February is...

Our hottest month is February. I love hot weather. We are having lots of it too, but not the usual heatwaves. It was low twenties during last week and I was cold! I don't like being cold.

I've been doing lots of watering in the garden. We are getting lots of flavourful tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers from the garden. I made pesto with some of our summer basil last week. I love cooking with homemade produce from the garden, so satisfying. When I get some time this week, I'll pull up some beetroot.

These are some things that I relate to February, in the form of an acrostic poem...





F...Falling bark from the gum trees, all over the lawn, the

E...evening chorus of crickets and

B...Blood-stained cockatoos(little corellas) squawk and swoop through the sky, from tree to tree. 

R...Riding bikes in the street before bed time, sitting

U...under shade from the hot sun or inside with

A...air-conditioning. Eating

R...ripe tomatoes and peaches from the garden, where blooms of

Y...yellow flowers on zucchini and cucumber plants grow.


Are some of these similar to your February? Depends where on earth you are, I suppose.

An InLinkz Link-up

A blustery days baking

Yesterday was as blowy as buggery and the rain pelted down. The thunder and the lightening clapped and cracked the night before. I heard the thunder, it woke me long enough to hear it, I had no idea of the lightening though.

As we left for kindergym early yesterday morning, it poured. I was thankful for the trees covering the gate and I didn't get too wet. By lunchtime when we returned, I was quite wary that the tree branches may come down on top of me, and the car as I opened the gate. The wind was really forceful. A big branch had come down in the library car park and the SES truck siren wailed past as we left. Someone was in a bit of a fix. Luckily no cars were damaged, an hour before the car park was full, probably a good thing, because I may well have parked there. A friend that  joined us for baby bounce was one car park away from having a squashed car. Lucky!

Before we left for kindergym, I filled the bread maker with ingredients to make dough for hot cross buns. By the time we got home from the library it was done.

I have a Sunbeam bread maker, Brett bought it for twenty bucks at a garage sale a couple of years ago. I am not really an appliance freak, but we do get some use out of it. I do bake the occasional loaf of bread and is great for making all sorts of doughs, bread rolls, foccacia or pizza dough . This is more or less the same recipe that I used. I substituted the sultanas for choc chips. They were good!

We made this cake too. It's a blimin' cracker of a cake, I have blogged how to make this one before. Make sure you use something else than bourneville cocoa, it isn't any good for this cake. You will see it doesn't look as good in my previous post here, plus it doesn't have finger holes as well...yet.

I took some of both today for morning tea at playgroup. Usually we just have cut up fruit for morning tea. Silly me just assumed with it being the week before Easter, and a Friday, it was the last week of term. It wasn't! We always have party food the last Friday of term. I took it on a panic and a whim. My usual party food take is popcorn, easy as a bag of microwave popcorn! The kids loved it anyway, and at least one of the adults couldn't resist chocolate cake. Looks like I will be making popcorn in a couple of weeks, when it really is party food day.