Off for an adventure.

So what was this most precious thing that Luna was running to show me?

Oh yes, a “Tiny mushroom!”

Found somewhere right over there…

That wasn’t the only one either.

So much to discover at Cornwall Park.  Luna declared (after Autumn Equinox dinner, which included candles) “Today was the best day!”

Kauri bark and gum,

Lichen!

Om nom nom, risotto with lentils, carrot and walnuts, accompanied by roast kumara and potato, topped with fresh basil…

Hope you had a good equinox.

I love to get people sewing, it’s easier and more fun than some may think..  You can buy one of these babies from my Felt.co.nz shop.

It’s good to start with something fun and well, these will be quite festive too.  I’m putting together these sewing kits, you can make a set of three or five strawberries, and the good thing for beginner sewers is that makes good practice!

Like my other kits, all you need is a pair of scissors, the kit comes with the felt, stuffing, template, thread, needle and a couple of pins.  They require no tricky fancy stitches, just a little time.

I’ve used mine as a string of strawberries to decorate the house, and Luna has a whole pile to play with too…

So look out for me at i.craft.kingsland if you’re in the hood this weekend, or come to The Michael Park School Fair to see me… or any of my other markets (see over there to the top right..) or you can just email me if you’re interested.

I am really so excited!  That’s all I’m saying.  Besides the deets of course.

It’s from 10 am – 5 pm, Alexandra Park Raceway, corner Greenlane & Manukau Roads, Epsom.  Genuine vintage
* Fabrics
* Clothing
* Hats
* Linen
* Accessories
* Trims
* Buttons
* Lace
* Books
etc
General admission: $5.00, door sales only.

Wohoo.

If only I’d had a chance to whip up this blue number…

I made these to-die-for Oreo Cheesecakes for a high tea today.  I thought I’d share the recipe, because you ought to make them and then have a sugar high headache like I have now.  Here are some more photos, they’re super quick and easy, using a cookie for the biscuit base saves loads of crushing-mixing-chilling time.

See?  There’s the cookie.

I’ll share the recipe, as I adapted it a little, using less eggs and cream cheese, fewer cookies and made it all metric.  Also, as my stick blender died, I mixed it all by hand.  I have found using a fork to work up the cream cheese, alternating with a whisk makes a good smooth cheese filling, so don’t let not having a good mixer stop you!  Sooo, adapted from the above link, here’s what I did…

Cookies ‘n’ Cream Mini-Cheesecakes

Ingredients

• two boxes of Oreo cookies, I used 20 for the cup cake bases, and chopped the rest to add to the filling
• 750gms cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten
• 1 cup sour cream
• Pinch of salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 140 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Place 1 cookie in the bottom of each lined cup.
2. Beat cream cheese until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Gradually add sugar, and beat until combined. Beat in vanilla.
3. Drizzle in eggs, a bit at a time, beating to combine and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Beat in sour cream and salt. Stir in chopped cookies by hand.
4. Divide batter evenly among cookie-lined cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake until filling is set, about 22 minutes (mine took about 30 minutes). I always let my baked cheesecakes cool in the now switched off oven once set, this seems to prevent the tops splitting.  Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (or up to overnight).

Voila!  I usually get all over the top with cheesecakes, sprinkling on flaked or grated chocolate, but ah, these are already unbelievable rich.  You could crumble cookie bits on top if you bought extra cookies if you wanted to really go all out.

Do you need to see another photo?

Last one, now go make them!

This years garlic harvest was a bumper crop, we had made a few minor changes based  on last year.  We spaced the cloves out a little more – at least 15cms, and we actually did not feed the bed as much as the earlier plantings, and the cloves were already sprouting when we planted them.

Before braiding them this year, I also gave them longer to dry, a little too long as the leaves were quite crisp and brittle while I finished plaiting, but the garlic is just delicious.  We harvested them on the Summer Solstice, and although the heads were complete, they were rather small, I think if we left them a little longer in the ground, maybe another couple of weeks, or a month, they would have been much bigger. 

Just beautiful around here today, they garden is alive  with colour and the ground is warm, can’t wait for the garlic harvest.  Summer solstice is happening on the 21st of December, a day of pulling up the lovely fat bulbs, and of course a delicious lunch.

Such a lovely and satisfying way to celebrate the solstices.  This is the second attempt at garlic growing for us, and this is by far more successful than the first.  I so recommend growing your own!

The photo above was taken in August and shows the first strong shoots pushing up through the mulch and good worm cast compost…  only four months later and we have these!

I found some lovely large organic garlic cloves at my local organics shop, much of which was already sprouting and was much better than the seed garlic I bought from the plant shop the previous year.  We used the same bed in the garden, and for the six months it was between crops we added several layers of compost as garlic apparently uses a lot of nitrogen.  After planting the cloves we covered the bed in a thick mulch of leaves.

It was really very easy to grow, we have a worm farm which provides a good liquid fertilizer, that I applied fairly regularly, we had plenty of rain and so I did not need to water very often until late November.  We also tended to avoid many other plants growing in the same bed as garlic is one of those plants that does not make a good companion, ours shared the bed with some self-seeding Kale and Calendulas and that was about it.

It took a morning to brush off the dried dirt and braid up, about 50 cloves, six of which stayed smallish cloves and a couple that were spiked by the fork, so plenty for us and some to share around.  It’s good to let it air dry, we kept it mostly shaded for a few days until it was ready for braiding.  The flavour seems to develop nicely as the cloves dry, but you can still cook with them fresh.

A friend sent me this press release from Juliet Batten, the author of the (really good) book Celebrating the Southern Seasons: Rituals for Aotearoa…

Autumn is with us: the season to turn inward as the weather cools, plants withdraw their energy and the light turns towards the dark.
Light a thousand candles for Halloween on April 30 and restore the true festival of Last Light

Did you know that
Halloween is a festival of the dead?
That Halloween is an autumn festival?
That in NZ we are celebrating it at the wrong time of year — in Spring?

Juliet Batten, author of Celebrating the Southern Seasons: Rituals for Aotearoa (Random House, 2005) is asking us to restore the true meaning of Halloween. ‘Let’s light at least a thousand candles between us, and use this night to remember those who have died,’ she says. Halloween developed out of the Celtic festival of Samhain, held in late autumn (October 31 in the northern hemisphere; April 30 in the southern hemisphere).

‘By lighting a candle inside a hollowed out pumpkin, and placing it on our doorstep on April 30, we honour our loved ones who have passed over,’ says Juliet Batten. ‘We also mark the passing of light as we enter the darkest months of the year. Let us realign this festival to the point in the seasonal calendar where it belongs. In this way we honour our old traditions and also the land in which we live.’

Last Wednesday evening I celebrated the Autuimn Equinox, it was lovely, friends and family turned up and we enjoyed some seasonal foods, and had a few drinks. It was great to catch up with people again and it was good to think about the changing of seasons and reflect on what ancestors may have said or done at such a time.

Traditionally, at this time of the year food would have been harvested and people would be enjoying good food and taking some rest after the hard work over the summer period. This was also a time to begin preparing to move into the dark time of the year and is a time for reflection and an inner focus.

Equinox timetables
Stonehenge Aotearoa

Whatever you do, don’t miss the fabulous Lantern Festival. Closing tomorrow evening with, as usual, fireworks brought to you by Wah Lee.

Happy year of the Fire Pig! Not too sure what this means for a Fire 火 Snake 蛇 like me.

Here are some images from last year’s festival