Cool Cats and Blood Oranges

Cool Cats by Siena

I did not do anything much creative today apart from cooking , but my middle daughter Siena made these little cats out of fimo- I just love them, and each has their own personality.

As to the cooking- after last weeks curry night on Saturday we got so enthused and decided to do the same again with a couple of friends. Firstly we ( Celeste my eldest daughter and I ) made a pumpkin and orange desert. It is french out of the cook book by Stephanie Alexander called Cooking & Travelling in South West France. Stephanie Alexander is a bit of a cooking guru in Australia- and definitely is at my house too - her Cook's Companion often being used by kids and myself. But we have such an excess of pumpkins from the autumn I am trying to find ways of using them. It looks good, but we will taste it tonight and see if it worked. There is an orange caramel sauce dripped over the top which I made with the blood oranges from our garden. I remember blood oranges being a super special treat in winter as a child in the Netherlands as they came all the way from Spain, so of course I had to have a blood orange tree in the garden. This year the fruit is just gorgeous- aren't the colours of the oranges divine? Then we made potato omelette, as I am almost legendary ( well amongst the twenty or so people I know in Gellibrand- grin) for my potato omelette, and then a new recipe of a carrot /coconut and mustard seed salad and as I didn't have yoghurt I tried tinned coconut milk, and it tasted very nice ( another thing to do with a glut of carrots- we are trying to beat eating them as the bower birds are avaricious gluttons who burrow down into the centre of the carrot with their big beaks and eat them away). There is a trick to keeping chillies too- you just put them in a plastic container in the freezer and use them as needed, they taste like fresh chillies. Also made naan with tomato and garlic and oil toppings and a chickpea and potato curry which smells delightful, and some marinated chicken drumettes- all that should feed my horde and some extras ! I have a lot of cookbooks, I love them almost as much as textile and art books. It is good to use them now and again.