Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

Yesterday, three sulphur-crest cockatoos visited out backyard.

They’re a large white parrot – native to Australia and New Guinea – and commonly found in urban areas. Pete gave me five minutes to take some quick photos before he chased them away – we definitely don’t want them adding our garden to their feeding route!

Named for the prominent yellow crest on their heads, they also have a pale yellow patch on their face, and eyes which always make me think of the stick-on wibbly ones used for craft projects…

Their beaks are powerful and intimidating, but I was amazed at how deftly this one used hers (his?) to pick out seeds from the chickweed…

They’re quite beautiful, with a seriously cheeky stare, but they can be a major pest in parts of the country, decimating crops and even eating away at outdoor furniture and timber decking. We’re hoping they don’t find our neighbour Mark’s passionfruit vine!

This post is for all our overseas friends – everyone here in Australia knows these birds well, and either loves them or hates them!

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Life is a bit hectic at the moment, so I hope you’ll excuse these meandering posts. Sometimes it’s tricky to find time for detailed writing, but I always have bits and pieces to share.

The photo below was actually taken a couple of weeks ago – it’s a long distance shot of the first glossy ibis we’ve ever seen. This beautiful bird has stunning dark plumage and is quite different from the icky scavenging white ibises that haunt our city parks…

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I’ve mentioned this before, but these are my favourite anchovies in the whole world. I buy them in large tins from Chefs’ Warehouse and decant them into glass jars…

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About once a year, I render lard from free range pork fat. I know it sounds like we go through a lot of it in our cooking, but we really don’t use that much – it’s so concentrated that a little bit goes a long way.

This time, I put the fat into the food processor to blitz it up first (far easier than chopping finely by hand), then cooked it very gently for several hours in a heavy pot with half a cup of water added.

Once the water had evaporated, but before the fat started to brown, I poured off as much as I could – this gave me a very white lard suitable for both sweet and savoury dishes. I let the rest cook down until the fat was completely crispy – the second round of lard is browner and will be used for Cuban bread and refried beans. All the lard went into the freezer and I was left with the crackling…

I’ve used these crunchy leftovers in cornbread before, but the boys didn’t like it, so this time I tried adapting a recipe I found for Masnica (Croatian crackling bread). I ground the crackling with salt, pepper and a little lard in my mini food processor, then spread some of the paste over 600g of my sweet dough…

It was a bit rich for us, but my parents loved this – I sent half a loaf home with them, and froze the rest to turn into stuffing at a later date…

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I’ve discovered this salted preserved duck at my favourite barbecue store in Flemington. It needs to be steamed prior to eating, and is basically the duck equivalent of speck or lap cheong…

I dug out our rice cooker (which we almost never use) and laid the washed duck, spring onions and sliced ginger over the raw Basmati rice and water, then turned it on. The end result was chewy, salty meat and deliciously flavoured rice. The wolves went completely mad over it…

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I’ve rediscovered an old word game called Bookworm – it’s now available on the iPad for a couple of dollars, and it’s very addictive. Do you play it?

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I had lunch with my lovely friends Diana and Annette, and Di gave me her surplus garlic cloves from their recent planting. The ones that have started to shoot will go into the garden as companion plants, and the remainder have been packed into the freezer…

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Lastly, our wonderful old family friend, whom I’ve always known as Aunty Marty, invited me to her daughter Tanya’s farewell morning tea. Marty is now 86, but she can still throw a party! I took along some chocolate cane toads and a batch of chestnut flour brownies…

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How has your week been? I hope it’s been an enjoyable one! x

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A random collection of bits and pieces from our place…

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I took a few photos while we were outside moving the chook dome. Our bed of basil had over twenty bees visiting (I couldn’t keep count of any more than that)…

Our mutant broccoli decided to flower before we had a chance to eat it – it has the largest flowers I’ve ever seen on a brassica…

The French marigolds keep evolving. You might recall that a basket of these came as a gift to our garden a couple of years ago, and they’ve happily self-sown along the paths and in the beds. The colours continue to mingle with each new generation of flowers…

We’ve had an interesting time with squash this season. Our self-sown mutant butternut trombies start out with mottled pale green skin and light coloured flesh. At this stage, we add them to curries, and they cook almost like a potato…

What they end up as, if left long enough, is a proper butternut squash (with just a little residual green around the stem)…

 The flesh becomes orange and sweet. As we adore butternut pumpkins, we’re delighted with this outcome…

And remember the two tromboncinos which weren’t producing any fruit? Well..it appears one of them did, and we missed it. As we were moving the chooks, we came across this monster in one of the beds (gives you some idea of how wild our garden is, that we could completely miss something this big!)…

It’s definitely not a true trombie, but it’s a squash of some sort (the pencil is for scale). It weighs in at just under five kilograms, and I think it might be a Jap pumpkin cross…

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Lovely Bizzy Lizzy and her gorgeous partner Peter joined us for lunch last week. I baked a loaf of Buratto flour sourdough (which we ate with fresh ricotta and quince jelly)…

…tempered up a batch of dark chocolate rocky road filled with marshmallows, crystallised ginger, roasted hazelnuts, cacao nibs and feuilletine flakes…

…and baked a tray of June’s Hungarian cottage cheese cake…

Speaking of June (who also joined us for lunch), I made her a Turkish tile trivet after she admired the ones on my dining table…

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I had a birthday recently, and gorgeous Terri ordered me a giant cannolo – it was filled with chocolate and pannacotta gelato (if anyone is interested in these, they’re made by Rino and Marisa at Rino Saffioti’s in Haberfield)…

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Lovely Lorraine baked me a chocolate and nut krantz, and it was divine, a bit like grown up brioche (I broke off a corner to try it, then remembered to take a photo..sigh). It made me even happier that it arrived on a cake board…

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Our car is now seven years old, and the vinyl on the armrests has worn away…

As a birthday present, and in response to my incessant begging, my darling friend Maude crocheted me cotton armrest covers. Over the course of a couple of weeks, she popped in at regular intervals and sat in our car and crocheted.

I know I’ve said this before, but I have the best friends in the whole world…

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What’s been happening at your place?

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We have this list, you see.

It gives the names of all the different bird species which have been sighted at Sydney Olympic Park, and there are over 180 of them.

There are little boxes next to each name, so that we can tick off birds as we spot them. Obviously we now have to keep going back to see how many we can find. The photos below were taken over three relatively short visits.

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We’ve walked the foreshore of Newington Armory…

This little Australian Reed-Warbler let us know in no uncertain terms that we were too close to his nest…

These Double-Barred Finches were tiny (11cm long), and darted around so quickly that I struggled to keep my eyes on them (let alone my camera lens)…

Sydney Olympic Park is visited by four species of Cormorant, and we’ve now spotted all of them! This is the Little Pied Cormorant…

Australian Magpies are named after European Magpies, but they belong to a completely different family. They’re closely related to Butcherbirds and Currawaongs (there’s more information on Wikipedia here).

Our Magpies are black and white…

…and fierce…

These funny looking Purple Swamphens (also known as Pukeko in New Zealand) are all over the park…

They’re yet another Alice in Wonderland bird, in my opinion…

Willie Wagtails are so named because they shake their tails from side to side as they hunt…

A long distance shot through a wire fence of a White-faced Heron…

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At the Brick Pit and Wentworth Common, we saw another of these Herons…

A small group of Little Black Cormorants with their mother of pearl feathers, photographed in the Brick Pit from the 18 metre (60′) high walkway above it…

There’s a male Hardhead (White-eyed Duck) at the top of the photo below as well – according to Wiki, it’s the only true diving duck we have in Australia…

Kookaburras are such a common bird in Sydney, yet this is the first one we’ve seen at the Olympic Park. They’re a variety of Kingfisher…

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Strolling around Lake Belvedere, we observed a large Pied Cormorant colony breeding and nesting on the small island in the middle of the lake. Substantially larger than the Little Pied Cormorant in the photos above, these big birds sit and dry their wings after fishing…

Apart from size, they’re also distinguished by a yellow eye-patch and blue eye-rings. According to Wiki, this species is found only in Australia and parts of New Zealand.

They’re remarkably adept in the water…

On the island, there is a large tree filled with nesting Pied Cormorants. This wasn’t the sharpest photo of the day, but it did capture the very moment when the parent bird was landing with a fish for her begging chick…

This Australasian Darter was a joy to watch in the water. I believe this one was either a female or a juvenile, as the adult males are jet black…

We thought these were Pacific Black Ducks, but they’re actually Australian Wood Ducks…

They look a little like small geese…

The females have an eye stripe (which is why we confused them with the Pacific Blacks), whereas the males have an all brown head (as can be seen in the top photo)…

Dusky Moorhens were out in force. They were nesting in the reed beds…

This one tipped into the water like a rubber duck in a bathtub…

Oodles of Eurasian Coots were on the lake – they have distinctive and quite spooky blood red eyes, and legs that are set right at the back of their bodies…

In Australia, our Pelicans, like our Magpies, are black and white, and they have the largest bills in the bird world. Here’s one next to a Pied Cormorant.

…and a couple resting comfortably on the island in the middle of the lake…

Finally, my favourite bird of the day, a Welcome Swallow. A native to Australia and Melanesia, this little one happily posed for photos…

They’re only small – about 15cm (6″) long including their split tails – and their iridescent blue heads and backs were stunning…

A few months ago, I wrote a post about Living Within Our Means, in which I talked about finding the free services that our cities have to offer. For us this year, it’s been discovering the bird life at Sydney Olympic Park, just a short twenty minute drive from home. All of our bird posts can now be found here.

Tell me, are any of these birds familiar to you? I’m quite curious about how far they fly – I know some of them never travel off our shores, and I know that pelicans in other countries aren’t black and white. I’d love to hear more about the birds in your part of the world!

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