Christmas comes but once a year ...

...but we like to celebrate it for the whole month of December!

The first year Andrew and I were together we discovered a mutual love of all things Christmas...

Celebrating citrus ...

Living in Singapore I am smack in the middle, so I get to choose which hemisphere I want to reside in on any given day and consequently which season I wish to follow.

I still call Australia ...

We recently spent a few weeks on the east coast of Australia. It was good to be home.
Wide open spaces, great coffee, family, friends, a beautiful wedding, the sand between your toes and the bluest of skies. This time it was hard to come back to Singapore, very hard.

Vietnam and the rice paper roll ...

It has been a while!

Things got a little hectic around here, but rest assured we have found the time to squeeze some food adventures in between eloping, honey-mooning in Thailand (where we spent a day on an incredible cooking course) and feverishly working on our apartment renovation plans.

Happy birthday to Bujty ...

My Mum has a birthday rule in our family, it goes something like this "A birthday is not a birthday without a cake". Quite simple.

Bursting with crimson flavour ...

The berries have been amazing this year in Singapore, imported mostly from the USA - the crop has been bumper!

Crazy as a ...

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, we certainly did. This morning we took a long bike ride down to the new "Gardens by the Bay", Singapores newest botanic gardens behind Marina Bay Sands. The weather was glorious with a cloudless sky, light breeze and relatively low humidity.

Golden goodness ...

This cake, oooooh this cake. I challenge you to stop at just one slice. It gets better with age and day two and three will see the flavours intensified as the syrup has time to infuse properly with the crumb.

We shared ...

This post is dedicated to my very dear friends Kat and Stefan and their newest family member, Baby Sophia.Thank you for inviting me to share in this wonderful milestone in your lives. 

Tom (too) Yum Goong Soup and salt tinged fresh air

This is my view as I sit here writing this to you, those are my funny looking feet at the bottom there ...

Breast or leg?

Ratatouille. The word comes from Occitan (ratatolha), a romance language spoken in southern France, Italy’s Occitan Valleys, Monaco and Spain’s Val d’Aran. The French word “touiller” means to toss food. The dish originated in the area around present day Occitan Provenca.

He bottled Asia!

It is so hot in Singapore at the moment. You wouldn’t think that it could get any hotter, but it can and it did. Hot, humid, sticky, and for once the rain seems to have disappeared. It has been a good 4 or 5 days since we last had any rain, very unusual for Singapore and I wish the rain would come back and cool us all down!

Heart via stomach

I test out a lot of my baking on Andrew’s work colleagues. He works in an office full of hungry people who are more than happy to be fed. Usual practice is that he puts the goodies out on the bench in the lunch room mid-morning and most people will tuck in after lunch. Andrew collects the empty container at the end of the day along with any feedback.

Sing-a-Nut Pie

One fine Sunday, a dear friend and fellow Blogger - the lovely Caja of “DejaFood” - challenged me to a pie-off. An international, 6,000km flight away, trans-continental Key Lime pie-off.

Introducing Andrew to an old friend!

I have mentioned once before on this blog fond memories of waking as a child in the morning to find my Nanna sitting at the kitchen table, usually completing a crossword puzzle or often writing lists (probably where I get it from), waiting to serve me jam and cheese on toast for breakfast.

Come on in …!

“44 Cookham Road” isn’t a clever (poor!) attempt at a play on words, but rather, the address of my Nanna’s home for 37 years and the title of my first ever blog! 

Yes, it is true I am attempting my first foray into the online communication medium that seems to have taken the world by storm. Being generally behind the technological 8-ball I had no idea of the potential that existed until I started on all of this!

I am assuming you want to know why? Not why I am behind the technological 8-ball, but why this blog...

Those of you who know me well would agree when I say I am an accidental investment banker who has an unrelenting passion/obsession for food, photography and books (oh and the colour red!). My journey until now has led me to this point, and don’t get me wrong I am not complaining about the various paths I have been on as I don’t believe in having regrets or looking in the rear view mirror – everything happens for a reason.

The paths have served me well, my current career serves me well and I must be somewhat ok at it as I have just been promoted for the second year in a row - well done me! But somewhere in all those travels on all those paths I have lost a small part of myself, the creative part, and I miss it.

So this blog is my space to create. To start writing for myself (not for the company, the boss, the investors), to put some focus around practicing my writing and my photography and to get me back into the kitchen regularly where I used to love to be constantly!

So I welcome you into “44 Cookham Road”!

Bujtor’s baguettes …

My sense of smell seems to be extremely acute, more sensitive than the average person. Day old left overs will offend, milk well within its expiry date will be nosed with suspicion and I could smell a bushfire from several suburbs away!

Virgin no more ...

I had a rare and very welcomed day off work a few weeks back. A whole day I could do with as I wished, imagine my excitement! So I spent the day with a very dear friend who also shares my cooking, food and kitchen accessories passion.

A dark and delicious day and dessert!

We woke up this morning to a thunderous, Singapore storm and a gloomy dreary day outside – I could not have been happier! Just ask Andrew, nothing gets me more excited than the prospect of a rainy day where I can turn up the air conditioning to almost Arctic levels and pretend it’s winter!

Easter ...

...hunting for chocolate eggs, pyjamas, new books, lamb roast, a change of season (except in Singapore!), hot cross buns, Cadbury Crème Eggs, Ribidy Rabbit (the stuffed toy my brother received for his first Easter from my Nanna, they became inseparable friends!) , family gatherings and chocolate,  chocolate, CHOCOLATE!

Chocolate: Here today … gone today!

I think it is the lead up to Easter? Well that is what I am blaming it on anyway … my over consumption of chocolate that is. In any shape or form, baked into things, poured onto things or just ‘as is’ preferably resembling a Cadbury Crème Egg, I really can’t seem to get enough of them.

Quails and quinoa

Andrew went away this weekend to visit with his Nanna in Canberra. We spoke earlier, just after he had missed his connecting flight home to Singapore and was waiting at Sydney airport for the next one! It did give us a chance to catch up on the weekends news as he whiled away the hours until the next flight.