What's cooking?

Found these photos I took of the boys .They were cooking these fruits and vegetables in a repurposed drum.

Both the chef and sous chef were busy preparing for their casserole.

We can see who is obviously taking charge in the kitchen . Teehee..

They've now decided to grill their vegetables/fruits on the gas hob.

We are explorers

I got home one day and found the boys in their tent in the living room.

Me: What are you two doing?
Noel: Me and Abel are exploring in the jungle, Mum.

Check out what they've brought with them into the tent: Bananas, Grain waves, M&Ms, a big piggie bank, scarf, t-shirt, Thomas toy, Happy meal toy, mobile phone, tooth brush and half loaf of bread. That's a pretty good packing list considering he's packed that all by himself. Noel, you've left out baby wipes and Abel's disposable nappies :P

Outdoor Play

This photo taken in winter on a sunny day. Abel geared in gumboots and jumper was wheeling the wheelbarrow around.

Then he left his wheelbarrow behind and start to look for other things to explore.

He decided to play with the 'blue drum' and I hope he hasn't eaten any dirt in the process.

The making of the kitchen Pt 3

Here's the 3rd instalment of the making of the kitchen. So after we decided to lower the height of the kitchen cabinet, dad was left to finish off 'the kitchen'. He bought those spare rice cooker lid thingie to make Oven knob. He was inspired by my oven so he used those screws to make the 'timer'. We got our mixing bowl from Kmart and I found a broken tap from home which was perfect for the kitchen. Dad repurposed the CD rack as the gas hob. He found the remote for a broken eletric blanket as the knobs for the kitchen. Then he built a shelf for Noel to put his bric a brac. He used the leftover plywood to make a cleaver, a chopping board, a tray, a spatula, and a knife.


Noel utilised leftover wood blocks as his food.

Here he's stirring his food and the neat thing about pretend play is he gets to talk about the process of what he is doing, and he also gets to comprehend what adults do in the kitchen.
Below, Noel was concentrating on his cutting skills.

I've sinced added some plastic fruits and vegetables for him to play.

Thanks Dad for making such an awesome equipment. I wish I had this when I was a kid :P Btw, this photos were taken back in Apr '10>_<

Giddy up

We were very grateful to have Auntie YH to help us when MIL had an ops in June/July. Here Abel posing for a photograph with Auntie YH. Fortunately Abel bonds with Auntie YH very well.

Biking

Noel practised riding his bike in the house compound in winter.

Crawley Caterpillar

Abel and his first remote caterpillar. Jake got this for him from Taiwan. It can go front and go backwards. He gets very excited when he plays with it.

Rides 2

This one is adjacent to the library that we frequented.

Rides

Both the boys love riding on this sort of ride, and the proprietor of any business is always wise enough to put them on the big entrance so the kids won't miss them when they walked past.

Goodies from Taiwan

Jake brought back a lot of goodies from his Taiwan/HK trip few months back. As I promised K, this post is ultimately for her.
heheh. I photographed the ones that I could and some were eaten before I could photograph them.

A trip to Taiwan can never be complete without the pineapple tart, also known as 凤梨酥。Apparently the ones here are from some famous shop (or so they claim in all their shops;P )
Then Jake brought me my beloved cuttlefish snacks, in 6 formats, like barbecued, chilli, shredded, etc...HMMMMMM....I can feel the pimple surfacing as I type this.

Then he got some Wing Wah mooncakes from Hong Kong before he came back. The turqoise and purple boxes are new format in 'bite size' format. It was aptly named in Chinese /Cantonese 一口饼。The tin box is of coz their traditional mooncake. Just lotus paste as we don't want the mooncake to get confiscated at the customs. Btw, the flavour for the bite size format were green tea and black sesame flavour.

Then it is some lion biscuits. It comes very attractively packaged, and inside, it was a lion mould with red bean paste filling. Pretty nice. (see picture below for the biscuit itself)

There's also the beef jerky. Yum...so juicy and sweet. They were gone in no time.

Finally below is some prawn crackers from KaoHsiung or Tainan if I am not mistaken. They are pretty good. It comes in dry format and has to be deep fried much like the ones we buy from Mukah. These ones have a very different flavour from the Mukah ones. They also disappear as quickly as they appear.

The Making of the Kitchen Pt 2

Found this photographs I took of Dad building the kitchen for N. Initially he built it the counter top to be 30inch high (we didn't think 30 inches was high but in reality it was way too high for N). He would have to stand on at least 2 steps to play on it. So Dad modified it to fit to N's height better.

Blocks

Jake got Abel a bucket of these blocks from Kmart. They came in various shapes and the lid also functions as a shape sorter. On this ocassion, Noel actually sorted all the cylinders in a straight row and started counting and saying the colours of the cylinders. then he sorted out the squares and built some sort of fort. It was fascinating watching him concentrate in his play.

It all started with this...

This year I have done a lot more baking than my previous 2 years combined. It all started with this self-crusting tart (I've written about it in the blog before). Anyhow, the ex-workplace was organising a Masterchef bake-off at work. One can either enter sweet or savoury category. Butter, Block cheese or ricotta cheese are provided. To cut story short, me and A were enlisted into the bake-off. So I baked them the night before and brought it to work to be judged by internal judge-s and the internal judges picked 5 shortlists for each category. The tart made it through the shortlist and then I found out the final judge was Simon Gault (one of the NZ masterchef judge) EIks. He told us to bring each of the dish to him and we were to pose just like the contestants in the TV show. He asked me a list of questions. I was very flattered when he said he would happily eat the tart on his lunch time :) I came runner-up. *grin..

Tunnel

Lots of laughter can be heard when they crawled through the caterpillar tunnel.

Toy Story ride-on

Abel received this cute ride-on from Aunt L for his first birthday.

Abel's 1st birthday

after 8 months delay ;P here's a snapshop of abel's 1st birthday. it was to be held at the beach but it was rainy the day before and very windy on the day so 3 hours before birthday started, we decided to have it at home. After plenty of sms-es, and phonecalls, emails, everybody arrived at our place. because his birthday was very close to chinese new year, we dressed the boys up in the chinese costumes.
p/s: sal, thanks for your banner template !! I got lots of comments about the banner.