Moving Again....Back to Point Cook

As some of you might know, we are moving house again, even though that was not originally the plan! We have had a few issues in the unit we are currently in, none of which we could have predicted before we moved here.

1st of all, we though it was a bit more dusty and dirty here when we cleaned every week, and asked the landlord to have this checked. He ended up coming out himself looking at the heating ducts (without having any professional knowledge), and decided there was no dust problem. However, the last couple of months, we have all been waking up at night coughing, so it has now become a health issue for us that we don't want to live with.

Secondly, there has been a couple of break ins to neighbouring properties since we moved in, and it was revealed to us that our unit had a break in before we moved in (which was not disclosed to us by the agent), so we are not feeling safe, especially since our unit is on a corner block with no fences around!

Moving into summer, we also realised we would like some outdoor space to enjoy, especially for Oscar so he can run around, and our current unit only has a small courtyard with mulch and concrete :-( so not really child or table/chair friendly... 

Luckily, we have been really fortunate and found a great house! It is in Point Cook, so we are moving back to our "old" stomping ground, and will be closer to Oscar's daycare as well, as this is also in Point Cook. Unfortunately, Kasper will be 5-10 min further away from work, but this will hopefully change soon, as it looks like the new Point Cook entry/exit to the freeway will open in the next couple of weeks in south going direction (already opened towards the city), which means it will be just as quick for him to get to work as it is now....

Some of you will know our new house quite well, as we are moving into the house that one of my mother's group friends used to live in... :-) Unfortunately, she moved to Adelaide (and we will miss her and Lila - Oscar's playmate - very much) to be closer to her family.

Here are some pictures of our new place. We are moving next weekend - 22nd October.
Address will be: 9 Leadbeater Street, Point Cook, VIC 3030 (postal address will remain the same - PO Box 6526, Point Cook, VIC 3030).

Front of house

Office

Living room with exit to courtyard

Kitchen

bathroom

master bedroom 

ensuite bathroom

view of garden from master bedroom

2nd bedroom

3rd bedroom - will probably be Oscar's bedroom

Hallway

Garden with undercover patio and artificial turf (no lawn moving :-))

Oscar loving the garden

Garden

courtyard with planter boxes and bench seat

courtyard - this will be Bailey's outdoor area :-)

Well, I better get back to packing boxes considering we are moving next weekend!!

xoxoxo

Oscar - 2 years

Wow, didn't that roll around quickly?! All of a sudden the little baby has turned 2, and is now a little toddler that runs around, crawls on everything, throw tantrums when he doesn't get his way, loves helping mummy and daddy in the kitchen or with the laundry, and is a little chatterbox (mostly talking about cars, trains and other vehicles).

Oscar 2 years old :-)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY little Darling xxx

We celebrated Oscar's birthday with a brunch for the mother's group + kiddies, and it was a fun morning with lots of play and some nice new gifts :-) Entertainment for weeks to come!! 

Yesterday, we had the 2-year check up with the health maternal nurse, where they measure children's growth and development to see how they are tracking.

All Oscar's numbers were good, he is now 90cm high, which means he will be around 180cm as an adult, and he weighs in at 13.5k, both numbers being on the 75th percentile, so all within normal development.

The nurse was quite impressed by Oscar's vocabulary and speaking in sentences already, as kids this age are only expected to put 2-3 words together, be able to count to 5, and know a few letters of the alphabet. Oscar counts to 29 and can almost sing the whole alphabet song, so he is well ahead in that part of his development according to the nurse - which is always nice to hear :-)

To give you an idea of how he is, I will attempt to upload a few videos :-) Enjoy!
As the uploading didn't work, I have put some videos on youtube which is working, just click links below or copy and paste the link into your browser.

https://youtu.be/GwNH7hSQxLE

https://youtu.be/l0ooWImzHxY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tvWfz1_Vco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjMRtxqe2lU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edsr33Ps0Ls

Designing our new home

Now that we have become land owners, it's very exciting to really start looking into all the details of our new home, from finalising floor plan to picking out materials for flooring, kitchen, bathrooms etc.

We have decided to spend some of our weekends touring Melbourne and the surrounding area for suppliers to view and feel materials before we make any final decisions on what we are buying. 

A couple of week ago, we went to Geelong (yes, close to where Kasper works) in order to check out a flooring place that had timber flooring and also carpets. As it turned out, the flooring store turned out to be part of Beaumont Tiles, so it was great as we can also come here to pick out tiles for our bathrooms and kitchen splashback. 

It ended up being a very productive trip, as we managed to pick out our flooring choice for the entire house - a light timber laminate floor that will allow us to use underfloor electric heating :-)   - and our kitchen splashback tile colour, which we are very excited about!

Light timber laminate flooring - Scandinavian style

Kitchen splashback tile colour - Mint - in subway size tiles 

This is a picture which will give a good idea of how our kitchen will look, as we have picked pretty much the same colours (except for benchtops, which might be a bit different.

Kitchen colours - white drawers/cupboards with mint subway splashback tile.

We have also pretty much finalised our floor plan for the house, and decided to open up the wall between the living and dining room in order to feature a double sided fireplace made of bricks. We originally had a wall between these rooms with French doors, but decided the fireplace would be something we would enjoy a lot more!

Our floor plan

Here is a picture of the fireplace inspiration. We want a lighter brick and also looking at doing the brick wall a bit wider.

Double sided fire place inspiration

As the kitchen is in the middle of the house, we have planned a feature skillion roof line with windows up under the raked ceiling letting light into the kitchen. The next couple of images should give an idea about what we are trying to achieve.

Front view of house/roof line. The facade will be slightly different as my drawing program cannot do exactly what I want with porch ceiling and roof.

Kitchen with raked ceiling with windows under roof letting light in. (please disregard colours of kitchen, another shortcoming of my drawing program)

Kitchen/high windows from another angle

We will have feature ceilings in the kitchen, dining, living room and hallway.

It has also been a great help to have a family member working as a professional kitchen designer, as he has helped us draw up our kitchen in their professional kitchen design software to give us a realistic idea about how our kitchen will end up looking, and I must say I am super excited!!

Here are a couple of pictures of how the kitchen will end up looking:

kitchen seen from dining room

Kitchen seen from Oscar's bedroom

kitchen seen from hallway

In the coming weeks, we will focus more on materials for windows, doors and bathrooms.
To be continued... :-)

Busy July

What a busy month it's been!
And it seems the month have just flown by... so here is a little catch up on what we have been up to.

Sunday 3rd July - Art Workshop for Oscar

We started out the first weekend with an art workshop for toddlers/kids, where kids get to paint with fingers, sponges, toy cars, little cups etc. to create fun artwork :) The people who organise the workshop have a great set-up with a website where they sell the amazing artwork that the little kids produce!

painting with fingers

painting with a little plastic leaf

Painting with the car :-)

As this was a first for Oscar trying out paint, and he is not too keen on getting dirty fingers, he was not too happy about mummy dipping his fingers in paint and trying to get him to smear it all over some paper... however when more colours of paint became available, and he got to "paint" with the little toy cars by driving them across the paper after being dipped in paint, he was straight into it!

He also tried some of the other tools, but the favourite was definitely the toy cars, and as the other kids were moving on, Oscar managed to "steal" a few of the other toy cars so he had more to drive across the page :-)

Painting with cars :-)

Painting with cars

Painting with little cup

Sample artwork produced :-)

The paintings were collected by the teacher and hung up to dry, and then some high resolution photos of the artwork were taken. The photos were then sent of to a graphic designer, who "enhanced" the artwork with some background colour to produce the artwork that they post for sale on their website. The end result is some beautiful artwork produced from Oscar's paintings, which you can see here:
https://www.jellybeanstreet.com/search?q=Oscar+Tordal+Mortensen 

Some of the proceeds of the sale from these artwork goes to a charity of your choice, and for Oscar's artwork we chose the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne to receive donations from Oscar's artworks and posters. You are welcome to buy our little Picasso's masterpieces if you like them!! :-D

I also received some of the photos taken of Oscar's original artwork, which are very nice, and I should receive a memory stick shortly with all the photos of Oscar's artwork from this workshop. Here is a little sample:

After the painting, the kids had some fun playing with each other and all in all it was a great day out!

Playing with the other kids after painting

7th July - Melbourne Arts Centre "Dig" an interactive performance for toddlers

Thursday morning, Oscar and I went on a bit of an expedition, as we were going into Melbourne city to see the performance called "Dig" for toddlers. As the performance started at 9.30AM, I decided to catch the train to the city instead of battling the morning peak hour traffic. 

At the moment, Oscar is very fascinated by all sorts of cars, trains, trucks, tractors, etc. so I thought it would be a great experience for him to actually go ON the train instead of just seeing it driving by... But I was wrong! He couldn't have been more bored on the train going into Melbourne, just seemed to think "what are all these people doing here almost standing on top of my pram?"

However, the Melbourne Arts Centre performance was a hit! Oscar had great fun running around and playing (which was encouraged during the performance).

Here is the write up about what the performance was all about:

Dig

Help us excavate a mysterious world!

The creative team who brought you Rain for babies and their carers’ is collaborating on a new work for toddlers. As the team dig, build and deconstruct, they will begin piecing together something truly unique – creating the show as they go – with your help!

This is an extraordinary opportunity for toddlers and their grown-ups to join an explorative process, and be part of a brand new work that will offer music, performance and an immersive visual experience.

The train trip back home was a bit more exciting, as Oscar got to sit on mummy's lap and could see a bit more of the landscape rushing by, but he definitely still prefers to see the train rolling by from the sidelines!!

Saturday 9th July - Landowners :-) :-) :-)

Saturday morning we were very excited as we had been eagerly awaiting the new land release at Riverwalk Estate in Werribee, as it had quite a few of our preferred size block of land available with north-facing gardens (as we are in the southern hemisphere this is the optimal orientation of a block of land, as you get most summer/winter sun in your garden). Here is the website for the estate: www.myriverwalk.com.au 

We had an appointment at 10.20AM, and were lucky to get one of the blocks we wanted, as all the 14m frontage blocks were sold by the time we left!!

Our new block of land is 14m x 32m (448m2), which is a large block compared to most of the blocks they sell nowadays. The land doesn't settle until September 2017, which means we cannot start building our house until then, so we still have a bit of time up our sleeve to finalise all the details of materials, decor etc. that we want to use.

As a nice bonus, it was a nice sunny day :-)
Here are a few pictures from the day.

Kasper and Oscar outside the Riverwalk Land Sales Office

Look Oscar, that's our block of land, lot 1705 :-)

Happy land owners :-D

Saturday 23rd July - Australian Citizenship Ceremony

And if that wasn't excitement enough for the month, on Saturday 23rd July we finally had our citizenship ceremony after having passed the Australian citizenship test back in February!! 

The ceremony was held at Wyndham Civic Centre, which is right here in Werribee 5 minutes from our house :-) The ceremony included speeches from the mayor of Wyndham along with some prominent citizens and politicians. After speeches, all the new Australian citizens (including us) said the Australian Citizenship pledge, and were invited up to receive our citizenship certificate. 

Ready for the ceremony - we were lucky enough to get 1st row :-)

All the people getting Australian citizenship

Long wait and difficult to sit still for a little guy :-)

Finally it's our turn to line up to receive our citizenship certificate

Meeting the mayor of Wyndham and getting the certificate :-)

The ceremony ended with a local schoolgirl singing the national anthem "Advance Australia Fair" and another Australian nationalist song called "I am Australian".

We also received paperwork for registering on the electoral roll, which means we can now vote next time there is an election!!! :-)


Now we just need to apply for our Australian passports, as we can no longer use our permanent resident visa in our Danish passport to enter Australia.

It is fantastic to finally having dual citizenship, and we are now very proud Australians and Danes all in one....

Upcoming Holiday

As we have now committed to building a house, we have put a pause on all overseas travel and have instead decided to take small mini-holidays locally. As a result of this we have been looking at some exciting long weekend trips/locations that will also be fun for Oscar. 

Luckily, there are lots of great places in Victoria, and we have managed to find a farm stay in the Pyrenees area, where we will be going for the Melbourne Cup long weekend. (end of October). We can also bring Bailey, so it will be a fun family holiday where Oscar will get to experience a lot of farm animals, so we are looking forward to that!

Here is the link for the farm stay: https://www.stayz.com.au/accommodation/vic/the-grampians/amphitheatre/178923#propertyFeaturesSection 

Until next time....

Spanish Rockling (Ling) One Pot with Crusty Bread

Sometimes you get inspired by other recipes, and this recipe is one of those... It was sooo good, we had it for dinner last night, and I just had to write it up and save it here on the blog so I can refer back to it...

Original recipe uses cod (Danish: torsk), but because we can only get smoked cod here in Australia, I decided to use the Rockling or Pink Ling fish instead, as it is also a firm-fleshed white fish.

The image below is borrowed from the original recipe, as I forgot to take any photos of the finished result, but it was pretty much what's in the image below. Super delicious!!

Spanish Rockling One Pot

Here is the recipe (for 2 people):

INGREDIENTS 

• 2 chunky rockling fillets, approx. 200g per person
• 100g diced chorizo
• 1 pinch saffron threads
• 1 large glass white wine (I used sauvignon blanc)
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 can chick peas, drained and rinsed
• 1 large red onion, finely diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 250ml chicken stock (or 250ml water with 1 chicken stock cube)
• Juice of 2 juicy lemons
• 2 tsp sugar
• Fresh flat leaf parsley
• Olive oil for cooking
• Extra virgin olive oil for finishing
• Sea salt and black pepper
• Buttered green beans and crusty bread to serve.

METHOD

Use a wok or pan with a lid to fry the chorizo in a little olive oil until it starts to char at the edges, then remove it with a slotted spoon and put it in a bowl until later. 

Add the onion to the oil in the pan and cook on a medium heat for about 5 minutes until softened, then add the smoked paprika, garlic and cook for a couple more minutes.

Next add the wine and let it evaporate slightly, then add saffron, chicken stock, diced tomato, sugar and salt and pepper, bring to a simmer gently with the lid on and taste after about 10 minutes, adding salt and pepper as needed.

Next, add the chick peas and lemon juice, cooking for around 5 minutes with the lid off, and place the rockling fillets in to the pan with the chorizo, nudging the chick peas out of the way so the rockling is partly under the sauce. Put the lid on and simmer gently for around 8 to 10 minutes, spooning the sauce over it a couple of times as it cooks.

When done, remove the lid and scatter with the fresh parsley and drizzle with a little extra virgin olive oil.

Serve at the table in the cooking pot. Doing this will mean the rockling continues to cook in the residual pan heat, so you don’t need to overdo it on the hob. 

Serve with green beans that’s cooked in boiling water for 4 minutes and been dressed in a little butter, and crusty bread.

Enjoy!! It is really yummy :-)

Moving AGAIN!

We have been contemplating a move to a smaller house in order to save money for a deposit for building our own home - so land and house deposit. 

The last 3-4 weekends we have been touring around the Werribee area in order to find a suitable place. On the weekend, we saw a 3 bedroom house in Werribee that we were happy with, and made an application. Late yesterday, we were approved and now have the new place from Friday 13th May.

After the initial reaction YAH, we got the place! it wasn't long before the next reaction came: SHIT, we need to start packing all the removal boxes :-l

Anyway, it's all for the better of our future of building OUR OWN ECO-FRIENDLY HOUSE, so if all goes to plan, this will be our 2nd last move in a long long time :-)

Here are a few photos of the new place.

Front of house

Side of house - it is a corner block, so just 2 neighbours :-)

entry and hallway

Living area

Living area other side

small boring courtyard with no grass which Kasper is super happy about!

Ensuite to master bedroom, lots of cupboards and bench space, which will be nice!

Kitchen 

Dining and living area across from kitchen, Oscar and Kasper inspecting :-)

We expect to move to the new place on the 21st May (if all goes to plan). That will leave us with a week or so to get cleaning sorted for the old place.

The new address will be 1/10 Macadamia Grove, Werribee VIC 3030. We will be close to Werribee train station and city, so that will be nice!
Here is the map:


Or link if you can't see the map: https://goo.gl/maps/HLrVB7gKA9L2

We are also excited to be closer to Werribee city, as there are a lot of nice cafes and restaurants, so I think we will probably go out for brunch etc. a bit more :-)

Ris a la Mande (Rice Pudding) with Cherry Sauce - Aussie style

What do you do when the husband cannot tolerate cream in his food, and one of the main ingredients in your dessert is whipped cream?! I researched what I could possibly use as a substitute (low fat), and if I could find this substitute ingredient in Australia.

Well, I was lucky enough to find a recipe for a low fat substitute version of this Danish dessert - usually eaten during the Christmas period. However, the substitute ingredient for cream was something called "fromage frais" which I cannot get in Australia.

So what to do, what to do? Well, I've heard about numerous desserts using mascarpone cheese, which is a creamy Italian cheese, so I thought, I'll try that as a tester with a small portion, and if it doesn't work I'll have to make it with cream, and hubby will have something else for dessert.

Luckily for me, the test version worked a treat, so here is the recipe for my Aussie version of Ris a la Mande with cherry sauce.  

Ris a la Mande
250 ml water
250 g arborio rice
1.4 l of full fat milk
1 tsp salt
2 tbs sugar
200 g blanched almonds (without skin)
1 vanilla pod
500 g mascarpone cheese

1) Bring the water, arborio rice and salt to the boil, and let it simmer until the water is absorbed.
2) Add the milk and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to low and let simmer until milk is absorbed and it has the consistency of risotto, approx. 20-30 min. Keep stirring the pot to avoid the milk burning in the pan. 
3) Take the rice pudding off the heat, add sugar and let the pudding cool off.
4) Roughly chop the almonds
5) Slice open the vanilla pod, scrape out the vanilla beans and mix them in the rice pudding.
6) Mix half the mascarpone into the rice pudding until it has a creamy consistency, then add the chopped almonds and the rest of the mascarpone and stir until combined. 
7) Transfer the Ris a la Mande to a serving bowl, cover with cling film, and refrigerate until serving. 


Cherry Sauce - to serve over the Ris a la Mande
500 g frozen cherries (or fresh pitted)
150 g sugar
1 vanilla pod
300 ml water
2 tbs corn flour

1) Pour the cherries into a pot with the sugar, water and vanilla pod.
2) Bring to the boil, turn down the heat to low and let simmer for 15 minutes
3) Stir the corn flour with a splash of water and add to the warm cherry sauce while stirring, and wait for the sauce to thicken slightly.
4) Cool down to warm temperature (around 50 degrees) and serve over the cold Ris a la Mande

You can make the Cherry Sauce in advance and cool in the fridge, and then warm it up slightly before serving.

Enjoy!