Hello friends,
The weather has been fairly rainy lately, to the point where we haven’t gone out much. The little one is a little stir crazy at points. One of the honest saving graces is a TV show that he’s obsessed with. He seems to have graduated from the Disney channel. Straight into the Discovery channel and animal planet. He’s completely obsessed with Abalone Wars. I think some people here are from Australia and know of the industry but it was new to us. He hunts in a makeshift ocean and is using his summer swim goggles every moment of the day lol.
In honor of his recent obsession, I decided to make some fun food. If you know what an abalone look like, it’s pretty disgusting honestly so I wasn’t going to do that at all. I did however make some cute fish with his berries. One of the local farm stores we frequent got a brand new shipment of organic strawberries. Scored a couple of those packages! They also had blueberries so naturally we scored some of that too. We try to instill a good diet of fresh fruits and veggies, he rarely eats anything out of a box except for pasta and organic Cheerios (off brand oat O’s, not the cheerio brand lol). When he saw the little fish strawberries, he was pumped! Went hunting for abalone for a couple hours after that lol gave me some peace!
In our spirit of making our own homemade stuff, one thing we’ve been waiting to do is make our own pickled stuff. There are a hell of a lot of recipes so it’s crazy to figure out which one to use but we have this one we tried. It was a ‘quick’ pickling of 5 days sitting time. Some were months! As 
The recipe had nice dill, mustard seeds, coriander, allspice, dill, bay leaves and peppercorns. The only thing we weren’t too thrilled about was the red pepper flakes. We love spicy stuff but a pickle recipe is not what we want that in. Maybe we will try it in another recipe, not sure.
The finished product, waiting to sit in the fridge to cure for a couple days. It’s looking pretty good! We busted out the mandolin to make some nice cucumber slices, wanted to make it look professional. We used some nice organic cucumbers we got in our Misfit Market box, so it’s been nice to use up what we’ve got instead of using boxed foods. Thankfully the little one loves dill pickle chips, sometimes he will snack on 15-20 chips at once, too much for me but he enjoys it!
One period of really nice weather was the other day where I took this picture. These plants aren’t ones I’m used to but boy were they thriving. With all of this restriction business, people haven’t been out to do things like kill ‘weeds’ (not a fan, these plants belong here not necessarily the monoculture grass) which I’m sure someone has complained about. The condo association will kill these poor things. I would try to research and harvest a few samples of stuff like this to see if it’s edible but as nice as that pond looks, I don’t trust the water. Some points it looks gross! I think it’s man made so that’s not too shocking.
Take care everyone and stay positive, things are on the mend for a lot of people!
