o frabjous day! books, recipes & other things

Raisin and Banana Bread

This recipe is adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s Jacked-Up Banana Bread, with the addition of some rum-soaked raisins. I had a heap of bananas that were going nice and speckledly (perfect for banana bread), and I wanted to try something different to my usual Nigella Lawson recipe. But I love the addition of dried fruit cooked…
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18 January, 2011
Chockablock Cookies

This recipe is originally by Dorie Greenspan, from Baking From My Home to Yours. I found it on Popsicles and Sandy Feet and made some slight variations due to the ingredients I could get hold of (and to leave out the dried coconut, because I’m not a fan). It’s a lovely chunky biscuit that’s so…
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17 January, 2011
Ice

(Photograph taken by my father in Antarctica, where he worked for a year when he was about 23.) My father and I were watching the first half of Shackleton last night, the miniseries with Kenneth Branagh as Shackleton. I have always enjoyed stories of Antarctic expeditions, probably because of hearing my own father’s stories, but…
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16 January, 2011
Heading south

We have been relatively unaffected here by the flooding in Brisbane – we live on a different river system, and while it did experience flooding (and we had to take rather convoluted routes home at times due to roads being closed), it did not approach the severity of the flooding in the Brisbane river system.…
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15 January, 2011
End of the line

We have had so much rain recently that the dams are perpetually full, and the driveway is beginning to get soft and muddy underfoot (which it has never done before, it generally drains fairly well). Mud and thongs – generally the only footwear we wear when perambulating around the garden – are not a nice…
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9 January, 2011
Lady pigs

Me: “Those little horses look like they’re dead when they lie down like that. But I don’t think they can be, because there’s always a couple of them lying down whenever we go past.” Husband: “Would you like a little horse?” Me: “No – I would like a pig.” H: “We could get a pig.”…
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8 January, 2011
Book Round-Up for 2010

I only read 71 books in 2010, which is heaps less than previous years (135 books in 2009, 183 in 2008 and 173 in 2007). I think part of the reason for this is I downloaded more things to watch on my iPod, so that commuting time was spent watching things rather than reading. Shocking!…
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2 January, 2011
Too cool for words

Me: “Listen! A Doctor Who theme ringtone to go with my Tardis message tone. How cool is that?” The husband, cautiously: “Do you mean ‘cool’ in the sense of ‘really unbelievably nerdy’?” Me: “Sure.” The husband: “Then yes – very cool.”
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1 January, 2011
To the other side

We were driving home the other night, puttering along watching out for water over the road, and we stopped for a koala – the first I have seen in the wild that hasn’t been an unmoving lump in a high tree. It was pacing across the road and paused as we slowed and stopped, staring…
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31 December, 2010
Christmas time

The plane bounced sharply a few times on our descent into Cairns, causing high pitched shrieks from the passengers. It was that sort of jolting that makes you gaze out the window (while clutching onto the seat in front of you) and contemplate the interesting fact that you’re hurtling through the air in a pointy…
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30 December, 2010