Author: Bunny Eats Design

Officially ruined

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Let me get something straight. I’ve always been an instant coffee girl. Quite happily. Yes, espresso is lovely, but without an espresso maker, who can afford to buy a daily espresso? Not I. Espresso was a once a fortnight treat. Until now. The Koala and I were very spoilt and received a ROK manual espresso maker from my parents for Christmas. I’ve been enjoying a lot of espresso lately. The ROK is a breeze to use and best of all, it’s FUN. Make something fun to use and it will practically run itself. Why we love the ROK: Great tasting espresso Easy to use Easy to clean Fun 10 year warranty Does not require electricity (just add boiling water) Beautifully designed Comes with spoon/tamper (spamper) Makes a double shot espresso by default I’ve been avoiding coffee at work because I fear instant coffee wont live up to espresso, but after a couple of weeks of espresso, I had my first instant coffee and I found it tasted like ass. What have you ruined for yourself …

Double pass to om nom yum

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I am pleased to announce a double pass worth $40 to give away to one lucky reader courtesy of the Auckland Seafood Festival. All you have to do is share one word that best describes your favourite seafood in the comment section below. Delicious words like Mills & Boon 50 Shades for food voyeurs. Terms and Conditions One entry per person Valid email address must be supplied with entry and winner will be contacted by email Entries close midday Monday 21 January 2013 Winner drawn on Monday 21 January 2013 and announced on this blog and on the Facebook page You must be able to attend the Auckland Seafood Festival on any of the festival days: 26, 27 or 28 January 2013 Prize not transferrable for cash. No food, booze, flights, travel or accommodation expenses will be provided. You make your own way there You must be aged 18 and over to enter To be eligible, entries must fulfill the competition requirements Bunny Eats Design reserves the right to reject any entry if it does not meet the criteria above …

Dreaming of plump, sweet scampi

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Auckland Anniversary means that our little city enjoys a 3 day weekend. This mid-Summer holiday means locals flock to the beach and the outdoors and gorge on fine food and booze (New Years resolutions already forgotten). If you’re interested in feasting on incredibly fresh, beautifully cooked seafood, head down to Halsey Wharf at Wynyard Quarter next weekend for the Auckland Seafood Festival. A community project with proceeds going to local charities, there’s all sorts of good juju in attending this festival. Not to be missed if you love seafood. With over 65 seafood dishes on the menu there is surely several dishes to tickle the tastebuds of seafood lovers. The Wild Seafood Challenge is on again and for $12 a good way to tick off some seafood boxes. This year’s Wild Seafood Challenge includes: Raw Kina Marinated Sea Cucumber in Coconut with Ginelli’s Lemon, Lime and Cucumber Sorbet Marinated Grilled small fish with Kawakawa aioli Grilled Octopus The Mussel Mary with Ginelli’s Champagne sorbet Grilled Scampi Last year’s super popular Scampi Street will be back and …

The smallest piece

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“The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece… the whole universe will get busted.” – Beasts of the Southern Wild Our oven got busted. The smallest piece, the pin for the oven timer snapped off rendering the whole oven useless. Our landlord has been and gone, taking the timer with him so we have a hole where it used to be. Hopefully it is an easy and quick fix. Our stove works fine so I’m not relying on raw or microwave meals. Just no roasting or baking for a while. At least this isn’t a baking blog! Stovetop pavlova and cheesecake anyone?

Mozzarella Pizza

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After making Caprese Salad with my home made mozzarella, I still had about a third of the 250 grams of cheese left. There is no such thing as leftover cheese in this household and pizza is a surefire way to use up cheese. I always keep a packet of tortillas in the freezer and they’re great for pizza as you don’t need to defrost. Just start loading up with toppings and by the time you’re ready to pop into your pre-heated oven, they’re already defrosted. Four decent sized blobs of mozzarella dotted each of our four pizzas as well as prawn, capsicum, mushroom, onion, garlic, basil and tomato/mayo sauce. A perfect way to use fresh mozzarella.

Caprese Salad

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This post is part of Our Growing Edge, a monthly blogging event I have started to encourage us to try new food related things. If you have a blog and have tried something new this month, come and join this event. I put Caprese Salad on my Summer To Do List because I always loved the simple, contrasting ingredients. Summer tomatoes + soft milky mozzarella fior di latte + green fragrant basil. It looked easy but I’d never made it before. Since I just made mozzarella fior di latte from scratch, Caprese seemed to be the perfect way to enjoy it. The gist of it: Cut the mozzarella and ripe truss tomatoes into thick slices. Alternate slices on a platter. Tuck fresh whole basil leaves here and there. Finish off with a drizzle of good quality extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt and black pepper. Dig in with forks 🙂 Check back tomorrow to see what I made with the rest of the mozzarella.

Notes on Mozzarella

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I couldn’t stand that mozzarella eluded me. Not one to admit defeat, I tried making mozzarella one more time. Much better results! A single ball of mozzarella – enough for a meal or two – can easily set you back $10 or $15NZ.  The unhomogenised farmhouse milk I bought from our supermarket was expensive at $5 for a 2 litre bottle, makes about 250grams of mozzarella so worth the effort. I’m no expert on mozzarella, but I believe failures and learning how to correct failures give you a better understanding of the process. Failures make you better at what you do. If you never fail at something, you might never know how to correct something if it one day all goes horribly wrong. This time I used the recipe by Allison from Pease Pudding, combined with my previous research. I had to add 0.5ml of calcium chloride to Allison’s recipe as my curds refused to form even after half an hour. 5 tips on making mozzarella: If your curds refuse to form, add 0.5ml calcium …

Tofu Tuesday: Tofu’s Grotto

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Tofu hangs out in our backyard from morning to night. He has free reign of his little kingdom which includes a decent sized backyard and all of the underside of the house and deck. It gets pretty hot outside in the summer though and he’s pruned and landscaped to his exacting shade and size requirements. Behind our shed, within the bushes, Tofu the bunny has hollowed out a nifty grotto to relax in the heat of the summer afternoon. This is where we will find him on a hot day. This shady green cave has at least 3 entrances and plenty of room for a bunny to stretch out.

Tofu Tuesday: Kitchen Scales

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My sister got me this set of kitchen scales for Christmas. Of course, the first thing we weighed was this little dude. Tofu’s diet hasn’t resulted in any weight loss, in fact, at 2.6kg he’s gained 100 grams since he was last weighed. Still, his diet was for better health rather than weight loss so it’s not a complete loss. He hasn’t required a bath since his diet started so that is a very, very good thing. A new year often brings eating related resolutions, but being healthy should always outweigh weight loss. Wishing you all a happy new year and enjoyment of the good life.

Monday Bunday: The Welsh Rabbit Cheesery

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This restaurant branding for The Welsh Rabbit Cheesery by Candy Coated Universe is smart and sassy. I love the nod to vintage design as well as the twee rehash of classic tattoo art. The limited colour palette with touches of red is very chic these days. I hope this look is here to stay. The twine and brown paper packaging with rubber stamp make me pine for cheese. Oh no wait, I pine for cheese just fine on my own. See more work from Candy Coated Universe at their website here. This project was designed for Tenfold Collective who I’ve blogged about before and are also tickled by bunny shapes.

What are you doin’ New Years Eve?

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Wishing everyone a happy New Year! This duet by Zooey Deshanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was uploaded one year ago today. Adorable. I learned how to play the ukelele one afternoon last summer. I was left to my own devices at my parent’s house and so I helped myself to my little sister’s uke. It’s a fun instrument to pick up, especially if you’ve ever played the guitar or violin (I played both) but I’ve forgotten how the uke chords go already. No doubt this time of year is seriously overrated, but I’ll be first to put my hand up to organize something fabulous to do. We usually head to one of the many beach towns around and stay in a bach (holiday house) for the week. This year many of our friends are away so it’s going to be a little more low key. Still, we bought ourselves two bottles of our favourite white and gold rums for the occasion. Party on lovelies.

Macadamia Pesto (by hand)

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Pesto is one of those things I buy all the time and I often wonder if it’s worth the price for what you get. Pine nuts are ridiculously expensive and with a macadamia nut tree in our backyard, I figured I should try to make some macadamia nut pesto. The macadamia nuts I harvested from our tree about 6 months ago are now dry are ready for eating. The nuts haven’t been roasted, but in their raw state, the are great for pesto. Let me start off by admitting I don’t own a food processor. I had one once but I never used it so I gave it away. This pesto recipe is all choppped by hand which doesn’t take long at all, but would be faster if you let a machine do the chopping. Saying that, it’s also really satisfying chopping up a whole bunch of stuff. I mixed this batch of pesto with a pan of whole button mushrooms and baked for 20 minutes in an 180°C / 350°F oven but this would …