the KohKoh Nut

I’ve actually been keeping a low profile of late because I have been a busy bee – literally.  My first task for 2012 was to help out with a baby shower with a bee theme for my sister.

I was quite pleased with the results, and thankfully, it was the only thing I did because it did take a bit more time to do due to the fact I had not done something like this for, and it does take a bit of working out for the edible ingredients.  I had to make sure I made cupcakes that didn’t go stale and could keep for a few days, and I am pleased to say they stayed moist and yummy throughout. (Yes, I finally had one of the bees yesterday).  The second thing I needed to make sure was that my hands were super clean – as I did not want to get a speck of dirt or dust on the decorations. I keep in mind that people will not be peeling off the top layer and will be eating them directly, so cleanliness is next to godliness, so to speak.

Here are some more pics on what went down.

Can’t wait to do more of this kind of thing. I am super grateful for the opportunity to be creative again, and I can say that this is a great step to be reactivating my creative mojo.

I haven’t actually made any soap of late, as I have been quite busy cleaning. Hubby and I had decided that it was going to be way way too time consuming to shred all of the documents we had amassed so we hired a recycle bin specifically for confidential document shredding.  Well, we dump, the company shreds. Simple, right?

It is taking quite a bit of time to scan the documents, and filing and naming them appropriately, so I figured I would scan what I can and anything I don’t need, I definitely consign to the recyclers.

I’ve filled 3/4 of a recycle skip bin, boy do I amass a lot of crap (yep, you heard it here first, folks)!

I’ve got an exciting venture in the works – stay tuned!

The new year is a time when people start thinking about doing the usual family portraits but from time to time, we do tend to forget our furry friends.  My friend Roseline has been building up her business of pet portraiture in her website:  http://www.OliveTheRabbit.com.

I want to share a little story about Olive. Olive was Roseline’s first rabbit. She was a very pretty black bunny with the sunniest of dispositions.  She did what normal rabbits do, and spent quite a bit of time frolicking in the backyard.  I was living in Sydney at the time – this was 2001/2002. I was lonely and was 2-3 hours ahead of my friends in terms of timezone. And so Roseline emailed me a picture of Olive. I still have it. It was pinned to my workstation for the longest time, and later, on my fridge.

Olive has long since gone to bunny heaven, but she has never ceased to cheer me up. I look at the watercolour of the pretty bunny and I immediately cheer up.  All too often when we live in a concrete jungle, something inside us reaches out for something tangible  to hold on to.

One of the things people do not realise is that Roseline is multi-talented. One of her many passions is in animation and creating animal portraiture.

Roseline started her career with a Science degree from the University of Western Australia. During this time, she was also in the Army Reserves, and quite frankly – the first Asian chick I knew we all privately admired for taking up the GI Rose persona.  Whilst we were all pursuing our own university degrees, Roseline had always been about helping other people out, and putting others before herself.  However, not long after graduation embarking down the science route, Roseline decided that it wasn’t for her and tried her hand at teaching English and went overseas to Taiwan for a year.  When she returned, she enrolled in the Film and Television Institute in Fremantle, Western Australia, and from there, a great animator was born.  Her career has taken her to Hobart and Melbourne, where she was involved in animating a few children’s series for television.  She is now back living in Perth, Western Australia, and I never had a bigger priviledge than being swept along in her world from time to time.

Looking through Roseline’s eyes opens a completely different world, and if you have a much loved family pet you would like a whimsical portrait done for you, I would totally encourage you to contact Roseline.

Here are some of Roseline’s animation offerings (borrowed with permission from her website)

 If you are not familiar with some of Roseline’s animations, here is one of her earlier works “Spooky Doll Kids”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljB8Q95pkLA

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!!

Oops, I didn’t mean to shout, but I’m super enthused. It feels like I have woken up and shaken the cobwebs away. I say this in the earliest of hours – well, I tried waiting for a decent hour to post my New Year’s message, as everyone is still likely either (a) in recovery mode or (b) woken up by their child sticking items into their eyeballs or (c) carrying on like any other day. I hope it is not the latter, as I can feel that 2012 is going to be a good year for a lot of us.

2011 was the year of heartbreaking natural disasters, proving that Mother Nature is indiscriminate in her fury.  Our community spirit is strong – whether we live on the other side of the world, or whether we know the people affected personally – we lend a hand. It was a time for us to dig deep, and we came through.  May we continue our altruistic and look beyond the borders of religion and belief.

This is a year where we should all strive for bigger, better and stronger things. I am not saying that we should reach for the impossible and fail miserably, but sometimes in failure is the key to the next success. I firmly believe that if we are to aim for something, we put our heart and our soul into it. When we cannot go any further, we can sit back and think that we gave it a bloody good go.  Then we can be proud of ourselves.  Sometimes our Ego is our key driver and motivator.  But there are other times where we need to put our conceptual reality by the door and come inside (I’m still learning).

Children are the best example. They do not know any limitations or constraints nor do they feel they have to prove anything other than the satisfaction of achievement. Everything is possible for them. It is unfortunately part of our social consciousness to hold back, exercise restraint and caution which in turn creates apathy and lack of motivation.

In my life, I do not believe I have failed in anything. I did give everything a good go. I believe that there is nothing I cannot do if I set my mind to it wholly.   I may not be the smartest person, the richest or the most talented, but I do know that I care. And that is what binds us all together. Empathy and love for each other.

And this is my wish for you for 2012. Make a goal/decision and give it 100% of what you have.

Image courtesy: http://s3.amazonaws.com/buzzfeed-media

Together with success and motivation, there will also be a lingering presence of grief, sadness and wistfulness as we give thanks for the love of people who are no longer with us.  These are people who have touched our lives in many ways – whether we had personally met them or not. We will never let these people wander too far from our thoughts, and this is the greatest gift of all – to be able to keep them alive in us.  We know that our departed loved ones will be looking after us from up above and watching out for us. And making sure we do not get up to too much mischief down here.

So, as the path behind us has been set firmly in concrete, and we can merely turn backwards to bounce off its surface, the path before us is still fresh with wet cement. 2012 and beyond will be up to us to write our stories, to define ourselves and to change the world!

Much love and peace to you, and other people’s cooking

We had so much leftover meat from Christmas, that we are still working through them even though we have given a lot to our parents to take home. When I say we have a lot, we have an insane amount given the fact that there are only the two of us working our way through the meat.  To tell you the truth, I was actually ready for my veggies again but we had to make our way through this or there would be wastage, and I hate to see good food go to waste.

And so I had a brainwave.

What about having pierogi for dinner?

A pierogi is an Eastern European dumpling. It is similar to a Shanghai dumpling/oversized Chinese wonton/Japanese gyoza, but the closest thing the Europeans could relate it to was an Italian ravioli.  It is quite funny how there is a universal food that everyone eats around the world which inherently has the same purpose.

I had first heard about pierogi in a recent cookbook acquisition Rose Petal Jam (recipes and stories from a summer in Poland) by Beata Zatorska & Simon Target. It was actually quite a left field purchase for me because I had actually quietly resolved to do more Asian cooking and my purchase actually started steering me away in the other direction. Still, we live in a multicultural society, and what is great about every single culture, we should share around.

I’m keen to try new things, and what better way to eat our meat in little bite sized pockets than to mince it all up in our Thermomix and make a filling?  Aided and abetted by a lot of potato and pumpkin leftover mashed to pieces, it was a great way to finish off this little number.

This recipe is inspired from Rose Petal Jam and adapted as follows:

Now, Martha Stewart, I ain’t, but it’s great I have produced something edible for dinner tonight!

Merry Christmas, everyone.  I hope you had a fantastic start to your holidays so far.  As we approach 2012 and leave 2011 behind, it is undoubtedly a year of quiet reflection – over our blessings as we welcome new births into the world; and over our losses as we shed a quiet tear for those who have left us behind.  But their spirits shine brightly this Christmas as they all watch over us, keeping us safe and keeping us healthy.

And a very Happy New Year for 2012!

It has been 1.5 weeks since I have left my full time job, and I am sure you are waiting for some form of news from me about how I’m going. Well, I have been rather sick over the last 7 days and it sounds like I am stick hocking up furballs from my throat.

I’ve actually realised that it’s not so bad to slow down. I had serious reservations about giving up my full time job, especially when I have been so career-driven these last 12 years, but I hadn’t quite contemplated my retirement quite so soon. There’s still another 30 years to go until I can officially retire, but knowing me, I am sure to fall into some venture or another between now and then.

Now that things have calmed down around me, I have actually finally learned the art of  mindfulness. I did, for the first time, actually read a recipe that has no pictures next to it. I am generally the type of person who likes pictorial instructions on how to create something. I hate reading words, which is rather ironic, given that I like writing which involves a lot of words.

I like the thought to be able to slow down and concentrate on things that I wanted to give more time to – things like my photography, blog, cooking and gardening. This is something I am going to promise myself for 2012.

Christmas day was the first time I wandered across the road to use the swings and playground there, would you believe? We have been living across the road from all that for the longest time, but I never used to make it home in time to really take my dog for a walk. I was always in a hurry. When I wasn’t in a hurry, I was stressed out.  When I wasn’t stressed out, I was asleep.  A completely unhealthy pattern because I have never been more susceptible to sickness and just unwellness in my life.  It was completely against my Aquarian nature not to get distracted by shiny things and veering off the path from time to time in my journey to my destination, and when I found myself going against the grain a little too often, I felt at odds with myself.  Something was not feeling right, not natural. I could pinpoint the problem, but accounting was something which I had been doing since I was in Year 11, at the age of 16.  So to make the decision to step back from something I have been doing for more than half my life was not something I found easy to come to terms with.

So far, I have been completely happy in the kitchen. I’m not a great cook, but I am garnering a lot of inspiration from the Food Channel. I am permanently glued on to cupcakes and cake decorating. It is just so wonderful to see people so passionate about what they do.

It does sound like my thoughts are just dropping out of my head in a random fashion.  Believe me, this is how relaxed I am at the moment, I am totally not thinking about sentence construction.  I will post more soon on my new found life, but as a parting note, I thought I’d share with you the progress on my pink oyster mushrooms, which have gone beserk in the garden.

I woke up wanting to make red velvet cupcakes.  I went through every single recipe I had in my recipe stack of tricks and I even went through my vegan cupcake collection – and every single recipe asked for red food colouring.  Red food colouring. And so I ended up doing more research on the internet than I actually spent trying to cook the recipe.  Well, I didn’t have buttermilk anyways, so it didn’t turn out so great in the end.

There is a certain ick factor when I find out the source of red food colouring is from carmine.

As well as the fact it is a cute little Italian name for a guy, carmine is also some sort of weird deep rich magenta pinky colour produced from boiling scale insects (such as cochineal) in either ammonia or sodium carbonate solutions and filtering out the solids to extract this reddy liquid like substance.  Freshly picked off a cactus and straight into a boiling pot. We get this colouring in lipsticks, sweets/lollies, ice creams, yoghurts and even some of our fruit juices.  Carmine does mean “red crimson” so that is where the colour comes from.  This is infinitely disgusting to find out!  What on earth are we feeding our children in an attempt to do fancy cakes for their birthday parties?  This means that I view any red foods that I buy with great suspicion.

Over the years, I have been asked – why have I chosen to make things from scratch or go vegan?  Or even try to understand what some of the labelling in our food means?

The reason for this is purely for my own education and understanding.  To understand a theory that happens to BE, I needed to understand the basic foundations of what MAKES UP the whole.  I am not silly enough to say that I get it right all the time, I just found this out after wanting to make red velvet cupcakes.  ARGH! Back to the drawing board, this is truly disgusting to think I’m serving up red beetles to my family for Christmas. So I think it has to be another colour! Out they go (they didn’t turn out that red anyway at my refusal to use half the bottle).  Mind you, there could be some health benefits of eating something organic like a beetle, but mind you, after all the chemical processing, there might not be anything great left after all that.  We’ve obviously been eating this stuff for years, although I have tried to stay away from anything that “glows” un-naturally, I still find this to be a huge ick factor to the whole ground-up-beetles-slash-red-food-dye experience.

I just want to be a happy, healthy, grown up person trying to understand why her body reacts to certain things the older she gets.  I am starting to listen to my inner voice more as my tummy sometimes drowns out the sound of everything else with its dialogue with my senses.  I have had enough issues with my health of late to not want to add to the list.

I need to do more research but for the moment, I understand that the Wilton’s Brand of colouring may contain only plant based fats, which could be music to a lot of our ears.

I’m a dabbler. It’s going to take me  a lot of goes and cake woes to get this right.  As we deviate away from the simple life, and taking shortcuts where we can for the sake of convenience, we are slowly killing ourselves with our industrialised geniuses.  This is one of the reasons I needed to take some time out and focus on what really mattered in my life.

In an ideal world, I would like food labelling to actually state what the product is, rather than giving it a scientific name. For example. MSG, not monosodium glutomate or 621. I don’t need to carry a pocket dictionary of labelling terminology to determine what I am eating – I go by this general rule. If I don’t know what it is called, then I wont trust it. Or alternatively, how much of this in the stuff I am eating is going to pose a danger to me.  I am not like a big NO CRUSADER that I would shun things outright. I have to wean myself off things slowly. But I do what I can where I can help it, knowing where the final end goal is for me.

Big people aside, spare a thought for our little furry friends this Christmas, and the type of preservatives they have to put up with.

Of course, we can’t always have everything. We need preservatives and additives to keep our food from going off.  This is precisely the reason why I am choosing to cook from scratch and eating it as soon as possible, rather than breeding penicillin in my fridge. Now, I am not suggesting you do exactly what I do, I am merely sharing information as my personal awareness increases.  Please find a happy medium that you are comfortable with.

Challenged by Sarah, I’ve set to task on making a new Olive Oil soap that would save her the trip of travelling all the way down south.  Olive oil by itself makes a hard soap, but not as many suds.  I did give another bar to Sarah and she did not react to it, and it had a combination of oils, so I was wondering if there was any chance that this would turn out?

The OliveNut  is made predominantly with olive oil, soybean oil and coconut oil. I have never made soap with 3 types of oils before in the recipe and it appears to be taking quite a bit of time to set.

All good things should come to those who wait, so I waited this out a few weeks to see how it is going. This soap is as plain as can be. Without wanting to throw too many variables in this, I wanted to see how long it would take to saponify. It’s going to take awhile – more than a week, in fact, and it is still mushy.

Introducing the sampler OliveNut chippies.  These are cut in the shape of chips / fries / wedges. I’ve cut them smaller so I can have sampler sticks on show. Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of the packaging left to sell it en-masse.

Let’s see how this flavour-less chippie turns out.

Well, it’s not quite how I imagined spending my first few days of semi-retirement.  Being sick. The giveaway would have been my lack of posting of late.  I came down with some sort of a sore throat/fever/blocked nose/head cold derivative on Sunday night. I am not sure what has sparked this on, but I strongly suspect that since I have stopped working as of Friday night, and now that I’ve had a chance to relax, my immune system must have decided that a shut-down was in order for me to regain my inner balance. Go figure, my body works in mysterious ways.

Up until this week, I hadn’t really been feeling the Christmas spirit. The commercialism of what is supposed to be a religious event is a stark contrast to where we were last year.  Last year, we were in Rome, Italy, for Christmas.  No presents, no crowded shopping centres trying to fit in the mad last minute rush, just the two of us.

But this year, as it is our first year in our house (as opposed to a little villa), so it is our first year with a full sized Christmas tree. So it was great going around and getting some baubles.  Unfortunately, we did not find a white Christmas tree which I had so desperately wanted. It appeared that white was in last year, but not this year in Perth.  So back to the drawing board and we bought a green tree this year.  I had wanted white only because I wanted a minimalist tree – without overloading it to the hilt with things to make it stand out against the dark green. Oh well, looks like it is going to stay true to the Australian Christmas theme of evergreenery.  I’m actually quite impressed with the effects.

The next few days are going to consist of mad cleaning before the family arrives on Christmas Day lunch.  I have been testing out a new soap flavour but I am waiting for it to harden before I can cut it to let you know how successful I was. More on this soon!