So it's been a busy little while since my last update, with work and general family life taking up more time than I had said I would devote to it at the start of the year, how easy it is to walk around and over the comitments we make.

Foodwise it's been a mixed bag with only half of the family here most nights (Eve waitresses at Strawberry Fare - a dessert restaurant famed for being on the site of an old mortuary - not much else) and Bryn now also working front of house at the Mexican Cafe in Newtown, the second only ever boy to work there (the first was the owners nephew)

I have to own up here, we have been eating there since Bryn was just old enough enough to sit in a high chair and throw up on their carpet when a corn chip got stuck halfway down his greedy throat, and Eve worked there in her first incarnation as a waitress, so he was a walk in when he got old enough.(he's now almost 15 and a half)

So for most of the week I find myself halving portion sizes or over catering and finding myself with lunch for the next day, not that bad really.

It's been a quick steak on the grill, pork chops and salad and then tonight Bryn and Zoe combined to produce Rosti, not bad at all except that Bryn grated the potato on a very small sized hole on the grater instead of using rhe mandoline so a touch more like a dense crispy potato pancake than a light air filled rosti, but tasty all the same.

Eating out has also been sporadic, Yum Cha at Golden century a week back (Saturday morning of the Sevens weekend so quiet) and that's been about it.

All fairly standard except the New Years rice cakes, very gelatinous, slightly caramelized surface as if pan fried after being set as a slab (like grilling or pan frying polenta perhaps?) but with a restrained sweet taste, something I find is rare with asian sweet meats as most are either hugely sweet or are strangely unsweet.

Will have to search my cookbook shelves and see if I have anything that offers a recipe for this.

We are in the end stage of re-decorating our main lounge upstairs, sounds grand but really our place is a slightly odd layout. Two bedrooms down, a kitchen that joins into a dining/lounge type area at the back of downstairs and a single bathroon, small study/office and a single bedroom upstairs. And then the room, the entire front of the upstairs facing North is a single room, flooded with sun year round and now completely redone (except for the carpet) and ready for bookshelves in the 'reading' corner. This will allow me to pull close to 200 cookbbooks out of storage and have these out and at my fingertips. I cannot wait.

In a later post I'll start to share the range of these, as I have been at times an avid garage sale haunt, and managed over a few years to obtain some older and rarer NZ originals;

I've listed a few below (and will over time share a few of the recipes contained within the pages of these pieces of history, especially those that deal with recession time cooking options), I have some already out and just pulled three down; these are,

The "Peace" Recipe Book, an effort by a returned soldiers wife (Veteran African War) Elsie G Harvey and published by N.Z Newspapers at the Star Office, Auckland. There is no publishing date but so perhaps  sometime soon after 1915? if that refernce is the 2nd Boer War?

Practical Home Cookery Chats and Recipes, written and selected by Katrine, Cookery Editress late "Weekly Press" printed in Christchurch in 1929 by Simpson and Williams Ltd

The Blue Triangle Cookery Book - published in Aid of the Funds of the Y.W.C. A., Wellington - again no publishing date.

cheers