This week in brief

Happy October and day light savings! Woop woop. Hopefully this means summer is right around the corner.


I’ve been eating a lot of salads for lunch but towards the end of the week I was running low on greens and salad ingredients. So I cobbled this one out of whatever I had left, and wow, it was amazingly good! So fresh and crunchy. Salad ftw.

Bro and I took a trip to Costco on Thursday night. Let me tell you – if you’ve only been to Costco during the weekend, STOP RIGHT NOW (thank you very much). It’s so much better on a weeknight! Look at how empty it is. Bliss.

I made paleo pancakes again this weekend, with bacon, sliced apple and honey. I followed a different recipe to last week’s, and sadly these weren’t as good – too eggy and savoury. However, I have breakfast for the next two days because it made so many pancakes, so there’s one positive.

Yesterday we braved the rain and so I could buy some herbs. Thankfully it stopped raining today so I could plant them. I try every year, but the facts are – I am a TERRIBLE gardener… Perhaps this year will be the year I keep all my plants alive??

If I don’t mention them again this summer, you’ll know I wasn’t succesful – hah.

Dinner last night was hot smoked trout, but it was a disaster from start to finish. First, we mistakenly lit turps instead of methylated spirits (really not a good idea). Turns out we didn’t have any methylated spirits left, so Alastair had to go out to find some. No one seemed to sell any, and he had to go to four different places before finally getting a bottle.

Eventually we had the smoker all set up with the right fluid. Everything seemed okay until I looked outside and realised there were FLAMES shooting out the side of the smoker box. Uh oh.

We managed to retrieve the fish, but god what a disaster. Public service announcement: don’t mistake turps for methylated spirits. It does not end well.

While at Costco on Thursday, I purchased two coconuts, solely because the label had a recipe for salted coconut chips. It was my first time opening a fresh coconut, but it was easy – I followed the instructions for whacking it around the equator with a hammer and they cracked open just like that. However, prying the flesh out and peeling it into thin strips with a vegetable peeler took quite a bit of effort.

The coconut strips were salted and then placed into a hot oven for about ten minutes. And while they were nice, they were SO much effort. It definitely wasn’t worth it, particularly when plain fresh coconut is so good already.

I still have the flesh from a whole coconut left over and I’m not sure what I should do with it. Maybe I’ll just eat it plain. Any ideas that don’t involve me standing there for 30 minutes prying and peeling and setting off the smoke alarm several times?

That’s it from me this week. Tell me about your week!