More cooking adventures; now including pelicans

Well my Swiss roll turned out mighty fine. I had two recipes for the cream filling.  One almost turned out, but it was pretty experimental so I stuck to the simple actual cream based one. I was pretty proud that the cake didn't crack and was decently fluffy, since all the egg beating was done by two sets of  tired arms. Very yummy. It lasted just over a day.

About two and a half weeks ago I received a package in the mail. In that package was a kit for growing your own mushrooms. This week has been the first in which the soil on top of the mushroom compost has shown just how much everything has grown. As you can see it's in the bottom of my closest. I'm pretty excited to start cooking with my own homegrown veggies.

Today, though cloudy was beautifully warm. Not really humid and because there were clouds the heat from the sun felt very soft. I determined that we had to go for a walk and there was no way of getting out of it.

It was fantastic timing for our excursion because at our local waterside park, there happened to be a club cricket game in play. I got pretty excited about it so we tried to figure out where the opening in fence around the pitch was. It was on the completely opposite side to us.

Over the winter the oval had been in a bit of a re-vamp construction zone. So today was the first time I was able to get a good look at it. And I was sort of delighted to find out that in co-ordination with the players uniforms and the general clean look of the whole sport there was a beautiful white picket fence that surrounded the pitch.

After watching for a little while I think I did start to understand how everything works. It would be fun to try out for myself.

As a side note, during our short stay in the park. At least 8 planes flew over us. These were arriving at the Sydney airport so some of them came in very close. The one right before this shot was perfect, but the camera was off, it was more than double the size of this one in relation to the lights. So close that you can read name of the company on the bottom of the plane quite easily.

Tom and I continued our walk by the water where we spotted a pair of pelicans. I got excited again and went a little overboard taking pictures. In my defense the pelicans hung out right in front of us and one put on quite the show.

A bit of fishing, it did actually catch something and was pretty funny as it tossed it in the air many times before eating it.

This was done for no particular reason, except maybe my amusement.

 

Yah that was a lot of pelican pictures. But it was so entertaining and the bird looked so pretty.

The other big news for today, we made pierogies! And were they ever yummy. I found a recipe online, I was pretty confident that the stuffing would be good, because how can mash with onions and cheese go wrong? The dough was the challenge simply because I wasn't sure what it was supposed to be like in the end. Turns out that pierogie dough is silky smooth and really nice to work with. It stretches quite a bit without tearing and is just generally awesome. The only hitch was finding something round to cut the circles with.

Rolling  out the dough.

A cup!

This was not even half the dough.

 

 Time to stuff.

The first few, we found the cup was too small as a cutter, so I graduated up to tracing our potato masher and then for the last few a bowl. 

The yummy results. We still had a fair bit of stuffing left, even with Tom and I testing it throughout the process. Mmmm jumbo pierogies.

To accompany we had the traditional sour cream and my favourite HP sauce. *drool. The rest I froze for future meals. Hehehe.

Right now Tom and I are watching rugby league, the Balmain Tigers (our team) playing the Illawarra Dragons (we just lost, darn!). I feel very Aussie. 
Tomorrow is Tom's dad's 69th birthday. So we'll be going to a family luncheon. It sounds like it's going to be fun, I understand there will be cupcakes.