As you know, I’ve been doing a lot more cooking here than ever in my life. No ta bao and big breakfast in town is just too costly for a weekly affair SO I buy the eggs, bacon, make my own pancakes (I actually do this on the go every other morning), cream cheese etc…

Sophie LOVES to help around the kitchen BIG TIME. I must say she’s getting really competent at it. She knows how to crack eggs, bin the rubbish, wash dishes (yes, even glassware), etc etc… I think the next thing I’m going to teach her is to cook on the stove.

Here’s the scrambled eggs that she prepared on her own. I cooked it for her. She chose the plate, insisted on where to put the eggs, blueberries, crispbread (I made these using a recipe I saw in Life & Leisure in NZ) and cream cheese.

Cooking makes her really happy. And thing is, if she cooks it, she eats it. Very good coz she really don’t eat all that well.

I saw a recipe in Women’s Weekly (NZ) and I thot it’ll be fun to make these cookies with Sophie. Well, ours didn’t turn out like the ones in the pictures, sigh, yet again. But but they tasted oh so good and the second batch was prettier than the first. That’s the thing about baking, it gets better and better!

It’s fun roping Sophie in to help.

First, we need to wash the cookie cutters! It’s so hard to find cookie cutters in these parts. Finally I found cheapo ones at the $2 shop and they are great! It’s plastic so I don’t have to worry about Sophie cutting her fingers.

Next make the dough. Soph helped to pour in the stuff but we didn’t take photos coz it’s always pretty messy and sticky to bring out the camera.

And then the fun part, cutting the cookies. Then adding the chocolate sprinkles. Of course she tried at every point to taste .

Finally we all eat the cookies and give some away to our favourite friends. I love that part about baking, giving away some. So, we’ve stopped buying store cookies and desserts for a while and are happy making our own. I even bought a little red cookie jar to store the cookies. No country kitchen is complete without a cookie jar!

Cooking the fish that James caught.

For more pictures, click thru to see our flickr site.

Living in HV has spoilt us silly. We could ta bao anything from Sushi Teh, Crystal Jade, Nasi Lemak…… you name it, we had it (I’m drooling now..).

One of the things that we are trying to get used to here is FOOD. We eat breakfast in our units. Lunch and dinner are served communally so there isn’t much choice for food.

It’s not that we don’t like Western food. We love it – the pastas, steaks etc. But Kiwis don’t eat a lot at lunch and dinner here is at 5.30pm! We normally eat sandwiches or pies and salads at lunch. So we get hungry after lunch and by 10pm we are hungry again!?

Sophie hasn’t been eating much because she doesn’t really eat pies, fries, potatoes and all the raw veggies (which btw has been really good for us). But I was surprised to see that she started to eat raw onions and lettuce today!

Anyways, we started to get creative about our meals on the weekends because the school provides us with ingredients in the morning for our lunch and the kitchen is closed for lunch on the weekends. It’s mostly for sandwiches. So we get tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cheese/hard boiled eggs.

On Fri, James went fishing with one of the staff and they caught a trout! So on Sat, we cooked it for lunch. Steamed fish with soya sauce! We used all the tomatoes, and onions for the fish instead! I bought a microwavable mug and cooked rice in it! So we had fish and rice. WAH SHIOK! The fish was so sweet…….. yummmmmms!

Today, we cooked an omelette with all the ingredients – onions, tomatoes, cheese and Sophie had that with some shell pasta I cooked in the microwave. She helped to cook the omelette. It’s a fun thing to do. I simply cracked the eggs and cut up the veggies and she helped mix everything and stir it.

Actually although we would love to eat like we do at home, we are actually quite ok with it coz James and I are quite chin chai people. It’s Sophie that we are worried about coz she hasn’t been eating much. But I think she’s adjusting coz seems like most of the other babies are not eating much too, just fruits and bread. We’ll see…

P/s The post above was written on Sunday. On Monday Sophie had a virus that made her throw up. She was down the whole day and got better today. All the kids got it last week. We thought it would pass us but Sophie finally caught it too. But she’s much better now. She’s been drinking and just sleeping lots. Also thank God that one of the students in our school is a PD!

The cell kids played with cookie dough yesterday and out came these marvelous creations! Wanz made the dough and even Sophie got to use the moulds, add chocolate chips and M&Ms. She loved it! The best part? EATING THEM!

Look at how happy she was!! Her favourite were the chocolate chip ones. We brought some home and she’s been happily eating them too. Wanz made some coconut milkshake for the kids too. Sophie loved that too! Such a treat to have a friend who is a good cook!