mutteringhousewife

A Trip to Tempe

We were actually going to IKEA. I hadn’t been to the big one at Tempe before. So when my good friend and neighbour requested my services as sidekick I was more than happy to oblige.

I don’t know that they’ve achieved anything over the smaller store at Rhodes. Acres of fairly cheap looking fabric. Much cardboard furniture that’s good for if no one will see it or you’ll only need it until you find somewhere permanent to live. The odd dozing boyfriend on a bed or lounge. Many shelves that will never attach to the plaster of my walls, composed as it is of sand and a century of paint, laid over diamond hard brick. An assortment of jars and containers I know from experience aren’t water, air or moth tight. I was uninspired.

I did pick up some cheap Christmas wrap and a set of biscuit cutters that will feature in a blog in the near future. And it was mildly entertaining. But it was what my friend, let’s call her Daniela, said next that made my day. “You know the Pepe Saya factory is in Tempe. Do you want to see if we can find it?”.

You know how I feel about Pepe Saya butter. It’s revolutionised my pastry making. As it’s expensive (not for what it is mind), I save it for best. You betcha I wanted to see if we could find it, even it wasn’t open to the public. I looked it up on Google maps. It appeared to be right next door to IKEA. A quick glance out of the car park showed that the shortcut would have involved scaling a set of quite fresh looking barbed wire fences. If only we’d bought one of those ten dollar throws that don’t appear to have any other use! But we must not repine. “Let’s go around the long way”, I suggested. “It’s just a block”.

Quite a large block, as it turned out. Down a little street lined by nondescript factories, skip bins and badly parked trucks on one side, tiny weatherboard houses from the past on the other. “Is it really down here?” asked Daniela. “It doesn’t look like anything and we’ve walked a really long way. We should have driven. Why didn’t we drive? Lucky I didn’t go to the gym today, I’d never have made it this far.” Down an even smaller street and right at the end was quite a tiny sign for a whole lot of gourmet dairy businesses. And Pepe Saya’s. Up a steep driveway littered with boxes and more apparently abandoned trucks and white vans and pallets and a forklift.

It was just a small glass door, behind which was a set of stairs. “Maybe it isn’t open to the public” I said. “I’m ringing them,” said the ever resourceful Daniela. As she pulled out her phone, the roller door opened to admit the forklift. A young man with very blue eyes started guiding it in. “Erm”, I said. “Do you sell to the public?” asked Daniela. “Of course, come on in, have a look around, there’s a fridge just behind there”, the young man said.

We wandered in. There was a fridge, as advised, looking like the sort of the thing the school canteen might have put in the cleanup. It had a couple of containers of creme fraiche, a pat or two of the familiar foil wrapped butter and not much else. We got chatting with the young man about dairy products and baking. He clearly knew his stuff, and I found out why when one of the forklift guys called out “hey, Pepe!”. Lucky I hadn’t realised who he was when we started chatting, otherwise I would have confined myself to “erm”.

We bought three containers of creme fraiche, a litre of buttermilk, Daniela got a pat of butter and I bought myself a two kilo wheel of butter. I’ve been feeling some baking coming on for quite some time and two kilos was the wholesale amount. It’s a beautiful thing too, lovingly shaped, wrapped in waxed paper, tied up with string and tightly sealed in cling wrap.

“You have to look after it” Pepe said. That didn’t involve reading it a bedtime story, as it turned out, just wrapping it up tightly every time you use it. “How far are you from home?” he asked. Daniela explained that we weren’t far, but we had undertaken the hazardous and windswept walk all the way from the IKEA car park. So he gave us a styrofoam box and lovingly loaded up his produce, tucking an ice pack in with it. We left him to look after his half tonne of freshly delivered fresh cream.

Having bought the bulk of the stuff, I gallantly offered to be the one to carry it back. I wasn’t met with any resistance.

Oh, do I have big plans for this stuff. Ice cream, fruit cake, shortbread, little tarts. I’ve started on the butter already, carefully wrapping it back up again so I can be worthy of it. It’s so FRESH! I don’t really like the taste of the cultured butter straight off a knife but because it’s so fresh the cultured flavour is only just a hint. That’s it, I’m going to have to go to Tempe every time I go through two kilos of butter. At the wholesale price and with Christmas coming up, that’s going to be quite often.

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October 17, 2013

What to do with Marshmallows with Issues – Iced VoVo Slice

One of the many things we learned while camping is that marshmallows aren’t as robust as they look. We brought along a couple of jumbo sized packets to roast over the campfire, but only got through half a packet before the total fire ban overtook us. We carelessly tossed aside both the opened and unopened packets and discovered as we were packing up that the contents of both packets had coalesced into one giant, ungainly confection.

Waste not, want not. It looked to me like I was going to make Iced VoVo slice. I was a bit stymied by the children never having heard of an Iced VoVo, what with their organic home baked hemp swaddled upbringing. I explained that it was a biscuit topped with jam, marshmallow and coconut. “Sounds weird”, they said as one.

You know I’m not an easy person to deter. First to find a suitable base. I chose Tish Boyle’s sweet pastry crust, and it goes like this.
Place one and a third cups of flour and 125 grams of cold butter in the Thermomix or inferior simulacrum. She also suggests a third of a cup of white sugar, but this is going to be pretty sweet with the jam and marshmallow, so I only put in two tablespoons. Zap it until the mixture resemble breadcrumbs. Add two teaspoons of cold water and a large egg yolk and zap again. Press into a lined roasting pan and bake for twenty minutes, until just starting to brown.

What to do with the marshmallow? I think I had about 200 grams in the opened packet. I put it in the Thermomix.

I tried just chopping it, but that just made more mess. So I put the temperature up to fifty degrees, the speed up to ten and whipped it for an amount of time that escapes my memory. Five minutes? Possibly ten? I peeked in the top and stopped it when there was a light pink shiny thing going on in there, instead of multicoloured glop.

I spread the cooked slice base with the last of my first experiment with strawberry jam, the one that wasn’t sweet enough and was too acid. It has featured in a few normal jam slices, but this may be its finest hour. I squodged the warm marshmallow on top of that, it was cool enough to spread out with my fingers. There may have been a bit too much marshmallow, if there is such a thing. I then pressed a whole lot of desiccated coconut on top, I felt that it needed a lot for texture and flavour. It did sink in quite well.

You want to wait until it’s well and truly cold, maybe even refrigerated, before you cut it because that marshmallow is STICKY.

The hordes didn’t really like their first piece. Outside their experience. Five to ten minutes later they wanted another bit, just to make sure. And now it’s all gone and they’re clamouring for more. Lucky I’ve got a whole ‘nother packet of marshmallows with issues.

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October 8, 2013

What I’ve learned about Camping. Part Two. Action.

Most people go camping to commune with nature, wander through the bush, live life in the slow lane. Not if you’re camping with my husband, though. He booked us into every activity Glenworth Valley had to offer. And here’s what I learned.

If you’re a middle aged woman going abseiling for the first time in a long time, the key is to stare at the top of your shoes, no lower. If you’re a small boy, you may need moral support.

If you’re a show off fourteen year old boy, you go down every which way.

Here’s how you remove a bush tick. You kill it first with some strong fluid, as it may be Aerogard Tropical Strength. You then grasp it firmly near the skin on your daughter’s neck an remove it with a firm twisting motion. That’s what Gosford Hospital told me, anyway.

I know diamond pythons are as common as belly buttons north of the Tropic of Capricorn. But they can also be found this far south.

There are about two hundred horses at Glenworth Valley, and I think the Muffet may have ridden or patted all of them. I learned that I really quite like riding. But my legs are entirely the wrong shape. It was a full twenty four hours before I could get them to cooperate again.

If you’re a very small boy, no relation to me, and you ride your tiny bike down a steep slope terminating in a ditch, like this,

you will, much to the horror of onlookers, go over the handlebars and break your bike clean in half. It turns out that one of the little boys in the audience wasn’t crying in sympathy, it was his bike. He was to be seen for the next two days forlornly wheeling the front half of his bike around like a pedal free unicycle. The young trick cyclist was essentially unharmed, you’ll be pleased to know.

The last thing I learned won’t be very surprising. It is that, after a hard day riding and abseiling and feeding people and washing up in a bucket, a glass of aged red served in a plastic cup under a sky full of stars, drunk while reclining on a grassy hillside somewhat dotted with horse pats, tastes mighty fine. Mighty fine.

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October 8, 2013

What I’ve Learned about Camping. Part One. Setting Up.

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t my fault we’ve never gone camping. It just that in such an active family we’ve never managed to find a weekend that was completely and totally free of sport. When a long weekend loomed that had been reserved for a family event that was subsequently postponed the time seemed right. Ho for Glenworth Valley.

There appear to be two types of campers. One lot are after a cheap holiday, so they bring along all the comforts of home. A giant tent with multiple annexes. A folding pergola. Tables and chairs. Gas barbecues. Many lights. Flock lined inflatable air beds with pockets so they don’t fling you off if you roll over too incautiously in the night. Their own toilet paper.

And there’s the likes of us who are after the nature experience. I didn’t want to commit to camping too much in case we didn’t like it, so we made do with what we had. We hired a four man tent from reception and brought along a two man tent my husband has grimly retained since childhood in the unwavering knowledge that he would eventually have a family that he would definitely take camping one day. I’m not even sure it’s real tent.

Yes, the banana yellow contraption. It wouldn’t sustain the onslaught of a swarm of monarch butterflies, so it was lucky there was no weather to speak of.

As it turned out, there was a third type camping at Glenworth Valley this weekend. “What’s Confest?” we asked our abseiling guide, Dean, after we’d passed the fourth sign for it. “Well, I don’t know what the C and the O stand for, but the N is for Nudist”, he explained. They were put in the most remote field available, but they still had to ignore utes full of gawkers on their way to abseiling, or kayakers, or the odd string of horse riders. It turns out the Confest is slightly more nuanced than that, but it was definitely a clothing optional event.

To the things I’ve learned. I’ve learned that a child can sleep quite comfortably on ground covered only by a doona, but an adult attempting the same feat becomes rather aware of their hips. A Thermarest or equivalent is the basic minimum requirement for a half decent night’ sleep. I wonder if a yoga mat would work?

I can light a fire.

My dear husband took one look at that and said “that’s never going to light”. What would he know. Nothing. In under five minutes that was a blazing inferno. But apparently I wouldn’t have earned the Scouts badge because I used three matches instead of one. Pfft.

One can make proper coffee camping.

It was more a proof of concept than anything else. We got that pot as a wedding present or something and it has rather languished at the back of the cupboard. I was certainly not going to be drinking instant even if we were going bush. It did work, the handle didn’t melt, but to took ages and was very very very strong. I thought getting a latte from the Glenworth Valley cafe was cheating.

An ablutions block is a marvelous thing to have available while camping. The one in our field was constructed of green powder coated corrugated iron, you pushed one button for a one minute warm shower and that’s really all you need. It was light and well constructed and had three hooks for your stuff and a soap dish and you couldn’t ask for a nicer fit out.

And finally a hammock is an excellent addition to any holiday. A few people brought their own, but we set up within easy reach of an existing one.

I’ll get on to the activities in my next post. Suffice to say they were many and varied.

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October 1, 2013

Strawberry Meringues

I was put off attempting meringues after being kitchen hand to a friend as she made macarons. Man those things are fiddly. Age this, dry that, grind this up, measure the temperature of the other. Make a ganache. Write an anxious email to Adriano Zumbo about your feet. Where I was making my error was in assuming meringues are similar. They aren’t. Do you want the Women’s Weekly fail safe meringue recipe? Of course you do.

It really is just dump all the ingredients in the KitchenAid and let the whisk do its thing. No messing about with the thoroughly clean bowl or the order of ingredients. I’ve made them a few times now to much acclaim. Today, to the annoyance of my family, I decided to mess with them.

I blame ooh aah cooking. She put up a link to instructions for making strawberry dust. You’ll appreciate that the problem with adding flavours to many recipes is the fact that the flavours have to be relatively dry, otherwise they muck up the consistency. But if you can dry out strawberry! Or any other berry, or mango or pineapple or any of those flavoursome but damp fruits! Look out friand recipe. Here’s what you do.

You blend up half a kilo of strawberries. Or however much you have on hand. You spread the pulp over a couple of baking paper lined trays, thus.

You put them in the oven for many hours. The oven temperature should be below 100 degrees, just high enough for water vapour to be condensing on the glass of the oven door. Fifty degrees wasn’t high enough on my oven, I had to go to about seventy. What you end up with is this.

It’s quite dry and feels disturbingly like skin. I didn’t want to dry it out further in case it burned.

You let that cool and ignore your husband’s passing comment that it may be time to request some more hours at work. Blend it up in the blending device you happen to have to hand. It doesn’t quite go to dust.

Now make your fail safe meringue. Place in the KitchenAid bowl the whites of two eggs, one and a half cups of caster sugar, four tablespoons of boiling water, a teaspoon of cornflour, a teaspoon of white vinegar and half a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Whisk for quite some minutes, you can leave it whisking until it gets really solid.

At this point I added in a quarter of a cup of the strawberry not quite powder and whisked that in. Pop heaped teaspoons of the stuff on baking paper lined trays, or you could go all fancy and pipe them, they hold their shape well. Bake at 180 degrees for ten minutes, then drop the oven to about 120 degrees and let it go for another fifty minutes.

See, it has zingy little flecks of strawberry through it. I think they’re delicious. The Horror wants me to go back to plain ones , but he’ll help me out by eating these ones. I still have some strawberry particles left, but I have to go to work now. Additional strawberry awesomeness will have to wait.

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September 17, 2013

Little Coconut Cakes

At least I’ve had some warning this time. Also prior experience. “Mum, can I take something in for the last choir of term?”

The first time I had this request from the Horror it was half an hour before we left for choir, so as I always strive to be a good parent I told him to go jump in the lake. Having learned this lesson I’ve been able to ratchet the request back to a much more reasonable forty eight hours prior. This even enables us to work out what baked good he’d like to take. He’s rather enamoured of something I had a crack at yesterday, namely mini coconut cakes. As they’re almost all gone, I’ve just made another batch. I’ll have to hide them so he has some to take in tomorrow morning.

First, locate some coconut. I like to get mine in flake form from The Source, in Balmain.

A quick visit to the Thermomix turns it into a very fresh tasting desiccated coconut.

One also needs coconut milk. I was able to persuade myself that the ancient tin dug out of the back of the cupboard contained something still edible, no really, it was fine. I tasted it and everything.

Cream together ninety grams of butter with three quarters of a cup of sugar. Add a teaspoon of vanilla essence and an egg and cream some more. Add an egg yolk and incorporate that also. I found some nifty little glass saucers with lids for keeping just such a thing as left over egg whites.

Was it at Peters of Kensington? I can’t remember. But I used some egg whites that had been kept this way for two weeks in the fridge only yesterday, they made excellent meringues.

Add three quarters of a cup of flour and beat that in. Add a third of a cup of coconut milk and the zest and juice of half a lemon and beat that in. Add a third of a cup more of flour and a third of a cup of desiccated coconut and beat that in. Spoon into greased mini muffin tins. Or these saucer shaped things that I think I inherited from my Nanna.

Bake at 160 degrees for about twenty minutes, or until turning golden on top. Don’t they come out a cute shape?

I’ve adapted the recipe from Coconut Tea Cakes in the ever reliable Good Cookie, by Tish Boyle. I have modified a few things. I added the lemon, I love citrus and coconut. I’d like to try lime, but it’s sometimes a bit funny when you cook it, especially the zest. The recipe book suggests sweetened shredded coconut, but I spit on that suggestion. Why can’t Americans sweeten things as they go, or would it be too shocking to see how much sugar they eat? Or are they just trying to use up all the corn syrup? There’s also a fancy frosting to go on top, but I’m not bothering. Too hard to store.

Of course what will happen is that The Horror will take these in tomorrow morning and some kid will have brought in Krispy Kremes. Then the Horror will eat half of the coconut cakes himself at recess and make himself some friends with the other half. Whatever, I’ve done my bit. The housewife’s honour is satisfied.

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September 10, 2013

Lemongrass Iced Tea

Well at least I think it’s lemongrass. The leaves look right, and smell right. The flowers look about right. It’s the stalks that I’m not sure about. They’re segmented and kind of pulpy in the middle and also eight feet tall.

A friend gave them to me, pulled them out of her garden which they were threatening to overtake. I was very pleased, I love home grown surplus. It wasn’t til I got home that I started wondering about them. I chopped up some of the leaves and ran a bath over them. No scent. There was some scent when you rubbed the leaves. And the stalks didn’t look right, they are more like bamboo. “You’d better identify them properly before you kill us all”, said my killjoy husband. No sense of adventure, that man. I thought I’d experiment on myself by making lemongrass tea.

I took some leaves and snipped them into the Thermomix, they’re pretty dry and I didn’t fancy chopping them by hand or pounding them with a mortar and pestle, equipment with which I’ve never had any success at all.

I zapped that lot to get something that looked like it had been scraped from the underbelly of a lawnmower. Undeterred, I added two tablespoons of gunpowder green tea, that black stuff that looks like rat droppings.

It was very fragrant, no denying that. A bit reminiscent of lemon scented Jif, as I always find with lemongrass. I added a litre of water and set the Thermomix going at speed three on reverse at one hundred degrees for ten minutes. The result was full of stuff that I wasn’t confident my usual sieve would catch. So in a stroke of sheer genius I rummaged around in the back of the cupboard to find the coffee percolator we’d got as a wedding present that my brother-in-law actually broke on our wedding day. Couldn’t throw it out, sentimental reasons and all that. But look!

The filter fit exactly over my tea jug and did a marvellous job of removing all the very unappetising looking sediment. I added four tablespoons of honey to the hot tea and tasted. It tasted like slightly bitter green tea. I slung in a bit more honey, added a litre of cold water and stuck it in the fridge, hoping for the best.

I was called in to work the next day and my magic teaching tonsil tonic is iced tea, so I took some of my latest concoction. Much to my surprise it tasted completely different cold. Too much honey, for a start. Otherwise, light, fragrant, with a definite lemongrass aftertaste. Either that or some dishwasher powder residue. It’s good enough to make again, if I can ignore the clamouring for a return to the popular favourite of strawberry iced black tea.

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September 2, 2013

Terribly Healthy Bar

You know I don’t usually do this kind of thing. The whole giving up stuff, I don’t get it myself. Can’t you just have bit less coffee, wine, sugar, white bread, self loathing? Why do you have to give it up entirely? Moderation in all things, I always say, but for many people it doesn’t appear to work. Me, if my trousers are getting a bit tight, I lay off the cake and get a bit more exercise. I don’t go out and buy a bigger size. And I don’t pick something to flagellate myself with. Don’t we all know what food is sometimes food? But I’m surrounded by people who seem to feel better if they give up something entirely, if only for a month.

I have a relative who has given up sugar, and it has been a really big thing for him, a real struggle and he has managed to lose a lot of weight this way. I’m very proud of him, because I know how much he loves the sweet stuff. I have watched him eat a large amount of biscuits at a sitting, so I guess moderation isn’t the best option for him, it’s all or nothing. So I wanted to make him something tasty that he could have with a cup of tea that wouldn’t have him falling off the wagon.

There’s a few variations of this on the webz, and I didn’t think it would hold together. You take a couple of large bananas that have seen better days. You mush them up. You mix these with two cups of oats, or in this case, five grain mix which is even better. You add in about half a cup of chopped other tasty bits and pieces, I chose dried apricots, dates, almonds and shaved coconut.

Chopped in the Thermomix, naturally. Flavours of your choice, in this case a teaspoon of cinnamon, a teaspoon of vanilla and the zest of an orange. I think the orange may have been overdoing it, but heigh ho. Press the lot into a lined square cake tin and bake for about half an hour.

Pickle me grandmother, it does actually hold together. I’d wait until it was cold before cutting it up. It was pretty good in a very hemp lined tree hugging way. Sweeter than I would have expected, that would be all the fruit. But I believe sugar from fruit doesn’t count, it’s one of those regimes with fairly arbitrary rules, based, as they always are, on the work of an American guru. I don’t think you could eat too much of it anyway, your jaw would wear out.

But the main thing was that it tasted good with a cup of tea. Mission accomplished.

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August 29, 2013

Toffee with Gas

You’re getting a peek today into one of my tutorials. I’m teaching fledgling primary school teachers how to teach science and every week we do some hands on activities around one topic. This week we’re playing with air, and there was an activity planned which involved gelatin and a blender and various other things to make something edible with air whipped into it. Well, you know how it is with blenders. These were cheap and nasty ones and burned out on Monday. We can’t have the students not knowing anything at all about air in food. So I’m going to tell them about one of my favourite combinations, air and sugar.

But first! Just the sugar. For a control I need to make this food without the air. When you heat up sugar dissolved in water quite a lot and then cool it quickly, what do you get? Does anyone know? That’s right, toffee, a gold star for you. Just doing it with white sugar is a little dull, so here’s the recipe I’m using today.

Place in a large saucepan three quarters of a cup of white sugar, two tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of golden syrup and two tablespoons of water.

Generally a toffee mix will have more water in it, but bear with me. Heat it gently while stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Not too gently, you don’t want to be there all day. You let that bubble away without stirring it until it gets to about 150 degrees Celsius. You determine what the temperature is with a candy thermometer.

If you have a dodgy thermometer like I do that appears to have got water in it and is unreadable, or just don’t have one, you want to test the mix periodically for consistency. You do this by dropping a bit of it onto a saucer of cold water.

Those little blobs will go from stuff you can swirl around, to blobs that retain their shape, to blobs that are fairly firm but can be squished, to hard crunchy little blobs. Those last two steps can be quite close together. Get that stuff off the heat and pour it onto a baking tray lined with baking paper.

Pretty soon it will harden and you can snap it into bite sized tooth gluing pieces.

We could go into the chemistry of what’s going on here, and it’s a lot more complicated than you’d think. I’ll restrain myself and just mention that the sugar hasn’t really melted, kind of, because it’s thought that sugar doesn’t actually melt, it decomposes into a whole lot of other compounds, some of which melt at this temperature and some of which don’t, and it’s still kind of in solution with a tiny bit of water. Dumping it onto a cold tray not only recrystallises the sugar and the breakdown compounds, but by doing it fast you’ve also turned it into a glass. Don’t get me started.

So how do we add air to toffee? I’m glad you asked. Bicarbonate of soda.

Make the toffee as before. But just at that point where you’re taking it off the heat, chuck in a teaspoon and a half of bicarbonate of soda. You’d kind of expect that a bit of bicarb into this super hot boiling mess would pretty much explode. But it doesn’t, because what it would like to react with is water, and there’s only a tiny bit in there. Mix it fast with a wooden spoon, you want those carbon dioxide bubbles distributed throughout the whole lot before it starts solidifying. Dump it, as before, onto a lined baking tray.

Honeycomb. You’ve made honeycomb. It has little to no resemblance to that waxy stuff you find in a beehive, but we’ll let that go too. This will also set pretty fast, when it’s cool you can snap it into pieces. Now taste some of the toffee and some of the honeycomb. The honeycomb will give you a bit of a buzz on your tongue from unreacted bicarb, but ignoring that, aren’t they completely different eating experiences? And the difference is air. You lucky lucky tutorial class, you actually get to try some. Aren’t you glad the blenders burned out?

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August 26, 2013

The Cat

I am getting to the stage where you’ve heard it all before. I am making lots of stuff, litres of strawberry jam, strawberry tea, jam slice (with the failed first batch of jam), raisin bread, but it’s all a bit fresh in the audience memory. So I’m going to talk about the cat.

I first suspected that something was wrong when he would stand in front of a toilet with the lid closed and make a sound like a toddler was tying his tail into a neat bow. He wanted to drink from the toilet. A lot. To the point where he’d actually nag you to get off the thing, are you going to spend all day there? Oh, we supply a bowl of water, but apparently it has dog germs. He was one thirsty cat.

So the vet did a thing where they deftly inserted a needle into him and withdrew some fluid ounces of urine. The urine was all wrong, Linus was in the early stages of renal failure. But don’t worry, they blithely reassured me. Give him these pills and this special food and you’ll have him for years to come! He’s already nearly fifteen. I’m still getting the stains out of the carpet from the last elderly cat we had on the premises. Years, hey. Hmm. That food is really expensive.

He liked the first sachet. But not the second, after I’d bought a case of the stuff. I’m not surprised, it looks like the sort of thing a small marsupial would produce after a night on the turps.

So I spent a few days trying to encourage him to eat it. “This is bogus”, he’d say. “Where’s the real food?”

He’d also stick his claws into me quite a lot. The dogs, on the other hand, thought the stuff was delicious, so I’d have to guard Linus every time he wanted to eat, which was every ten minutes. So very irksome. So I looked up do it yourself renal care food. Wow, too complex, and I don’t know if I’d like to risk grinding chicken bones in the Thermomix. So many supplements, and who knows if you’d get the balance right? Question, what would he be eating in the wild? Answer, nothing, he’d be dead. And guess what my research also uncovered? A cat will actually starve itself to death if it doesn’t approve of the food choices its human is making for it. I’ve had cats all my life, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So for the moment we’re going with a compromise. He gets the pill, that’s not a problem. I mix some marsupial poop with the renal kibble and a scoop of delicious kangaroo meat, his previous high protein diet. Human grade too, sometimes I suspect the pet grade stuff is just sawdust soaked in blood. He’s stopped sticking his claws into me quite as much.

He’s not nagging people to stop using in his water bowl as a toilet any more. This may just work.

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