Oh boy!

I am in the middle of a home redecoration cycle and have just about finished my son Haydens room. I find boys rooms a bit hard. When they are babies it's quiet easy to complete a boys room lots of neutrals, white and small splashes of green and blue. Decorating for a four year old is different. There is personality to consider and their stuff! However there is a limit to how much plastic multicoloured toys one can handle so when he is not around I begun the cull. He rarely notices and to make myself feel less of an ogre I promise to 'invest' in only beautiful and classically crafted toys(more for me I know). What do you think of the cheap plastic toys that seem to fill every gap in our homes?

Soul food!

Photo from illmungos photo stream


As the sun starts to disappear, it makes me crave warming and soulful soup. Tonight's menu was one of my favourites, the classic French onion soup........yum! I love cooking simple old school food and soup is so easy. It's one of your best friends in the the kitchen. We always make our own vege stock from a couple of carrots, celery, leeks, sweet potato, onion, bay leaves, fresh parsley and thymne. Sometimes if I have a chicken carcass lying around I will add it. Chicken marrow and fat is incredibly healing and I don't mind it in my home made stock. This gets all chopped up roughly and chucked into my big stock pot and bubbles away for a couple of hours. This is normally a weekend job both Aaron or I will enjoy doing and we can freeze it and use it in anything we make like pasta sauce, casseroles etc.
Having my own stock makes cooking home made soup easy. Tonight Aaron chopped up the onions we added our stock some White wine vinegar, garlic and we were done. Dinner in 15 minutes oh don't forget the cheesy croutons with home made pesto from the fridge. Just what I needed after a crazy Monday and a full on weekend painting. What do you think of when it's cold and you're hungry?