No-Bake Muesli Bars – and I’ve moved!

I have officially become a big kid blogger and have bought my own domain…woohoo!

This means that everything has moved over to thekiwicountrygirl.com – including today’s post for Vanilla Almond No Bake Muesli Bars!

I think I have managed to set it up so that you should still get updates but just in case, head on over to the new website and sign up to get all new posts delivered to your email. I’m not sure if the posts on the new site will come up on the wordpress.com reader (if someone could let me know if they are or not that would be hugely helpful!) and I’d hate for us not to be able to keep in touch! =)

I’m slowly trying to work out the technical side of the new site and will hopefully be able to set it up to make it more user friendly…and prettier!

Any advice/feedback will be happily received!

Cookies & Cream Brownie Bites

I have a bit of a strange obsession with things that are smaller than they should be. Things are just cuter when they’re teeny, right?

Teacup pigs. I want one.
Miniature cup & saucer. I have one.
Baby animals of any description. Don’t even get me started. Just don’t.

I couldn’t even get a regular sized cellphone. I have a Samsung Galaxy S3…mini.

And as for small pieces of dessert? Well that just means I can eat more and trick myself into thinking I’m not eating that many. Are you with me?

These brownie bites are little pieces of perfection. Chewy, fudgy brownie covered in an Oreo cream cheese frosting. I’m going back for seconds. And thirds.

Who am I kidding, they’re so small you can go back for fourths!

Homemade Bagels

BAGELS!!!! I’m kind of excited, can you tell?

I’m not sure everyone feels quite as strongly about bagels as I do, so if you don’t – bear with me. If you do, you are in for a TREAT!

I’m not even kidding guys – these are a-maz-ing!

Chewy but soft, strong enough to hold a bunch of toppings and versatile enough to sit right on the sweet/savoury fence. I’ve been to New York City and had a deli bagel and lemme tell ya – these bad boys are the real deal. We had them for Mother’s Day lunch, then we had them for dinner and I promise you, if we had any left we would have had them for breakfast the next morning.

April Round-Up

April was CRAZY!! It was certainly a month of extreme highs and lows.

It didn’t start well as my Grandpa passed away after a short illness – it came as a bit of a shock and was tough as we are a very close family. I have been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with my grandparents since I was a baby – Grandpa was there for all my big moments – here we are at my graduation a few years ago with my 2 wonderful grandmothers. It was a sad time but it was nice to have all our family together and to celebrate the incredible man he was.

And on a completely different note, the last 3 weeks of the month were nothing short of amazing.

Josh & I took off on a 3 week trip of South-East Asia which blew my mind! 10 days in Vietnam, 5 days in Singapore and 6 days in Bali for my friends wedding. It was SO great! I won’t go into detail now, it’s going to take me a while to sort out my photos and gather my thoughts so that I can do justice in telling you all about the places we went and things we saw. Oh, and did I mention the food we ate – some of it didn’t look edible but it was all the best food I’ve ever eaten!

Not much happened on the farm while we were away – lucky for us Josh’s parents took care of the chooks and the garden so nothing changed much…we are just waiting patiently for our new hens to start laying!

So I’ll leave you with a sneak peak of some of the photos I took while we were away.

Bottled Feijoas

If you have never eaten a feijoa before, I feel sorry for you. For 2 reasons.

Reason 1: They are delicious!! Why have you never eaten one?? Go and eat one now.

Reason 2: If you don’t actually know what they are and can’t get them, hence the reason you have never eaten one, there is no way I can explain to you how good they taste. And I’m sorry about that. I’d like to tell you they are kind of like this, or a little bit like that but they’re just not. They are feijoas and they taste like feijoas and they are delicious and there is nothing else to it.

In case you hadn’t realised from my feijoa-ey rant, it is feijoa season in NZ at the moment and they are everywhere. You can buy them from the supermarket but I don’t know anyone who has ever done that because if you don’t have a tree, you probably know someone who does and those little suckers can produce!

There are a ton of things you can do with feijoas (also known as pineapple guavas). Scoop them out of the skins and eat them raw, stew them, make jam, bake cakes, make desserts, chutneys…the list goes on.

Friday Favourites – Autumn Essentials

In less than 24 hours we went from super sunny 35 degree sunshine to 12 degree autumn. It’s cold and I’m feeling it. Don’t get me wrong, I love autumn but I just wasn’t prepared for it this year. 3 weeks in tropical paradise will do that to a girl!

So to make me feel better (and because it’s Friday!) here is a list of my 5 favourite “must-have” items to get me through this autumn.

Homemade Tomato Sauce (Ketchup)

We are now into the 3rd week of our 3 week adventure and today is the day we came for…my beautiful friend Julia’s wedding day! We’ve been to Vietnam, Singapore and are now in Bali and have had the best time, eaten a lot of incredible food that I will do my best to recreate for you, and spent time with amazing people.

In 4 days we will be back to reality and straight into cold weather so I’m making the most of beach dresses, sandals and summery cocktails while I still can. And to keep you going until I can post photos and tell you all about our adventure, here is this week’s homemade recipe.

This sauce is lucky it’s so delicious. I won’t go into too much detail but the 1 hour it took me to make this sauce involved using a vacuum cleaner to rescue 2 tomatoes from behind my chest freezer and accidentally deleting ALL the photos I took of the process for this sauce. Sigh. But at least I now know that my vacuum cleaner is dual purpose. Win.

What to do with 1 million kilos of zucchini

If you have ever grown zucchini and been able to keep up with it, I’d like to hear about it. If you have 20 kids, it doesn’t count.

We had 2 zucchini plants this year. And we grew approximately 60,000 zucchinis. Now I’m not great at maths, but I’m pretty sure if I ate all that zucchini I would turn into a zucchini.

So after eating fried zucchini, barbequed zucchini, boiled zucchini, zucchini with eggs, zucchini loaf I was ready to do something else with it and what is my go to when it comes to preserving extra food? Freeze it of course! I sliced some up to freeze so that we could have them all winter – as they are so full of water though I’m not sure how they will go – I’ll let you know!

Homemade Chocolate Whizz (Magic Shell)

This may be the most excited I’ve been about something I’ve made in the kitchen. And I’ve made a fair few things in the kitchen. But this…this is amazing! Homemade Choc Whizz! Or for anyone not in New Zealand, Magic Shell or Ice Magic. The incredible chocolate sauce that goes hard when you put it on ice-cream. Also known as the stuff childhood dreams are made of. Well, mine anyway! Nerd alert – it’s the coconut oil that creates the hard shell. Due to the fact that it is solid at room temperature (unless it’s the middle of summer) it basically reverts back to that state once it’s in contact with the cold ice-cream. This is a kitchen science experiment gone right, and only using 2 ingredients!

The battle of the white butterfly

There’s a war going on in my garden currently. It’s me against these monsters.

All summer there were none. And now, right when my garden is at it’s peak there are approximately 7 million of the suckers.

They just flutter around looking pretty and then BOOM. They eat all my plants.