Not for Thanksgiving: Vietnamese Spring Rolls

Thanksgiving is next week and I am a very sad girl because for the third year in a row I’ll be missing my Mom’s delicious t-giving food. I love most everything about Thanksgiving – drawing up the menu, making a shopping list, doing the big shop, helping Mom in the kitchen, making the table look pretty, seeing my aunt, uncle and cousin, eating so much food it hurts, and passing out without attempting the dishes.

I don’t love getting dressed up for the holidays. Never have. Fights used to occur over what my sister and I would try to wear; we favoured jeans, tees, maybe a cardi, but inevitably we were sent back to our rooms to try and find something a little more ‘festive’ and ‘nice’ to wear. We don’t do dressing up for holidays very well. There might even be a pact afoot between us and Cousin to have holidays all in our pajamas, with minimal fanciness. Maybe.

We'd still have the same food though.  Even a power outage won't stop us from having our traditional Thanksgiving food.  (True story!)

Right now, every American foodblogger and their monther is and has been sharing Thanksgiving recipes (click here if you still need some ideas, there are 101), and I wonder how many of them will be used by other people. See, my family has a pretty set menu of culinary demands when it comes to Turkey Day and we rarely deviate from it, and I kind of have the feeling that most Americans are like us.  But that doesn't stop me from wanting to try new kinds of Thanksgiving, just not on the actual day.  I almost feel like I need a whole week of Thanksgivings just to try all of the foodcoma-inducing recipes that are flooding my Google Reader right now. Dear Mr. Obama, could you please make Thanksgiving last a whole week? Worldwide?

Meanwhile in New Zealand it's all windy and sunny and the flowers are blooming and I just feel like skipping down the street with a basket of freshly-baked goodies under my arm and singing at the top of my lungs. Except I don’t sing, or skip, so it would be more like me just walking down the street with (let’s be honest here) a plastic Farmer’s bag with something bad for you in it, grumbling about having to go to work in an office instead of being outside.  Which actually does happen, just about every morning really, because I'm (a) not a morning person, and (b) sitting in an enclosed box all day while the sun is taunting you can really suck.  And then there are the people out on the harbour sailing and kayaking and I just wish I had a robot that looked like me to do my job so I could go out and join those people in their boats.

Boaty people at the Boatshed doing all kind of annoying boaty things in the sunshine.  Boaty.

When I was a kid, I declared I’d never have an office job – I would have a job outside if it killed me. But then I realised that if I wanted to make more than minimum wage I couldn’t be a lifeguard forever, and there’s also this thing called Winter that kind of makes working outside a bit less glamorous than previously thought. I’m still considering a career change though, I hear being a Woman About Town is exciting!

Geez, it’s like Random Tangent Day in Christina’s head. Are you following all this?

Please excuse my creepy pink fingers.  It's the filter, I swear!

So because the holidays are coming and that means you need a lot food floating about the place to feed your guests, and because the weather is glorious and I'm guessing that probably means you want to spend as little time as possible slaving over a hot stove, I give you my favourite no-cook (and therefore no hot oven to overheat you) appetiser – Vietnamese Spring Rolls. Or, around my house, Spling Lolls. We’re silly.

These spring rolls have a great fresh flavour, which combined with the mint and a hint of the fish sauce, the crunch of the cucumber and peanuts, and squidginess of the wrapper makes for very fun eating.  It's also a great way to get people (husbands, children, sailors suffering from scurvy) to eat salad without them realising it!  Who can't resist finger food that looks like....spring rolls. 

A word of caution, however: these are a bit labour-intensive, so get some other people involved in the assembly bit. And for heaven’s sake, give them some wine while they do it. Unless they’re children, then something highly-sugared should get them through.

These spring rolls are enjoying the sunshine, but the sweet chilli sauce is being all moody over in the dark.

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

• Packet of rice-paper spring roll wrappers (available in Asian supermarkets and specialty shops)
• Vermicilli noodles
• Half a head of cabbage – green or purple, or both if you’re fancy
• One carrot
• Bean sprouts, a big handful
• Cucumber, cut into thin matchsticks
• Fish sauce
• Fresh mint leaves, chopped
• Peanuts, chopped
• Sweet chilli sauce for dipping

1. Chop up your cabbage into thin slivers and shred the carrot.  Boil the vermicilli for a few minutes, just until they're pliable.  Drain off the water.
2. Chuck the cabbage, carrot, noodles and bean sprouts into a wok or other large vessel on medium heat.  Splash (not douse, not drown, but splash) some fish sauce over the veggies, about two quick turns around the pan should do it.  Cook the mixture down for a few minutes, then transfer to a bowl.
3. Chop up the mint and the peanuts and set out in bowls for your assembly line.  Cut cucumber into matchsticks and set out on a plate.
4. Grab a bowl big enough to submerge your spring roll wrappers and fill it with hot water, but not too hot that you can't stick your hands in it. 
5. Spring roll construction: stick the spring roll wrappers about halfway in the hot warm and let it soak for 15-30 seconds, turning the wrapper every 10 seconds or so.  The hot water turns the wrapper all soft and pliable.  Rub your fingers against the wrapper to help the wrapper soften. 
1. Lay out flat on a clean plate.  Pick up a handful of filling mixture and spread in a line along the top hemisphere of the circular wrapper.  (If the wrapper were an America-centric map of the world, you'd be spreading it over the good old USA.) 

2. Place a few cucumber sticks along the length of the filling, and sprinkle peanuts and mint over the mixture.  Fold the top of the wrapper over the mixture and tuck under.

3. Fold the sides over, toward the middle.

4. Roll the filling down to the other edge of the wrapper, using your fingers to tightly tuck everything under along the way.  You want the spring roll to be quite tight, not floppy and loose, because let's face it, no one likes a limp.....spring roll.

5. The wrapper will stick to itself.  Serve with sweet chilli sauce!

How do you like my diagrams, eh?  Some fancy work in Microsoft Word goin on there!

Coconut Yogurt Cake on a Lazy Sunday

You can’t beat Wellington on a good day, or so they say. 

Last Sunday dawned absolutely gorgeous and sparkling, cruelly mocking those of us who had partaken of the adult beverages while attempting to scream the Welsh to victory over the bloody French.  Our vocal support was to no avail – the silly Coqs kept the mighty Dragons down, albeit only by one point, and our heads were slightly the worse for wear after our own efforts in front of the TV screen.  So the only logical thing to do was throw back the curtains and let the sun shine in. 

Spice is doing the Kitty Paddle during her sun bath.

It took us at least an hour to get ourselves mobilised and out the door, still in a zombie state, but a little buoyed up by this Yogurt Coconut Loaf from Allyson Gofton’s book Bake.

Sweet, sweet hangover food.

My chauffeur/husband dropped me off at the Frank Kitts Underground Market for a wee bit of retail therapy, and look at the pretties I found!!

Some recovery was needed after that strenuous shopping expedition, so we parked ourselves on the waterfront and stared for a while.

So preeeettyyyyy.

Eventually, we had this conversation:

C: Huh, the water’s is really shallow.

J: Yeah, you’re right.  Guess the tide’s out.

C: I can see the bottom.

J: Lots of rocks.

C: Hnnnhhhhh....

Riveting, I know.  We’ll write the great American/Kiwi novel one day, we will! 

Stare at this long enough and it becomes a headache.

Out of sheer laziness and the desire to stay outside/not go home, we took a little drive up the Brooklyn hill to the wind turbine.  Working in the energy industry, we’re both kind of nerds about alternative power.

Wellington on a good day!

The rest of Sunday was much more exciting what with the All Blacks beating dirty old Aussie, but I’ve already told you about that!

Yoghurt and coconut loaf

from Allyson Gofton’s Bake

• 1½ cups caster sugar
• 1½ cups self-raising flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• ¾ cup desiccated coconut
• 1 cup thick natural unsweetened yoghurt
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 Tbsp dark rum
• 3 Tbsp light oil

Passionfruit icing

• 25g butter, melted
• Pulp from 2 ripe passionfruit OR lemon juice
• 1¼-1½ cups icing sugar, sifted

1. Sift the sugar, flour and baking powder into a bowl, stir in the coconut and make a well in the centre.
2. Beat together the yoghurt, eggs, rum and oil and pour into the well in the dry ingredients. Fold into the dry ingredients.
3. Turn the mixture into a well-greased and lined 23cm x 13cm loaf tin.
4. Bake the loaf in a 180°C oven for 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean. 
5. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes before turning out onto a cake rack to cool. When cold, spread the top of the loaf with passionfruit icing and serve in thick slices.  I didn't have any passionfruit around the house, so I just used some lemon juice to counter the sweetness of the icing sugar and that worked quite well.
6. To make the icing, mix the melted butter with the passionfruit pulp. Gradually beat in the sifted icing sugar to make a smooth, slightly runny icing.  Pour the icing over and enjoy!

Blue Trees and Purple Bushes

A few weekends ago, I went to the market for some cheese and milk and came back with a bunch of fabric. I may have gotten lost and gone to the wrong market. But this one was much more fun and colourful, like my own personal wonderland! By ‘this one’, I mean the Frank Kitts Underground Market, which has been going in full swing on both Saturdays and Sundays during the Rugby World Cup. It’s been great for the stallholders, but bad for my bank account, because it makes it too easy for me to roll up and get my fix for the week.

And by ‘fix’, I mean fix of pretty.  And cute.  And gorgeous.  And life-force giving.

I found this fabric at Stichbird's stall, and I had to have it.  Well, I had to have it so I could make a present for my friend who is due to bring a human into this world in a few weeks.  I felt this new human would need some pretty so she could get her fix too.  It's something you learn early on.

And here’s what I did with it. One fabric, two ways, lots of colour and fun and pretty for one’s fix.

A baby-changing mat!  That's not exactly a square!  More of a wonky parallelogram really!  Oh well, little baby girl Evans will learn the finer points of geometry at a tender young age then - I'm contributing to her early genius.  She will also learn that trees are blue and bushes are purple, and will be sorely disappointed when the real world doesn't live up to this rainbow pallette.  She'll learn to accept disappointment at a tender young age too then.

You wouldn't know that I have never made one of these before, would you? (Heh heh.)  Yep this design came totally out of my own brain.  Much as all of my one-off hair-brained crafty ideas do.

And look, isn't that clever, it rolls up!  *Pats self on back*  I'm so clever.  :)

Here's basically what I did:

1. Sandwiched some quilty/batting-type stuff that I failed to take a picture of between this jungle fabric and the complementary (I hope) blue leafy fabric.
2. Measured out enough ropey stuff to go around the outside, then turned it into piping by some more of the blue leafy fabric around the length of the rope.  [Really should have taken photos!]  Sewed that piping to the inside quilty/batting stuff, then folded over the outside fabrics and sewed them so that the blue piping was showing around the edge.
3. Made a strap out of an extra piece of blue fabric and quilted down the length of it.  Attached velcro to the ends of it so the mat can be rolled up and velcroed into a tube for easy transport.  Or so my brain thinks.
4. Quilted around the edges of the animals to keep all three layers in place and show off my less-than-stellar skillz with the sewing machine. 

With the rest of the fabric I created some wall art.  You can never have enough wall art!

Just frame some scenes in cheapo wooden embroidery hoops, paint them if you like, then decorate to your heart's content.  

I decorated them with some ribbony bows to conceal the screws, and then staple-gunned the smaller ones to the bottom of the larger ones. 

Look at that giraffe, he's so happy to be living in a land of candy-coloured plant life.  You're living the dream, my friend, living the dream.  Just watch out for the lion that smells like chocolate, I'm pretty sure that's a trap.

Choux Pastry at La Patisserie

Something terrible happened to me recently. Are you ready to hear about it?

I was accused of being a “girly-girl”.

Gasp! I nearly had a fit of the vapours, I was so shocked! Me, a girly-girl?! Never!

I had to know – “WHY do you think I’m a *shudder* girly-girl?!” The answer: “Because you wear skirts and makeup and brooches on your coat, and you like to bake.”

All true things, but I must add caveats to each: I wear skirts because they’re fun and comfy and I’m not into pants at the moment; I wear makeup because I have to thanks to my invisible eyelashes and little eyes, seriously I could never be one of those backpackers who doesn’t bring her makeup with her; brooches are fun!; and of course I like to bake, I married a Baker, and also many many humans of the male persuasion also bake, so therefore it is not inherently girly. So there. You have no grounds for your argument. :)

My aversion to “girlyness” started back when my mother decided to dress me in blues and yellows as a baby, and people would think I was a boy. When I was 8 and my sister was 4, we were given boy-short pixie haircuts, and we both mistaken for boys constantly, not helped by the fact that we would dress ourselves and didn’t wear very girly colours. Read: nothing ever matched at all in any way – one of my favourite outfits was a lavender/blueish sweatshirt with bears on it with hunter green dinosaur sweatpants. My seester and I, we are blue-and-gray girls. BTW – “seester” is not a misspelling, it’s her official title.

I did sports and got dirty and didn’t wear socks for a whole school year. One whole knee is covered in scars from bike accidents. I didn’t understand the value of blow-drying my hair until I was in college.

I am NOT a girly-girl.  Maybe I was influenced by Arnold too much - Kindergarten Cop was my fave.  Even my cupcakes are frosted in non-girly primary colours!

I don’t have a problem if you might be one, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go round, but it’s just not me.

And then I learned how to make choux (sounds like shoe!) pastry. It’s light, it’s French, it can be filled with all kinds of fancy cream fillings, and to me it seems very very girly. And I’m ok with that. But just this once, coz while it is sooooo good, I’m still not a girly-girl.

I went with the Wellington Foodies Meet-up Group to La Patisserie in Miramar, the only true French patisserie in New Zealand, according to chef-owner Marie Loic Monmont, who is cute as a button and highly entertaining. She only uses completely organic, local ingredients, with the sole exception of hazelnut and pistachio pastes, the best of which is made in northern Italy. She also employs actual French boys to help out in the kitchen, tre authentic!

Chef Marie Loic Monmont - aka deliverer of heavenly delights.

You know how at parties, there are always people who don’t leave the kitchen? That’s me. I don’t do chatting in groups very well, so I make myself useful instead. Inevitably someone ends up in there with me and we have a blast just one-on-one. And if people start to catch on to the fun happening in the kitchen? Oh, there’s something in the bedroom that I mustbedoingrightnow. 

That's me, getting all up into the pastry, piping like a pro!

So being that person, going to a Meetup Group event was pretty intimidating. If you haven’t heard of Meetup Groups, it’s an online forum where people of similar interests start and join groups with a specific focus and then hold or attend events. I am also a member of the Circa Theatre Meetup Group, and it’s really great for people who enjoy going to plays but don’t have someone to go with them. The Foodie group is really active and constantly organising new activities, like attending cooking classes together and doing dinner parties. So like I said, walking into a group of people I don’t know, on my own, with no one to lean on or keep me from hiding in the corner, yeah that was big.

And not as scary as I thought it would be! Probably because the reward of being a big girl and talking to new people was getting to eat the best éclairs everrrr. I made myself take 10 minutes to eat mine, there was a lot of savouring to be done.



That green stuff is pistacio-flavoured creme patisserie and it's the best green thing I've ever eaten.

Here is Marie’s recipe for choux pastry – it’s very exact, because according to her, “Cooking may be love, but pastry is science. It’s a chemical reaction happening in your pan, in your oven.” A scrumptious chemical reaction!

Pate a choux
from French chef Marie Loic Monmont @ La Patisserie, Miramar Wellington

• 250g cold water
• 110g unsalted butter (you can use salted butter, just omit the salt)
• Pinch of salt
• 180g flour, sifted
• 360g eggs (because eggs are different sizes, and this can also vary through the year

1. Put the water and butter in a saucepan and bring to the boil and mix, then take off the heat.
2. Add the flour and whisk it up into a ball. This will take a lot of muscle!
3. Transfer to a mixing bowl, and add eggs one a time, mixing well after each one. The batter should be pretty thick, as it will be piped, so definitely not runny at all. *You can use a mixer with the paddle attachment for this step! Saves arm strength.
4. Using a very wide piping tip and large bag, pipe thick lines of 12-15cm or golf ball-sized dollops onto a lined baking tray. Keep tip pointed down at tray, not at an angle.
5. Make a quick egg wash by beating one egg. Brush over the top of the piped choux to even out the bumps and lumps.
6. Finish by raking a fork down the length of the choux.
7. Bake in 180C oven for 20 minutes or so, depending on how hot your oven runs – watch the choux to make sure they don’t go too brown, but DON’T open the oven as this will let all your precious steam out, and it’s the steam that helps these pastries rise with their bubbles inside.

And if you want to fill your delectable pastries (and what sane person wouldn't?), Marie also provided a recipe for fancy filling!

Creme Patisserie

• 1/2 L milk
• 4 egg yolks
• 125g sugar
• 60g flour
• 1 vanilla bean, split open

1. Bring the milk to boil in a saucepan with the vanilla bean.  Take off the stove and wander over to your bench.
2. Stir in egg yolks, sugar and flour.
3. Put saucepan back onto the stove and cook until the cream is thick, stirring constantly with a whisk.

Aaaaaand what éclair wouldn’t be complete without a chocolatey topping?!  None, that's what.

Chocolate Ganache

• 100g cream
• 100g chocolate

1. Bring cream and chocolate to the boil in a saucepan together and stir together.
2. Smother on top of those glorious choux....what's the plural of choux?

For a chocolate filling, mix chocolate ganache with some crème patisserie, and add a pinch of cocoa powder and a pinch of icing sugar!

To fill: poke a hole in the bottom of the baked choux. Put your filling into a piping bag and pipe into choux.

Shove one into your mouth and collapse into dreamy bliss.

You’re welcome.

OR if you can’t be bothered doing all these crazy things yourself, swing by La Patisserie in Miramar, but be warned that they only make enough to sell for that day and because what they make is so good, it does sell out. Go now!  And please bring me some too.

Social Baking: Cheese Scones & Berry Yoyos

Growing up I remember getting up early on a Saturday just to watch cartoons, and I would sit in front of the TV from 8 or 9am straight on through til noon when the boring adult shows came on, like Masterpiece Theatre.  My favourites were Garfield, the Smurfs, Captain Planet, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Winnie the Pooh.  It pains me something fierce that Hollywood has ruined three out of those five with live action/CGI theatre releases.  Ruined, I say! 

*While researching my childhood, I came across this site, which has a complete listing of all the 80's cartoons and any DVD releases put out, so you can relive those golden Saturday mornings of eating your cereal in front of the tube in your pj's.  I know what I'll be doing next weekend!

I also had the live-action version of Rainbow Brite on beta and I'm pretty sure our beta machine went the way of the dodo due to death-by-over-Rainbow Briting.  God I loved that multi-coloured with the awesome boots.  Who else could pull off saying, "Hey Glumface! Next time there's a rainbow, look up!  You'll feel better!"  I mean for realz, homegirl had it goin on. 

Those boots are to DIE for.

That is the ONLY reason I would ever consider getting up during the single-digit hours on a weekend of my own accord.  I like my sleep and am a champion sleeper-inner, a fact my mother (hi Mom!) still bemoans.  Seriously, she called us this Sunday at 11:15am.  I may have said I was awake, but only awake in the sense that my mind was no longer in deep slumber state.  I was still horizontal, eyes crusty, voice hoarse from screaming at the rugby the night before, husband snoring beside me.  It took a full 10 minutes of poking and prodding for Jonno to wake up, and of course once he was on the phone Mom couldn't resist give him stick for being asleep sooo late on a Sunday morning.  Even from thousands of miles away she still manages to give us a hard time. :) 

So how I was convinced that 10am on a Saturday morning was the perfect time to cash in a Social Cooking voucher is beyond me.  Like so far beyond comprehension that I'm pretty sure some clouds would explode or something if we tried to figure out why I agreed to getting up early on a weekend.  But the promise of a good coffee before our baking session and the fact that we were going to be baking did make up for the early hour. 

*Has that Rainbow Brite picture burnt your retinas yet?  I can't see colours right now...

The Social Cooking kitchens are in a gorgeous spot down on Chaffer's Marina, and right next to Port Cafe, which I am very happy to say serves a lovely mocha.  The format of the class was pretty conducive to really getting into it: first the instructor gives a demo of the steps and then turns you loose to work in pairs on that day's recipes.  Now, while I am happy to be in amongst it all with everyone else, I hate hate hate with a passion getting called up in front of a group to do something, and that was pretty much the first thing that happened that morning.

We were given aprons and name tags.  The instructor asks who among us is a baker and, of course, I got pointed to by my mates.  No pressure there, right?  Heh.  Not unless you're a huge introvert with a seething fear/hatred of being stared at. 

Cue shrinking and attempting to hide behind my mate.  Unfortunately, she spotted my name tag and said, "So Christina, do you want to come up here and cream this butter and sugar?"  How do you say, "No, I'd really rather not coz then people will look at me and I might possibly melt into a puddle on the flow, and that would be really hard to clean up and you don't want that do you?"  So I stood there, creaming butter and sugar, while everyone watched, for like an eternity.  She couldn't move on to something else while I creamed, noooooo, she had to make everyone watch while I finished my task.  I about died.  But then it was over and we got down to the business of making yoyo's, which I had never had before. 

The biscuits themselves are so darn cute, and you could probably get creative on how you do the tops.  One thing that we did learn was that they don't spread, so however much you press them down into a disc, you will be trying to shove double that plus filling into your mouth.  Strategic baking, I tell ya!


Sweet, buttery goodness.

Now, I have to confess I was a little skeptical when I read the recipe before we made them.  "These are sweet biscuits, right?  For dessert kind of thing?  But there's no chocolate!"  I'm not very good at having non-chocolate things for dessert.  But it turns out yoyos are a delightful mouthful of joy, and so easy to throw together.  Look, aren't they pretty?


Berries make everything better!

For the second act, we made "The Best Cheese Scones in NZ".  Should be called "The Best Cheese Scones to Make If You're Really Lazy!" coz they were super easy and only required three ingredients: regular all-purpose flour, shredded cheese, and milk.  Mix, dump, bake, enjoy.  Kind of like in a rugby scrum. 

Scones for the lazy baker!

In all the morning was pretty fun, and we got both recipes done and dusted in about 1 hour 45 minutes.  Which is good, because if it hadn't been fun, I might have had to break some heads.  Imaginary heads though, I'm a nice person!  I don't know that I would have gone to this particular class of theirs if I hadn't been with friends though, as I'm decently competent around the oven and could have put these together if I had been so inclined.  What makes it is that you're baking with friends.  Anyway, on to the recipes:

Yoyos, from Social Cooking

makes about 10 sandwiches (20 biscuits)

Biscuits:

• 175g butter, softened
• 1/4 cup icing sugar
• 1 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1/4 custard powder
• a few drops of vanilla extract

Filling:

• 50g butter, softened
• 1/2 cup icing sugar (or 1/4 icing sugar, 1/4 cocoa powder for chocolate)
• 2 tbsp custard powder
• optional: few drops of flavouring
• optional: fresh or frozen berries

1. Biscuits: Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy.  Add vanilla and mix in.
2. Sift flour and custard powder together to break up the lumps, then mix into butter mixture.
3. Roll spoonfulls into a ball with your hands, but don't handle too long or the butter will start to melt.  Place on a baking tray lined with baking paper, about 1 inch apart. 
4. Press down into flat discs with a fork or some other implement of distruction.
5. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 180C, until just golden and no longer soft.
6. Filling: Beat all ingredients together with a wooden spoon.
7. Once the biscuits are cool, spread filling on half.  Top with a berry or two for added flavour and colour and sandwich with an un-frosted biscuit.  Scrumtious!

The Best Cheese Scones in NZ, from Social Cooking
makes about 8 big honkin' scones

• 2 cups of self-raising flour
• 2 cups of shredded cheese, your choice of flavour
• milk to mix
• Optional ingredients to add: chopped parsley, chives, basil, parika, chopped chillies, spring onions, the list is endless!

1. Preheat oven to 180C.
2. Place flour, cheese, and any optional ingredients you've added into big bowl and mix together.  Form a well in the centre and add a little bit of milk.
3. Mix ingredients together, and add milk as necessary until they are all holding together but not any more.
4. Dump big handful-sized mounds onto a lined baking tray.
5. Bake for about 20 minutes, until golden.  They're so good you don't even need butter!

Last Week In Wellington

• Peter Jackson is off location-scouting new places around New Zealand to film The Hobbit movies.  That means all the actors are on sabbatical - if they're smart they've left the country - and I won't be coming across dwarves sitting at a waterfront cafe' or Gandalf collecting donations for charity.

Ian McKellen, raking in the dough at the cricket.

• These top-ten quotes from LOTR makes me excited for Peter to get filming again.

• It's nation-wide school holidays.  This means packs of bored teenagers are roving around the city looking for ways to be as obnoxious and true to the stereotypes as possible, making it impossible to walk anywhere around the CBD, especially during lunchtime.  Thus I've been bringing my lunch to work for the past week.  Bugger trying to wade my way through schoolkids just to get food.

• Maybe that's why Peter Jackson is exploring the remote places of the country now, to get away from those crazy kids? 

• The Antarctic has relocated to New Zealand, leaving snow over most of the country and blowing wind so frigid through all the cracks in our non-insulated houses that we've all collectively gotten hypothermia and lost feeling in our legs.  That must be why all the boys are running around in shorts and jandals now.  Frickin weirdos,

• It only spit a few flurries into Wellington, which is more than they've seen in years.  Why do I live in the only place in the whole damn country where it doesn't snow?!  I love snow!  I love rolling in snow.  I love eating (clean) snow.  I love it when the trees are all covered with snow.  I love it when the cats first see snow and freak out, then come running back inside because they don't understand why this white stuff is so cold and wet.  I love snowboarding.  I don't love falling on my butt repeatedly when snowboarding.  I love it when the world is white and sparkly.  I love it when everyone has to wear a bagillion layers just to go out to get the paper, because then we're fat and happy.  Therefore, I'm not happy that I live in a no-snow zone.  I cry.

Happy Feet was happy to meet me. 

• Happy Feet has gone for a swim now that it's cold enough.  I'm pretty sure that he is just about the smartest penguin EVAR, because he knew that the Antarctic was going to move here, and he left home early enough to find himself a flash home and an endless supply of high-quality salmon.   

• I have learned the art of only heating one room of your house at a time with an oil heater.  You spend most of your evening in the lounge where the TV is, right?  So as soon as you get home,  you shut the curtains, close the doors to the lounge and crank up the heater.  Then make something for dinner that requires as little time in the kitchen as possible, or pile on 3 layers of clothing, hat, scarf, and fingerless gloves and brave the cooking.  Once you have procured hot food, hoof it back to the lounge, top up with a few blankets and maybe a cat or two, and stay there til the shows are over and you're ready to head to bed.  Make a mad dash into your pajamas, wave the toothbrush in front of your face while simultaneously washing your face, heat up a hot water bottle or wheat pack, then (and this is the key) drag the oil heater into the bedroom and seal the door shut.  Shiver under the sheets until your finally warm up, or if you're lucky like me, you can snuggle up to your own personal heater (read: husband who runs a few degrees higher than normal humans).  Then finally, hope like hell that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to pee, because really at that point you are risking all kinds of unpleasant things like frostbite, hypothermia, and even death. 

That was last week.  Maybe this week I'll get around to actually posting something that I did for the purpose of blogginess?