happy halloween

so halloween is here. its not as big as back home but its certainly being celebrated. but in this apartment its not likely that we would get tricker/treaters. but rather than mope blaise had an amazing idea, lets make caramel corn.

about 4 onces of cream (15% works best)
about 2 cups of brown sugar
a bit less than 1/4 cup of butter

well actually it was toffee corn because of the cream. we used a combo of a few recipes. essentially you heat butter,cream and sugar on the stove until you get a nice, rich, boiling syrup (slow boil btw, you don't want it to burn).
you have your popcorn in a tray, one bag of natural microwave popcorn and we added 2 cups of pecans cause blaise loves them.


you pour the syrup all over the popcorn and then stir it as best you can so it all gets coated.



next you cook it in the oven for 15 minutes, take it out stir it, put it back in (repeat twice).



at the end you have delicious golden toffee corn


NOTE: this stuff goes kind of 'damp' if not stored in an airtight container. its still good but not as crunchy if it gets 'damp'.

Container gardening part 1

I like fresh herbs, i like cherry tomatoes, blaise likes real tomatoes...and we have a small balcony with sun only till lunch time. 11 feet by 4 feet, limited sun but a supposedly awesome growing climate.

so i decided to make use of one of blaise's many wiki-ed links and look at container gardening.

now the 2nd issue is the cost of everything, dirt is pretty standard in terms of pricing but pots and rocks...gah!

so rocks are the easy part, i grabbed my lee valley canvas bags and with blaise in tow we headed down to Lyall bay



soon armed with two canvas bags full of small rocks and large rocks we headed home.

next up was pots. well here was where it was going to be harder. but i seemed to have the container spirits on my side. i walked down one day to throw out garbage and it appeared someone had done a spring cleaning. there was two huge square containers and 2 buckets. so i scrounged them and ran them upstairs and gave both the containers and rocks a good solid scrubbing in the tub.

so now i have containers and rocks. still need plants and dirt.