Moved

Hallo all,

I'm unable to maintain this blog really...
I'm kinda dodging between places. So if you wanna check out my stuff please head on over to
https://www.facebook.com/gardensofmay

or

http://gardensofmay.deviantart.com/

Wow, how long as it been?

It's been so long since I have posted anything here and to be honest it was because I lost a lot of my motivation but I'm slowly getting it back. I have been cooking and baking quite a bit but my desire to blog about it has waned a little bit I think it's slowly coming back.

Just returned from a week long holiday in Queensland which was absolutely rejuvenating and am ready to get right back into it. :)

The last thing I cooked which I'm really proud of would be when I was living in the gold coast and I had very limited resources as we didn't want to buy too much. We were basically living in each apartment for two to three days and we went from apartment -> resort -> apartment so any ingredients pretty much had to be used in each residence we stayed in as there wasn't anywhere in the resort to store cooking ingredients.

Basically, scrambled eggs and a mushroom with bacon and egg baked into it. And a light orange and apple fruit salad to end the morning with. It was nice and light and refreshing and was really cheap to make all together.

Stew!

It's been a while since I've made any posts here and honestly, I haven't been much in the kitchen lately. I was supposed to make biscuits for Valentine's Day and make a post about it here but I never got around to it as I was sitting behind the sewing machine all day. It's okay, the boyfriend didn't mind.

I also never posted the pineapple biscuit or peanut biscuits that I made for Chinese New Year but oh well! Today I bring you stew!

I went out to the shops and got some ingredients to make a tomato based stew because for some reason, that's what I felt like eating. I also had the tastiest stew at my boyfriend's house the other night so I was craving for more.

So this recipe started with two 800g cans of diced tomato, two capsicums, an eggplant, three zucchini, an onion, a lot of garlic, a bottle of sundried tomato pesto and some lamb. Not in that image that I also used was some EVOO, salt, pepper and flour.

All I did was coat the lamb in salt, pepper and flour and dice up all the vegetables. Then I browned the lamb in the EVOO and removed it from the pot. Cooked the garlic with the onion until it was all softened and then put everything into the pot and cooked it for a while before I decided to stick it all into an oven proof dish and put it in the oven. At this point I had seasoned the pot with salt, pepper and some sugar.

The main reasoning for the oven is because I didn't want to stand there watching over it and stirring it every so often, I wanted to go to my room and sew. So I put everything in the oven for two and a half hours, stirring every half an hour.

After that was done, it hadn't reduced as much as I wanted to so I returned it back onto the stove for a while until it thickened. And then served over rice.

This amount makes you a REALLY BIG pot that you'll be able to eat for a week. :3

And is so very very tasty! But if you're sharing with other people you might be fighting over the meat.  ;)

Poor neglected journal~

There hasn't been much work done on this journal since the last few weeks as I have ben busy preparing for WaiCon. I had baked so much food upcoming to waicon, my Popcorn flavoured macarons got reprised (Thank you Adriano Zumbo), Brioche, Walnut bread, Melon Pan, kaya and a lot of other things have been made for people to eat on Australia Day/my friend's birthday as well as during the convention itself. I was a part of running a store with some friends and I wanted to ensure that they had food to snack on throughout the day.

It was a wonderful albeit tiring experience and I'm looking forward to doing it again next year. Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of any of the food that I had made so there's nothing to show for all the work I have done in the past few weeks but there will be pictures and possibly recipes coming up in the next few entries for everyone so please look forward to that.

A great experience I had over the weekend however was somebody had noticed the macarons I had left our during the convention for people to snack on and I was hunted down and possibly befriended. That was kind of cool. :)

Anyway, I hope everyone's looking forward to this coming year and all the food related experimentation that I'm going to be doing. I've decided that if I'm going to be posting recipes on this website, it's going to have to follow 2 rules. If they're recipes that I learnt off friends/family or off the internet then I shall post them up here because they are freely sharable but if they're recipes that I learnt from a book that I have purchased then I will be directing people to purchase that book. I'm not going to be posting up those recipes.

I think that's pretty fair. And onwards on my journey towards culinary dreams. Recently I've been watching a lot of Top Chef. It's one of my favourite cooking series of all time!