Medley of roughly chopped vegetables with a nice dressing

and a not very good photo (Girl Lacer has been fiddling with my camera settings again, well that’s my excuse anyway)

I had a go at Bill Granger’s Spicy Slaw from Holiday tonight, it was a very rough approximation though as it’s a bit difficult to scale down a slaw recipe from ten portions to one, I also, as you see, don’t have fantastic knife skills. However, it tasted lovely, I have a very love hate relationship with coleslaw, as I’m not the biggest fan of mayo and I’m even less of a fan of the low fat alternatives, so this dressing of rice vinegar, lime juice and chilli really made it. If you’re interested, the recipe is here below the chicken burger recipe.

Surprise carrots

Me and Girl Lacer pulled some carrots today, we were quite surprised about how small they were! I think they might be meant to be like that, as they were from a kit specifically designed for window boxes, but still it was a surprise. I had planned on using a few in a coleslaw I’m probably going to make tonight, if I were to do that I’d have had to have pulled the whole container! So when I went to the supermarket just now I had to go and buy a normal sized carrot!

I’ll leave the rest of the carrots in a little longer, although one still in the ground is looking a little gnawed at the top, probably mice.

In other gardening news, I have at least two aubergines starting to form, which I’m chuffed with as the head gardener lady on Gardener’s World last week said aubergines were quite difficult to grow. I’ll take photos of the baby aubergines when they’re a little bit bigger and more obvious.

And finally, the snails so love my greenhouse the &*^% things are having babies there! Needless to say I evicted this snail along with the rest.

 

Bill Granger’s Coconut Bread

 

 

This is where I wish blogs had smelly vision because this bread come cake smells delicious as it bakes and it tastes just as good when it comes out of the oven! From Bill’s Sydney Food, he apparently sells it in his restaurants for breakfast, so yet another reason for me to dream about going to Oz. Whether this lot of coconut bread will actually make it to tomorrow’s breakfast before being eaten, I can imagine this would make an excellent, filling breakfast. So, if I’ve tempted you, the recipe is here.

 

I think my daughter is more likely to be a botanist

On my trip round my blogroll this morning, I came across some cute baby racoon photos on Neil Gaiman’s blog. Thinking that any self respecting 4 year old girl is going to like photos of cute furry baby animals, I showed them to Girl Lacer,

“They’re baby racoons,” I tell her.

“Where are they?” she asks.

“They’re in the back garden of the person who wrote one of my magic books,” I said referring to Smoke and Mirrors (Girl Lacer knows I’m reading a lot of magic books at the moment).

“What plant is that?” she asked, referring to the leaves in the photos.

“Um, I think it’s woodland,” I say.

“No!” she screams in frustration (she’s in that sort of mood at the moment), “I’m not talking about what country they’re in! I’m asking what the plant is!”