Current Status: Holidays
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I did wonder if Tiso was a contrived contraction of my favourite dessert.. :)
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the restrictions of a Te Awamutu education (your choices: liking rubgy, or league
Or sowing the seeds of Split Enz..
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a contrived contraction
Actually make that a mis-spelled one too..
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So, what sort of an idiot do you have to be to dress your three-year-old in his best and newest shirt and then let him eat dark red cherries?
A very smart idiot who had convinced the rest of the world that s/he has potentially fatal allergies to laundry power and clothes pegs?
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Our consensus was that we can finally reveal that Giovanni is in fact John Teesdale, formerly of Te Awamutu
And to think that I let you into my home...
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I
Was
Tempted
And
I
Fell. -
Still reporting holidays. We have been lucky to have a holiday in the Bay of Plenty which coincided with a week of glorious weather. Every day the sky was blue, the sea ranged from clear aqua to deep indigo (and was warm!), and the land - grass, bush, corn fields - every shade of green. There was endless outdoor space and clear air, even in the few crowded places such as Lake Rotoma and Ohope Beach. The mountains from the desert road were the clearest I had seen for a long time.
(BTW it wasn't all perfect and there were some incidents best forgotten eg one of our party had a painful bout of food poisoning, but it was pretty pleasant overall).Some highlights:
-The Haiku Walkway at Katikati (in a park down behind the council building). One of my mother’s haiku are featured on the boulders.
-The homemade macadamia and manuka honey icecream at Pacific Coast Macadamias which is just north of Te Kaha and overlooks a particularly beautiful beach on a coastline of beautiful empty beaches.
-The official pardon signed by Governor General Dame Cath Tizard for the 1860s conviction of Te Whakatohea chief, Mokomoko, on display in the historic Anglican church at Opotiki (see www.dnzb.govt.nz for the full story).
-The tea cosies and tapestry bags for sale made by the volunteers at the Shalfoon grocery museum in Opotiki.
-The peaceful warm sunset at the Opotiki wharf.[Meanwhile the snippets of news we heard were about a war on the other side of the world where people had neither space nor peace.]
And the best holiday read was a book a world away in every sense, ‘Stuart: a life backwards’, the intertwined life story of homeless sometime criminal Stuart and his biographer, Alexander Masters, which won the Guardian first book award in 2005.
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I love holidays like the one you've just had, Hilary. I hope you feel well rested. We live in a lucky country in a lot of ways, don't we?
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I should just add on the downside - a lot of the good things in NZ are not accessible for people who use wheelchairs. Just a couple of steps, an entrance too narrow, a path too rough, a blocked doorway - that's all it takes to create a barrier, and that's not fair.
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I did wonder if Tiso was a contrived contraction of my favourite dessert.. :)
You know, even now that I've been unmasked... I really want to know what this dessert is. I can't work it out.
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tiramisu......yummmmm
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Yes Jackie. We did feel lucky (most of the time). But you could also sense we were on the edge of something. There were lots of property for sale notices and mortgagee sales, especially in some of those new beach subdivisions with ugly Auckland sized houses on bare sections. And although most of the little towns looked thriving (unlike the last time I went through there in the 90s) there were some closing down sales and newly newly closed businesses.
I also felt that the days of touring around NZ by car might be numbered.
And the environment needs protecting to stay looking so nice. Lots of land clearing for dairying and unfenced waterways through cow paddocks in evidence. And many signs warning of toxic algal bloom, or not collecting shellfish and not spreading didymo.
And why is all that corn being grown in fields labelled with its patent number?
On the other hand some towns had resource recovery centres instead of town dumps and had good recycling practices. The tourists were the problem. But NZ needs the tourists. -
tiramisu - if made with real coffee & genuine ladyfingers...I used to (in my travelling days) test a restaurant for *desserts only* by tiramisu/zabglione/black forest cherry cake -which are the only desserts I like, obtainable from a restaurant (my mother makes brillant ones, but aue! she isnt cloned, yet.)
Odd, that two of them are from John Anecdote (or whatever his name is)'s country-
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tiramisu......yummmmm
Ah! I see. But isn't it a bit of a stretch? I might as well say Sacha reminds me of sachertorte.
mmmmhhh, sachertorte... damn!
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genuine ladyfingers
Oh, my mother is very particular in her definition of those. Not only from a particular tiny town in her ancestral land, but from a particular bakery. We used to buy them in huge boxes of about - I don't know, perhaps 500 hundred biscuits each? When she was a girl she devised a lovely variant on tiramisu in the shape of a flower (you cut the ladyfingers diagonally after they've been soaked, then you piece them back together matching thin end with thin end so that each pair of halves forms the shape of a petal - very ingenious).
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When I was in 6/7th form we had a German exchange student come to live with us for a year. Her mother kept sending her recipes for desserts to make for us and tiramisu became one of her specialties. due to a partner with an egg allergy I haven't had it in years though.
She also made an amazing cinnamon and brandy ice-cream which was utterly delicious and also semi-lethal. I wonder if we still have the recipe for that?
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mmmmhhh, sachertorte
It has been done before. In my defense, never post when hungry - everything sounds like food.
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Can I recommend the Italian brand of tiramisu that Kapiti cheeses imports for some supermarkets.
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Can I recommend the Italian brand of tiramisu that Kapiti cheeses imports for some supermarkets.
Huh, I don't know, mascarpone doesn't travel very well, does it?
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Hooray for mothers Giovanni!
And waua! steven crawford! I have a disabled family member who is about to start fundraising!
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I should just add on the downside - a lot of the good things in NZ are not accessible for people who use wheelchairs. Just a couple of steps, an entrance too narrow, a path too rough, a blocked doorway - that's all it takes to create a barrier, and that's not fair.
People in general, and for the most part, only think about people who use wheelchairs when they are forced to, by law, don't they? And when they do have to think about people in wheelchairs, it can be quite tokenistic. I will never forget a colleague at teachers' training college who used a wheelchair. She had to give the course up because practicums were just too hard for her. I always thought that it was incredible that in early childhood education - where we were and are alll supposedly so "PC" - nobody thought about making it easier for this young woman.
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Great idea Steven. But not sure that it would fit into the car boot with the luggage and wheelchair. And what about the hoist for getting on and off it?
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mascarpone doesn't travel very well, does it?
It seemed to do just fine in this case. Yum.
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Great idea Steven
I reckon a bit of DIY barrier removal is a great idea.
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only think about people who use wheelchairs when they are forced to
And only think about wheelchairs when they hear the word "disabled".
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