Favourite cauliflower and zucchini soup recipe

I made a quick and easy soup for dinner when I got home this evening. This warm, hearty soup is comforting after busy days at work. Its summer but has been wet for days so wintery soup seemed to hit the spot.  And its zucchini season here so this recipe is a good way to use them up.

Ingredients

1 head of cauliflower, chopped

1 zucchini, chopped

1 can coconut milk or evaporated milk

olive oil

grated parmesan

salt and pepper

Method

Throw cauliflower and zucchini in a large saucepan with drizzling of olive oil.

Put lid on pan and put on medium heat and steam vegetables for about 5 minutes.  Be careful not to burn the bottom of the pan.

Add coconut milk or the lower fat evaporated milk.  Heat until vegetables are soft.  Add seasoning to taste.

Blend soup until smooth.

Serve with a sprinkle of parmesan and toast.  

Please let me know what you think. I hope you really enjoy it.  Tune in tomorrow to find out how I re-purpose the left overs into a new meal idea. 

Mmm. 

Soothing Tea

Soothing chamomile with honey to wind down during a busy day.

Day 2 bee keeping course with Bruce White

Amazing day 2 of the bee keeping course.  This is what a swarm looks like: terrifyingly beautiful. 

After the swarm was dropped the bees flooded back into the hive as a dark safe place. 

I took heaps of photos so stay tuned because I will post more as I sort and label them.

We came home with heaps of knowledge, practical experience and a jar full of the freshest, tastiest honey imaginable.

Extracting the honey gets the heart rate up.

Thanks to Andrew Britton, Bruce White and smallfarmsnetwork. 

Bee keeping course with Small farms network and Bruce White

Day 1 of a bee keeping course in Berry was wonderful.

Howard bravely held a frame teaming with bees! He didn't get stung but I did. Youch. It hurt but I've had worse I guess.

Fabulous frame covered in bee brood - or baby bees safely cocooned in their cells. I marked some drone bees, the ones that mate with virgin Queens, with a red whiteboard marker. Learning about bees is quite scandalous in mixed company! 

Honeycomb! Yum. Worker bees making honey. How gorgeous.

Just a taster - more tomorrow.

Guerrilla knitting Melbourne style

Guerrilla knitting Melbourne style. I loved these knitting and crochet covered trees in the heart of Melbourne.  Guerrilla knitting is one of my favourite public art forms. It enhances the natural elements of the urban environment, its colourful and creative. It an be recycled. And it is not destructive.

Love it.

Just bought a soda stream: couldn't bear throwing bottles out anymore

Today I made a move to reduce our ecological footprint a whole lot further.

We love mineral water. We love to drink it cold and plain. The bubbles add to the whole experience that flat tap water doesn't match. I don't drink soft drink. Howard will have a little cola now and again but that's all. But oh wow mineral water, we drink bottles of it.

A couple of months ago I started making ginger beer. I found a great old homespun recipe - I have been meaning to share that whole experience - I will do that I promise.  PET soft drink bottles are perfect. No more exploding glass!  We started keeping our mineral water bottles to re-use. I recommend to everyone that they pile up plastic bottles for a couple of weeks instead of flinging them straight into the recycling bin and closing the lid. The growing pile has been tugging at my heart, the guilt building with the pile. Ok, yes I always recycle them. Yes I re-used some for ginger beer then recycled them. Sometimes I use them in my vegie garden.  Our recycling bin is full of steel tins, glass wine bottles, milk in either cardboard or sometimes plastic and hundreds of plastic mineral water bottles per year.  I can no longer live with the mineral water bottles.

So we bought a soda stream. Financially I think it won't be cheaper. If we only drank Perrier yes it would, we love Perrier by the way, but the homebrand tastes pretty good and is super cheap. We bought a kit with machine, CO2 canister and one litre bottle.  We added a bottle of flavour for Howard and two half litre bottles for Howard to take to work and we are set.

The result: great tasting sparkling water, no salt to worry about and no more throw away bottles.

Cheers to a reduced footprint and guilt free mineral water consumption. 

Divine cabbage rolls for dinner tongiht

Ok now I have won the cabbage roll war!
Despite my neighbour kindly giving me two of her home grown savoy cabbages I haven't been sold on them. And then I grew one of my own, by accident: I planted a punnet of broccoli and one of cauliflower but big surprise there was a cabbage amongst them. I believe it is a sugar loaf cabbage. Well I couldn't let it go to waste so had to come up with something good!

First I cooked a pumpkin and mushroom risotto. I washed the cabbage and cut the core out. I upended it in a pot of boiling water until soft. One mistake I made the first time I tried cabbage rolls was just using one leaf per roll. I suggest you use two leaves, lay them down top to tail to maximise the area. Spoon risotto into one end of the leaves and roll up. Place open end down into an oiled baking dish.

Top with tasty tomato sauce and grated parmesan.  Bake until bubbling and golden.

Eat and enjoy.  It tasted really good. I think the secret is to use a really tasty filling that you would normally enjoy and a topping with zing!