At Last!

The wee cria we've been waiting for arrived. As is our usual experience, we knew nothing about it till all of a sudden there it was! No signs from Coco the day before or anything. However she had been looking absolutely huge and was almost at 365 days!

He's a wee boy. And when I say wee, he is scrawny as anything, but very, very tall with long gangly legs. He's very quiet. And as ever with our cria births it wasn't all sweetness and light.
He seemed to be walking even more unsteadily than our other crias and one of his back legs just didn't look totally right. So I spent the morning worrying, then thought sod it! I'm phoning the vet. She duly arrived, took his temperature ( normal) listened to his heartbeat ( normal) but I wasn't being completely paranoid, as he has a relaxed ligament in his back leg - that's why it looked squiffy. Vet said this can happen when a baby has been in the womb and is a bit overdue - can happen in horses supposedly! Anyway, it will right itself over the next few days. However I am glad I called the vet - I was totally honest and told them that it wasn't an emergency, just paranoia! I don't think I smiled properly until they gave him the all clear!

So, sticking with the tea name theme, we're going to call him Leaf, as in tea leaf.

Here he is still all wet and soggy, about half an hour old. Check out those super spindly legs.

Here he is with his mum, Coco, and half of his sister, Stella.

It is so lovely how our family groups stick together. Last years babies went down to Naturally Alpacas to be weaned but as soon as they got home they went straight back to their mums. They never tried to suckle again, just wanted to be near mummy. Now both Vienna and Coco are part of a family of three and last years crias, Herbie and Stella are most protective of their new brother and sister. Usually making sure that the cria is inbetween them and mum, in a sandwich!


 Still a bit gunky here. I did clean it off later I just wanted him to bond with his mum first.

Almost! He actually suckled really well. He's the first one we've had that we didn't have to start off with a bottle.

Much that Coco did the right thing and gave birth on a lovely sunny morning, the weather very quickly turned to custard and this poor wee guy has had a lot of thunder, lightning and even some hail to contend with. Thankfully he's all rugged up in his wee coat.

I think I mentioned before that this is the last time we'll breed from our girls. We're not cut out for it at all. I find the whole thing terribly stressful, so we'll just stick with our four babies, two girls and two boys!

coconut and raspberry sponge

Just like School Dinners!
All I need now is some pink custard and I'll be transported right back to 1980!

Lloyd was just about to go out and start the mammoth task of cutting the grass. I decided I would bake, so asked him what he'd like me to make. He said he fancied coconut, raspberry sponge. So he went out and I searched for a recipe.
It really couldn't be more simple

Ingredients

• 8 oz butter
• 8 oz sugar
• 10 oz SR flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 4 eggs
• half a Jar of raspberry jam
• Pack of Desiccated Coconut
•  
• What to do 
• Preheat the oven to 180ºC, gas mark 4, Fan 170. Grease and line a roasting tin with greaseproof paper.
• Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time beating well with each addition. If the mixture starts to separate, add a little flour with the egg. Fold in the remaining flour and the baking powder.
• Pour the mixture into the tin and level the surface. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until well-risen and golden, and coming away from the sides of the tin.
• Turn the cake out of the tin and allow to cool on a wire rack.
• Spread your jam of choice over the top of the cake and sprinkle with desiccated coconut.
• Cut into individual small cakes.

I made my cake in a small ish square cake tin, so it rose a lot and I needed to cook it for about an hour.  Being such a tall cake I actually sliced it in half and put more jam and coconut in the middle then put it back together. It makes a very light moist cake and is delicious!
We were going to make some custard to go with it, but we've run out of milk.

Pizza Night!

We've still got tomatoes in the greenhouse and they are the redest, sweetest tomatoes ever. But they weren't going to last for ever so we thought, why not have some home made pizza.
I made some dough in the breadmaker. I couldn't find my wee recipe book, so I went online and found one that I hadn't used before.
It was lovely and had a great flavour, so here it is.

Pizza dough recipe

2 teaspoons dried granulated yeast
3 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup water, plus
2 tablespoons water

Once the dough has been made leave it for around half an hour in a well oiled bowl, then you can roll it out. This made 4 very, very thin based pizzas.

I had to adapt it a bit as it was too solid, so I actually added about another tablespoon of oil and same again of water. This loosened it up a lot. It was still thicker than the usual dough I make, but it actually rolled out a lot better, so I think I'll use this one again. ( but another reason it may have been more solid is that I think my yeast was dead!) 

Lovely tomatoes and some basil. (in one of my bowls!)

 We have very basic pizzas in our house. So all we put on them is some cooked down, home made passata, some home made feta ( or mozzarella) some tomatoes and some basil. And that's it.

We didn't light the pizza oven this time, we just used our oven in the house with the pizza stone, and apart from some pretty terrible sliding of pizza by me, they were perfect!!

 And yesterday was mother's day. I am a doggy mum, so to celebrate this fact we had lovely crepes for breakfast. Yum.

Here's the very simple batter recipe for the crepes.

The fifth Annual Curry Cup

Last year, Lloyd won the Curry Cup.  Which meant that this year we hosted and Lloyd couldn't enter. But I could :)
The day dawned lovely and sunny with a weather bomb, and we had thunder and lightning and some amazingly heavy downpours.
Thankfully we have the Woolshed which is such an amazing space, so we moved our big refectory table over and Danny & Paula brought over an outdoor table so that everyone could heat up their curries an wee camping stoves.

I made curried eggs a la 70's! But my secret weapon was crispy fried onions that I sprinkled on top. I was actually really pleased with it.

Lloyd made a Dahl - just because he couldn't enter doesn't mean he couldn't cook.

Here we are, all set up and just waiting for the various curries and folk to arrive.

OoOoo the curries are on, and heating up.

The actual entries, there was even more food though, poppadoms, dahls, roti breads, raita and the biggest bowl of rice ever seen! Number 7 won, number 2 second and the big one at the back was third. (Mine was number 4 and I was the only person to actually make the dish the curry was served in!)

Some of the delights included; a Burmese rendang, Butter Chicken, lamb curry, a couple of dahls, monkfish curry, a beef something or other, the curried eggs and even some curry ice cream!

It takes a while for 14 people to stack their plates high with curry!

Still queuing!

At last, all sitting and eating

After eating, eating and eating - some even went back for fourths -  the voting was done and counted. Lloyd was ready to announce the winners.... oh the suspense!

Danny was in third place, and deserves a special mention for his home made curry ice cream. It was absolutely amazing!

Nick and Sara were runners up, with the gorgeous monkfish curry - it was delicious and a personal favourite!

And Andrew had a well deserved win with a Burmese Beef Rendang.

Lloyd seemed even happier about this than Andrew!

It was a really brilliant day. Yet again the curries were all spectacular. It makes the voting really, really difficult. People were back round the curry table taking wee spoonfuls of individual curries, Masterchef judges have nothing on us!

Bring on next year! As Andrew has won a couple of times Nick and Sara offered to host. 

Oh and guess what? I was 4th! The top three all had a lot of votes so I was a fair way behind them, but 4th! I was well chuffed, I think it was the onions that did it!

where, oh where have I been??

I've no idea! But the time between posts has been for ever!
I can't even remember all of what we've been up to, so I'm just going to let you see a selection of photos and you can guess!!!

 

And for Charlotte - Banana!
Who is GREAT!


Did you guess right?

Answers are!

Pizza night at friends
A lot of dogs sleeping where they're not supposed to be
Baking
Roller Derby - my new favourite thing!
International Dinner - Mexican night!
Cafes
Auckland and yachts
Auckland and girls night out
The Script
Decided to sell my lovely car
More pottery.

As ever, it's all go!!!

No sign of a baby cria, but Cupcake is doing GREAT!
We're still enjoying tomatoes from the greenhouse and Lloyd is making enough chilli sauce to feed the whole of NZ.


Hope all of you are well and happy!

Glazed Pottery!

The second batch of pottery was ready to be picked up today. I was really excited to see it, as it included the very first ever bowls I made on the wheel as well as the newer ones.
Now, I'm aware that these are very lopsided and squint rustic and I could say I made them like this on purpose  - however I'd be totally lying, as, in fact, I would love to make a symmetrical, weighs less than a tonne bowl, but I'm not in that league yet!

That being said, I am really thrilled with these. They are in colours I like and are all usable.

First, these are small, hand made bowls out of white clay. I love how they turned out.

This is a medium sized bowl I  made on the wheel, out of white clay. I like it, it's lighter than the terracotta ones and less squint! ( the light is terrible today as it's pouring down so you can't really see the true colour)

The first ever wee bowl I made! I gave this a pourer and it works perfectly. It's a small bowl

 A terracotta bowl, this is SO heavy!

And lastly, I made these hearts towards the end of a class one day as a sort of time filler, and when I came to glaze them I had spent so long on the bowls that I just slapped some glaze on these, but I LOVE them! They've got holes in them, so that I can thread them to form a sort of heart chain.

I am loving this so much!

A new Cria

Vienna had her baby a few days ago.
It was expected but out of the blue if that makes sense!

We knew the due date was near, but since alpacas can give birth a month either side of the date, unless they show you some signs it's very difficult to tell!
Vienna had given no clues at all.
However when Lloyd went out to feed them, a little later than usual as we'd had a long lie, I heard him yelling. I ran out, and lo and behold, an absolutely perfect little Cria. She was still very wet so wan't all that old.
We named her Cupcake, as I was just making cupcakes when he shouted.

But as ever with cria births on our farm, nothing was a simple as it could have been.

Firstly she was trying really hard to drink, but nothing was coming out. A quick read of the internet and I found out that there is a waxy 'cap' on the nipples and obviously this little cria wasn't sucking hard enough to dislodge it.
In the mean time we bottle fed her about 50ml of colostrum stuff just to be sure that she got some into her as quickly as possible, then I had the rather awkward job of getting rid of the waxy cap. That was fun - not.
Luckily Vienna is the most biddable of alpacas and just stood there while I fiddled around under her. All terribly dignified.
Anyway, milk appeared and wee Cupcake got her first drink from mum. And all was well. Until evening.
I'd been out in the feeding pen for about an hour just watching and all of a sudden Cupcake seemed to get incredibly dopey, floppy and not at all interested in anything. When we stood her up she fell over.
Steve and Christine from Naturally Alpacas had come up and Christine said that this wasn't great. So the vet was called. Cupcakes heart beat was fine, and so was her temperature. Vet and Christine both thought that the birth may have been difficult and that perhaps she'd been starved of oxygen for a wee bit and maybe her brain was a little swollen.

She was injected with vitamin B1 and B12 and a steroid and antibiotic. We put her wee coat on and within about half an hour she was much perkier.

Then it was bed time.

In the morning we both woke up with rather hammering hearts. Lloyd put on his brave pants and went out to see what had happened in the night. Thankfully it was all good and little Cupcake was trotting around quite the thing!
And any day now, or in the next month we have to go through it all again with Coco who was mated at the same time as Vienna...

Anyway, introducing - Cupcake!

Here she is with her big brother, Herbie. Herbie is a wee monster, he's so in your face and completely funny but certainly has never been the gentlest of wee boys. However, he seems to totally adore Cupcake. He takes care of her, makes sure that Cupcake is in the middle of him and Vienna and is just so incredibly gentle with her - I'm amazed.

With her mum, the lovely patient, Vienna

 We have everything crossed for a smooth delivery from Coco. Then Cupcake will have a wee playmate!

 So, after the stress of all that I decided that we needed to eat a lot of home made biscuits!
Lloyd found this stunningly beautiful foody blog - the food dept. The photography is to die for and so it would seem are the recipes!
I made some of the peanut and cinnamon salt biscuits  - they are amazing.
The recipe is super simple
(I've taken this directly from them so all credit is theirs - and I hope this is ok)

 

  Recipe

Makes approximately 20 biscuits

• 125g unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 1 free range egg

• 1½ cups self-raising flour

• 1 cup roasted peanuts

• ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

• ½ teaspoon salt flakes

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºF (360ºF). Combine the butter and sugar in a bowl, cream together using and electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the egg and mix well.

2. Add the flour and beat in on low until well combined. Using a wooden spoon mix through the peanuts.

3. Using heaped tablespoons full of mixture, shape into balls and place onto a lined baking tray.  Lightly flatten.

4. Combine the cinnamon and salt flakes in a small bowl. Sprinkle onto the biscuits and bake to 10-12 minutes or until golden.

5. Cool on the tray and store in an airtight container.

Suffice to say these were all gone on the same day - I had a meeting in the evening so took them along and we ate them all!!