Surprise!

Hello Again,

 

It surely has been such a long time since I lasted posted.

Mostly we have failed at the eco thing recently, having just received a $165 power bill we are a bit like “Fuuuuuuuudge Brownies! OMGoblins! What the bleep are we going to do?”

So far we have come up with NOTHING! Exams and whatnot have got in the way. But a small silver lining or two has appeared. 1: I have started my first window sausage. YAY! It’s red and pretty and made from an old cardigan sleeve and will look so festive with the purple sparkly one I have in the works.

The second and most exciting silver lining is this handy website. I found whilst doing some stumbling on stumbleupon.com (word of warning, if you ever want to get anything done ever again DO NOT use this website).

www.goodguide.com

Easy to use and with quite a number of NZ prodcuts listed I think everyone love it foreverandeverandever.

 

Now as I have a delish bowl of homemade custard and bananas and a generous glass of good old pinot gris next to me I shall now sign off.

 

Tahtaa

Eco Adventures!

 

 

* Today we went on a wee mish to the make-up sale on Blenheim road and espied a new wonder. An enormous, most glorious emporium of superfluous goods! Eco Shop has been born!  As we wondered around, again slack jawed, we felt our lives now complete. From this treasure chest we scored a unique, handmade, one of a kind gem, it is a coffee table. It comes complete with inlaid chess board and hinged lid. Bliss in a piece of furniture.

Another Eco-ey thing I’ve trialled is something I’ve always been mortally afraid of putting anywhere near my mouth. Baking soda. Conveniently leaving my toothbrush in Auckland and having all the motivation of a second year geog student ,I couldn’t possibly drive the 5 nanoseconds to Pak n Sak to get a new one. So that left me in a plaquey kind of a pickle. With considerable trepidation I opened the little orange pams box and carefully spooned an inexact amount into a roughly unknown quantity of water. Squeezing my eyes tight and blocking all connections between tongue and brain I took a big swig and waited for the wretching to begin. It never came. Whilst most vile and jarring, the bs wasn’t entirely unpalatable. I swished and swilled and desperately tried not to swallow. The end result was a pleasantly refreshing tingling on my tongue. And a super quick pleading text to faithful flattie to please purchase me a pretty pink toothbrush on his hunting trip the supermarket. I think I could actually use baking soda on a regular basis but only as a mouthwash. I hate sticking a toothbrush laden with that foul sticky faux minty paste between my teeth and it would only be a bajillion times worse with powder. FYI my trusty iPhone auto-corrected ‘bajillion’ to ‘bank lion’. Huh. Who would’ve thought eh?

Also on trial is vegetarianism. By default this last month we are collectively vege-munchers. And much to my horror/surprise it seems to be working quite well. I personally have discovered a whole new world of spices that are quite frankly mind blowing. And I’m not talking about cinnamon, nutmeg or garlic-herby-salt. I’m talking the real stuff like turmeric and paprika, star anise, coriander and sweet basil. Although a little queasy about the airmiles these treats have travelled, I have concocted a mean curry and zjooshed up mac’n'cheese. The greatest cook ever, Lofty Alex, made pizza so good the devil himself might possibly requisition it. But if we are honest we are meatless because w

e are too busy/poor/lazy to hunt it down and we are missing it. All I want right now is a big juicy steak, preferably organic homekill though if it makes y’all feel any better. I’m a carnivore and being a herbivore is only fun for so long till it gets tedious and I forget to shave under my arms for two weeks in row. Mmmm charming… But remember it’s not awkward till you make it awkward! Just like public spooning or participating in a consensual sober human stack!

Night night cherubs. Sweet dreams and enjoy ur baking soda mouth wash tomorrow

The Real Stuff

Today’s blog actually has our plans for getting our eco on

Contents will include:

- Plans for planties

- make your own window sausages

- update on the lightbulb thing

- preservathon!

- more rampant rambling

Plants!

So, courtesy of Kings Seeds we have a zillion million seeds that need a home. Unfortunately we don’t have much garden space so are wanting to build a raised garden bed but have none materials. We are hoping the EMF community can help out with supplies? If you have any spare pea straw or wooden boards etc, please let us know. We are happy to provide baked goods in advance. I’ve put up a picture of our current garden. Yes it is on a window sill and yes the poor wee basil is looking a bit sad. Sadly he finally kicked the bucket and is lying at peace beside the garden shed. But on an aside. Take note of the little fly flower on the far right window. That’s our fly control insterad of spraying nasties into the air. We have a few around the house except they only last a few weeks. Aaaand if you use them, may want to remove the

m. Yeap, ours are growing something, the one in the bathroom was peeking at me in the shower, the rude little so-and-so…

 

Preservathon

This is my genius idea to inspire some competition… in this competion…  MAfter Jan’s down right delicious and inspiring tutorial I have come up with a game plan. An inter-flat preservathon. Mostly I’m just super-competiveness and want to make something so I can win a prize. The criteria will include, organicness, innovation, unsualness, and presentation. It will be judge by Matt, Sharon and hopefully the delightful Jan herself and the prize will be you get to keep all the other entries. The winner will also receive a spread in Canta and no less than 27 brownie points.

Rhubard Pie

 

Almost as good as pumpkin pie. Made with home grown rhubarb and orchard grown apples wrapped up in cinnamon and puff pastry, it’s  tastebud-tantalising treat and everyone should go make one. Right now.

Lightbulbs

We are now getting used the relative darkness when you first turn the lights on. It was a little jarring to switch on light but actually dusk appears, but they do brighten up (like your smile) very quickly and are so worth it. For those who

 

are interested, Bunnings stock similar lightbulbs for 7.62 each. By my much flawed caluclations that means we are about $150 better of courtesy of EMF. Yusssss! I revel in this knowledge. Thanks guys!

Homemade window sausages

Not so delicious but every bit as neccessary as real sausages. The windows in our house don’t close properly and let in the artic gales quite severely. Conveniently I have an enormous bag of clothes sitting in our conservatory that I hadn’t got around throwing at the Sallies yet. With my superior blanket stitch skills I want to make some slinky friends to conquer the gales and make our house snug as a bug in a rug, except it will be in sausages. If anyone wants some spare material please let me know and I’ll  bring the bag to the next sesh. A bottle of home brew would be much appreciated (but not expected) in return.

Rampant Rambling

 

I’m thinking of bringing some pie to the next meeting, my famous pumpkin pie. It is good BUT given about 72% of my fellow Hippies Anonymous goers don’t eat dairy or eggs so my challenge is to make pumpkinny goodness sans eggs an

d dairy. I’m going to rely on the Googlator to get me through this but any suggestions would be helpful : )

On a completely unrelated note – - WE HAVE INSULATION!!!! This is immensely exciting and makes the house feel warmer just with this knowledge on board. Unfortunately we have recently found that there are holes in our conservatory roof. We know this because there is a sneaky tendril of jasmine poking through. To it I say: “Out jasmine, out I say!, You will not get in and be stealing our warmies. Out!” So far it’s not listening. I don’t think it speaks English. I’m gonna try Japanese, as soon as I get good enough. I reckon give it two months. I’ll keep ya’ll posted.
The photo is of our most lofty flattie… * goes out to check actual height and comes back with more pie and and a tea… forgot to find out actual height…* scrambling into the ceiling to check on out insulation. Unfortunately Alex (the Great) is is broad as he is tall and couldn’t get hi shoulders into the roof so it was just a fleeting glimpse but that is ok. Big ups for not squealing at the big spider webs we saw up there Alex

 

Done now.

 

KBai

 

All about Pungkin

A little family history is in order.  The inception of PPC is a non-convoluted or complex story so to make up for a non-interesting story I attempted to make this sentence unecessarily complicated and failed and now I”m just rambling.

Basically we moved in and had this beautiful new raised garden full of bark and whatnot so I dutifully weeded. For about 5 mins. Then we made like hippies and left it to nature. Consequently the night fairies took over and one morning we woke up to a rather magical pumpkin plant. It already had baby unicorn pods growing on it and under those PUMPKINS. Our plantie supported six enormous pumpkins the these fruit of Cinderella continue to nourish us with their orangey, infuriatingly tough flesh. Below I have included some recipes that we found written on little sheets of vellum inside the unicorn pods.

Magical Pumpkin Pie:

We successfully sold this at the Winter Wonderland markets three weeks in a row until UCSA casually informed us we coud no longer cook in their licensed kitchens on account of it being a tad destroyed by a visiting quake. And yes people did ask us what ‘pumpkin’ pie tastes like and no it does not taste like hamster steaks.

Ingredients

Half a pumpkin. Must be home grown and not trained or interferred with in anyway. Unless you own a cat or dog. That really does add flavour. Tin of sweetened condensed milk. 2 eggs -free range only or it  will turn into slime. good amount of sweet mixed spice- preferably home grown but as we aren’t Morrocan residents this c0uld potentially be tricky. Garden variety should be ok. Pinch of salt. Don’t you dare use rock salt. That bleep is raped from the environment in horrible ways. For the base have some fun smashing up some (palm-oil free) biccies and melt in 125gm of non-fonterra butter then mould into a pie tin.

Method

Heat the oven to 220. Now read carefully for this is the confusing bit, the pie goes in the oven on 220 for 10 mi

ns. Then turn it down to 180 and bake for a further 25 mins. The top will rise a bit but it’s not supposed to. I don’t know how to stop that so just watch it with disappointment then have fun stickin a knife in there to pop it. Easy dais

y, not too vigorous. ! If you want to be really fiddly you can fold tin foil

around the edge of the pie as it tends to brown up a bit too quick. Take out and let sit then dust with icing sugar and serve with ice cream of lard, whatever takes your fancy.

Voila! You just made the best pumpkin pie you will ever taste in this hemisphere, or the ones actually. I’ve posted a piccy so you can see the awesomeness. P.S Your pie will never be better than mine…

I also have a recipe for Raging Pumpkin Soup and Pumara and Coconut Rosti with homemade aoili but as I have a dirty habit of updating blogs well and truly after my bedtime of 10pm I can’t be bothered. They will be put up in due course.So I’m going to leave you with an entirely unrelated picture of m

y little smidget (who is currently dropping her infamous silent-but-deadlies, yeah, be jealous) and a wee quotey quote with a susty twist… Actually I’m not the technologies is being a bleep again and now everythings all strangely aligned and not in the right place and such. BALLS!

Hello world!

At last! We have learned to use the internet machine and our blog is created! By We I mean I of course and by I, I mean me, Jen, representative for Pumpkin Patch Cottage (PPC – (Cuz that’s how we roll yo) – for short).

Well where to start… I’m gonna just got for it and start with our achievements thus far and then projects in the pipeline. Today after much procrastinating I have changed the lightbulbs over (and the crowd cheers!!). Every single light bulb in our house that my diminuitive little stature could reach is now snuggly fitted with a shiney new eco-bulb. In the process I have learnt many things. The first being that not every bulb is destined to smash in your palm. In fact a total of none embedded themselves into my flesh. The second lesson is a frustrating one. You know the lefty-loosey, righty-tighty rule? It’s not all encompassing. Approximately 40% of our light fittings are don’t adhere to the rule. Also approximately 2% of them are bayonet fittings. What the flip? Lesson number 3 – I rule. I am the lightbulb-changing Queen.

I also discovered a very sustainable and hilariously fun activity in which I reused the boxes. Yes, you guessed it. I made a fort.  A lightbulbbox fort, magnificent, grand, menacing and entirely penetrable by my little dog. I’ve attached photos for your enjoyment. View it, love it want it. Really this fort building business is the most fun you can have with your pants on.

Our second achievement was a trip to my new favourite shop. Bin Inn. It is the mother of all foodshops. I’d award it 5 gold stars just for it’s genius play on words before I even when in. When those ancient sliding doors opened, we took a moment to stop and appreciate. Walls lined with wholefoody goodness, shelves on exotic foreign food, even a random stall of useless bric-a-brac. If it was legal I’d live there, choosing a different bin of rice or lentils to sleep in each night. We spent a good 45 mins wondering around slackjawed and came out $37 poorer but so enlightened.

BLAST! The technologies is gaining on me and this little laptop is about to go nunighs. This rambling post shall continue when I next remember…