no, I can't keep my mouth shut. Why do you ask?

My pen has a moustache on it! Also: Fifty Two Tasks, again.

ello my darlings

 

My new pen does indeed have a moustache on it, and here is a ladylike face I am pulling with the aforementioned pen. Oooh la la! It's a Seven Year Pen which means that it should last seven years (amaze), and will save BILLIONS OF PENS in the process. How good am I? There is a website that sells them - Seltzer Goods - but I bought mine in spending fit at Madame Fancy Pants. Yes indeedy, Thursday was a day of fitful and impulsive spending. I also bought another Lipstick Queen lipstick and a pair of tights from Farmers which seemed like a great idea at the time but do my legs no favours at all - they make them look like strangely blotchy sausages.

 

I'm writing this on Day Six of my Six Items or Less Challenge, and can I quietly say that I'm actually really beginning to enjoy it? It's been making me thing a lot about how many clothes I have, what I feel comfortable wearing and how I want to dress. All excellent things to reflect on! Shannon brought back a whole heap of beautiful silk scarves from India and Nepal during his trips and I've been learning a bunch more ways to wear them, and I've found that I really love wearing scarves! Especially headscarves as turbans: turbans rock my tiny world.

 

FIFTY-TWO TASKS

I had a busy week (for me) so it was a bit of a squeeze getting all my bits sorted out in time. I went through all my fabric, got rid of some random second hand purchases and sorted out a bag that I now know just contain little scraps of awesome fabric. I cleared out my yarn and put all the yarn I was revolted by or that was acrylic (such a snob) in a separate plastic bag. I was planning to take these to the op shop but then I realised that if I was to do the task that Megan nominated (knitting a scarf for a Wellington statue) that I was best to hold on to it, no matter how uninspired it made me. Thus, it shall be relegated to the garage for the time being. A conclusion that I came to during the clear out: I have no reason to buy more fabric, and I should sew some awesome things with the awesome fabric that I have.

 

So! On to the next one. And I think that this week ... I'll attempt to make something delicious with liver or kidneys. Yes! Awesome! The opportunities are endless really aren't they? Pate, steak and kidney pie, liver all delicious and rocking by itself, kidneys with bacon fried up for breakfast ...

 

Which brings me to the end of my ideas. Do you have any? I'll keep you posted about mine.

Fifty-Two Tasks: The first week

via All Things Amazing

Very vaguely, I chose "Start the New Year with a clean slate" as my first task of 2011. I can definitely confirm that there was much tidying that went on - an entire room was reorganised (as has already been noted) and everything in the aforementioned room was cleaned, including myself. I've been wearing makeup to work and arriving on time (both of which bode well for my productivity). I've addressed some things that happened in the old year that I wasn't happy about and have made some active re-thinking decisions. My bed has been made everyday for a week! Thus, I say that "Start the New Year with a clean slate" is indeed a success. Consider my slate wiped clean. Onwards and upwards!

My next task is a decluttering one, because that's the kind of lady I am. I will be choosing item 26 from my list which is - "Clear out my craft stuff and get rid of any fabric or wool that makes me gag". A whole week to achieve! This I can do. Also, it will make my room look tidier because at the moment there is a blue plastic crate that is vomiting fabric scraps everywhere. And tidier makes Ginger happier, yes indeed.

I'm taking part in the new cycle of Six Items or Less! We begin on January 10 - my first post is here. If you see me in the street, amaze at my sophisticated style please, and don't point and laugh. Lovely xx.

New Year's Eve - and Fifty-Two tasks

I'm pretty sure the party I'm going to will be like this, but with more furs, gloves, and awkward looking ladies.

Hello my lovelies, I just wanted to drop in and say Happy New Year! to you all. At this particular moment in time I am in the process of pulling everything together (last minute) for the New Year's Eve party that I'm going to - at my friend Henry's parent's farm in the Wairarapa. They have a key hole-shaped pool! And (I think) a tennis court. And sheep! Also, there will be drinking and dancing and sunshine and good people. Nice one.

I Love Resolutions which I believe is quite well recorded. This year I've decided on just a few resolutions, using the one word resolution idea that is So Hot (with the Blog People) Right Now. This is like, the opposite of the Ten Things in 2010 job that I did last year (and the subsequent Ten More Things).

Thus: this year I have two one-word resolutions: Exercise and Make.

By Exercise I mean - Something. Anything. I'm aiming for everyday, but also I'm not planning to beat myself up if I don't manage to exercise everyday

By Make I mean - presents, my own clothes, my own food ... and those things that I really can't make myself, I will buy second hand. The thinking process should be: Make? Buy second hand? Do I need it?

In a similar vein, I've decided to undertake Fifty-Two Tasks in Fifty-Two Weeks. However, I have only come up with twenty-six tasks thus far. Input is strongly encouraged as for suggestions for more (keeping in mind that I am "living" off the student allowance next year).

I am starting this year with my first idea which is: Start the New Year with a clean slate. I'm not sure exactly what I meant by this, except (maybe???) that I am letting go of last years Ten Things and starting again. Thus, tomorrow morning I will wake with a wonderful new sense of lightness! And then on Sunday I will clean my room and house crazy hard core. And go for a long walk and walk out all the cobwebs of last year.

Have I mentioned how much I love Resolutions?

Have a wonderful New Year's Eve my lovelies. It's so so nice to have such fabulous readers, thanks so much for being on board with me this year! I think next year is going to be a blast!

♥ I wrote a post for Bex at Thrifty Chick about Christmas! I meant to put it up last week but got horribly caught up with last minute Christmas things and then the wind caused the internet in our house to go bung (I wish I was joking).