Month: June 2009

Can’t get enough of …

With a shoutout to Ampersand Duck for bringing it to my attention.

Bulleted Friday

  • I’ve been in a bad mood all week.
  • And no, the reason is not what you think.
  • Oscar = never.stops.talking. but it’s not proper talking and it’s all asking the same thing over and over again about what is currently making him anxious or whoever’s business he’s sticking his nose in to.
  • Felix = never.stops.the.whiney.voice and is just so melodramatic and picks fights with Oscar so very often I’ve taken to calling him Drama.
  • Jasper = screamy McTantrum Pants. ‘nough said.
  • Grover = YELLING! GUTTERAL LOUD YELLING! OHMYGODSTOPTHEYELLING!
  • Last night I tried to force feed Jasper, such was my irrational concern about his current diet of air and cruskits.
  • As if I’d never learnt that doing such a thing doesn’t end well.
  • As if I had not told myself to not worry about his diet and to just keep offering and maybe by 2020 eventually he will start eating it, just as Felix did but this time we’ll do it without the tears and mealtime meltdowns.
  • Then this morning, he woke up crying with a tummy ache, which i put down to the fact he hadn’t eaten since about 3 the previous afternoon.
  • He willingly ate (and had asked for) his breakfast of 3 weetbix, milk and honey. His only proper meal of the day.
  • Then spewed everywhere.
  • Excellent, I gave my child an eating disorder.
  • By midday the spewing had stopped and his tummy was all better.
  • But because of the spewing I wouldn’t let him eat or drink (except for small sips of water) much.
  • OH THE IRONY.
  • By 4pm he was completely back to normal.
  • For dinner I made a hot chicken curry (for Chef and Felix), a mild veggie curry (for me and Oscar), pan-fried chicken tenderloins (for whoever wanted them but hopefully for Jasper) and rice.
  • And Jasper ate? Plain.boiled.rice.
  • ‘It’s my favowit’ my arse.
  • I actually sent my CV to someone today to hopefully be considered for some freelance work.
  • Such is our poverty.
  • Hence my filthy mood.
  • Which is probably just stress and worry in disguise.
  • Mum and I have been daydreaming about repainting/decorating.
  • A post on that to come.
  • On Monday I had my first day with no children in almost two months.
  • Except our internet connection has been dodgy for the last three weeks and another service guy was coming out between 7 and 12.
  • My SIL came down and picked up Grover for me, as I couldn’t take him up to my MIL’s.
  • How nice is that?
  • Only to be completely diluted by the fact the engineer wasn’t here by 1 and when I rang they informed me the problem had been fixed on Friday, that the problem on the weekend had been another district wide problem and that the job lot had been closed.
  • Wasn’t it nice of them to let me know.
  • After the previous week I’d had a customer service guy calling me so often it was bordering on stalking.
  • So I had one hour to go and do something before I had to pick up the boys from school.
  • So I went to Kmart and bought some undies.
  • Awesome.
  • It was Chef’s b’day last week.
  • He was 38.
  • I didn’t get him anything, well, I gave him something but this isn’t that kind of blog.
  • I still feel bad about it.
  • I caught up with one of the mums I’ve known since Oscar started school (her son was in the same special ed program) and her life has been such a shitstorm (think starting a house reno involving the entire back of the house being demolished only to have your husband retrenched and then getting screwed by the bank when they remortgaged their house and her car breaking down at least once every day on the school drop-off) we’ve decided us and another mum (who’s son was also in the same program and has t.w.o. autistic sons) are going to go out one Saturday night and get completely off our collective trolley.
  • That wasn’t so much a bullet point as a paragraph.
  • The sourdough making experience is still quite unsatisfactory.
  • Another contributor to my filthy mood I suspect.
  • I did however make the most sublime apple and rhubarb pie this week.
  • Which made the world a whole lot better.
  • But I know the world is awesome – a walk home with the little fellas afte dropping the boys at school and stopping off for a play in the park and then on the beach makes that perfectly obvious.
  • I really want to make some cumquat marmalade but refuse to pay in the vicinity of $9 a kilo for the fruit. I used to have two trees that produced enough for a decent batch, but one died and the other doesn’t get enough sun to fruit.
  • OMG I’m just such a developed world whinger at the moment.
  • Move along.
  • Nothing more to see here.
  • Oh, except that our little veggie patch has taken off.
  • The broad beans are reaching for the sky!
  • The chives are blowing in the breeze.
  • The basil is getting a good pruning almost every day.
  • The oregano is liking it’s little spot on the corner despite getting routinely run-over by boys on bikes.
  • The parsley is a delightful grouping of stalks thanks to the possums.
  • The thyme is no more thanks to the bandicoots.
  • The passionfruit has some new little shoots on it, after the possums stripped it of every single leaf.
  • And how are we keeping them (the possums) off the passionfruit and parsley?
  • By giving them their own platter of fruit and veg each night.
  • And by hanging stockings full of napthalene all over the passionfruit vine trelis.
  • So now, the backyard smells like an old lady’s jumper.
  • Awesome.

Vegetable Pasties

I love vegetarian food. I could quite easily never eat meat again and probably not miss it one jot. Well OK, maybe a little jot but it wouldn’t be a gnawing agonising pining kind of jot. Moving on.
With all this gall bladder malarky I’ve been leaning to a lot more dinners based on vegetables and legumes rather than meat and pasta and that naturally led to a hankering for vegetable pasties.
I was going to make these with my new love, Maggie Beer’s sourcream pastry (it’s the first pastry I’ve truly worked with where the experience is delightful and the results sublime), but decided at the last minute to use my other favourite, hot water pastry. It’s perfect – and indeed advised – for pies and working with a hot filling.
The following is based on a recipe by from Allan Campion and Michelle Curtis’ tome In the Kitchen a book I turn to time and time again for fail-proof straight-forward recipes.
This makes a lot, you could halve it but I always figure sooner have left overs you can freeze for easy dinners down the track. Also, you could change the veggies, throw in some lentils, you name it – just to mix it up. Oh, and instead of curry paste you could use some ground cumin and coriander and fresh coriander to go a bit Morrocan.
Vegetable Pasties
Based on recipe from In the Kitchen, Allan Campion and Michelle Curtis
The pastry:
  • 300ml cold water
  • 200g butter
  • 2tsp salt
  • 600g self-raising flour
  1. Put the water, butter and salt in a saucepanand heat until the butter has melted
  2. Remove from the heat and quickly stir in the flour until it forms a ball
  3. Place on a lightly floured bench and knead gently for about 30 seconds
  4. Divide dough and keep remains in the saucepan covered by a teatowel – it gets firm when its cold
  5. Roll out to 14-18cm rounds, depending on how big – or small – you want them to be and brush generously with beaten egg
  6. Place a heaped tablespoon in the middle of the round, pull the pastry up and press together with your fingers
  7. Brush with egg wash.
For the filling:
  • Olive oil
  • 1 leek, finely chopped
  • 4 potatoes, peeled and diced
  • 400g potato, peeled and diced
  • 2 carrots, peeled and diced
  • 2 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 2 tbsp tomato paste
  • 1-2 tsp curry powder (to your taste)
  • 500ml stock
  • 1 cup frozen peas
  • kernels from 2 cobs corn
  • 150g green beans, topped and tailed and cut into small lengths
  • 1-2 cups cauliflower florets
  • 2 tbsp chopped herbs
  1. Heat the oil and saute the leek
  2. Add the potato, pumpkin, carrot, garlic, tomato paste and curry paste and cook for about five minutes
  3. Add the stock, bring to a simmer and then cover and cook for 10 minutes
  4. Uncover, add the rest of the vegetables, turn heat up to high andn stir until all the liquid has evaporated – about 6-8 minutes.
  5. Stir in parsley, season and allow to cool a little (while you make the pastry)
  6. Place the filling in the middle of the pastry circles as outlined above
  7. Put on a greased baking tray and bake in a 180C oven for about 30 minutes or until golden brown.

Bulleted Sunday

  • It feels like it’s been raining for months.
  • I adore the rain.
  • We completely rearranged the back room on Friday night.
  • Our ‘back room’ is our dining room, office, living room, play room.
  • It was an ambitious and somewhat stupid time to start this process.
  • Saturday morning was family brunch to celebrate Chef’s birthday.
  • He was 38 on Wednesday.
  • I got to bed at 3am and was up at 6.15am.
  • Such little sleep was as awful as I remembered it to be.
  • I have not been coping with the reality that this house as become Tantrum Central.
  • Even Grover got sent to his room today.
  • My inlaws returned from their trip to the Gulf country late last week after being away for about six weeks.
  • Tomorrow, I’m dropping Grover up at their place afer I take Oscar to speech and then drop him at school and Jasper at kindy.
  • I’m so excited I’m not sure what I’ll do but I do know there will be a component of browsing with no agenda.
  • I’ve been making my own sourdough breads for the last two weeks and I’m still not happy with them but it’s such glorious dough to work with I am persevering.
  • Tonight I made vegetable pasties for dinner and they were sensational.
  • I even made the pastry and it didn’t split or break or anything.
  • I’ve lost three kilos which is good but not near the goal I had set for myself this term.
  • Last week I organised appointments for Oscar at the paediatrician, dentist and cp specialist and dealt with my gallbladder.
  • This week will be calls to another kindy to say we’d still like a spot and a local music school to investigate keyboard lessons for Felix and local sporting associations to find out about possibilities for Oscar.
  • My MIL brought me over a big bag of lemons, so this week will also feature the production of quite a few jars of lemon butter.
  • Our internet connection and payTV for that matter have been dodgy for the last three weeks or so.
  • It’s been really quite annoying.
  • Tomorrow, the fifth serviceman – an engineer no less – will pay us a visit to try and work out why the hell it’s not working.
  • Possums have been decimating our backyard for years.
  • After doing some research I am trying the whole new approach of actually leaving food out for them.
  • Apparently if you do this they eat that and not your plants/parsley/passionfruit vine/lime tree.
  • That or I am a complete idiot.

Put a gallstone over here and a gallstone over there

Put a lot of mid-sized gallstones sitting at the bottom of your gallbladder everywhere everywhere,

It’s a let’s take your gallbladder out kind of day kind of day,
It’s a gallbladder kind of day.
So, there’s about 8 mid-sized gallstones sitting in the bottom of my gallbladder.
Don’t be alarmed, apparently about 1 in 10 adults has gallstones and the best way to deal with them is to whip that pesky pear-shaped organ out.
Pay attention, there’ll be a quiz later. First prize will be one of my gallstones. Bronzed.
Kidding.
Anyway, the gallbladder sits on the underside of your liver on the upper right hand side of your stomach. If you get a fairly regular pain on that side, up under your ribs, a gnawing kind of discomfort pain where you feel like you can’t really get a good deep breath, go on and make an appointment with your GP.
What happens is the gallbladder squeezes bile into the small intestine every time we eat. If you have gallstones then that bile can’t flow smoothly as they block what’s called the cystic duct and you get associated pain in the upper abdomen, back pain, nausea, vomiting and other delights.
Things can go significantly awry if the stone moves down to the common bile duct and you’ll end up with jaundice and pancreatitis, by which time you’re in real trouble.
So what’s in these little stones of joy?
Cholesterol apparently.
Which is interesting considering my cholesterol is sub-normally low at 2.7.
But get this, gallstones have been linked to:
– multiple pregnancies (tick)
– obesity (tick)
– rapid weight loss (tick)
– ageing (sigh. tick)
– gender – more women than men get them (tick)
– some ethnic groups (brrrrr)
Apparently, when you’re pregnant the consistency of your bile changes (it gets thicker and more crystalline) and makes it more predisposed to form stones.
Combine that with the fact you need eostrogen to make gallstones and voila! here you go Ms allconsuming, your gallstones are ready. My surgeon suspects that I’ve produced a couple with each pregnancy. Awesome. Stretch marks, weight I can’t shift, droopage of everything and gallstones.
Because I’ve had pain on and off for the last 10 years (shut up, I just thought it was because I’d over-eaten or was too fat or something) and that this year the symptoms have been a lot more pronounced and consistent (the pain, the nausea, the vomiting, the bloating, the my GOD I am so attractive right now) these puppies have to come out sooner rather than later.
So basically, they make four small incisions, pump you full of carbon dioxide, dig around your insides and suck all the relevant parts out, hopefully don’t leave any medical gear in there and then stitch me up. This is called a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. I call it one of the many miracles of modern surgery.
If the stones were smaller and floating around, then my surgeon would have whipped me in next week due to the whole risk of pancreatitis but as mine are mid-sized and are all having a snuggle together at the bottom of my gallbladder it’s when it suits me.
Yeah, like any surgical procedure of any nature whatsoever is ever going to ‘fit in’ with my life.
Combine this with the fact I’d only just upped our health insurance to cover private hospital as well as public (which meant we took a much higher excess) so they won’t cover me in a private hospital and I was going to be hit for the higher excess (more than double our previous cover) to go to a public hospital, I was all ‘so I’m screwed’.
Then – after a delightful hour on the phone with my insurer – when we reworked the new cover to a lower excess I rang the surgeon’s secretary to say we’d have to do it at the local public hospital and she was all ‘oh, well you’ve got a bit of a wait’ – to which I was thinking, no shit sherlock – and then gave me a date in August.
Sweet. In that oh my goodness I have to go to hospital and have a general but at least I’ll stop feeling so crook after eating anything kind of way.
Then I asked her about some plan which would mean I wouldn’t be hit for any of the surgeon’s fees and she said it didn’t matter anyway as I’d be in as a public patient. Oh right. Sure.
Sweet. In that awesome I don’t have to even fork out my excess kind of way.
And that, my dear friends, is that.