Herby tomato salad

Made this tasty tomato salad with freshly grown herbs today for lunch, perfect even on a crisp day like today.

Ingredients:

Grated carrots
Sliced tomatoes
Finely chopped onion
Rocket, basil and coriander
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Perfect with homemade bread
and lots of cheese

Free template for felt slippers

As 50% of our household is occupied by a crazy Swede, and this Swede insists on enforcing a 'no shoes in the house' rule - it's only fair that some welcoming slippers are made for guests. Using Martha Stewarts template, we are busy making some grey and yellow felt slippers.

We like old stuff...

As we start renovating our new place we're finding all these interesting things...  Like this one, what looks like a part of an old blind, in solid brass, Made in W Germany, a piece of history right here.

Friday Flowers

You can never have too many Proteas...

Muizenberg back in the day...

Found these amazing pictures of Muizenberg back in the day, such classics!
Always interesting looking at old photographs and seeing the people, the styles, and the architecture. See more on our Pinterest board.

Graphis Magazines

We found this little gold mine at Rattlesnake bookshop here in Muizenberg... A selection of Graphis magazines from the 1940's - 50's, two beautiful boxes with these amazing magazines. They just simply had to come home with us.

BRIGHT

We bought some old school chairs last week and started restoring them over the weekend. We've decided to turn them into a set of dining room chairs. Chair backs and bases have all been sanded with the top layers of ply removed, and the steel frames got a lick of the most popping/fizzing enamel colour we could think of mixing. We've only just started on the painting so will upload more pics once completed. How's that colour?

Homemade apple sauce

So easy to make your own apple sauce, and no funny extras. Just apples, sugar and a dash of cinnamon. Super nice on your breakfast porridge.

Home-baked apple muffins

Nothing beats freshly baked muffins... These have digestive bran flour and chunky pieces of apples added for 'health'.

Quick Homebaked Baguettes

Took just over an hour for these fresh mini baguettes to be ready for consumption. Nice with butter and cheese.

Freshly baked

Tried a new recipe called Tebröd (Swedish for Tea Bread), from a book mum gave me, called 'baka bröd'. I have this (sometimes irritating) habit of always wanting to try baking something new, so haven't really perfected any of them... We've eaten lots of 'interesting' breads, however this one turned out really well, luckily enough!

It's a bun made for teatime, but also worked really well for breakfast and lunchtime  (yes, this is what we've been eating all day). It has (suppose to have) creme fraiche (I used youghurt), oats, linseeds, milk, sirup and both yeast and baking powder. Loveliness in a bun.

Our edible garden

We ate our first, out of three, homegrown broccoli's yesterday, and it was superb! It is something so reassuring to eat your own homegrown, especially at that size. It is the largest vegetable we have ever grown, which is very exciting for us, also because it grows so quickly over here (being used to balcony-gardening in the UK). Very happy it survived the slugs :)

Check out our old post to see what the garden used to look like.

Handmade hessian pallet couch

The couch is done! Pillows made out of recycled coffee bags, foam covered in hessian, all hand stitched. Resting on two pallets. The idea is now to make another one, positioned in the corner to create an L-shape.

Baby summer dress + pants

Many of our friends are having babies and as we love to make things, we took the opportunity to make some baby clothes (or Ida did)... The original pants and dress patterns can be downloaded for free from Made by RAE.

Muizenberg BLACKOUT - 60 sec shutter speeds

Around 4-ish pm yesterday the electricity in our block of streets went out, needless to say we had an easy day at work. It was pitch black from the vlei to Albertyn road. These 2 shots were taken on 60 second shutter speeds with some pretty warming results.

Before and After - the veg patch

Remember what this space used to look like? See post below for a reminder.

Welcome to the 'After' vegetable patch. We've been grafting really hard of late with very little weekend time. So, to maximise on our time, we planted a few vegetables from seed; radish, swiss chard and beans, but majority of them from seedlings. We planted broccoli, rocket, coriander, onions, and celery. It feels like cheating but at the same time gives instant gratification as half the bed appears to be looking beautiful after an hours planting. We also put down our herbs from the bathroom and re-potted some too.

The veggie patch is also going to be full of vital nutrients for the vegetables. After the trenching, the decomposed matter, cardboard, paper, plant cuttings… we put manure, kelp, wood shavings, compost, a sprinkling of bought nutrients and finally a good layer of topsoil which we mixed in. Note the difference in colour of the soil around the veg patch, that's what we had to start with.

It was such beautiful weather on the weekend, so after our planting session we decided to end the day with a fire and a lovely bottle of red wine. Oh ja, the rocks that make up the fire place came out of the ground too.

The Big Dig - Saturday 18/06/2011

1 X Jackhammer, 1 X Angle Grinder, 1 X Pick, 1 X Garden Fork, 2 X Spades, 1 X Metal Mallet, 1 X Chisel, 1 X Wheelbarrow, 3 X Buckets, 1 X Skip, 6 X Humans (2 Ladies & 4 Gents).

Who on earth thinks that concrete is more attractive than plants hey?

Half a metre deep 'L' shaped trench with a layer of cardboard, followed by plant cuttings and a full bin of decomposed food matter. We put a light layer of soil over this and later in the week we'll put a layer of horse dung down followed by another layer of soil and then a final layer of topsoil. Once the layering is complete we'll be ready to plant our veggies… the veggie story to be continued another day.

A beautiful sunset over Muizenberg mountains to end off the day.

Herbs in the Bathroom

While we wait for our veggie garden to take shape, we have been growing some herbs like parsley, basil and dill. No clever scientific explanation (like hot steam and soap) to why we've kept them in the bathroom, other then the fact that's where they get the most light. They might even get upgraded to the real outdoors soon!

Homemade muesli - so much better...

The stuff you need:

3 cups Oats
1 1/2 cups Nuts, like peanuts, pecans, walnuts etc
1 1/2 cups Seeds, like sunflower or pumpkin etc
1 cup Raisins or any other dried fruit
1/3 cup Honey
1/3 cup Vegetable Oil
1 tsp Cinnamon


How to do it:

1. Preheat oven to 140C
2. Mix all you dry stuff together in a bowl.
3. Mix honey and oil in a separate bowl.
4. Add the honey and oil mixture to the dry stuff, mix together.
5. Transfer onto a baking tray and bake in the oven for about 45 min or until golden brown... Stir every 10 min or so.
6. Let cool before transferring into a jar or container.

Willy:s paper bag

We love this paper bag! Ida's parents kindly sent a package with some Swedish books (having been living outside Sweden for the last 10 years, her Swedish is suffering a bit, and asked if they could send her some books).

The recycle/reuse philosophy definitely runs in the family, as Ida's mum wrapped the parcel in this recycled paper bag (Willy's is a food shop in Sweden). It now has a proud place up on our notice board in the office.

PS we think the extra bold serif typeface rocks, looks so similar to the Egyptian Slate we use.