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Everyone loves food. Delicious home cooked food is even better. Delicious home cooked food that mixes in all the best ingredients – best ever!

A pretty parcel of salted caramel cookies tied with a bow. Chocolate mixed with berries and chilli set into the shape of unicorns. Pint sized rainbow cakes in mason jars (if you do it right they will keep unopened for AGES so you can make them well in advance). Mini pulled pork or bacon and egg pies. Olive and rosemary bread. Jars of bacon infused whisky. The possibilities are endless and interesting.

However.

You could go one better for your people that love to cook.

Instead of making them something how about giving them the recipe and ingredients. Hand craft a fancy recipe card from card stock, doilies, and fat felt pens – you could even laminate it so the butter and flour wipes right off.
If it’s cookies or cake you could layer the dry ingredients in a jar. All they need to do is tip it into a bowl and add eggs and butter.

If you’re super amazing (and have lots of time) think about making a collection of your favourite recipes.

If you’re like me you’ve got recipes bookmarked all over the internet, post its in your cookbooks to mark pages, and print outs that people have emailed you. Type them up, scan them, or work on writing them out over the course of a year. Print them in a book. Stick them on themed recipe cards and present in a wooden box. Hand out card stock to everyone and get them to write up their favourites.

If you go the recipe card in a box option make sure you include a few blanks for them to fill in later. Note the size of them down for yourself and you’ve got xmas and birthdays sorted forever!

Boom.

We scored three artichokes for $1.50 in the sale bin at the supermarket yesterday which is a saving of $4.50 PER ARTICHOKE apparently.

I love artichokes but I’d never actually cooked and eaten them whole like this before, usually I’d have artichoke hearts with an antipasto platter or on a pizza. Brend reached back into his mind grapes to remember how they ate artichokes in Spain. People would turn up to parties with bags full of them and they’d steam them and eat them with nothing else!

We steamed ours for about 20 minutes until they went dark green, then dipped the edible parts of the leaves and the hearts in a butter, garlic, lemon thyme, and basil sauce. So good.

Make sure you get rid of all the fluffy stuff in the middle (the choke) before you eat the heart, it gets caught in your throat big time. No fun.

Did you know that making lamingtons is super easy if you use store bought sponge?

I’d only made these lamingtons once before, and they were the classic kiwi raspberry flavour. This time I decided to treat my friends to some lime lamingtons for our election gathering. Lime is green and most of us are Green voters. Geddit?

What you need:
1 store bought sponge cake
1 packet of jelly
Dessicated coconut

• Make jelly up with 1 and 1/4 cups of boiling water (instead of the 2 cups the pack asks for). Let it cool in the fridge till it just starts to set.
• Trim the dark edges off your sponge and cut it into about 12 pieces.
• Dip all sides of the sponge cake in cold jelly mix and then roll each piece in coconut.
• Repeat for all of your pieces. Cut a slit in each lamington and add cream if you like it like that.

How easy is that!

1. Metropolis Cafe (Hamilton)



2. Coffee



3. Monterey (Newtown, Wellington)



4. Pies



5. Cambodian Seafood



6. Gin



7. Scones



8. Lasagne



9. Breakfast all the time

Saturday involved another trip to the food mecca that is Petone, and a final cheese toastie at Cultured (their store is now closed D:), a bag of biltong from OnTrays, licorice from the Dutch shop, and a hanging planter for Brend. The planter is the only new thing I bought in October that wasn’t food or entertainment! A present for someone bought from a store owned by someone I’ve met in real life totally doesn’t count as failing Buy Nothing in October.

While in Petone we popped in to Sweet Pea, a new high tea place that looks so fucking cute. I absolutely adore Martha’s Pantry in the city but Sweet Pea was really spacious and felt like it would be more relaxed. When I’m next in Petone and not full of cheese I’ll definitely try it out.

After drooling my way around Petone I drooled all over the awesomeness at Craft 2.0 and then dragged myself home in the hot sun to finish the icing on my Halloween party cookies! They had scary words on them like ‘Babies’ and ‘National Government’ and ‘Feminist’.

Hungover on Sunday meant french toast and reliving the costumes from the night before. Best dressed went to Tim as Ron Swanson that time he got back with Tammy 2 and ended up in prison with corn rows; and Fiona dressed as Al Swearengen from Deadwood. She wore a chest merkin, and kept a glaring scary look in her eyes. We managed to not die before seeing Drive at the Embassy, where we also sighted John Waters in the wild!

Also I never used to understand the Ryan Gosling hype, but now. Daymn.

A month sober.
A month without cheese.
Almost two weeks with cake, or chocolate, or anything else good.

Here’s to eating and drinking so much this birthday weekend that I’ll need another detox next week to recover!

12 September – 23 September: 3 bottles of water a day; no cheese; no alcohol; maximum 1 caffeinated drink a day; maximum of 2 coffees a week; 2 days a week where sugary food is allowed.

Day 1:

It’s only midday but I’m already feeling virtuous for swapping the morning coffee for a bottle of water. Since returning from Asia the water drinking has been waaaay down. Less than a bottle a day usually, so a bottle is actually quite an achievement.

11am: I catch myself staring intently at the chocolates at the checkout.
The panic that has appeared over not being able to eat sugar is ridiculous (!) but proves the point that the time to get over this addiction is now.
I have a birthday celebration on Wednesday and I’m getting tattooed on Thursday, so I already know my sugar day allowances will have to wait till then.

2pm: Every mention of tea on twitter makes me want to drink it ALL. Apparently I follow a lot of tea lovers. Second bottle of water has been downed in protest.

4pm: Jason is home from work and enquiring whether I want anything from the dairy. “Don’t even tempt me.” “You’re probably saving lives in Colombia by not buying coke anyway.”

This coke or this coke Jason?

Day 2:

A BLT and smoothie for breakfast. When you’re doing the Best Detox Ever^TM you get to eat things like BLTs for breakfast. There’s no cheese so it’s fair game. Apparently the reason I love cheese so much is because I’m addicted to morphine. This is turning into the get Kim to rehab show.

12pm: The water isn’t going down as easily as yesterday. But I am determined to have my entire digestive system transmute into pure mother-of-pearl.

Cake made by Laura.

Day 3:

Thank god it’s a sugar day. These pieces of coconut rough are like sex in my mouth. Cannot stop fantasising about the man shaped cake I’m going to eat tonight.

Day 4:

Went a little crazy on the sugar last night. But must keep going today. It’s tattoo day and I need to keep the sugar up. Lest…something.

Day 5:

Ugggggghhhhhh. Two days of sugar and I feel like absolute crap. My throat is sore, I’m bloated, my arm feels like it’s had a million little needle pricks.

12pm: My burger without cheese or cheese sauce is not as good as my usual burger with cheese and cheese sauce. I hope it’s not because I’m still addicted to morphine.

4pm: Oh shit, I think I’ve caught Kate’s cold. I knew sitting in the sun at Park(ing) Day was too much stress on my pasty white skin.

Day 6:

Yep, definitely caught the cold. Thank goodness Brendan isn’t working today so he can be my slave. Am I the only person who wants to eat cake when they’re sick? Brendan refuses to try to make me a cake, his friends are over or something. Poor excuse.

Day 7:

Brendan is working today though, so I have to fend for myself. This cold seems to be one that kills you straight away and then retreats rather quickly, I’m at least able to walk today.

12pm: In my feeble state I failed at healthy supermarketing and have to designate today a sugar day. A 4 pack of muffins, mocha flavoured milk, mac and cheese in a box (doesn’t count as cheese cause it definitely doesn’t have any cheese in it), and some fruit & vegetable juice so I could trick myself into feeling virtuous.

Day 8:

What a waste of a sugar day. I decided to finish of the half a muffin I had left and then realised that totally counted. Laaaaame. Is this the normal amount of sugar people eat in a day? How do they even enjoy life?

I’m really really craving a glass of wine tonight. Only a couple of weeks till I can have one. Ahh!

Day 9:

3am: Insomnia fuck yeah. It’s times like these it sucks to be in a couple. No watching bad tv in bed for me.

8am: I’m surprisingly functional considering I spent about 5 hours in bed either staring into darkness or at my little phone screen.

7pm: Eggs have crossed the line from tolerable texture, to omg am I eating slime texture. In an attempt to try new ways to eat them I made this super easy avolegmeno, it’s like fancy sour chicken soup. SO so good. Like eating cream without the horrible side effects eating cream gives me.

Day 10:

3am: Finally going to sleep after spending the last 4 hours trying to clean up malware I found on the site. It wasn’t infecting anyone else and wasn’t even visible if you came straight here, but search engine results made me looks like I was peddling Viagra. Fuck you you fucking fucks.

Still craving sugar but I’ve noticed how my stomach looks when I don’t eat it. Flat!

9pm: I made up for the lack of alcohol at tonight’s pub quiz by eating a second dinner.

Day 11:

11 am: How do you eat french toast without sugar? Is it even possible? I couldn’t so I sneaked a sachet of equal. Only one though, and that shit totally doesn’t even count as sugar.

Halloween must be approaching because I just saw a photo of candy corn on twitter. My friend in high school would go to America sometimes and bring me back candy corn, that shit is sweet sweet nectar, I doubt my teeth could even handle it now. Twitter friend was nice enough to link me to the devil website where I could get some for myself though.

Day 12:

I just realised I’m not complaining about cravings as much. Maybe this detox is actually working? My strategy has been to get so stuffed on savoury food that there’s no room to think about sugar.
My life revolves around food so I’m happy with my decision to give up pescetarianism, because it means I get to eat the new pulled pork burger at Monterey. Pulled pork is where the meat lover was rereleased last year.

7pm: I missed out on all the cheese with dinner at Brend’s sisters place, but the cheery pie and pretzel chocolate chip cookies at Jo’s were too much to pass up. Technically that means I’ve used up next weeks sugar day allowance a day early. Technically that means no sugar treats for the next two weeks! I hope I don’t hurt myself when I fall off the wagon.

I’d love to be a food people. Unfortunately I’m better at eating food and squeeing over cute plates and good service than I am at actually cooking. I leave that to talented boyfriends and flatmates.

Thankfully I didn’t have to do any of the cooking this weekend. We drove out to the food mecca that is Petone in the morning and visited a bunch of new (to me) foodie places.
The Dutch Shop where we picked up chocolates and licorice bullets.
On Trays where the small isles are full of delicious looking jars, drinks, cheeses, olives, and a whole lot of South African dried meat. Brend and I chose a bag of delicious Biltong, but it didn’t survive the day.
An Indian store full of spices and dried pulses and ready to eat curries.
And finally the supermarket where we picked up salmon and ribs and capsicum to smoke.

Back in town the boys got the smoker going while I headed to Martha’s pantry for some girly high tea with Jo, twitter friend Selina (Jo’s IRL friend), and Selina’s daughter Shannon. On entering Martha’s Pantry I started kicking myself for not having been earlier; it’s a wonderfully girly heaven. Full to the brim with cute cup and saucer sets, frilly aprons, delicious looking sweets, and a million kinds of tea. The furniture is painted white and paired with kitschy table cloths, ours had cross stitched flowers.

I topped off all the high tea goodness with a walk home in the unusually warm Wellington weather; (almost) a bottle of bubbles; and smoked ribs, salmon, and salad.

Unfortunately overly sweet bubbles give me hangovers so I spent Sunday eating pie sandwiches, microwaved sausage rolls, custard squares as big as my head, and drinking orange cordial. I watched 5 movies as well.

There is a decided difference between the boys and girls in our house. The boys are full of drive, electing to get large amounts of exercise, writing, and other artistic activities out of the way before settling in for the night. The girls however need deadlines and rewards to get what they need to do done.

We were having a discussion about it the other day. Kate and I would both like to make our businesses work and we’d both like to lose our winter weight. The boys suggested we just do what we needed to do to get it done. We both lamented that our minds don’t work like that. In lieu of a very real deadline we need the switch. The thing in your mind that clicks over one day without much of a reason, that lets us put our mind to something.

Thankfully my switch to stop with the daily scone breakfasts, candy binges, huge lunches, and snacks after dinner flipped a couple of weeks ago.

The change has been dramatic and apart from weight loss the best result has been less sore tummies. I have colitis so eating fried food, and anything with high fat dairy or high amounts of sugar make me feel a bit sick. That’s how bad I was before. Willing to put my health at risk for a sugar fix. It’s the closest I’ll get to being an addict.

How do you get the things you need to do done? Can you just use your natural drive and grab what you want or are you more like me?