Farewell Perth Garden...

I've put my 50mm lens back on my camera since it's way more compact than my wide angle lens.  And I've been reminded how much I love that 50mm lens.  It takes such nice photos.  I mean, yes, I have to stand about a kilometre back from my subject to fit it in the frame.  But, ugh.  Such good images.

I was therefore inspired to do a last walk around the garden here in Perth before we leave.  It's all looking so good and it feels such a shame to leave it when it's really starting to look complete.  The house will be rented out until we eventually sell and we know, we know, that tenants most likely will not look after it the way we have.  That's fine.  Sigh.

This is a bit of a photo essay just for my own records so I might not even bother to caption these.  I mean the captions would just be: "plants", "other plants", "more plants".

Oop chubby little baby hands, how'd those get in here!

Plants

More plants

J is addicted to peas fresh off the vine which is lovely and all but also means no peas for the rest of us because she's physically incapable of leaving them alone long enough to actually, you know, ripen.

Other plants

And lastly - because I'm all about keeping it real - cleverly cropped out of my garden shots is the ever-growing collection of toys, bikes, wagons, and doll strollers, which have taken over the backyard.

Taranaki

All photos are my own.

Another week gone by!  As our move date draws ever closer, I thought we should have a look at my adoptive region of Taranaki.  It's pretty scenic.  Good coffee.  High rainfall.

It is also Lonely Planet's #2 region to visit in 2017!  HINT HINT, friends and family.

Taranaki takes its name from its biggest attraction, the mountain, known as Mount Egmont or Mount Taranaki.  According to Wikipedia it is "an active but quiescent stratovolcano".  I don't know what that means, but hopefully it's not anything Pompeii-like.  

The mountain stands 2519m high and you can hike up and down it in a day.  Because of its resemblance to Mt Fuji it provided the backdrop for the movie The Last Samurai.  Everyone you meet in Taranaki will tell you this fact.

You can see the mountain from almost everywhere in Taranaki (including our place!).  It occasionally looms up unexpectedly behind a hill or between two buildings, but I would suggest that it's obscured by cloud conservatively about 80% of the time.  

In winter there are ski fields on the eastern slope of the mountain.  So this is one of the truly unique things about Taranaki: you can go for a surf in the ocean and then ski the mountain, all within one day (or within an hour if you're really motivated).

This is my wallpaper on my computer at the moment.
I made B drive me around so I could take many photos and test the strength of our marital bond.

View towards New Plymouth (distant left) from halfway up the mountain in summer

New Plymouth is the major city of Taranaki with I think about 75,000 people.  So again my friend Wikipedia tells me it's a similar size to Bunbury in WA.  It's nice.  The main shopping centre is called Centre City.  There's a path that follows the coastline called the coastal walkway.  A farmers' market called the Seaside Market is held the first Sunday of every month.  There are lots of really beautiful weatherboard houses, which enchant me no end since I come from SA where everything is built of brick and stone.

Another of my favourite attractions in New Plymouth is Pukekura Park.  

Now let me just open the Wikipedia page for this one...

Pukekura Park is a Garden of National Significance.  Each year they hold a Festival of Lights from December to February, which is when we have usually been visiting, and it really shows off the park.  It's incredibly beautiful.  There are easy walking trails all over the place, a tea house, and a lake with row boats you can hire!  I had one of the best ice creams of my life in Pukekura Park when we visited last year.

Taranaki, like most of New Zealand, is more resemblant of England than Australia.  I dunno, I had always kind of thought that NZ would be similar to Oz since they're so close to each other.  On my first visit, in 2012, I was totally bowled over by how green and lush it all is.  I mean, it is volcanic as we have already learned so everything loves to grow.

Speaking of the volcanic-ness (my english just gets better and better), the sand on the beaches of Taranaki is black.  BLACK-black.  It's WEIRD.  And gets really hot.  It definitely adds a new and interesting dimension to the beach snaps.

The photo below is taken from Oakura beach, looking back up the coast towards New Plymouth.  The little eminences you can see are the Sugar Loaf Islands with Paritutu Rock to the right (the hill with the chimney coming out of it).  You can climb Paritutu Rock but it's deceptively dangerous and a few people have actually died falling from it which is a little sobering.  People have died on Mount Taranaki too now that I think of it.

These next few photos aren't actually from Taranaki but from Mokau, a little beach town about an hour north of New Plymouth in a region called Waitomo.  B's dad has a holiday house there (called a "bach" in NZ! - I think a whole other post on NZ colloquialisms awaits).  In case you couldn't tell from these photos, it too is incredibly beautiful.

Pretty great, right?

Renovations #2

You guys, I'm drowning in paperwork.  I was an administration assistant when I was still a contributing member of society, so I love a form.  Love forms, love ticking boxes.  

But oh my wordy lordy are there a lot of boxes to tick and forms to fill out to move to New Zealand.  And each form has a supplementary form, and some forms have questions that I don't know the answers to, like, as a random example, the date purchased, price in NZD and origin of all the alcohol in our booze cupboard.  Actually I've solved that one as I will be drinking all that alcohol in the next couple of weeks.  There's no form needed for that.

It's only been a couple of weeks since I wrote about the renovations but oh boy are things coming together now!  I can really picture us living here.  Which is good, because we'll be there in LESS THAN THREE WEEKS OH MY GOD.

Bedrooms

The wardrobes are all in now I think.  B was insistent that we not put doors on the front which I'm pretty sure is going to be a stupid idea but whatever I have forms to fill out and no time to argue.  All I can think is MOTHS.  Moths eating all my clothes.

In the girls' rooms we'll probably use the robes for toys, books, etc, and use their dressers to keep clothes in.  Or we will be putting doors on everything in about a month's time.

Bathroom

Look!  Look!  Look at the shiny bathroom!  Just got the heated towel rail to be installed and we are d.o.n.e in here.  Before you think we're all up ourselves with a heated towel rail, please recall that this is New Zealand.  It rains, like, every day.  Unless we want to dry ourselves with mould spores, a heated towel rail is pretty much essential.

Laundry

I don't think I shared any photos of the laundry last time as there wasn't much to show, but it's going to be so good.  Look at all the bench space!  And on the opposite wall there's a narrow little cupboard to store all my laundry soap and stuff in.  I do love doing the washing and I'm going to extra double love it in this big awesome laundry.

Kitchen/Living

Just awaiting the carpet in the living room, not much to see here...

But the kitchen, now this is where I get quite excited!!!!  I love it.  I can picture my girls sitting up at that big bench.  I can picture myself standing at the sink looking out that window at the little house paddock.  Do you know how many times I have dreamt of something exactly like this for our family?

Pouring rain, sun shining, blowing a gale, fire crackling, muddy gum boots at the door, little girls running up and down the hall, bikes, ponies, flannelette sheets, hydrangeas, roses, snow on the mountain, it's going to be so good.

So good, you guys.

Ok I'll stop now.

The last of the summer snaps

Well, summer is done.  Yes, ok, it officially ended several weeks ago but our autumn break only arrived last week, so now it's really over.  That's the last truly hot summer we'll have for some time and I can't say I'll miss it.

That being said, I think the New Zealand winter that we'll head straight into might be a bit of a shock to my system.  I'm from the Adelaide Hills originally and winters there can certainly get very cold - with frosts and everything - but it's been a long time since I've lived through one.  I've really been spoiled in Perth where we have about 2.5 months of winter TOPS, and the sun still shines most of those days.

One person who I think will really relish the cooler climate is the poor cat.  Poor black cat living in Perth.

This is pretty much how he spends October to March

The garden has come through this summer amazingly well.  B kept up the watering with gay abandon, knowing that we had to get things properly established before we leave.  It's all responded in kind and even plants we thought were d.o.n.e have marshalled themselves for a comeback.

Exhibit A below being this bromeliad which was a gift ages ago from an old colleague of mine.  It's been various states of miserable until we transplanted it into this spot and behold!  A flower!  A pretty cool looking flower too.

Exhibit B is my fiddle-leaf fig, the hipster's plant of choice circa 2015.  Longterm readers with elephantine memories will recall from my old blog that I found this plant as a very sad specimen squashed amongst the $7 flowers at the local supermarket.  It had about four very dusty leaves.  I watered it and wiped its leaves and it grew and grew!  

But then we had a few days' hot windy weather a couple of months ago and its leaves started to droop and die back.  I cut off the dead and dying foliage and B was insistent that it should be re-potted.  It looked like it was on the way out anyway so I reluctantly agreed to give it a go and see what happened.

And behold!  New leaves!  I never doubted you, B!

Because I am super on-trend at all times (see: fiddle-leaf fig above), I also recently started a succulent pot.  Not entirely sure why as we won't be here to see it to fruition but the pot was sitting there empty so hey.  Taa-daa.

My kids generally keep me indoors during sunset doing fun things like bath time and reading Spot books, so I usually only see the best sunsets on Facebook and Instagram.  Somehow the other day, though, I happened to be outside while this was going on.  This was actually taken looking east.

One day my girls will be able to take care of their own ablutions and think how many sunsets I'll soak in then!

Found a recipe for brioche bread in Gourmet Traveller magazine.  If we're friends on Instagram you will have already seen this.  Six eggs and 300g butter.  It smells like a croissant.  I'm pretty happy with how it came out considering that I have about zero bread-baking experience.  It was slightly underdone but totally delicious.

Baby A turns six months old next week this week today.  She's had a very cranky and dribbly phase recently so might be teething but really who knows.  Luckily she's chubby and delicious or I might have been tempted to put her out for the rubbish collection once or twice.

Less than one month until we're in New Zealand!!

Salted Chocolate Cookies

You get a bonus post this week because I just had to share this recipe!

Original recipe from taste.com.au

We can't take any food, opened or otherwise, with us to New Zealand.  That means over the next few weeks we'll be doing our best to run down and use up our pantry stocks.

The good news is that the moving company will donate any unopened food to charity.  But I keep all my baking supplies in glass jars which means it allllll needs to be used up.  This recipe enabled me to finish off the last of my superior cooking chocolate.  These cookies also happen to be delicious, and I'm a big fan of any recipe that doesn't require an electric mixer because: lazy.  I can never be bothered to drag the thing out of the cupboard.

Salted Chocolate Cookies




Ingredients
275g 70% dark chocolate, chopped (I only had 180g so I also used the last of my dark chocolate drops which added up to about 220g I think)
100g milk chocolate, chopped (I didn't use any milk chocolate because YUCK)
1 1/2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup cocoa (I always use dutch)
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar (I had none so used the last of my brown sugar and raw caster sugar)
180g salted butter
3 eggs, lightly whisked
2 tsp salt flakes

Method
Preheat oven to 180C or 160C fan-forced.  Line two large baking trays with baking paper.

Melt butter and 100g dark chocolate and 50g milk chocolate (I obviously just used 150g dark) in a medium saucepan over low heat.  Set aside for 10 min to cool slightly.

Meanwhile, sift flour and cocoa into a large bowl.  Stir in sugar.  Add chocolate mixture and eggs and stir to combine.  Stir through remaining chopped chocolate.  Roll slightly heaped tablespoons of mixture into balls.  Place on the prepared tray 5cm apart.  Slightly flatten balls with fingers.  I didn't leave my chocolate mixture to cool for quite 10 min so my dough was quite loose and wet.  I didn't bother to flatten them because they spread on their own.  Bake for 11 min.  Sprinkle with salt.  I was quite cautious with the salt and you can barely taste it.  You could leave it off altogether and they would still be delicious.  Bake for another 1 min.  Cool on trays for 5 min then transfer to wire rack to cool completely.

Cookies will keep in an airtight container in a cool dark place for up to one week.  Trust me, they won't last that long.

Oh, nearly forgot to mention, yield is about 35 cookies.