Accomplishment

In the time that this family has been living in two different countries, I have developed a few new skills.  I can change a downlight, pump up a bicycle tyre and pay a kid to mow the lawn.  But I have always steered away from things requiring excessive use of tools.  Until I noticed that every time I walked on it, the second step from the top was starting to sag.  Not good.  I had visions of standing on it one day and having it collapse under me.  I could envisage the layers of difficulty having a broken leg would add to our lives.  So I did what any sensible singlish woman does - block off the stairs with some garden mulch and an old pair of pantyhose, and wait for a suitably helpful man to come around.

Suitably helpful men seem to be thin on the ground at the moment.  The stairs remained blocked off, the person who delivers the milk and bread seemed to be unable to locate the other stairs and took to leaving the delivery as far up the blocked off stairs as an arm could reach.  It was time to take matters into my own hands.  I scoped out the job, realised that I would need to measure things, unscrew things, take off palings etc.  It waited another week, just in case a helpful man materialised. (Apparently he had a bad back...)

Sunday dawned bright and sunny.  Buoyed by my success with changing all the blown lightglobes in the lights on the deck, I decided the time had come.  The gym workouts seem to have paid off, because there was a considerable amount of brute force involved in undoing four very tight screws (complicated of course by me tightening them first by mistake, like I always do).  I broke every rule of handymaning.  Measure twice, cut once?  Nah.  Measure, and add on a bit just in case, cause you can always cut it off.  If it doesn't move, don't force it?  What rubbish.  When you can't get the last screw out, smash the step with a hammer until the rotten bit breaks, then get the rest of the step out.  Use the hammer to bang the screw through.  Trim the plank to fit (I even sanded it a bit!) then whack it with the mallet to get it to fit in place.  I was going to resort to outside assistance to drill guide holes (I have never drilled anything) but while waiting for a slightly more helpful man to turn up, decided to let brute force have another go.  The final screw went in just as the cavalry arrived.

The step is fixed through my own endeavours.  Not painted, mind you, but at least safe.  This life contains its challenges, but in a suitably Disney fashion, hard work and determination won the day.  I felt very proud as I walked up my stairs.

The search for the perfect portuguese custard tart

I've been making PCTs for a while now, courtesy of Bill Granger's quite achievable recipe.

Speaking as someone who has never had an affinity with custard, either cooking or eating it (dating back to a traumatic experience in primary school involving bananas, packet custard and a boy named Karl) I'm quite proud of my custard tarts.

I'm also becoming more fussy about the quality of the tarts I eat that are made by others.

So when I had an event recently at Parliament House, I took the opportunity to have PCTs on the menu for morning tea, knowing that the pastry chef at Parliament House is a pretty talented individual.

Firstly, a custard tart at 10.30am when you have been up since 4.30am, already run one event and are a good way into the second tastes pretty good.

The custard was good - a bit softer than mine with a nice flavour. A lovely dusting of powdered sugar and a little bit caramalised around the edges. The pastry wasn't very crisp. My kind banquets person on the day gave me a take home pack for the children and they loyally said they preferred mine. Time to compare.

A weekend batch of custard tarts resulted. I made the custard a bit looser than I usually do and infused a bit of mandarin peel in the custard. They came out of the oven looking pretty good and we took them around to share with Bronwen and Claire M.

Bronwen, not having tasted the Parliament House version was unable to compare. The girls and Claire M could compare. We seem to prefer my pastry and the Parliament House custard.

I'm going to keep working on this, since a good PCT is a fabulous thing. And with new chickens on the scene at Bronwen's place (welcome to Twitter and FaceChook) eggs are not something we are short of. I'll keep you posted on how I go.

A look behind the scenes

This blog post is a shameless cross promotion for another blog. Since December 2010, my sister Bronwen has been writing a blog. No ordinary blog, but a frog blog, called http://frogsfordarcy.blogspot.com/. Darcy is a young friend of hers who has been having treatment at the Sydney Children's Hospital for quite some time now. While in there, he expressed a liking for origami frogs, and the frog blog was born. Bronwen posts on the frog blog every day, which is a huge undertaking. Needless to say, some of the posts are quite bizarre. But some posts have an extraordinary amount of thought and effort put into them. Here's a look at the making of a frog blog story.

It starts with an expedition to Commonwealth Park. (Actually, it all started in Tasmania, with this post here - we asked where frog would end up. Turns out she ended up on Lake Burley Griffin.)

The actors get prepared for their scenes. We scope out some locations and the shoot begins.

It attracts the attention of some locals.

The story grows as we change location and come up with brilliant ideas for what happens next.

The shots in the can, we sit back and wait to see what will unfold on the frog blog.

Huge hats off to Bronwen - the frog blog is often very funny, very clever and means a great deal to Darcy and his family. Might I just say - she rocks.