Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Donuts & Dahl
My husband worked tirelessly today, and I mean endlessly, to get these eyebrows up. Usually you would use fence palings for the battoning, but being the perfectionist he is (thank God), he used dressed cypress pine (?). He put up each batton, then shaped it and drilled the hole. It's going to look fabo and exactly what we pictured. The Old Girl deserves something a bit special.




Expect a lot of food talk this year. It's my cyber equivalent of tapdancing to keep you occupied between bouts of work on the house.
Today when I was in Woolies I was most excited to see my favourite fruit, the donut peach! I'm not much of a fruit eater. I can really put the veges away, but when it comes to fruit I'm a bit fussy and I can never find anything that tastes as good as it looks. Call me retro, but I also prefer my watermelon with seeds, but apparently that type is now extinct. I'm suspicious of food that's been too tampered with.
Remember in the Seinfeld episode when Kramer finds the Mackinaw peaches are in season, well that's about how excited I got. Unfortunately, my love of donut peaches seems to be hereditary and out of the whole bag we bought, I only managed to secure one. We'll be going back for more tomorrow. I highly recommend you give them a go. Their season is very short too from memory, just like the fictional Mackinaw peach.




Further on the food note, here is the dahl I made for dinner tonight. We aren't vegetarians, we just indulged a bit at Christmas time and are enjoying some simple food.



I've got several recipes for dahl. It's basically red lentils, onion, turmeric, garam masala and some stock or water. I used Charmaine Solomon's, but you virtually don't need a recipe it's so straight forward and fast. It's also delicious, cheap and good for you. (yes that's a Hare Krishna cookbook in the middle, not sure where that came from but it's good)




With dahl the accoutrements are key. You'll need some rice, yogurt (preferably with some mint and cucumber mixed in), some relish like mango chutney and some fresh coriander. That's it. Sit back and have fun watching your husband subtley search for the meat.






One last thing. I'm not sure if I posted a photo of my frangipani cuttings, but in September my father cut a small branch off three of his frangipani trees and told me to put these sticks in dirt and they'd grow. Doubtful, I did it anyway and forgot all about them until I saw them recently. They have leaves and some have flowers. They actually look like three little trees. Now I'll have to find somewhere to put them.






9 comments:

  1. Your husband is very patient to put those pailings up one by one and all hand drilled - worth the effort I must say. The Dahl looks yum too! ;-)

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  2. I just showed my husband your husband's efforts to inspire him for when he does the timber valance on our house in 2011. He's done a splendid job.

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  3. Did you ever find out what type of frangipani you have at the front which has the multi coloured flowers?

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  4. A lot can be said for perfectionism. Clearly whoever worked on our house prior to us had a 'near enough is good enough' mentality. I enjoy your tap dancing interludes between renos. Those fruit are a beautiful colour.

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  5. I noticed other frangipani trees around with different coloured pink flowers. Eventually they all turned the same colour.

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  6. What a simply amazing blog...am so glad I found you. Am off to work now but want to come back later, like to a good book I want to come back and read more and more. Mel xx

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  7. Oh I saw donut peaches yesterday and didn't know whether to try them or not but now I know I will have to give them a go! YOur husband has done a brilliant job btw, thet looks so good! Cheers x

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  8. Hi, just been browsing some blogs and found you. Your story sounds so fascinating, I'm looking forward to reading more when I have some time.
    PS Dahl for tea in my house tonight (for the same reasons that you write)- it's cooking as I type!
    x

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  9. Hi. Greetings. This post is really good and blog is really interesting. It gives good details. Fence Palings

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