Bountiful Harvest

As usual, it's been a long time since my last post. Over the last few months, the garden has been slowly working away. Currently I have several waves of new leeks coming up, and just harvested the very last leek from the winter crop. I've begun a rotation of spring onion seedlings in pots, planting the most mature ones and potting new seeds on a four week schedule.

Celery and carrots are growing, and lettuces are suddenly all maturing at once. I've been harvesting from the first swedes over the last few weeks – they are tender and flavoursome, with an odour you don't get from the dried-out supermarket specimens.

Cabbages are slowly starting to gain ground, and I just harvested the first one yesterday. I had to strip a lot of the outer leaves because I haven't been using pesticides on the garden, so it's been chewed on a little.

The potato tops have started to die off, so I'll be pulling those out in a few weeks. One of the plants has already died off completely, so I dug up a handful of spuds.

I also pulled up our largest swede so far. Tonight, if the potatoes are OK for Annette's diet, I'm hoping to make steak and three veg using all home-grown vegetables!

Father's Day

I received a few Father's Day cards from my niece Liana while she was growing up, since her dad died when she was little. But today, I got my first Step-Father's Day card from Maddy.

So now I can officially call myself "Maddy's stepfather", instead of "Maddy's sort-of stepfather."

Seed Raising Mix

I bought some seed raising mix to help the new season's crops along. After some lacklustre performance with spring onions, I decided to test the mix against dirt taken from our garden. I planted an equal number of seeds in identical containers, and provided them with the same amount of water and sunshine.

Spring OnionsLeft: Dirt from our back yard.   Right: Amgrow Seed Raising Mix.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference for the spring onions, but the ones in dirt came up a lot quicker and are slightly more mature.

Swedes: Dirt from our back yard.

Swedes: Amgrow Seed Raising Mix.

The swede pictures really speak for themselves, though.

Looks like I won't be needing any more seed raising mix!

The Empire Expands

First post in a while! I've been so busy doing things that I haven't had the time to write about them!

It's the start of Spring, so the garden I prepared in the Autumn is about to swing into high gear! I was going to turn over the beds of Winter veggies, but +Annette encouraged me to open up some new beds and put more of the back yard to productive use.

The green bit in the middle is the original patch!

The Winter crop of leeks and spring onions has been providing a small yield, and rather than pull them all up at once I'll harvest leeks as we need them. The garlic seems to be doing well, and I'm just keeping an eye on it to see when it starts to wilt on top.

I realised that I should have spring onions on a regular rotation, so I've started planting a little box each week. After four weeks or so, I'll transplant the oldest box into the garden.

A month or so back, I opened up a new couple of beds for potatoes. Just about all of them have shown themselves above ground, and most seem to be going strong! I also extended some of the old beds and put in swedes and cabbage. The cabbages are doing so-so. The swedes, after a worrying delay germinating, are going strong now - as long as I can keep the snails and slugs from eating them!

Having decided not to turn over the old beds yet, I had to scramble last week to open up some more room for new crops. I started digging up the back corner, but since the soil was rich with compost it was choked with weeds and roots. I dug a 1m x 1m bed, and have planted some celery, lettuce, and carrot seeds.

At the front of the photo, I made a larger bed from the lawn that was in front of the raspberry patch. This has more celery and three rows of leeks; I'll add more leeks along the bed in a few weeks.

I also have a few planter boxes of swedes, celery, leeks, and cabbages going. These are a sort-of backup in case the direct-planted stuff has a hard time of it. And if not, I'll be able to transplant them anyway and get a larger crop.

It's turning into a regular little home garden. I'm pleased that we're finally starting to get some usable leeks and spring onions, and am looking forward to many more things to come.

Paw Cookie

Yesterday evening I made some choc chip cookies (from the recipe on the back of the Cadbury's packet). I was just about to bite into one, when I noticed this:

Pawprint!

Then I remembered we shut Serenity in the bedroom because he was a pain while I was cooking dinner and wanted to eat all the chicken!

Maybe it's a sign, because the Strays Kickstarter launched this morning; I've been doing fuzzy animal art for this Fate Accelerated roleplaying game, including the cover illustration!

First Harvest

Things have been growing pretty slowly in the garden patch, partly because it's Winter and partly because I didn't buy any fertiliser for the first couple of months.

I took some pictures a few weeks back, but didn't get around to uploading them until now. Here's the initial patch; it's mostly leeks, with a few spring onions. I also planted some garlic cloves, which have really taken off! Some of the leeks are starting to look impressive, but they either have a long way to go still, or they're going to end up the same size as large spring onions.

I've also turned over a new patch, in preparation for the Spring planting season.

Today I reaped my first harvest - a whole two spring onions! These are from the Red Legs seedlings I planted when the garden first went in. I took the two largest, which were a decent size but not huge, and left the others to grow a bit more.

Steak knife for scale

Tonight for dinner, we had Atlantic salmon with poached egg on toast, garnished with our spring onions! I forgot to take a picture before I started eating it... Very tasty, but I overcooked the egg a little.

Breaking New Ground

In an effort to help the household budget, I've started work on a garden patch.

So far I've taken a hoe to it to break up the grass, dug up three deeply embedded leafy weeds, turned it all over with a garden fork (which also involved pulling out a whole network of long ropey roots), sprinkled some aged compost over it, and soaked it all with the hose.

Because of +Annette's food requirements, we're fairly limited in the crops we can usefully plant. It's a bit late in the season, but we're going to start off trying some leeks and spring onions. As the months pass, we'll add more stuff as it comes into season.

I've never been much of a gardener, so this is a whole new exercise for me. I still need to figure out stuff like fertiliser and pest control, and no doubt dozens of things I've never even thought of. But I have the Yate's Garden Guide, so hopefully my first foray into food production won't be a complete disaster!

ALL the Baking!

I spent the afternoon baking things!

The banana cake is from an online recipe site, substituting Nuttelex and rice milk where necessary.

The bread is just a quick white loaf through our bread-maker, substituting canola oil for the butter and powdered milk.

The cookies are from the recipe on the back of Cadbury's milk chocolate baking chips.

Pear Danish

I sort-of made this up based on what little I remembered about danishes. It worked pretty well - nice and sticky and sweet.

• 1 sheet of puff pastry
• 4 tinned pear halves, drained (or previously stewed pears)
• Pear jam
• Canola oil (for greasing)

Cut the pastry into quarters. Spread each with a good coating of pear jam, leaving about 1cm clear at the edges. Place a pear half in the centre of each pastry square, aligned diagonally. 

Fold over the edges a little to create a ridge all the way around, then fold two of the points up over the pear half. Press together at the top where they overlap. 

Place on a lightly greased baking tray, and bake for about half an hour at 180ºC, or until the pastry is cooked. Allow to cool a little before serving, as the jam will be very hot.

You may notice that the recipe doesn't involve icing or sugar or anything on top. It didn't really need it, since as +Annette pointed out, the jam provides enough sweetness. I only just realised that most danishes use custard on the base, but I'm not a fan and I don't think we have any anyway.

I used a bit much jam, so some of it bubbled out onto the baking tray to form a sort of toffee. It came off pretty easily after a bit of soaking, though.

Lawnmowing

I haven't had to do much lawn maintenance over the Summer, because it's been too dry to grow anything. The lawn's pretty much died back, although we did have to apply some Weed n' Feed to keep the dandelions down.

The last time I can remember mowing the lawn was just before Christmas. I just mowed the front lawns last week, but haven't done the back one yet. We've finally started getting some rain (which, if my regular fortnightly trips last year are anything to go by, will probably only happen every weekend), so the green things are starting to grow again.

We have a mulch pile in the back corner of the yard, but it's getting a bit carried away. I filled up the bin pretty quickly, and started working on a pile next to it. It got pretty big last year as I gradually hacked the back grass down, but the fresh green stuff tends to reduce in bulk as it loses moisture and starts to decompose. The few mows I did over the Summer yielded mainly straw and dust, which doesn't get much smaller over time.

I'll probably need to start doing the lawns every couple of weeks now things are getting wetter. At least we have an electric mower, which is nice and light and doesn't require any messy refuelling. It's just a matter of making sure I don't run over the cord, and trying to get the mowing done between rain showers!

Dinosaur Pasta

I like dinosaurs! I saw Jurassic Park three times, and now constantly work to raise awareness that this is a Velociraptor:

and this is a Deinonychus:

Anyway, we were doing the online shopping order a few weeks ago and +Annette ordered a box of dinosaur pasta shapes. I'll ignore the fact that one of them is called "Bronty" instead of "Apaty" because at least Bronty sounds like a real name, even though Brontosaurus has been recognised as a mistakenly-classified Apatosaurus since 1903.

So I was boiling them up on the stove...

Steggy and Rex clearly visible on the fork

...and Annette walked past, and I said "Hey, look!"

"I'm making primordial soup!"

Hair dye

+Annette has had dyed hair for as long as I've known her - mostly black, but with a coloured section down one side. When we first met it was purple, and then she changed it to red. Recently though, she's had it professionally re-styled so it's now black on top, purple on the right, and grades around the back to bright red on the left!

We've acquired some red and purple hair dye, and since it's not a job Annette can do by herself (not being able to see the back of her own head that easily), it's now fallen on me to do the periodic re-dyeing.

The first time was about a week ago. I found it to be a daunting and somewhat stressful exercise; I'm never at my best when learning new skills, especially ones where you only get one shot and run the risk of major failure.

I've never done much with hair apart from occasionally trim my own, so even the first task was troublesome. We had to divide the coloured hair into six bunches and tie it up to separate it. The little loops we made were like pulling a ponytail through, but only half pulling through the last time ("just like making a bun," advised Maddy, like I'd ever done that before either). The exercise was further complicated because the original dye-job had been done in overlapping diagonal wings to help the colours blend together better.

We had two red and one purple tube of hair dye. Mixing the right colours was probably the easiest part of the exercise! Next though, I had to learn about foils.

One at a time, I had to release the colour-separated hair bunches and thoroughly paint them with hair dye. We had to use squares of aluminium foil to pick up a layer of hair, paint it, then fold it up so it wouldn't splatter dye everywhere and to keep it out of the way while we did the hair underneath. It took a good couple of colour segments before I started to develop a good technique and really get into the swing of it.

After that, my job was done. She sat around for an hour or two with so much foil on her head it looked like she was baking mini-potatoes, then showered and dried it.

We got there in the end, and it turned out pretty well! It was a trial by fire, but at least I know what I'm up for next time she needs a colour boost. I've heard it said that confidence is the memory of past success, so it won't be quite as daunting.

Chickenherder's Pie

This was my first attempt to bake a full-size pie in the oven, rather than the individual serve pies that come out of our pie-maker. It's a chicken and vegetable pie with mashed potato on top, so it's like a shepherd's pie but without the lamb.

It's actually been a while since I made this, so I may be a little vague on some of the exact ingredients and methods.

Top

• Four or five large potatoes, peeled and chopped
• Chives (fresh or dried)
• A splash of rice milk (or regular milk)

Boil the potatoes until cooked all the way through. Drain and return to the pot.

Add chives and mash, adding rice milk as necessary to make the mash smooth but not runny.
Set aside.

(I didn't bother adding spring onions or garlic paste to the mash, since both of those ingredients go into the main pie filling and I wanted the top of the pie to be smooth.)

Filling

• 500g chicken mince
• 1 leek, chopped or sliced
• 2 spring onions, sliced
• 1 celery stick, sliced
• 1 garlic clove, crushed (or some garlic paste)
• A pinch of salt
• A tablespoon of canola oil
• A few teaspoons of cornflour
• A splash of rice milk (or regular milk)

Fry the leek in the oil in a large pan until it softens. Add the chicken mince and cook until it's sealed.

Add the other vegetables and the salt and cook until mostly done and the leek starts to brown.

To bind the mixture, sprinkle in a teaspoon of cornflour and stir in well. Add a dash of rice milk. Repeat a few times until the mixture sticks together well. Try to avoid it becoming too sloppy or ultra-stodgy.

The Pie

• 1 sheet of shortcrust (or puff) pastry
• Mashed potato (from above)
• Chicken and vegetable filling (from above)

Line a pie dish with canola oil, and press the pastry sheet into the dish. Trim around the edges with a knife.

(Normally I would have used puff pastry, but we seemed to have accidentally acquired a packet of shortcrust pastry instead.)

Spoon in the pie filling, smoothing it down so the top is pretty flat.

Cover the filling with mashed potato all the way to the edges. I also used a tablespoon to shape the mash in a spiral pattern, but whatever floats your boat.

Bake in the oven at 180ºC for... a while. I didn't time it, but you basically want to make sure the pastry is cooked and the potato on top starts to brown. Since the ingredients apart from the pastry are all cooked to begin with, it shouldn't matter too much as long as the pastry is done!

Busy busy!

Sorry about the lack of posts lately - I've been too busy living my life to find the time to write about it! And I did say I was bad at keeping diaries.

I do have a list of things I want to write about though, so I'll line up some posts for the next few days.

So, what have I been up to? All the regular housework of course, and lots of taking care of +Annette. We've been watching one or two episodes of The Walking Dead most nights, and we're halfway through Season 4.

I've been planning and running some roleplaying games, and doing some writing on a couple of my own games. I've also been teaching people how to play the Anima Tactics skirmish wargame, which has prompted me to pull out all of my partly-completed miniatures and work on finishing them off.

I've also been working towards getting a button badge production and badge machine hire business up and running, which I'll write about in a future post.

Check back soon for more!

Lessons I have learned

When you put mince in the freezer, flatten it out first so it'll thaw faster. If you leave it in a ball, you're left scraping layer after bloody layer of thawed meat off a lump that looks like a frozen brain.

I think cats charge around the house after making a deposit in the litter tray to make sure they don't have any remnants stuck to their butts.

Apparently you need to cover stuff when you put it in the fridge, to stop it tasting like fridge or stop everything in the fridge tasting like it.

You need to wait for cakes to cool down before you can ice them.

It takes a long time to dry out bread for breadcrumbs if you're actually trying to grill them while they're on a low shelf of the oven instead of baking them.

When +Annette said she wanted to clear all the plants out of the bed along the side of the house, she didn't mean the two herb bushes at the far end. I thought they smelled nice as the whippersnipper cut through them. I think they might be growing back slowly.

Insidious Grapevines

We have a decent sized back yard which, apart from mowing the lawns, we've been slowly chipping away at little jobs that need doing here and there; weeding, pruning, watering, and recently Weed'n'Feeding it.

One job I had was to clear the garden bed alongside the house. It was overgrown with long grass and grapevines that were threatening to choke the air-conditioner unit. In the first couple of passes I pruned back the grapevines to their stumps, and used the whippersnipper to get the grass down to a manageable level (and also accidentally take out a couple of herb bushes that I didn't know we wanted to keep).

The next time I felt energetic in a gardening direction, I went out aiming to dig up one of the grapevine stumps.

That is a hell of a job.

With spade, fork, trowel and axe, I toiled for hours. I tried digging all around the stump in an attempt to dig all of the roots out just in case they would turn into self-supporting runners and pop a vine up somewhere else, but in the end I just had to start hacking through them to stand any chance at all. The main stump had sent out a substantial branch, the end of which had started putting down roots of its own, and that was a whole other thing to deal with.

Eventually I returned from the field of battle, hefting the root and branch like the severed head and arm of my enemy. I left behind a rough, dusty hole that the displaced dirt could only start to fill. But it was done.

Of course there are two or three other stumps to deal with on the other side of the aircon unit, but they are a battle for another day.

Engagement Ring

When I proposed to +Annette I gave her my mother's engagement ring; mum gave it to me some years after my parents' divorce. By some lucky coincidence, it was the right size, and also featured Annette's birthstone.

At the time, I wasn't sure what the procedure was for the man. Do I get a ring? How is it organised? Presumably Annette couldn't have one waiting for me, since she didn't know when I was going to propose. We went through Annette's jewellery boxes and found one that fit my left ring-finger - a seven band rolling ring, which for the next few months became a comfortable thing for me to idly toy with, and which my finger missed when it was off.

When I started showing the ring to people, I met with a lot of confusion. They most often seemed to think it might be a wedding ring, but the suddenness kind of threw them especially as Annette and I were still living at opposite ends of the state.

Apparently, I learned, men generally don't get engagement rings. But that doesn't sit right with me; it turns the woman's ring into a symbol of ownership, saying "hands off, she's been claimed by someone else" while the man continues to go as he will, with no outward sign of commitment. Thinking about it, the same could also be said of the Mr/Mrs/Miss prefixes, which is a good reason to strengthen my support of Ms, and to embrace Annette's suggestion that we both change our last names to something completely different once we're married.

It was very important to Annette that I receive a proper ring, not just a jewellery-box stand-in. It arrived this morning; yellow gold with diamonds flanking an emerald, my birthstone. It's a touch large, but we can always get it resized.

This ring connects me with Annette, our rings complementing each other as we complement each other. Both rings are symbols of our mutual adoration and commitment, our equality and respect.

Birthday Cakes

Last weekend was +Annette's birthday, and she requested a cake! I haven't made anything but banana cake since high school, but with recipes to follow how hard could it be?

I started out with an attempt to make a low-chemical gluten free sponge cake, sandwiched together with pear jam and covered in marshmallow icing. This was possibly a little ambitious, but following the instructions I had high hopes of creating something spectacular!

The cake batter was mostly eggs and sugar, with a little corn flour and arrowroot, so it was pretty fluid. The recipe requested three circular cake tins at 23cm diameter or two square tins, but we only had a series of nesting circular tins with the largest at the requested size. I figured a tiered cake wouldn't be too bad. From the look of the mixture, it was going to make pretty shallow layers and then stack them together to create the full cake.

The circular tins has removable bottoms to assist with popping the cake out; a latch on the side tightens or loosens the sides to clamp the base in place. I was a little worried that the batter might leak out the bottom, but it didn't start doing that until it had been in the oven for a couple of minutes.

I suspect the heat may have expanded the sides enough to break the seal a little. With regular thick cake mixture that wouldn't be a problem, but with this liquid stuff it was. I poured the mixture out of the circular tins into a couple of rectangular loaf tins; the tops had started turning foamy while it was still runny underneath, so I tried to mix it together to make sure it wouldn't go lumpy. After cleaning all the semi-cooked goop out of the oven, I put the new tins in and started again.

It failed spectacularly. I ended up with two really flat cakes with almost-burned sides, cake-like tops with large uneven ripples, and a gummy and warped underside. It didn't even taste good. Into the bin, and on to Cake Number Two with time slipping away before company arrived!

The second cake was a plain butter cake with vanilla butter icing. The mixture was thick and smooth, but I took no chances and cooked it in a solid-based rectangular tin. It took a nail-biting hour in the oven, but cooked all the way through and slid out of the tin without disintegrating or sticking to the tin!

It did start to pull apart when I tried to flip it over, since I wasn't aware of the cake-flipping technique - place another cooling rack on top and then pick up both racks and flip to keep the cake intact. Also it helps to wait for the cake to cool off a bit, but I was running out of time to get it finished. On a taste test, even with rice milk and Nuttelex substitutions, it tasted delicious! Spirits buoyed, I moved on to the icing.

The icing was pretty much just icing sugar (or icing mixture in our case) and butter (Nuttelex) with a little vanilla essence. It's soft and creamy, not that shell-like icing. I started applying it to the cake, only to find it melting and threatening to slide off! Luckily I'd only applied one smear with a knife, so I scraped it off and put the cake in the fridge to speed up the cooling process.

Just before our guests arrived, I started icing again. It went on pretty thick, and it wasn't pretty, but it worked. I must admit, I could definitely taste the Nuttelex in the icing, so I don't think it was the greatest, but all up the birthday cake turned out very tasty and was well received.

It took a huge effort, and a near-meltdown in the middle, but perseverance and Annette's calming influence got me there in the end.

Solitude

Last week Maddi was home from school for the last half of the week, but this week everything seems to be back to normal - which means it's just me and the cats at home from 8am!

I really enjoy living in a household with other people, especially since one of them is the woman I love! It's awesome to welcome her home from work, spend time together, and kiss her goodnight every night, especially after we spent the better part of two years at a great distance from each other.

Before I moved in, I lived on my own for fifteen years. That's a long time to get used to your own company. As a natural introvert, I do regenerate energy when I'm on my own, and expend it on social interactions. Pleasantly though, spending time with +Annette doesn't drain my social energy. Even so, I do value time on my own (cats allowing).

Today I woke up completely refreshed. After everybody left for work and school, I spent the morning getting all the housework out of the way. I turned my music up (not very loud) and got things done with enthusiasm and gusto.

I planned to spend the afternoon working on various projects - get some writing done, work on my button badge hire flyer, maybe chat about games with Nat. However, it was difficult to pull myself away from the housework, which is a bit sad! There's always something else that needs doing, and once I'm in cleaning mode I can be an unstoppable machine. Eventually I took a break for lunch and settled down at my writing desk.

I only ended up working on my long-term roleplaying game project for three or four hours; it was a bit fiddly and required a lot of cross-checking, so I didn't manage to get anything else done. It was good to make some actual progress, and I'm going to try and do a little bit each day on that or some other similar project. It's been my plan for a while to do housework in the morning and project work in the afternoon, and I may finally be reaching that ideal.

Today was an awesome day. I felt good throughout, and I'm pleased at what I managed to achieve. Having the middle of the day to myself, and being able to take things at my own pace, gives me the chance to centre myself. Of course I'm always here when Annette is, so I have to be mindful to let her find her own alone-time to recharge as well.

Diary Day

I haven't posted anything for a couple of days, but my solid one-a-day stint lasted about eleven posts. Here's a diary of my activities for today.

• 6:30 - Woke up.
• 6:50 - Got up. Prepped lunch for +Annette. Emptied the dishwasher. Helped Annette get ready for work. Began a chat conversation with +Nat about game design.
• 8:00 - Sent Annette off to work with a back-rub and a kiss. Had breakfast. Cleaned myself up.
• 8:30 - Cleaned the cats' litter trays.
• 9:00 - Started clearing the floor for vacuuming.
• 9:30 - Got dressed.
• 9:45 - Vacuumed.
• 10:15 - Made the bed.
• 10:30 - Hung damp laundry up on the airer, since it's supposed to be a rainy day.
• 10:45 - Morning tea time! Irish breakfast, crackers and dip, and banana cake. Finished chatting with Nat for the moment.
• 11:15 - Hand-washed some garments in the sink.
• 12:15 - Started repairing a skirt.
• 1:00 - Lunch time! Homemade chicken burger (that collapsed under its own weight) and a glass of lemonade.
• 2:15 - Finished repairing the skirt. Me-time! Actually, nap time.
• 4:00 - Woke up, chatted with Nat again. Cup of tea and a snack to wake up properly. Glued together some bits of a model I'm working on.
• 4:45 - Talked with Annette over the phone on her way home.
• 5:30 - Annette arrived home. Glued some more stuff together.
• 6:00 - Started cooking dinner - pancakes! Brown sugar and lemon juice is very nice.
• 7:00 - Sat down for a bit and browsed the internet.
• 9:00 - Packed and started the dishwasher.
• 9:15 - Started getting ready for bed.
• 9:30 - Bedtime! Time for reading.
• 10:00 - Sleep time. Goodnight!

My solid "me time" turned into a nap, but I managed to get a little project work done and spent a lot of the day discussing game design throughout, so that was good. Hopefully tomorrow I'll find a few hours for solid project work - writing and design stuff.

Weekends

This is another thing I've noticed about my shifting schedule - and don't take this as a complaint, because my life and my lifestyle are both pretty amazing at the moment - but I don't really get a "weekend" any more.

Weekend days are different, sure. I see a lot more of +Annette and we have time to do more things together, relax and unwind. We get to sleep in, too! Annette does some housework too, and it's also a good time for us to get big two-person jobs dealt with.

Other than that, a lot of my routine remains largely unchanged from any other day. I'll still unpack the dishwasher, clean the cat litter and make the bed in the mornings, and still cook dinner and pack the dishwasher at night (although I might skip the vacuuming that normally happens every second day). I don't get a distinctive "day off", a day all to myself where I don't have to do any housework.

Granted, my old lifestyle involved living in a flat by myself, where I didn't have to do housework if I didn't want to. I could have whole days to myself, and pay someone else to cook my dinner. I'm sure that if my and Annette's situations were reversed and I was working, I'd be doing odd jobs and gardening on the weekends anyway - it's just part of living in a household where there's always something else to be done.

On the other hand, I am becoming more comfortable with taking a little 
"me time" every day.

Crumbed Chicken

I've occasionally cooked crumbed pork cutlets before, so I was already familiar with the basics of crumbing food. Flour, then egg, then crumbs, then fry it. I used a modified crispy chicken recipe from +Annette's Friendly Food cookbook as the basis for tonight's dinner.

Crumbed chicken with mashed potato and fried leeks

The mashed potato was as I've described earlier (which also details the preparation of breadcrumbs), and the leeks were just chopped and fried until browned. The leeks turned out a bit chewy, but I'm not sure if it's because I cooked them too long and dried them out, or if it's just because the leeks I used were a bit old to start with.

The crumbed chicken recipe is as follows.

• Chicken breasts, depending how many people you're feeding
• Plain flour
• An egg or two
• 1 tablespoon of water per egg
• Breadcrumbs
• Poppy seeds
• Salt

Cut up the chicken breasts into medallions about 15mm thick. 

Prepare three bowls; in the first, put plain flour. In the second, whisk the eggs and water together. In the third, combine a good deal of breadcrumbs, a few teaspoons of poppy seeds, and a dash of salt. 

Coat the chicken pieces in flour, then dip in the egg mixture, then coat with the breadcrumb mixture. Place the pieces onto a lightly greased baking tray. 

Put the tray in the fridge for 20-30 minutes to let the coating set a little. 

Preheat the oven to 200ºC, then bake the chicken for half an hour or until cooked all the way through.

Happy Valentine's Day

+Annette,

I love your smile; it makes my heart do flip-flops.
I love your style; you're my black and red gothic angel.
I love your strength; you've been through so much, and it takes determination to keep going.
I love your dedication; you have mastered so many difficult skills.
I love your creativity; you have the power within you to bring new things into being.
I love your hobbies and interests; we have so much in common, but have our differences too!
I love your passion; you have strong opinions and fight for what you believe in.
I love your loyalty; you'll go to great lengths for your family and friends.
I love your openness; we can share our innermost selves.
I love your tolerance for everything but intolerance.
I love your body, your mind, and your soul.
I love your humour; we have a life of love and laughs ahead of us.
I love that we finally found each other.
I love that we are so good together.

I love you.

A bridge too far

My day begins and ends with housework. I spend most of the morning cleaning the place and doing the regular chores. In the evening I cook dinner. I'm genuinely happy to do all of that; +Annette's out working hard, and I want her to be able to relax in the evenings.

But man, it's the last job of the day that sometimes seems like it's just a little too much to deal with, just one thing too many: loading the dishwasher. It doesn't sound like much, but after a day like today where I baked a couple of banana cakes, cooked lunch AND dinner and entertained guests, there's a lot of things to sort, rinse and stack. And I know that everything needs a good rinse first, because I really detest pulling things out of the dishwasher to find them still covered in grease, batter, or leftover food. Even worse, though, is when one really dirty thing spreads it around and covers everything else with gunk. So I scrub most things in the sink before they get loaded.

Once it's full or all the things are in the machine, chuck in some powder, hit start, and time for bed.

OK, just needed to get that off my chest!

Getting places

Nobody in our household drives. We don't have a car, and don't hold any driver's licenses (although young Maddy might be going for hers soon!).

We're pretty used to walking places, and everyone has a bike too. I sometimes ride down to the shop (and most of the way back), but I haven't grown comfortable enough to ride on streets that get more than minimal traffic. When it's not quite so hot, we hope to go on a few rides together along the reserve.

We sometimes get lifts from helpful friends, or use taxis when we need to get somewhere far away or get there quickly. For long-distance trips we catch busses.

Since we live in a corner of the city that's pretty far away from everything else, I don't get into the city centre much. However, it's not an enormous city (about 20,000 people), so it's not impossible to walk to most places. It's just a matter of planning ahead and accounting for travel time.

Today I'd built up a list of things I needed to deal with in town, so I timed the journey. It takes about a quarter of an hour to get down to the closest "corner shop", and half an hour to the nearest shopping district. From there, it's only another ten minutes to the city centre. Unlike Hobart, the core part of the CBD is only five or six blocks across, so it's pretty quick to run around to different places.

So I managed to get all of my tasks done, or at least made an attempt. A couple of errands were thwarted due to non-availability of goods. I met up with +Annette, and we got a lift home with a friend.

It was a big expedition day, but I'll probably get to potter around the local neighbourhood for a good long while before I have to go into town again!

Caramelised Leek Stir-Fry

+Annette's on an Exclusion Diet to test for food intolerances, so we are somewhat limited on the ingredients we can use. It's mostly green vegetables, potatoes, pears, eggs, beans, as well as lean meat. I usually try to make things interesting so she's not always stuck eating the same stuff.

A while ago we had a happy accident while Annette was making chicken and leek pies in the pie-maker; a little mixture leaked out around the edge, and some of the leek got a bit over-cooked. But it smelled delicious, and added a nice bit of caramelisation to the flavour.

Since leek's related to onions, it seems that it caramelises in a similar manner. To test this theory, I made a leek-based stir-fry that turned out very nicely, so I present the recipe here. It's simple, but I'm proud of it nonetheless!

• 1 whole leek, sliced into thin rings
• 2 spring onions, finely chopped
• 1 stick of celery, finely chopped
• Half a cup of green beans
• 1 chicken breast, thinly sliced 
• A handful of cabbage (drum-head or red), chopped into strips
• A little Canola oil to line the pan

Put the oil in a large frying pan or wok over a medium heat (2 out of 6 on our stove-top using a heavy-based pan, but probably go higher if you're using a wok). 

When the oil is heated, stir-fry the chicken until it's sealed on all sides. Remove from the pan and set aside. 

Apply some more oil, and fry the leeks until they soften and start to brown. Stir them with a spatula to separate the rings and give them all a good chance to cook.

Add the rest of the vegetables and the chicken. Fry it all up, using a spatula to mix the ingredients and heat everything through. Keep going until the leek is well browned and the smell loses its sharpness and starts to turn caramelised, but avoid burning it to the bottom of the pan!

I've often been making this without the chicken as a side to a meat dish, and haven't been making a sauce or anything. If your diet allows, you might want to try a sauce (not sure what to suggest; ideas?) or experiment with additional stir-fry ingredients. The caramelised leek is the focal point though, so I guess you probably don't want to add anything that's going to overwhelm that flavour.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for variations or improvements!

Shifting Schedule

To say that my daily schedule has undergone a change is something of an understatement!

I used to get up at 8, work from 9 until 5:30 with a one hour lunch break, have dinner out at a takeaway or restaurant, and then it's mostly leisure time until bed at 11.

Now, it's almost as though my work and leisure times during the day have been inverted. I get up around 6:30, and help +Annette get ready for work. Once I have the house to myself around 8:00, I usually do housework for most of the morning. After lunch I may get a bit of time to nap or do what I want, although I often find odd jobs to do around the house. Once everyone's home, I cook dinner, make hot drinks, and rinse dishes so I can load the dishwasher.

Unlike my previous clearly-delineated life, work tends to be more broken up and more pervasive. To start with I had to really pay attention if I wanted to actually get some time to myself and work on my projects, since I was still in hyper-cleaning mode from cleaning my flat before I moved. Now I'm settling into a routine, I'm learning to put aside some time each day for myself. There's always something else that needs doing, and while I try to do a little "extra" each day around the house apart from my regular tasks, I'm learning not to just work-work-work straight through any more! Doing a little each day, things will slowly get done.

Furbabies

Besides me, +Annette, and Maddy, there are two other members of our household. We adopted two cats from the RSPCA last year. Originally we went to get a little cat called Raffy, but her cage-mate Winston looked so lonely by himself, sitting with his back to us looking forlornly out the window, that we had to bring him home too. For his placid nature (and our love of a certain TV show), Winston became Serenity. "Suki" means "like" (as in to like someone) in Japanese, and Firefly fitted energetic and fuzzy Raffy, so she became Suki Firefly.

Suki Firefly

Suki was two when we got her. Originally rather nervous, she's settled down a lot - although she's still a high-energy skitty kitty and will happily charge around the place and bounce off the walls. She's very flexible as you can see, and has a habit of getting your attention by rolling onto her head from a sitting position, somersaulting to reveal her fluffy tummy. Sometimes it's pats, and sometimes it's bear-trap.

She also loves destroying rolls of paper towel and toilet paper, ripping cardboard to shreds, pretending to gut coathangers with knitted covers, sitting on the backs of swivel chairs or leaping on them so they spin around, and pestering her somewhat more sedentary 'brother'. She's not a lap cat but she will sleep on the bed, and she doesn't enjoy being picked up much.

Serenity

Serenity is more of an older gentleman; we were originally told he was three or four, but it turns out he's closer to seven. He's a very cuddly cat with a 'husky' build, although we're trying to get his weight down a little. He enjoys sleeping, sitting on people, and eating. On top of cat food, he will try to eat any meat that's left on the bench, and likes to chew on my fingers. Just mine, nobody else's. He also has a strange fascination with polyhedral dice and will drag them to the edge of the table and try to chew on them, which is amusing but does tend to disrupt gaming! Oh, and he also likes chewing the corners of smartphones and tablets.

The only time he tends to move quickly is just after visiting the litter tray, when he either sits excitedly in the middle of the floor and stomps his front feet in what I have termed "jazz paws", or he just bolts around as fast as he can. Last week he ran into the ironing board as Annette was carrying it out of the hall!

The two have been indoor cats for most of their time here, partly to stop them killing things and partly because there are a number of established territorial cats in the area and we didn't want them getting into fights. We tried taking them for walks with a harness and leash, with mixed results; neither of them really like it, and while Suki (who was the most insistent about going out) eventually tolerated it so she could go eat most of the lawn, it was always a struggle to stop her going into problematic areas where she might get tangled. Serenity was originally terrified of the outdoors, showing signs of distress and insisting on going back inside.

Since I moved in, we've been letting them out on the condition that they wear loud bells on their collars so we can hear where they are. Standard cat bells are too quiet, so I bought a couple of smallish copper bird-bells that do the trick. They ring with the slightest movement, and are audible from the next yard over.

Originally Suki was the big explorer, heading off into neighbouring gardens while Serenity slowly inspected our back deck at his own pace. After a month or two, the situation's almost reversed - Suki spends a lot of her time lazing under the deck and hunting lizards while Serenity's off making a nuisance of himself by competing with an old female cat next door for her warm patio.

They are our furbabies and we love them very much.

Baked Eggs in Potato

I was looking through +Annette's Friendly Food cookbook for an easy, low-chemical lunch and came across these little things. Normally it would take about an hour to prepare, but we had some left-over mashed potato from last night so it was relatively quick. I'm just going to describe basically what to do, rather than provide a full recipe.

• Make some smoothly mashed potato! The quantity depends on how many of these you want to make, but you don't need very much per serve. Our mash also contains finely chopped spring onion, chives, garlic paste, and rice milk (although regular milk would be fine too).
• Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Get a muffin tray and line the cups with a little oil (I used spray canola oil). Sprinkle a bit of rice crumbs (or breadcrumbs) in so they stick to the oil.
• Grab a small ball of mashed potato and push it into the base of each cup, spreading it across the bottom and up the sides. Crack a fresh egg into each potato cup (making sure your cup doesn't runneth over).
• Cook for about 15 minutes or until the egg sets. Pop them out of the tray and serve egg-side up with garnish of your choice.

It makes a tasty change from fried or boiled eggs, and makes less mess than scrambled eggs. It does take a bit of time if you have to make the mashed potato first, though.

Game Day

I think I'm mostly going to post one thought or observation or recipe or something each day. First up, though, I thought I'd write about one of my days.

This morning before breakfast I fed the cats, emptied the dishwasher, made the bed around our fat cat Serenity, ironed +Annette's new workshirt, packed her lunch, put some bread in the oven to toast for breadcrumbs later, and saw her off to work.

Dry breadcrumbs are pretty easy. Just cut up some crustless bread into inch squares and toast on an oven tray at 130º until they're dry and crispy all the way through. Thinner bits of bread cook faster; if I feel any squish when I pinch the pieces, I put them back in for another five minutes.

You can use a blender to turn the lumps into crumbs, but I'm still a little leery about using such devices so I put the pieces in a plastic bag and gently crush them with a rolling pin. 

Today I have some guys coming over for a roleplaying game session from 12 to 5, so I have to race around like a whirlwind to get everything organised in time! Thankfully we don't have many plans for the weekend, so we'll both have some recovery time.

School went back earlier this week, so Annette's work at the college has been extra busy. Luckily her daughter Maddy is pretty self-sufficient, so I don't need to worry too much about getting her organised in the mornings as well.

I put a load of laundry on and vacuumed the carpet. Needing to pick up a few things, I hopped on my bike and did a circuit of the shops - hardware store for ant sand and a replacement globe for the bug zapper, pet shop for cat food, and grocery store for milk. Back home I had a quick snack and hung out the washing. Time to shower and get things ready for the game!

I was just having some lunch when people started turning up. I managed to keep my brain running for the duration, and it was a fun game. I ran a session of Ryuutama, where the group journeyed into a swamp to negotiate with a witch. After running a five hour game though, I felt like a nap.

But it's time to get dinner ready! Tonight I'm going to cook pan-fried steak with mashed potatoes and some frozen veggies. Annette's on a low chemical diet to test for food intolerances, so our menu tends to be at once limited and interesting.

Our mashed potatoes usually consist of boiled potatoes, finely chopped spring onions, chives, garlic paste, and rice milk. 

I used to cook steak too slowly, so it would turn grey and chewy. Now that I have access to a good stove and a heavy ridge-based frying pan, I crank the heat a little and sear lines into the meat while leaving the middle tender.

Before I started cooking, I loaded the dishwasher, took the recycling out, and brought the laundry in. I managed to coordinate the food reasonably well, so everything ended up being cooked and ready at the same time. It's a talent I'm still working on; in my first few weeks, one item would often be finished while something else was far from ready.

After dinner we relaxed with the last few episodes of The Walking Dead season one. It's my first time watching the show. It's good! Very tense and visceral.

Before bed, I had time to check the bug lamp (not sure if it's working properly), rinse some plates and scrub some pots, and load the dishwasher.

As I was getting ready for bed, I saw our other cat Suki tearing strips off their cardboard scratch mat. Something to clean up in the morning

Goodnight!

A new beginning

Recently, I turned my life completely upside-down.

A month and a half ago, I went from being a full-time graphic artist living alone in an inner-city flat and eating takeaway food every night, to living with my fiancée, her daughter, and our two cats in a suburban house; she goes off to work every day, and I'm at home keeping the house and garden in order and putting dinner on the table.

For the last fifteen years I've lived alone. I tidied up every few months for inspections, and after brief attempts to cook for myself decided that it would be much easier to simply eat out every night, especially since I had a healthy disposable income and lived a block away from one of the city's best restaurant and eatery strips.

But then, I fell in love with a woman who lived at the other end of the state.

We dated for a little over a year, taking a four-hour bus journey every couple of weeks to see each other on the weekends. Both of us had good, solid jobs and comfortably established home situations, but eventually being apart was too much - with every trip, a thread being stitched between us was inexorably drawing us closer together. On the eve of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, I popped the question and we were engaged. A month later, with the help of a wonderful friend, I moved house and merged my life with hers.

Now, I'm in the position of homemaker while she's hard at work earning our family's income. It's a complete role reversal from the old-fashioned "ideal" family of last century, and it's a situation I'm enjoying and embracing.

I know this lifestyle is familiar to many women (and some men) already, and for a while I wasn't sure if I should bother writing down my experiences - after all, what makes me special when so many others are dealing with the same things and being taken for granted? I hope my gender-reversed perspective provides some entertainment at least, and gets the message out there that it's OK to challenge gender roles no matter how ingrained they are in our society.

This blog will chronicle my progress as a budding homemaker, gardener, handyman, and cook. We're also a crafty and geeky household, so I may share some of our projects and other things. We're a gaming household too, although it's board games and roleplaying games more than computer games. My other blog - The Game Mechanic - focusses the gaming side of things.

This blog's name is a roleplaying game reference, too; I'm starting out as a Level 1 Homemaker with no Experience Points, but I'm sure my skills will level up in time!

I'm going to try to post something every day, but I have the feeling that I may not get the chance sometimes! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you back here soon.