Vivian is 3. She started to engage herself pretty well with a lot of things that she likes, shows the interest in making stuff with her own little hands. Two nights ago, she took out some old play dough that I bought from dollar shop when she was about one year old. The quality of that play dough is really poor. They are hard for shaping, kneading or I would say, almost doing it with anything. I didn’t bother because she hardly use them until this point. But that night she was particularly wanting to make something out of it. I knew this was not going to work.

I didn’t tell her anything, just let her play the cheappie for that night. And yesterday I went to the shop and bought a Dora play dough pack for her (as it has the Dora and other characters’ moulds) and picked up the stuff that I need to make my own play dough from Coles. I cooked again after we finished the dinner while she was playing with her Dora thing. About 15 minutes later, I have had 4 additional colours of homemade play dough ready to be added into her colour palette. They were very close to shop-bought stuff, just perfect softness to handle and absolutely safe for children as they are literately edible.

The most importance ingredient is Cream of Tartar (powder), which you can easily find in any baking section of any supermarket, such as Coles or Woolworth. I didn’t need to buy anything else as I already had all other ingredients in house.

I am also sure that you can find the recipe by Google it in no time. There is just no secret, everybody knows how to make it. But you won’t believe this, you can even find the play dough recipe on McKenzie’s Cream of Tartar packaging, as if nowadays people only use cream of tartar for making play dough.

To save the time, my tips are, to do the mixing up in a big batch without adding the food colouring, but divide the dough into several parts and add in different colouring when they are hot off the heat. Knead them on a piece of baking paper separately, be careful not to burn yourself. It takes quite some kneading work to get colour blend well and even. But trust me, you will get to there with your intensive beautiful colour tone eventually.

I will try to find some time to make more colours this week, and get some small containers.

We just managed to pick all the peaches off the tree on Sunday, now we need to harvest grapes in the next 1-2 weeks (before birds leave their marks on every single one of them).

This year the yields are not as good as last year. We had a summer drought time, only had a few decent rains. Grapes are much smaller this year, though still very sweet and lots.

I made about 5 jars of peach jam, cleaned out tons of peaches that had fallen on the ground; saved about 5 kg good ones for us to eat. This evening, Vivian helped her daddy to collect the first basket of grapes. It was about 4 kg, probably 10% of the total yieldings.

Sitting down together after the dinner to eat them was an enjoyable thing. We are currently teaching V to coordinate her mouth and hands to spit out the skin and seeds. At least, she really loves grapes.

However sometimes when I am in a good mood, I do go off a little bit and make it fun. Here is an example of it. I peeled a tomato’s skin with a sharp utility knife to a continuous strip, then curled it up to form a rose like flower as an edible decoration to a dish.

I had no difficulty to do it at all, as there is certainly some sort of link between doing this with a piece of paper and a piece of tomato skin. This idea was kind of inspired by my normal crafty projects then was confirmed by the wife of a highly regarded chief in Canberra who actually used this method to create similar thing in his cooking.

I guess you probably can achieve this with many varieties of veggie or fruit skin, such as peach, apple, pear or even lemon. I wondered how they are going to look with different colours and textures. Does anybody have their own edible fun idea to share? I’d love to hear.

Majority of the houses on Isabella Street are cottage style and now busting with blooming cottage garden flowers and overflowing greenery in the spring. Every single detail just pulled the string of my heart. My eyes got so busy, but still couldn’t get enough.

Once again I peeked one of my dream houses, located at the corner of Collett Street and Isabella Street, facing the river bank. I just couldn’t forget this house since many years ago when I first saw it, even though around that time, it was just a very old and abandoned house.

However I was too scared to take photos of any private property. Kath used to tell me to put a photo of my dream house under the pillow and write “Is this the right thing for me?” It is supposed to be a spell to make your dream to come true. Maybe I need to come back, with more courage.

Only took a few photos of river, in the rain.

I suppose as a parent, we adapt ourselves along the way of our children’s growth, especially you want them to have some intake of food. We call it “compromise”, a phase transforming your desperation to creativity, so here I present my version of fairy bread. I was inspired by some photos on the Internet, but I really can’t remember who and where to give the credit.

Here is how:

1. Two slices of white bread, cut off the crust.
2. Use a cookie cutter to cut one slice of bread to make a hole in the middle. (Here I used a heart shaped cookie cutter)
3. Spread another slice of bread with butter or anything you like. (Here I spread the hazelnut jam. You can use jam, cheese spread, peanut butter, vegemite…etc.)
4. Lay the cut bread on top of bread with jammed side up, sprinkle your decorative sprinkles in the hole to cover the entire cut shape. (Here I use daisy flower sprinkles. You can easily get sprinkles from cake decoration section in supermarket. They normally have variety of choices. Thousands and hundreds are the most common one used in fairy bread.)

And you are done! — Give this as a bait to lure your kids to eat. Good Luck!