Sunday roast

The Australian Sunday roast is probably comparable to the Sunday lunch in Germany – a special family meal. We’ve been invited to a friends place for a roast this Sunday. She made seafood chowder and it was the best seafood chowder I ever had – fantastic, delicious, great! After this entrée soup we had a lamb roast with oven roots and mashed potatoes, also very yummy! We warm apple cake and ice cream for dessert I and I made lime mouse for dessert II. After that we all had to roll ourselves home :-)

Pirates!

We watched the 3^rd part of the Pirates of the Caribbean – good movie, really entertaining. But I think the first part was still the best just because it was new. With the 2^nd and 3^rd part you kind of knew what to expect.
Hint for all those who are going to watch it in the cinema – stay until the very end! There will be a short extra scene after the credits! :-)

SHOPPING!!!

Friday is late night shopping in the city centre and shops are open until 9pm. So this Friday after work I went shopping – I haven’t been shopping for ages!! It was sooo good :-) I bought t-shirts, shirts, blouses, underwear and … I found these great shoes R.M.Williams Turnout. But unfortunately they are really, really expensive... so I haven’t bought them …. yet :-)

Big Brother

Walking / Standing around in the city and looking suspicious ;-)

Well, I think I can't deny it... ;-)

I would really like to know who came up with this slogan!! PERTH - A city for people??!!
This really makes tourists wanna come to Perth... I mean who or what else lives in cities?!

Renewable Energy

We went to a talk about renewable energy in WA which was quite interesting. A guy from verve energy talked about possible renewable energy recourses for WA. I actually though it is so sunny and windy here, why don’t they put up solar cells and wind farms and they should have enough energy for everyone! But unfortunately it is not that simple. The highest demand for energy in summer is in the evening, when the sun is setting. They set up wind farms already, but setting up more will be difficult because the coast is either too far away from the grid or it is a nature reserve.
I think the crux of the matter is the cost for energy and also water here in WA. Water costs around A$0.45 per 1000 litre (compared to A$3.30 in Germany)!!!! Setting up a rainwater tank to water the garden will take years to be profitable! Energy costs about A$0.13 per kWh, compared to A$0.32 in Germany. With prices that low, renewable energies are hardly profitable and people don’t feel the need to save water.

New Holland Honeyeaters

‘Our’ two little chicks are grown up now. But they still come back to our garden to drink nectar or to have a bath :-)

Winter is near…

… and it is getting colder and colder. I mean a 20°C maximum during the day is pretty cold for Australian standards. But this is the right time of the year to cook and try different recipes. So I was inspired by friends who gave me this recipe for pickled zucchini:

1. 5 big zucchini, peal, cut out the seeds and cut into pieces
2. 5 big onions, peal, cut into pieces
3. 1 table spoon of mustard seeds
4. 5 -7 bay leaves
5. 15 - 20 pepper corns
6. 50 g salt
7. 200g sugar
8. 0.5 liter vinegar (10%)
9. let everything sit for 3 days, stir occasionally

Very quick and easy and it tastes soo good! But Ian asked me what you eat it with?! I was quite surprised by this question and didn’t know what to answer… In Germany we would have it with dinner, together with bread and cold meat and cheese. I ended up telling him that it is a salad that you can every time you want.

Solyanka (russ.: солянка) – a rich salty spicy stew – is one of the most popular dishes of the Russian cuisine. (source)

Also something I haven’t had for quite a while. So I tried this recipe. It turned out really good. But next time I need to get good German sausages from the German butcher instead of this pre-packed Coles crap that contains hardly any meat and disolves when it is cooked.

Remember: Read the movie critics carefully!

A had a really good day a uni on Wednesday, so we decided to go out that night. A couple of days ago we saw the shorts for “28 weeks later” and Ian really wanted to see it. The shorts looked like just another SciFi movie like the “Outbreak” where a virus spreads and kills the whole population.
But I should have read the critics more carefully! Because this virus turned everyone in man-eating human zombies! And so after 20min. or so I could see the gore anymore and didn’t wanna hear those bloodcurdling screams anymore (as my eyes were closed most of the time anyways). This movie was really disturbing!! Or I am just too soft for this because it was rated MA (15 years and over)!!
Anyway I will make sure I read the critics more carefully from now on because I just don’t wanna see this type of movies!

Quarkkuchen (cheese cake)

Made from our traditional family recipe :-)

base : 60 g margarine, 60 g sugar, 1 egg, 150-200 g self-raisin flour
filling : 500 g quark, 1 cup oil, 180 g sugar, 1 vanilla sugar, 3 eggs, 1 sachet Puddingpulver Vanille (custard powder vanilla), 500 ml milk, some lime juice

One of the thousand flowers of the grevillea in our garden. The New Holland Honeyeaters love it!

Mother’s day

Australia celebrated Mother’s Day, just like Germany, on the 2^nd Sunday in May. And I was surprised to hear that Great Britain celebrates Mother’s Day on the fourth Sunday of Lent (see wikipedia).
We drove up in the hills on Mother’s Day Sunday morning for a bike ride. Ian and the guys rode 50km, while I did only the ‘short’ 30km loop. Even though it was quite hilly I averaged 18km/h and reached a maximal 50km/h downhill. This was actually really scary on this small race bike :-)
Before we had lunch with Ian’s parents we visited the markets in Mundaring. This is a complete different world! It is hard to describe but this place is just 30km out of Perth and the people look different, it is the countryside. I think people could tell that we don’t live in this area, especially when I took this picture from the markets.
The markets were outside and inside the community hall and people tried to sell the most horrible and kitschy things. But I have to admit that not everything was that bad. We actually ended up buying some oven mitts and an apron, handmade, with a red and black checkerboard texture.

Nerdish things

Ian and I upgraded our laptops :-) He bought 2GB of RAM and I bough 1GB RAM and a 120GB hard drive for my 3 year old laptop. So on Friday night we were busy upgrading the laptops. Ian had to test his shooter games straight away while I was still busy installing software and copying data. Sometimes we are really nerds ;-)

Office Music Video

I just watched another episode of my favourite German online TV show Ehrensenf. I found this office music video in one of the last shows. It is just hilarious! I can’t believe that they did this on a single evening!

Busy Weekend

I made lime marmalade again. But this time I added some ginger and we are looking forward to taste this lime-ginger-marmalade creation :-) Ian also harvested the very last limes of our little lime tree. I think altogether we got about 16kg of limes from this tree!
On Saturday night I was out in Freo with some girls from uni. And we were so proud when we got a stamp at the entrance of a pub saying “ID checked”. I mean we are all mid 20 but apparently we still look like under 18 ;-)
It is quite a routine now to do a bike ride around the river (40km) on Sunday morning and have breakfast in a nice café afterwards. And I am really getting better and better. The saddle doesn’t hurt that much anymore and my condition increased as well :-)
The last activity on the weekend was paving. We paved about 1 sqm in front of the door where my new scooter is going to be parked. After that we really earned the BBQ beef steak and prawns at a friends place :)

Korean BBQ Restaurant

On Friday night we celebrated a friend’s birthday in a Korean BBQ restaurant in Subi. It was really quite nice. They had this char grill in the middle of the table and we could grill our own meet and seafood – really yummy! But unfortunately I was sitting on the wrong end of the table and shared a grill with 4 other blokes! Instead of enjoying the food they were only worried about getting enough meat. So by the time I finished my first portion there was hardly any left :(

Poppy seed = drugs?!

The company Ian works for started to do random drug tests. So Ian was randomly selected on Monday and was asked to undergo a drug test. He though ‘No worries.’. But he was told on Tuesday that he was tested positive on opiates… Of course he couldn’t explain why – he never took any drugs.
When he told me, I just laughed and said that must have been the poppy seed cake that you ate on Sunday night. At first he wouldn’t believe, but I started to search the internet and eventually convinced him. So he told the people at work about the cake and I think they also did another more precise drug test. Anyway, everything is fine now. But what a coincidence!! :)