My favourite pancakes

I love love love these pancakes!!

Ingredients:
~ 2 cups of Plain Flour
~ 4 Eggs
~ 2 cups of Milk
~ Butter for cooking
~ Butter OR lemon for spreading
~ Sugar

• Put the flour in a bowl making a well in the center. whisk/stir in the eggs and then the milk till it makes a thin smooth batter. If you feel you need a little more milk then put a little more milk. 
• Heat a pan on a high heat just to heat the pan up for a couple of minutes. then turn the heat down to a lower heat and put the butter in. It may take you 2 tries to find the right heat for your pancakes to cook nicely without getting burnt. 
• stir the butter all around the pan till the pan is covered in butter.
• Pour the pancake mixture into the pan to the size that you would like.
• I use a small pan and cook one pancake at a time, so when i pour the mixture in i also tilt the pan so that the batter runs to the edges o the pan.
• When the pancake is browned nicely underneath, flip the pancake over and brown the other side. I find that my pancakes are done nicely when they are just golden brown. No need to cook more than that. 
• Pancakes are done. now to serve on a plate and spread on butter or lemon and sprinkle sugar and roll them up like cigars and eat like a little piggy!! YUM YUM YUMMY!!!!!! 

These are better than any pancake i could ever be given anywhere. I love how i make my pancakes with the sugar and butter and i try not to eat them all the time coz i love them a little too much. LOL! ;P
I do like other pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream, but i LOVE LOVE LOVE eating these with my kids **cough** or by myself  **cough cough** ... lol ;P

My Strawberry update

On a better note, my strawberries are going good. Im getting lots of flowers and they are turning into strawberries. Very cool to watch. My kids love it. Haven't eaten anymore since the last one.
They arent ready to eat yet.
One was ready but it was rotten on the side that was touching the dirt. Ill have to get some mulch coz apparently mulch stops that from happening coz it stops the strawberries touching the dirt and it is the moist dirt that causes them to rot if they are touching it.
Another plant that is still growing is my rocket. I have allowed it to flower and it has these pretty little yellow flowers. Its very nice. My other plant that is still growing is spinach. its not going as well as the rocket though.
Im just letting everything grow. We had a few rainy days a while ago and so i didnt have to water the plants, so i just left them to do their own thing. Then one day i went to check on them and they were covered in caterpillars. I also had an aphid problem too. I squashed as many little aphids as i could and got rid of the catterpillars by hand too, but they just kept coming back.
So i made up my own little concoction that i had been told might work.

• Get a spray bottle
• Crush and chop up some garlic
• put the crushed up garlic into the spray bottle
• fill with wam-hot water
• shake shake shake...
• either leave out in the sun for a day
• or just go and spray on the leaves. 

Seemed to work for me for getting rid of the aphids, or at least controlling the numbers. But it also kept the caterpillars away. Took a week or so of spraying pretty much everyday, but it worked.
Sometimes the bottle would get clogged so i would just shake it and it would loosen whatever was blocking it.
When i ran out of water in the bottle i would just go fill the bottle up again keeping the old garlic in the bottle.
Also sometimes if the bottle would get clogged and i couldn't unclog it, i would just take the spray lid off and just pour the garlic water all over the plants and in the soil. I would even let the old garlic fall out of the bottle and let it sit in the dirt. And then i would make a new batch of garlic water with new garlic.

Whatever it is that i did with the garlic water it seemed to work. I havent had an issue with any caterpillars for a long time. But the aphids are still there. I dont think you can get rid of them completely without using chemical sprays and i didnt want to do that. Also ladybugs eat aphids, but you have to get them to come to your garden, so you would have to either plant certain plants that ladybugs are attracted to, or you can apparently buy them over the internet. I think you can buy them off ebay. Not sure if they sell them in local shops though. Not in any local shops around me anyway.

Gardening Failure

I failed miserably at my gardening. ='(

I went out and bought some fertilizer in the powder form. It looked like a white-ish/grey-is kind of loose dirt. Very bad description,i know, but that's all i can remember about it.

My plants were growing ok. They were growing slow and sort of looked like they were missing something coz they started looking miserable, so i decided that maybe they just needed a bit of fertilizer. My brother told me that he had a liquid fertilizer that would be good to use, but coz I'm impatient i decided to just go out and buy whatever i passed in the shop. Woopsy!
It wasn't the fertilizer that did the damage, it was the fact that i had no idea what i was doing and didn't really follow the instructions properly.

So...... what i did that i shall NEVER do again is i loosened the dirt in the pots so i could get my plants out as gently as possible and then i mixed the fertilizer in the dirt and then placed the plants back into the dirt. no.. noo...NO NO NO!!! Apparently that was a very very bad idea. All of the plants that i did that to died very very quickly. It was like they were burnt from the root up. Very sad moment for my garden.

The only plants that survived were 4 pots.
1 pot was rocket and spinach and the other 3 pots were my strawberries. Oh how glad i am that i didn't kill my strawberries!
The only thing i did differently with these 4 pots was i dug a hole away from where the actual root would have been and i mixed the fertilizer in just that area, thinking that maybe when I water them the fertilizer will spread slowly through the rest of the pot and less likely to damage anything. Thankfully i was right.

The reason why i did that with these 4 pots and not the rest was because they were the last pots that i did and i sort of didn't think about it till then. The other pots were smaller and i wasn't really putting that much in so i thought it would be ok. But lesson learnt the hard way.

Now i have to start again.
Another thing, I have heard that those black plastic pots are not good to use because they get too hot for the plants roots or something. So that's interesting. Must find out what pots are better to use. Probably terracotta pots are better to use but the big ones are so expensive sometimes. But if they are better to use them maybe its worth it.

Avocado Dip

Ingredients:
~ Avocado
~ Squirt of lemon juice
~ Salt
~ 1 or 2 tbsp of Natural Yogurt (just makes it go further)
~ 1tbsp Sweet Chilly Sauce

• Cut Avocado in half and take out the big seed in the middle.
• Scoop out flesh and put into a bowl.
• Mash the Avocado flesh till all smashed up.
• Squirt a bit of lemon juice and mix.
• Mix in the yogurt.
• Sprinkle the little bit of salt.
• Mix in sweet chilly sauce. 

Oh Yummy!! This one is probably my favourite!! It is my favourite "sit on the couch with some biscuits and nom nom nom" dip.

French Onion Dip

Ingredients:
~ 1 packet of French Onion Soup Mix
~ 400g tub of Sour Cream
~ and if you think that its a bit too strong of a taste you can put a spoon or 2 more of Sour Cream or Natural Plain Yogurt.

• Mix sour cream and soup mix together till it is combined.

Yep! Thats it! Easy peasy!! And everyone loved it!!
Its a good dip to do when u want to prepare something very very quickly. And it tastes so nice. Good one to make when u just want to snack on the couch.

Baba Ghanouj (Eggplant) Dip

Ingredients:
~ 1 tsp of Paprika
~ Black Pepper
~ 1/4 tsp of Cayenne (or a tiny tip of the teaspoon of hot chilly powder)
~ Salt
~ Olive Oil
~ 1/2 cup of Lemon juice
~ 2 Eggplants
~ 3 cloves of Garlic
~ 1/4 cups of Parsley
~ 4 tbsps of Natural Plain Yogurt

• Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees C.
• Cut the eggplants in half and put them into a roasting dish and drizzle a little olive oil on them.
• Roast the eggplants for 40 minutes.
• Take them out of the oven and let them cool so that you can handle them.
• Scoop out the flesh. (I disliked this part because it was so yucky and messy. lol). 
• Put the flesh into a blender and add the black pepper, cayenne (or chilly powder), salt, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, parsley and yogurt.
• Blend until smooth. Till it looks like something you could dip a biscuit into without getting lumps.  
• Sprinkle paprika to serve.

I didnt particularly like this dip, it just wasnt my kind of flavour, but EVERYONE who tried it LOVED it!