o frabjous day!

o frabjous day! books, recipes & other things

  • 100 new recipes: part two

    Remember how I declared I had a marvellous project to make 50 new recipes this year? Well, I was making such good progress that I changed my mind and made it 100. So! You’ll find recipes 1 – 9 here, and below are 10 through 17: 10/100: Coffee Braised Beef – adapted from this recipe.…

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  • Belated Book Round-Up for 2012

    I read less in 2012 than I have in a long time, for obvious reasons – infants are not conducive to uninterrupted time with a book. 61 books in total – in comparison, I read 85 in 2011, 70 in 2010, 135 in 2009 and 183 in 2008. Apparently you get less free time that…

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  • Adjustment

    Edward was just over six months old when I started back at work for three days a week – 28 weeks, although I don’t think of his age in weeks anymore. For the first month at least, he’s spending those days with the husband, so I wasn’t nervous in the same way I would have…

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  • 50 new recipes

    I decided not to make resolutions for the new year, and instead decided on a few projects (from small to somewhat ambitious) that I would try and complete in the next twelve months. One of those was making 50 new recipes, with the goal of making different things to my usual recipes – not just…

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  • Things to make with too many apples

    We have been experiencing a glut of apples recently, as each week we don’t get through the large number in our fruit & vegie box. Making apple cakes and apple pies just doesn’t use up enough of them for my liking, so I made apple sauce instead. Apple sauce – or, to be more precise,…

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  • Spiced Apple Sauce Cake

    I made this for my 31st birthday this year, because I had plenty of apple sauce, and I love cream cheese icing. You can tell two things about my baking methods from this photo -I can rarely be bothered sifting icing sugar, and I’m lazy about cutting lining paper for cake tins (so I just…

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  • Ginger Beer

    This is such a simple way of making ginger beer in your pantry – it stays relatively well carbonated, and has a lovely bitey gingery taste. You will need a clean and empty 2 or 2.25 litre soft drink bottle and a plastic funnel. I used a soda water bottle so I didn’t worry about…

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  • Granola

    I’ve read quite a few recipes for granola, and never really understood the point of it – is it a breakfast food? A snack? Now that I’ve made it, I realise it’s a bit of both, and an excellent way of using up some of your homemade apple sauce (if you’re like me, and have…

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  • Apple Sauce Pie

    This is a beautifully simple pie, ridiculously easy to put together, and has a spicy apple-custard-ish flavour. You’ll need to make a pie crust (or use store-bought pastry) – I used Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, as I’m going through and making things from her new cookbook. (Pie recipe adapted from here). ingredients: pastry for a single…

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  • 4 months

    I see my little update posts on parenting ground to a halt at 7 weeks. From memory, that’s when things started to get easier (more sleep, less time spent frantically jiggling Edward to keep him happy), and I think I started doing other things and not focussing entirely on the baby. Four months old is…

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