i took a photo of a bird!

we visited ben's mum, who lives up in the adelaide hills, on friday night. neither of us wanted to drive home after she was extra lovely and fed us tasty champagne as well as taking us to chingari's, our favourite indian restaurant, so we made up a bed and stayed the night in her little valley.



in the morning his mum and i traipsed around the garden admiring the prettiness






while i dug up some of the self sown silverbeet and herbs from the lawn to pot up for my balcony



and very happily noted that she's letting the kale go to seed, so hopefully they'll pop up everywhere next year too...




when this little blue wren flitted past!



granted he did sit still for maybe 30 seconds...



but i'm still pretty happy i manage to snap two whole decent photos of him!

(do you think that's too many photos for that little writing?!)

an indian birthday feast

spices for the royal chicken korma

my favourite part of Indian cooking is the very first step of heating the oil up so that it glistens and dropping the cinnamon sticks, bay leaves and cardamon pods in, so they crackle, spit and pop around the pan. my nose twitches and my stomach does a little dance and suddenly my body, not just my brain, knows that soon it's going to get a tasty curry to enjoy!

royal chicken korma, saag chicken, spicy chickpeas

on wednesday ben's brother got a year older and to celebrate his mum and i made indian curries. she made a really spicy melt-in-your mouth chicken curry and i made a royal chicken korma with lots of cream and saffron, a saag chicken (i think saag can refer to any leafy green, mine was an untraditional silverbeet), and spicy chickpeas and potatoes. we didn't talk about what we where going to make in advance so we ended up with lots and lots of chicken ... but it was all delicious so it didn't matter.

it's one of our 'things' to get together with ben's siblings and eat an absurd amount of take-away indian ... usually until our bellys feel like they'll explode with tastiness! i don't want to be a take-away buying person anymore. i love cooking and can make indian almost as tasty as our favourite take away, it's just getting around to doing it that's the problem ... and learning how to make good garlic naan at home ... i've got no idea how to make good garlic naan at home!

there are lots more people taking a photo a day in august at The Byron Life.
these are my photos from wednesday, but they're a bit late again... taking photos everyday is pretty easy to remember, but posting about them is much more difficult!