What, no potato?

Many of you have either heard about or met our 85 year old Italian neighbour. I love that so often we are in our kitchen or out on the back deck and you can hear her yammering away in Italian. Plus she makes us snacks which is ace. We had a coffee with her yesterday and she was showing us her homemade pasta, but despite my best "oh, wow, that looks so great, we love home made pasta don't we honey," she didn't offer any to us. So we left only with a bottle of homemade wine and half a home made foccacia.

I was telling her I was going to make pasta e fagioli for dinner. She asked me what I was putting in it (when she got over laughing at my bad Italian pronouncing). I passed the test of using fresh, not dried borlotti beans, but failed dismally with failing to put potato in the soup. "WHAT, no potate? You need one or two, just for your husband," like I'm starving him or something.

Anyway, the soup turned out well, even though it didn't have potato.

To pour our wine with dinner we used our decanter for the first time, and OMG, it's so nice. We got lots of lovely crystal glasses and the decanter for wedding pressies, and it feels very luxurious to crack it all out whenever we feel like it. Like drinking tea in bed this morning out of our china cups. Just because we can.

Here's the decanter in action. We also got to use the fancy pourer Benno got us for an engagement present. Everything tastes better out of crystal!!

Blind love

We just replaced our old, wooden, dirty blinds with these nice new white ones. The slats are quite wide, so you get a bit of that plantation shutter effect without the massive price tag. Oh - and they are eco friendly too (not made of wood). It makes such a difference to the room, although in hindsight I should have taken a before pic since you aren't all here every day to see what it looked like before... But we are going to put them in the bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen too. I think it will make a real difference to the house! Exciting.

Risotto

It's a rainy Tuesday night, which is a shame, because about a month ago I bought two tickets to see Slumdog Millionaire... at the outdoor cinema. So we've canned that idea, and Jamie is making a smoked fish risotto for dinner!! YUM!! It smells great already. Every time we have risotto I think of my family - we used to have risotto EVERY time Frank came home from a business trip. Usually with a roast chicken. Frank had a risotto cookbook which had such a great quote in it about risotto: "Rice is born in water but it must die in wine."
As a slight aside I'm watching Gweneth Paltrow's cooking show on TV which got all these great reviews (it's with that big redheaded American chef guy), and she's SOOOO irritating. So sanctimonious and smarmy. I never liked her. Mainly because she was so sanctimonious and smarmy about being a macrobiotic, vegan, yoga loving, married to a musician, holier than thou, so above Hollywood, never smiling, skinny, cow.
p.s. she's not a vegetarian on the show, but is trying to compensate for being a hypocrite by saying that she only eats unfarmed meat. Whatever.

UPDATE: Dinner was delicious. Here's a pic. I think it was one of the best meals Jamie has cooked. It was totally quick and really quite healthy for a risotto too (p.s. that's a poached egg on top, which went perfectly with it). And smoked cod is so cheap. If you are feeling inspired, here's the recipe!

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/5203/smoked+fish+risotto+with+poached+eggs

A little bit of gender stereotyping

I'm not a baker. I'd rather roast (and eat) a nice piece of meat. Baking is such a precise art, and one with which I have little patience. Plus, my only baking accessory is a mini muffin tin, so any time I do bake it's only in the mini muffin form.

Anyway, I made these to take to our friends who were having us over for dinner. Lemon and almond. Everyone seemed to like them (and in the spirit of blogging truthfuless I put in the slightly darker than intended ones into the picture too). Especially their two year old. He did throw up later, but his mum assured us he just ate too much cheese. I know how he felt.

And while I was baking these, Jamie was taping up and painting the windowsill in the kitchen so he could paint it white. The spare room project has been getting some attention as well this weekend, and once the paint dries on the windowsill in there, I will post some pics of the makeover.

Thank god for Foxtel.

As mentioned earlier, I'm home sick today. Apart from establishing my new blog (things are going well with five posts so far today), Foxtel has been getting a work out.
So far, I've watched two episodes of Sex and The City (including one I've not seen before, which is remarkable given I thought I'd seen them all at least five times - the little known episode where Charlotte kisses the gardener at the McDougall country estate), an ep of Friends, Will and Grace, Dr Phil (prison wives), the Bold and the Beautiful (which has moved from its six o'clock time slot back to 4:30), and now, my personal long time favourite, Buffy, is on!! I haven't even had time to nap, my schedule has been full. Bless you Foxtel, bless you.

What a mess.

When we were house hunting, a spare room for visitors was an essential. However, like a lot of spare rooms, ours has recently become a bit of a dumping ground. Books under the bed, boxes everywhere (we are still getting rid of packaging from all our wedding presents - yeah, I know, boo hoo, life is tough), things to give to charity piled up under the window.

So we decided to do something about it, and went on a trip to IKEA. The results are still being implemented, but soon I will unveil the magical transformation...

New sheets.

When mum was over in Sydney after the wedding, we hit the sales and she kindly bought us a new sheet set, and insisted that we needed more pillows. Here is the result.

p.s. Getting into freshly washed sheets is totally up there on my list of favourite things. la la la la la la la la.

The sky teams with the theme.

Since the blog is dedicated to Rainford I thought I'd post this picture. I took it on the back deck a couple of months ago on an unusual Sydney evening where the sky went all pink and very pretty, matching the boganvillia moving in the breeze.

Official wedding pictures!!

Ok, so I got the "official" wedding pictures about three weeks ago, but there were 700 images to get through. These are some of my favourites. We had the best day and thank you so much to everyone for being there and sharing in it with us

This one is very mantic and my favourite of just Jamie and I...

The bridal party. Everyone looked so great and we had so much fun surrounded by our besties.

I think this one is really cute of J-Mo. This is just after the ceremony and the look on his face is priceless.

Then of course, giving the mums a hug - I love how both of us hugging our mums are in the same frame.


Family.

A quiet moment.

And if these aren't enough for you, check out more official pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/marshajacobs/PhotographerPics?authkey=fmGxJUFwRWk#

And some lovely unofficial pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/marshajacobs/Wedding?authkey=intxh8rn4GE#

And while I don't expect to be inundated with requests, if there are any that you like and want to make proper prints of, just email me and I'll send them to you on a disk.

Blogging

Inspired mainly through jealously of the Dodd/Parsons vacation blog, I've decided to start a blog too... With all my family overseas and most of my friends interstate, I figure it's a good way to keep everyone updated on the *important*, hilarious and food related things going on here in Rainford Street. And if Lindsay can work out how to do it, so can I. Plus, I'm home sick today (I'll spare you the details, but the good news is I'm probably losing weight), so what better fun to have than writing about myself. Coming soon... a post about making over the spare room IKEA style.