This is... a favourite recipe I would like to share

We're heading off to Sydney* tomorrow so i'm running a bit low on time...I'm going to be lazy and cut and paste this recipe straight from Jamie Oliver's website. I remembered it when reading about the garlic in QuiltingMick's recipe. This sounds strange but is delicious, and includes huge knobs of roast garlic.... yum.

Chicken in Milk

Ingredients

• 1 (3 pound/ 1.5 kilogram) organic chicken
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 4 ounces (115 grams) or 1 stick butter
• 1/2 cinnamon stick
• 1 good handful fresh sage, leaves picked
• 2 lemons, zested
• 6 garlic cloves, skin left on
• 1 pint (565 milliliters) milk

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C/gas 5), and find a snug-fitting pot for the chicken. Season it generously all over with salt and pepper, and fry it in the butter, turning the chicken to get an even color all over, until golden. Remove from the heat, put the chicken on a plate, and throw away the butter left in the pot. This will leave you with tasty sticky goodness at the bottom of the pan, which will give you a lovely caramel flavor later on.

Put your chicken back in the pot with the rest of the ingredients, and cook in the preheated oven for 1 1/2 hours. Baste with the cooking juice when you remember. The lemon zest will sort of split the milk, making a sauce, which is absolutely fantastic.

To serve, pull the meat off the bones and divide it on to your plates. Spoon over plenty of juice and the little curds. Serve with wilted spinach or greens and some mashed potato.

* Got a meeting to discuss declining frogs - at Taronga Zoo. How's that for a meeting location?

Wildlife

When we were down in Nowra recently we spotted some great wildlife - the Kookaburra and the Blue Tongue lizard were in Nan and Pa's backyard (Pa's a bit like Dr Doolittle) and the beautiful parrots at Huskison.

This little monkey was pretending to be like Mummy - I bet she wouldn't be so keen if she had my swelling digits and sleep issues...

Busy busy

I've done quite a few little projects in the last couple of weeks that I haven't posted. The first was a gift for the lovely Josie. She was clearing out her stash in preparation for her move to China and offered me some lovely mohair-y type wool which I snaffled very quickly. I wanted to knit with it immediately and somewhere between casting on and row four it struck me that I could make a stole type thing for her with the wool to take with her to China! I knew she'd like the wool - she did buy it after all - and I did one of those "wind the wool around needle twice then knit" stitches. Any way, she loved it. And it can be worn as a stole, a scarf, a shoulder warmer or a snood! Talk about versatile. Better photos will follow...


Then I made this bag.

Nan had given me an old bag from her next door neighbour's mum, who had just gone into a home. It had these beautiful old handles.... so i unpicked the fabric, painted the handles and used two materials from Nan's stash (which seemed made for each other) and voila! I love it.


And finally, Golden Sun Moth (Synemon plana) - an attractive moth with green eyes, clubbed antennae, and no functional mouth parts. It lives for about 2 years, which they live almost entirely underground as larvae. They emerge after about 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, with their fully developed eggs, search for a mate, lay their eggs and die. They only live for two to five days, as they cannot feed. Its another of my threatened species series... this poor little mite is critically endangered.


Anyway, got to run - meeting the girls for Indian - Yum!

Australian Lungfish...

or Queensland Lungfish,

• are a link with our prehistoric past
• has gills and a lung
• can grow up to 2 metres long
• is pretty freaky looking
• has kept me busy for a day or two...

Red-tailed, orange-bellied whale...

There are some that think that the Australian Minister for the Environment and Heritage is only interested in protecting particular species, for example the orange-bellied parrot, the red-tailed black cockatoo, and the whales. The Australian ran a cartoon to this effect...

I noticed that it is a very popular cartoon amongst some of my colleagues and so I decided to make one. Weird, yes. Strangely satisfying, yes.

You'll notice the beastie has roosted on my rose (one of the four we bought when they replaced the roses at Old Parliament House) which means that spring is nearly here! All the blossoms are out and we saw a bee yesterday that was absolutely laden with pollen. Lily and I had lunch outside at her little table - complete with golden daffodils - and basked in the sun. I forgot how much I missed my flowers until the daffodils that we bought over in pots came out. Our other house had so many bulbs and flowers - we just have dirt here... so we did some planting to rectify that. Lil and I got a huge punnet of pansies to plant. Today we bought some star jasmine plants to run along the fence so we don't have to see quite as much of the neighbours.

I also organised the cupboard in the craft/computer room. It had been a disgrace for so long. But now everything is back in its particular box, and every box is labelled with its contents. Like fabrics together. No more searching high and low for anything.

{you may now commence taking bets on how long it lasts}

More inspiration from work!?!

Two of our great staff are moving on and so we wanted to do something for them that was specific to the species they'd been working on. So I give you the Spectacled Flying Fox mobile phone case, and the Southern Right Whale stuffie.
I'm so happy with both of them. My husband drew a picture of the whale and then I made a pattern from it! My colleague insisted that it must have 'paddle shapped pectoral fins' so the fins and tail are pretty close to biologically correct! I love them... its a shame they have to go, but they're going to good homes! More later, but right now I have a date with Lil and the Playdoh.

I give you The Cassowary Bag!!

What is a cassowary??? I hear you say. Well! A cassowary is a prehistoric looking bird that lives in Queensland, Australia. It is endangered, doesn't fly, and is, well, pretty ugly. Anyhoo, a woman I work with has been doing a lot of work on the cassowary and as a result she has plenty of maps of the region where it lives. Given she's been eating, sleeping, and dreaming cassowary so I got one of her old maps and made it into a bag - hence the cassowary bag!

I sandwiched two maps between two layers of clear pvc/vinyl.

I don't know how sturdy it would be, but it was my first attempt at sewing pvc so I didn't want to make it too complex. Even the handles are part of the map...
I'm pretty pleased with it. The only problem was that the map got pretty crinkled when I tried to turn it inside out. I'd probably do side seams a little differently next time for that reason.