I’ve been wanting to make a cake with raspberries on top ever since seeing this photo.

I used this recipe from BBCgoodfood, whipped some double cream and icing sugar and topped it all off with fresh raspberries from the garden. It was pretty good!

Birthday present for a friend that I made last week.

1. A while ago we picked up a cupboard door from Toby’s. It sat around for a few weeks before I got around to starting to make something of it.

2. It turned out that underneath the ugle dark varnish was really lovely wood.

3. The rusty hinges and catch polished up well to have a nice weathered finish. I then used beeswax on the sanded wood to bring out more of the colour.

4. I mounted a photo I took in New York to finish it off. Now hanging on a wall in West Hampstead.

When we were working full time in London, weekends were all about breakfast and savouring a slow start to the day with good food, newspapers and pots of coffee.

Some of the favourites from the past year including classic boiled eggs and soldiers, poached eggs and asparagus, baked oatmeal with blueberries, french toast and berries, waffles, and poached eggs on tomatoes and soda bread.

I can’t wait to get our own house and kitchen to enjoy lazy breakfasts again. In the meantime, I love this tumbler for inspiration.

I made far too much hummus the other day so we’ve been eating it every day since! I’m unable to stick to a recipe so it’s made up from a mixture of a recipe from the Revive Cafe Cookbook and this recipe:

800g chickpeas (cooked)

3 tablespoons tahini

1/4 cup water

1/4 cup olive oil

2 cloves garlic, crushed

juice from 1 lemon

3 tablespoons basil leaves

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

All mixed together in a blender, adding water and salt to taste.

Served with extra olive oil and paprika.

I love coats. Particularly red ones in the grey winter weather.

1. Toast 2008 collection (via Black Eiffel)

2. Fidelity Sportswear at Steven Alan

3. Sessun A/W 2012 at Asos

4. FM908 on Etsy

I have a small obsession with chevron at the moment:

1. Raglan pullover

2. Leather necklace

3. Bracelet

4. Cufflinks

One of our aims, when we find our bit of land to build a house, is to generally become more self sufficient. This will hopefully take many forms, from energy generation to food production. While we’re waiting to for the big projects to start, we’re beginning with the small stuff, such as making our own bread.

This was our first bread making for a couple of years and we went back to basics, wholemeal loaves in a tin, classic bread. I recently bought the book ‘Make the Bread, Buy the Butter‘ and we adapted her recipe for everyday bread. It’s a great book for people like me, wondering which foods it is worth trying to make from scratch and is full of recipes. The story of amateur poultry keeping was brilliant and a bit of a warning for my grand chicken plans (I still want chickens though!)

We made a pizza oven for our last wwoofing hosts in Auckland.

It took about 3 days from a kit supplied by this company.

For non kiwis, the materials would be fairly easy to source (fire bricks, sand, cement, mortar, pumice, fire tiles and a ceramic cooking tile). There are plenty of youtube tutorials such as this one for more info, and lots of diy kits out there.

A quick outline of the building process:

1.  Prepare a concrete base. This could be using precast concrete slab or casting your own slab in formwork. We chose to make our own slab to allow for some interesting drainpipes to run underneath, and also give an extra shelf at the front for making the pizza!

2. Lay out the tiles and draw out the shape of your oven.

3. Using timber formwork make the interior arch and lay the first 2 courses of bricks for the oven.

4. Fill the centre of the oven with voluminous objects and the pumice to form the shape of the dome. This needs to be covered with wet newspaper to stop it sticking to the brickwork and mortar.

5. Complete the remainder of the brickwork dome and  cover with the the mortar left over. Create the formwork for the exterior arch.

6. Cover with pumice mix and fix in flue.

We ate pizza baked in the oven in our last night in New Zealand and it was great – the pizza’s only took about 1 minute to cook and at least 20 were consumed! Now we just need to make one for ourselves…

When we were staying with my aunt and uncle in Maine I realised how much I had missed knitting over the past 6 months. Luckily, there was an amazing place nearby that sold wool from their barn.

Peace Fleece sell yarn from their old wooden barn in Porter, Maine. In their own words: “Peter Hagerty and his wife Marty Tracy started buying wool from the Soviet Union back in 1985 in hopes that through trade they could help diffuse the threat of nuclear war. Since then Peter has journeyed through eastern Europe, central Asia and the Middle East in search of farmers and shepherds who are willing to set aside historic enmities in exchange for opportunities leading to mutual understanding and economic interdependence.”

Although most of their wool and needles are sold online they had a great selection of wool and knitting products in the barn, and it was hard not to want to buy it all. I particularly craved their beautiful painted needles:

Peace fleece also sell patterns so I proceeded to make my first pair of woolly socks. They’re a little large but work fairly well in wellies!

]]> http://www.thesaltbox.org/2012/08/31/socks-2/feed/ 0 http://www.thesaltbox.org/2012/08/31/auckland/ http://www.thesaltbox.org/2012/08/31/auckland/#comments Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:06:29 +0000 franimal http://www.thesaltbox.org/?p=45

We stayed in a room in Ponsonby that we found on air bnb.

Lunch at The Imperial Buildings in the CBD.

We visited the Auckland Art Gallery and climbed up Mount Eden to look at the view over the city.

We drove to Karekare Beach on the west coast for a windswept walk.