Hi all my loyal readers! Now that I’m slowly recovering from the recent technical difficulties I figured now will be a good time to link into FeedBurner so I can get a few more stats and try and tailor this blog to suit you!

So, with that in mind I’ve had to get a new RSS link, so please all update your readers, sit back and enjoy the meal.

Tags:Technical Difficulties

Stopping at The Deli in Erskineville, more to check out the cute guy that works there than anything, I floated around infront of the shelves until I spotted something I could justify buying to myself. Eventually I spotted a range of muslies from a little company called ilseum. 350 gram zip lock upright bags of a few different styles of muslie and a porridge made from all organic Australian ingredients. All approx $10 a pack.

ilesum Porridge

I asked the hot guy what it was like and he said he’d not tried the porridge yet but likes the ‘sweetly toasted’ variation of muslie - slow roasted oats, almonds, saltanas and honey.

The porridge is quite nice, surprisingly light in flavour for something that’s traditionally seen as very heavy. It’s probably got something to do with the great variety of fruit mixed in with currants, granny smith apples, cavendish bananas, nectarines, mini golden raisins, saultanas and peaches. Having said that though, it was a little light on the fruit for what I was expecting. It still needed a bit of cinnamon across the top and a bit of added sugar or honey across the top.

Tags:Porridge, Breakfast, Dried Fruit, Mueslie, Erskineville

At my housewarming I invited over my neighbors as a gesture of good faith just incase we got a little too ruccus and couldn’t sleep. They can hardly complain if they were part of it now can they? :P As a plesant surprise it turns out my neighbours are a wonderful couple. They told me all about the neighbours, stopping short of gossip. Who’s renovating, who isn’t social, who doesn’t pick up after their dog etc. Great neighboury stuff which is exactly what I was looking for when I moved here.

Not long afterwards they invited me to their house for dinner to meet some of the other people from the street. It was a dinner party, a real dinner party with linen table cloths, napkins and the good silver.

Oatmeal and Blueberry Cookies

As a thank-you I thought I’d make a small batch of cookies for them, but what? They had to be wholesome, they were a gift for a neighbor afterall and you can’t get any more wholesome than oatmeal cookies but of course I had to jazz it up a little. Forget the raisins. Blueberries were the go! I was going to use dried cherries but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Of course the week after I found them at David Jones. To give them a bit of extra depth you don’t usually find in oatmeal cookies I used rolled oats and rolled rye that have an earthier flavour that isn’t overpowering. If you cant find or cant be bothered, just use all oat.

Oatmeal and Blueberry Cookies - makes 24
150 grams unsalted butter, softened
⅓ cup of brown sugar
⅓ castor sugar
1 large egg
¾ cups of rolled oats
¾ cups of rolled rye
¾ cups of flour
1 teaspoon of bicarb
½ teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of vanilla
2 cups of dried blueberries (or any other dried fruit)


Preheat your oven to 200ºC. Beat together the butter and sugars until they are light and fluffy. It won’t be as pale as regular creamed butter and sugar because of the brown sugar so don’t worry about that. On a lower speed, add the egg and vanilla. Sift the flour and mix in the dry ingredients.

When well combined, but not over mixed, place dessert spoonfuls of the mix on a greased or properly lined baking tray about 4 or 5 cm apart. Learn from my mistake - if you use cookie sheets be prepared for the excess butter melting out of the cookies and going all over the place!

If you’ve got an even temp oven, bake two sheets at a time for 12 minutes. Mine isn’t so good so I did 1 sheet at a time checking after 10 min and rotating the tray.

Tags:Cookies, Oats, Oatmeal, Blueberries, Dried Fruit

So, an apology to all of the loyal readers of the red whisk. I’ve been suffering some rather nasty technical difficulties of late but they’re almost all sorted now. The mail server is still not back to it’s full operational standards but at least I’ve got the web server working! Please expect a normal posting schedule to resume shortly.

Also, while I had the chance I just wanted to give a shout out to the 20% of my readers that are from Japan and the 20% of people that are viewing my website from iPod touches... Hi :)

A Burnt Sausage

Tags:Burnt, Sausage, Technical Difficulties

It seemed for a while everyone in Sydney had the flu quite badly. It got bad, then better and then all of a sudden it would hit back with vengeance for all of the cough syrup and chicken soup that you threw at it. I was sick for almost two months!

My chesty cough was Benadryl Chesty Forte with a new berry flavour. Mostly because it was the only one I could find that was non-drowsy at any of the pharmacies I went to. Benadryl is Australia’s number one choice too, or at least it is according to the website. I was never sure if it actually made a difference scientifically or if it was just a placebo but from time to time the cough did seem a little less than with out it.

Luckily I had a chesty cough and not a dry cough. The dry cough Benadryl is a disgusting butter-menthol flavour. Who likes butter-menthol anyway and why make cough syrup even worse than it is?

As for the flavour, still try and wash this stuff down quickly but the initial shock you get from normal cough syrups isn’t there with this stuff. Don’t get me wrong though, its still bad but not what you remember from being a kid. The pain hits your sour taste buds at the back and to the sides of your tongue and then the bitter right at the back.

Benadryl Chesty Forte - Berry Flavour

Tags:Cough Syrup, Condiment