Eeek!!! …I’ve found a Worm in My… !!!!

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

The wonderful thing about having Foodie Friends is having someone who not only understands when you want to make something new in the kitchen: try out a new unknown ingredient, experiment with weird and wonderful flavours, …. but who will also have a great time laughing with you when the results  don’t  look anything  like the fabulous photo in the picture, or the taste has you all pulling faces and muttering  ”Welll err ….Maybe Not !“.

This taste testing goes both ways, we regularly share our triumphs and disasters and we are brutally honest when it comes to the verdicts both good and bad.

One special Foodie friend has been hinting to Kiwi Daughter all summer that there is a surprise recipe in store, made especially with her in mind:  if only a mystery ingredient could be obtained somewhere in the Netherlands.

To add intrigue and suspense this mystery ingredient was not named, Kiwi Daughter was only given regular updates as to the progress of the search, which for months on end were sadly negative. Then one day we got an excited message: the ingredient had been found and Kiwi Daughter’s mystery recipe could be made.

Naturally the kid had been needling and wheedling to try and find clues to the nature of the recipe and we ascertained it would most probably be something sweet rather than savory because the words Kiwi Daughter and Sweet Tooth are as firmly welded together as sucrose and glucose molecules…

The big day eventually arrived and after a shared meal of spaghetti  where there experiment was how much garlic can you add and still stay sanding when the person next to you breathed on you… (Little Mr. had a plain version of the pasta and apparently his experiment was to see how much grated parmigiani cheese he could distribute around the tablecloth)  We were told to stay in our places whilst Food Friend rushed home to fetch the surprise dessert.  Luckily “home” was only literally just around the corner and minutes later we were treated to the unveiling of…

Her latest Gardening project.

Seriously. Flower pots with real flowers and mud.  I kid you not.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

However, several things were giving the game away… normal pot-plants don’t come with frosty fingerprints on the pots.  (ok, maybe mine do, I’m an atrocious gardener).  Digging into this garden revealed that the “dirt” was in fact ice-cream mixed with crumbs from crushed up Oreo cookies and that the top layer of the “dirt” consisted of a layer of Oreo Cookie crumbs.

The flower was indeed real, but had been ingeniously inserted into a clean drinking straw embedded into the ice-cream so that stem did not touch the food.

Digging also revealed the elusive mystery ingredient: gummy worms! These were buried into the dirt and several peeked out at us. Giggles all round as we passed around spoons, grabbed a pot and went “digging”.

Ingredients:
Oreo Cookies (crushed into fine crumbs)
Ice-cream of the flavour of your choice (compatible with Oreo Cookies)
Gummy worm sweets
drinking straws
narrow stemmed fresh flowers
suitable freezable “pot-like” container (small is good).

The only unexpected thing was that we now know that gummy worms embedded in ice-cream and kept frozen, freeze very well indeed… rock solid in fact, so ” just biting a piece off” was a physical impossibility at first. We had to dig them out and eat them once they had thawed.

The other not so small discovery was that these “pots” which are beakers purchased from IKEA hold a lot  more ice-cream than even the biggest ice-cream eater amongst us bargained on. Our “pots” had to stay in our freezer and be finished in several sittings becuase this is a seriously filling desert.

We all agreed it was a “hit” of a recipe but could be repeated with the minor adjustments that maybe the worms could be decorative  on top next to the flower next time to avoid freezing them solid and the pot definitely needed to be a lot smaller.

Needless to say this dessert went down a treat and not just with Kiwi Daughter… everyone shoved it down!

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Sometimes the Writing is on the Wall (or Post-it Note)….

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Back in the mid 1990′s when I got my work contract converted to a permanent contract,  Himself  decided to take the plunge and set up his own business as a freelance translator.

It’s a tough line business with lots of competition but since at the time we didn’t have children and our household now had one guaranteed income we decided it was a good time to see Himself’s new business could sink or swim.

Full of enthusiasm Himself went to several specialist office supply shops  and came home with an impressive looking box full of equipment he thought he might need. Paper-clips, stapler, staples, tape, post-it notes, pens, mailing envelopes, floppy disks (yep… remember them?) , rolls of paper for the calculator with the print-out function,  seals for sworn translations, official stamps, letterhead paper, business cards and various other bits and bobs.

Fast forward to 2012.

I arrive home from work and find that Himself and the kids have been spending a wet half-term school holiday day pottering around in the house.  I quickly spy a startling sight in our living room that I can’t say I’m too thrilled about… the  TV cupboard we keep the TV on and antique desk  are covered wall-paper style with little post-it notes which are in turn decorated with little drawings and scribbles.

They are everywhere… it looks like the post-its went feral and went on a breeding spree … and despite some of the sweet little drawings (on just a few of them), most have only scribbled lines and  they look awful.

Himself is in the kitchen… I go and ask him what’s going on and that while I love our kids artwork, I am really not happy with it on dressers and cupboards that are almost 100 years old. Himself nonchalantly replies that Little Mr, has been happily busy for at least the last hour now and I should relax and enjoy his handiwork.

So I then inform Himself that Little Mr has also pretty much wallpapered with post-its all the cupboard and door woodwork in the house that Himself has spent must of  last year sanding and painting… and lo and behold ‘“relaxed” would not be the word I would use as Himself bolted out of the kitchen with a horrified  look on his face.

It turns out that one of the tasks Himself undertook on this day was to clean out the drawers in his office desk.  Unearthed from the very back of one of the drawers was a bundle of now very old post-it notes from that 1990′s shopping spree… the entire bundle of them still intact in their plastic wrapper in fact.

Himself, realising that if he hadn’t used any of them in more than 15 years that he probably never would, so he put them in a pile of stuff to be donated to the Kringloopwinkel  (second hand shop) and it’s from this pile that Little Mr. seized them to use in his “artistic” endeavours.

Later, after dinner and a large post-it removal exercise from various rooms upstairs, I came into our bedroom and my heart sank when I saw yet another post-it on one of our cupboard doors. I looked around… Fortunately, this time there was just the one.   (Little Mr. said he was “writing letters”  on some of them but after a while he got tired of writing real words so the scribbled ones were just “pretend words”). I get closer and see that instead of scribble, this one has real words on it… I pick it up, read it and my heart melts…

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Kids… don’t you  just love ‘em?

Fluttering These Eyelashes Gets LOTS of Attention…

Sometimes you really wonder what goes through the brains of some human beings. Somewhere, someone had an idea that putting eyelashes on car headlights was a brilliant idea… and somewhere, someone else actually made some! How brilliantly bizarre is that ?!

Surely no-one can help but smile when they see this car… it’s a totally charmer! … Now don’t you go fluttering your eyelashes at me, you little rascal of a motor!!!… I’m already smitten with you!

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Stocking Stitch Suspenders Might be Just Up My Street!

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Fellow blogger Alison made a post a short while ago about “Wildbreien” in the Dutch city of Utrecht where she lives.

http://oranjeflamingo.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/guerilla-knitting-by-the-centraal-museum/

“Wildbreien” literally means “wild knitting” in Dutch but translates to the English as the term “guerilla knitting” which in turn means randomly placed pieces of knitting in (often)  outside public spaces, often strategically placed to liven up otherwise mundane or inanimate objects like street lamp posts, railings, trees or drains.

My physiotherapist  is a fellow fan of “quirky”… In fact she probably deserves a medal or a solid gold cup for being quirky:  I kid you not, this lady got married in a banana skin costume in the Caribbean!

Like me, she delights in weird, wonderful and funny discoveries and so she promptly began one of our sessions by inflicting pain and making me laugh at the same time and asking me if I knew of a well known local lady who’s arty, crafty and knits up a storm that results in random examples of  Wildbreien  appearing in the neighbourhood around her practice.

I didn’t know of this lady but I was interested enough to see if  I could find one of her guerilla knitting  efforts.

I found this example soon enough because I got rough directions to its location and because it’s not too far away from my physiotherapists practice, so detoured off my usual path home to grab some photographs.

The kids have seen it since I took these photos and comments as to “what” it’s supposed to represent range from “cactus to plant or flowers” … although I have to confess that for me part if it does look like it swallowed Kermit and an arm sticking out is all that’s left of him.

Either way, for those who notice it’s a nice way to be amused, to smile at the unconventional attire that this lamp-post now sports  … it’s getting rapidly colder, doesn’t every lamp-post need a winter jacket?. My knitting is severely basic but I did pick up some needles at the street market some years ago…    …alas they are filed away somewhere with good intentions of learning to use them properly, I’d have to turn the house upside down a bit to find them, but if I did then surely there will be a refresher ”instructions for knitting” on You Tube some where and who knows?

…for a woolly jumper I may not have the skills  yet, but a stocking-stitch lamp-post suspender may well be just up my street!

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Go On, Show Us A Bit of Leg…

Just as an extra post today… there were a ton of photos that I took that had Barbie doll legs in them as they hung down from the spider’s grip on the trishaw I was riding in… since the previous one gave you a giggle,  from peeping toe tips to thigh high: here is evidence when you ride in a trishaw that has a spider on the roof,  that that last thing you would imagine you’d have to contend with is that Barbie would secretly  photo-bomb your photos ….

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Not Woof….W.O.F !

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

By various petrol stations there are painted on walls or on signs the word “WOF or W.O.F.”

I heard a funny story that a tourist once remarked that it was really strange that Kiwi’s wrote “woof” incorrectly so often…  but of course it was never meant to be “woof” !

This particular sign gives more information than most, many that I saw were simply labelled as “WOF”

The letters “W.O.F’ stand for “Warrant of Fitness” and it means that the place where the sign is displayed, is somewhere where you can book your motor vehicle in for it’s annual check-up “medical”.

If it passes the examination it can be issued with a certificate that confirms that it’s road-worthy for the next year (or six months depending on the age of your vehicle).

So, no… dogs don’t need a check-up (well, not by a car mechanic at least!)

So if ever you are a tourist in New Zealand and you wondered the same thing… it should now be clear !  Woof?

The Sign Says It All (…Whatever That Is!)

Ok, Now we are just a few kilometres from the location in my last post.  I grab two shots of signs within a few minutes of each other. The first photograph is a the “standard” road sign for bicycles… but the second road sign?

Is it a motorbike? Are there possibly bumps in the road ahead and this is a warning that riders may be thrown clean off their seats and into the air?  Might it advertise an unusual race between man and machine?  Or is the cycleway dual purpose and doubles as a jogging track?

I have no clue what this second sign means…  does anyone else have any ideas?

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

 

Children! …Run Through Here! (Or Maybe Not!)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

We have travelled a decent distance from Foxton,  and Little Mr. suddenly decides that he needs an urgent  pee-pee stop.

Whilst Himself helps him negotiate a good spot in the bushes that meets with Little Mr’s approval as far as privacy from passing traffic is concerned, I spy something in the next paddock that makes me laugh.

Clearly, if you had a bird’s eye view  it would be clear that there is a fenced path behind the paddock , but from this angle it looks all too much like the Bull has an open invitation for children to visit  and is waiting so that he can chase them.

Of course it’s safe for children to use the path, but from this angle it just looks wrong on too many levels.

Needless to say, Himself and Little Mr steered well clear of this paddock when looking for a suitable place to take care of natures call.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Surely We MUST Be Seeing Things!….

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Family Kiwidutch were driving down the main street of Foxton, when all of a sudden Himself starts to laugh.

I’m taking photos out of the front window but was distracted by the general view so didn’t  at first see what he had seen: a strange but familiar spike-like shape behind the chemist shop on the right hand side of the street.

I keep clicking as we advance, unaware until I saw the photos on the computer screen why Himself was laughing so hard, until the van reached a point where the  object of Himself’s mirth was simply unmissable: there’s a massive windmill right in the heart of  this small New Zealand town!

For Dutch people to find something like this so far from The Netherlands is a little surreal… did we really  sit on a plane for twenty-four hours to see something so kitchly Dutch staring at us in the New Zealand landscape? Apparently so… the whole family are now laughing as we pull into a side street and then a car parking area next door so that we can take  a closer look.

Sure enough, it’s a real windmill… and totally Dutch in a rather over-the-top kind of way.

The sign on the door says “de Molen” ( the mill) and inside there is a small shop that sells an array of Dutch sweets, baked goods and a few general Dutch groceries as well as flour milled by this, a working  flour mill. There is some blue and white porcelain and rather touristic figurines of the Dutch boy and girl kissing (does anyone actually ever  buy these?) and books on wooden shoes and windmills.

Himself and I joke about buying relatives some of the items for sale…  but decide that would just be a little too weird, so  instead ask the lady behind the counter  questions about how this rather severely transplanted windmill  came to be so far from home.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

We learn that the Mill’s first stone was laid in 2000 but it was officially opened in 2003. That said, planning, fundraising and construction had been taking place over the ten years prior to this.

There were some local émigré Dutchmen who had this idea on their wishlist for many years, since they felt like it would be a good tourist attraction for the town and because the area of drained and stop-banked pasture land just down the road  reminded them strongly of the drained and dyked polders they had left behind in their homeland.

It’s possible to go upstairs and see the working parts of the mills, but the kids are getting restless and hungry.

Himself doesn’t think it’s a good idea to let Little Mr. see it because he’s terrible at listening and can’t keep his fingers off machinery, and I have no intention of negotiating stairs on crutches of the type I know are found in windmills. We have fun looking around and can’t stop smiling at just how ludicrous this feels, but mind you, it does bring in tourists!

The biggest laugh of them all came when we were on our way out of the door and came face to face with a Dutch couple coming in!  They were speaking Dutch as they arrived and were rather taken aback when we started speaking to them in Dutch as well (greetings).

A quick chat revealed that they were a retired couple who were combining a tour of  New Zealand with visits to  relatives who had emigrated in the 1960′s and that they too were so taken aback by the presence of a windmill here, that like us they pulled over to investigate.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Art? Putting your Best Foot Forward! (or Leaving it Behind?)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

Ok, it’s official, this must be the funniest section of road in New Zealand.

I didn’t have to start gushing excitedly into Himself’s ear for our next roadside stop because everyone in our car was going “Wow, look at that!“, “Whoa, that’s really funny!”,

“Hey! Look at all those shoes!“, “Mama, look you have to blog about this!”

It’s hard to miss… somewhere on the north side of Foxton  you will find this: a Jandal fence.

Yet another U-turn later we are parked on the side of the road and I’m taking photos of this unlikely sight.

The Jandals are all colours, in extreme conditions of age and wear  (many look totally new), and appear to come from different countries too (at least I saw one pair with “Australia” printed onto it.)  Is it Art? … or just fun? … a rural tourist attraction? … or do the inhabitants of the next farm have a ridiculously mega-enormous family and this is their equivalent of “shoes by the back door?”

Who knows, but it’s there and it manages to stop passing visitors like us and added to the smiles we have already collected  in our travels today.

As a New Zealand icon and part of my “Kiwiana” series I’ve already made a post featuring Jandals:  http://kiwidutch.wordpress.com/?s=jandals , but as iconic as they are,  it’s safe to say that  I never expected to see a rural fence full of them!

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

(photograph © Kiwidutch)