Lemon cheesecake

Every year I make cheesecakes.  I love them, the kids love them, everyone loves them and they are just sooo easy to make.

I use a very deep, pop out bottom, round, heavy duty baking pan as this makes the cheesecake very easy to serve and it looks great.  When finished the cheesecake weighs around 2kg!  A very heavy, dense, no cooking required cheesecake.

They are quite tangy lemon and can be finished in many ways.  Sometimes I stir through some chocolate mousse in the cheesecake mix to give a marbled effect.  Sometimes I top the cheesecake with fresh fruit but today I decided for a chocolately top to counteract the lemon tang.

Cheesecake Base (per cheesecake):  3 pkts of Granita biscuits, 125gms of soft butter.

Ingredients for each cheesecake filling:  3 pkts of Philidelphia cheese, 3 tins of Nestle condensed sweetened milk, the juice of 6 medium lemons,  1 sachet of gellotine powder.

To make the base:  Place 3 pkts of Granita biscuits into blender with plastic blade and mix until very fine.  Add softened butter and mix for about 1 minute until all crumbed biscuits are moistened.  Stop mixing a couple of times to fold through with spoon.  Tip out the mixture into the base of the tin (at this point when the mix is loose it will come up to about half way in the tin).  Press down firmly with the palm of your hand concentrating on the edges first by pressing down firmly.  Keep pressing down until the base is even in thickness and is pressed down so the base is now about 1/5th up the side all the way around.

Lemon No Bake Cheesecake

To mix the cheese mixture:  Tip lemon juice into clean blender and add 3 tins of condensed milk.  Turn on for 2 minutes to mix thoroughly.  Cube the philly cheese and add slowly while blender is on medium high.  Stop every 30 seconds to manually mix with a spoon as the mixture is very “gluggy” and you want t ensure all the philly cheese is blended.  The mixture should be quite stiff but still pourable… it should “peak” if you lift the spoon out of the surface.  Put the gellotine power into a cup and add very hot water (approx 100mls) out of the tap mixing very quickly with a fork.  Turn the blender on and quickly add the gellotine before it sets.  Mix for about 30 seconds and then quickly tip onto the biscuit base in the tip.  Smooth the top.

Finishing your cheesecake:  At this point if you want to add a “dry” topping you can.  I used 5 flakes that I crushed and evenly distributed on the tops of each of them.  Refridgerate the cheesecake over night.  If you plan on topping with fruit then do this just before serving.  Fresh Strawberries or mixed berries on the top are my favourite.  The kids like these flake topped ones!

Garnished with pineapple

The ham was purchased from a local butcher who grows his own pork.

It smelt great and although it was cooked & smoked and ready to serve, I always find that it tends to be too rare near the bone so I cooked it at 200c for one hour then removed the rind leaving a layer of fat on the ham.

I sliced through the fat into the ham making a diamond pattern.  The glaze was made by mixing:  Juice of 2 oranges, finely grated peel of 1 orange, 1 cup of Red gum honey, 4 teaspoons of mustard powder and 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar.

I placed thin sliced pineaple and cheries over the top and fixed them with toothpicks. I don’t particularly like cloves (which tend to be the usual garnish for glazed ham) so instead I used star annise.

Glazed and ready to eat!

I then painted the glaze mix over the ham and placed in the oven for a further 40

Citrus, honey glazed ham

minutes.  I basted every 10 minutes or so to ensure the pineapple & ham did not dry.

I am happy with the result s far as looks go.  As for the taste… well I will have to wait until tomorrow’s lunch.  I plan to serve the ham cold.

I also cooked two rolled turkey roasts today that I had purchased ready to cook from the local butcher.  They came with stuffing in the centre.  I placed them in a tray 1/2 filled with water and cooked them for 2 hours on 200c.  The result was delicious with the skin brown and crispy but the meat moist and easy to slice.  I am taking one of these cold to Cliff’s family brunch and the other is staying in the fridge for cold meat over the next few days.  Now its time to make the cheese cakes!

This is the easiest of salads to make.  I didn’t follow a receipe but just used ingredients that I personally like.  I used 2/3s of a large box of cousous and added 1 litre of boiling chicken stock (shop bought stock) and stirred a couple of times over the 3 minutes it took to be ready.  I had cubed sweet potatoe and cooked it for 6 minutes until soft in the microwave and added this plus: 1 packet of raw cashews, 1 jar of roasted eggplant (cut into small pieces), 1 jar of fire roasted red capsicum strips, 1 small bunch of fresh coriander and italian parsley (just the picked off leaves).  I then added a couple of pinches each of: garlic powder, paprika, cumin, and chilli.  I finished it with the juice of two limes and stired it through.  It was delicious…. just a hint of spice, the crunch of cashews and the flavours of the fresh herbs with the egglplant, capsicum and sweet potatoe.  I grilled some chicken breasts in lemon pepper and sliced them and plated the chicken on top of the couscous.  As I’d made such a huge amount we have left overs to have with dinner tonight.  We also have couscous and left over chicken for work lunch today.  YUM!!

Home Services Nightmare

Earlier this year when I was working long hours I decided I didn’t want to spend my weekends house working so when a leaflet arrived in our local community newspaper I thought I’d hire a house work fairy.  The phone call I made was the prelude to a nightmare which is still not over.

I contacted the Fremantle office of a company called Home Services Australia who are based in WA (Fremantle) and in Sydney.  I booked a ‘trial clean’ and a guy (who said he was the supervisor) and 3 ladies (who did not speak English) arrived.  They started cleaning and the guy checked their work and made them re-do some of their tasks.  He got me to sign a form to allow them in the house (he said for insurance purposes)… omg never believe what people say about “don’t worry about the small print”!  I asked if he would be attending at every future clean because it was obvious the women did not understand anything I said as their replies were so vague.  Anyway… to cut a long story short.  Home Services Aust contacted me and said that I could buy a 20 hour bulk clean for $639 and I verbally agreed to this over the phone.  The cleaners turned up (MINUS the supervisor) and the job they did was 2nd rate.  The 3rd clean went the same way, no supervisor and a 2nd rate job done by the women.  Also they did not stay for the alloted time on one of these occasions.  I then looked at my credit card statement and was shocked to find that, not 1, but 2 amounts of $639 had been deducted from my credit card within 2 weeks.  Considering at this point I had paid upfront for the first clean and had 2 further cleans (amounting to 8 hours out of the 20 I’d paid for) I was very angry.  I contacted Home Services Australia who said “I’d signed a contract”.  I said that I’d never received a copy of any contract, nor any invoice for the payments (which I had requested several times).  They said that they had posted them to me weeks ago and that I’d signed a contract in April! (I didn’t even live in the house in April and had only heard of this company in September!).  Anyway…. emails went back and forth and basically the woman told me that they would NOT refund the 2nd amount of $639 but I could use their services at any time up to 2 years!  I requested that they fax me the copies of the invoices and I was (not) surprised to see that they had my surname incorrect.  I guess in some ways this explains, perhaps, their error in charging me the 2nd amount as their accounts person may have looked at this person’s account rather than mine.  Two days later I also received the invoices in the mail at home (the ones that she said had been posted weeks ago but the envelope was stamped as the same day I had initially phoned the company to complain).  I sent the company a letter in early November and went through the entire scenario explaining that even with the ‘contract’ that I had signed on the first day with the supervisor there was not any time that I had signed a form that had and amount, my credit card details or an amount and therefore the debit to my credit card was invalid.  To this date I have had no contact from this company regarding my letter.

As it was obvious they are just ignoring me I contacted my bank and had the 2nd (unauthorised) debit reversed and cancelled my credit card in case they used it again for a further invalid debit.  I also contacted the state’s consumer affairs / fair trade and have lodged a formal complaint about the conduct of this company.  I believe that this is what this company does… ring in a new customer, charge as many times to their credit card as they can and advise that they “don’t refund for any reason” and if they have  half the customers cancel credit cards and their services they are a thousand or so dollars ahead for every initial contact.  For me…. it cost me just over $1400 for a total of 12 hours service in total $116 per hour… wow that’s a pretty good profit margin!

Motorbike Frog

Several months ago we booked a swimming pool renovator to re-plaster and tile our cement swimming pool as ours is old and in bad repair.  But the months and weeks have dragged on and he has not turned up so over this time our pool had become a cesspool.  On the weekend I rang him and said “just give it to me straight - are we going to have our pool done by Christmas?”.  As the answer was “no” we decided to get our swimming pool back to normal so we can actually swim in it.  Cliff bombed it with chlorine to kill off the pond scum. The pool was so green that you couldn’t even see the sides of the pool.  He also put the hose in the pool to top up the water level so he could vacuum it.  About half an hour later an unhappy frog was clinging to the hose.  This is the first time we’d seen a frog at this house and we weren’t aware there were any around.  It was a motorbike frog (scientific name: Litoria Moorei), which is a local, still prolific, breed of frog.  They are beautiful, quite large (about 10cm long by 5cm wide) and their back legs are big.  They have lovely fingers that, if you place a stick near them, they will grab onto it just like a human hand.  We scooped out the frog with the pool net so it couldn’t get away from us in the over-chlorinated pool (as chlorine would no doubt be toxic in a short space of time with such porous skin) and placed it in a damp spot in the garden.  The next day when I walked past our fish pond (which has 12 large goldfish and koi in it) there was the frog bobbing about.  He seemed totally at home and looked much happier than he had the day before.

Swans on the Swan River

On Sunday we decided to go for a bike ride.  Usually we choose a circuit of between 20 and 30kms that, if it takes place around midday, includes a stop at a cafe somewhere for lunch.

We headed off from at 10.30am towards the Swan River near Mt Pleasant and followed the river along to the “Raffles” at the Canning Bridge.  From the Canning Bridge we swapped to the other side of the river and continued along the edge of the road to the yacht club before getting back onto the cycleway.

We decided to lunch at the Point Walter cafe on the river “Walters Cafe”.  Cliff had a steak sandwich with wedges and I had a BLT with chips.  We also had a couple of ‘Red Backs’ each, which at the time seemed like a grand idea, however I always have trouble cycling on a stomach filled with bubbly beer.  Obviously the beer must have gone to our heads because we decided rather than heading home (we’d already travelled around 20kms) that we would continue on to the Fremantle E Shed.  Unfortunately a kilometre after heading off up the hill through the bush and re-joining the river we hit a head wind.  Head winds are the cyclists enemy as far as I am concerned.  I don’t enjoy cycling into a strong head wind… in fact it tends to make me tired and quite grumpy!  We arrived at the E Shed and ate an (unpalatable) ice cream each and then turned East to head home again.  In what has become a bizarre phenomenon we hit a head wind again heading in the opposite direction to the head wind we’d arrived on (how does this happen?).  For some reason we were both extremely tired by this time and the trip home seemed extra long.

At this time of year there are always lots of Black Swans on the Swan River and on this trip we encountered a group of a dozen of them following an unhappy Pelican.  The Pelican kept turning around and flapping his mouth and wings at the Swan unhappily when they gained on him.  In the end the Pelican gave up and flew off in disgust and the swans continued on.  Black Swans are the reason the main river here in Perth IS the Swan River.  In fact the Black Swan is the emblem of Western Australia.  WA gave Queen Elizabeth Black Swans as a gift on WA’s 150th so England also has a flock of Black Swans (which are smaller than their native White Swan).

The round trip from home to Fremantle and back with the stop over for lunch was 53kms!  When we got home we showered and decided to “rest our eyes for half an hour”…. I woke up two hours later when it was dark….. at 9pm!  We got up for a few hours and watched tv and read so we would be able to get a good nights sleep for work the next day.  No chance me not sleeping that night however, I was totally stuffed!