eating our way around bali!

My favourite way to survive the Melbourne winter is to escape to much warmer surrounds for at least a fortnight! This year we returned to beautiful Bali for our belated honeymoon. Almost instantly after landing I lost track of what day it was. I did however, keep tabs on when it was time for breakfast... second breakfast... early lunch... late lunch... there's just something about Bali that stimulates the appetite and sets the tastebuds salivating for every opportunity to eat yet another delicious meal!

at Mushroom Bay in the beautiful island of Nusa Lembongan

We had a wonderful time, having fun getting up to lots of activities. Moo is now a certified Scuba Diver! We also did lots of swimming, snorkelling, trekking, canoeing, horse riding. We also did a cooking class and of course indulged in LOTS OF EATING!

We love to eat at the local warungs. Check this out:

See all this food? All for... under $5! From our favourite warung in Legian - Warung Mudah on Jalan Double Six.

The Balinese have wonderful sauces - sambals. It was great to learn how to make some in our cooking class (more on that next post).

Here is a raw sambal that our friend Janu's mother made for us in Nusa Lembongan. Janu showed us how to eat with our hands, Balinese style, and ate two delicious fresh grilled whole tuna with the sambal and rice. The sambal was made of coconut oil, lots of shallots and garlic, and of course chilli. I think it was possibly my favourite meal of the trip. So simple, so fresh and so tasty!

The coconut oil in Bali seems to be different from what I have been able to locate in Melbourne. The Balinese coconut oil is a light oil, not at all smokey, just a light fragrant taste and very light coloured and clear. Does anyone have any idea if it's possible to find this in Melbourne? I thought if we'd be able to find it anywhere it'd be at our local markets and stores in Footscray but our searches have been to no avail so far!

Upon returning to Ubud, we headed straight to Ibu Oka opposite Ubud Palace for their legendary babi guling - suckling pig! I think if I had to choose a last meal, it would be babi guling! Gets me every time. As you can see, it's very popular with the local dogs too.

There are many hikes you can do from Ubud, up to the surrounding rice terraces and villages. We took a jalan jalan up Jalan Kajeng and followed it all the way up the top of the hill through the rice fields

And across to the Sari Organic Cafe - where they support local farmers and actively promote and encourage them to grow organic crops. They have an onsight kitchen garden where they harvest produce for use in the cafe.

breakfast!

you wouldn't expect it but they have the tastiest potatoes in Bali!

We took a day trip to Kedisan, to spend a half day canoeing Lake Batur.

canoeing Lake Batur

It was a very fine day, perfect conditions for canoeing - very little wind and the waters were very smoothe. Still after a few hours of canoeing lunch was very welcome! And delicious! That's a fresh-as-it-comes fish from the very lake we were just canoeing in.

Back in Ubud we also booked in for a very expensive meal (and I mean expensive by western standards let alone Balinese standards!) at the exclusive, internationally renowned Mozaic. It was a full degustation meal but truly an experience! Eat dish was an explosion of flavour. Some samples for your eyes:

This trip we made the journey across the island to West Bali - it took about 4 hours drive from Ubud. Along the way we stopped in at Lake Bratan which has a stunning temple on the lake:

lady of the lake

And then we headed up to a village in the surrounding mountains, called Munduk which has a beautiful waterfall you get hike down to:

And of course after all that walking, we had worked up a fierce appetite. We stopped in at a new restaurant opposite the waterfalls entrance with this tremendous view of the valley

And we tucked into some wonderful homestyle cooked meals.

a soothing clear broth soup with minced pork, chillies and fresh chives - ultimate comfort food!

 

beef curry

In West Bali we stayed at a resort in Banyuwedang, very close to the West Bali National Park (Taman Nasional Bali Barat). We ate at the resort restaurant most of the time while there which had a great selection of Balinese and Javanese cuisine (it's just a 30 minute boat ride from west bali to Java, we could see it from our resort!) as well as Japanese and western cuisine.

Bali is plentiful with fresh, tasty snapper

nom nom tuna steaks

grilled seafood special - king prawns and calamari

ramen

We rented a motorbike and travelled up the road to have lunch at the stunning Bali Tower Restaurant - originally built as an observatory tower for the West Bali National Park. 

this was *the* best fried ayam (chicken) with a tomato type relish and chilli sambal

a daily delight - mee goreng!

black rice pudding mmm

All in all, a wonderfully relaxing trip! Next post will be sharing our Balinese cooking class! Stay tuned...

watch out, moo has a new hero

I've been rather obsessively trawling the internet for inspiration, instructions, photos, videos on how to build your own chook house, as well as looking out for affordable but decent quality ones to buy.

Amidst the search I stumbled across GardenGirl on Youtube last night. Inspirational! Lady with powertool,  and not afraid to use it! I like it. I want to be that!

Just check this out, would ya? This one is actually a edited, combined video of several video tutorials she has. But she has a multi-series video about making a chook tractor that fits perfectly within one of her raised beds, so she can rotate them in the fallow beds in a crop rotation. GENIUS!

This is JUST the type of inspiration I need, especially after the huge headache I got today trying to sort out our rainwater tank. Have decided we're going to build a base for it ourselves. Hand me that power drill!

p.d.c. here i come

[re-greening the suburbs via flickr]

Woooooooooo... I am very excited because I've finally signed up to do something I've been wanting to do for ages!

I am going to do my Permaculture Design Certificate!

Ever since I have attended my first Permablitz, I have heard attendees talk excitedly about how they are completing their PDC or how they recently completed one or reminisce with people they completed the course with.

Basically it's a recognised course that covers a broad range of subjects to provide a holistic overview of permaculture systems and sustainable living.

There are variety of ways of doing the course. There are residential courses where you go and spend 2-3 weeks on a site, intensively learning and applying principles in practical activities. But it can be a bit hard for those working full time to arrange time off to do the course in that format.

There are also a few places that offer the course as a series of weekend classes stretching over several months.

Either way the courses tend to be quite pricey, between $800 to $1000 for 70-80 hours from what I have seen. So you can imagine how excited I was when I saw this in the latest edition of PIE (Permaculture Melbourne newsletter):

click picture to enlarge

Not only is this course offered outside of regular working hours, it's also government funded so only $395! Actually affordable! The only thing is that I will have to drive out to Monbulk at least once a week for a few months but I don't mind. That's out near The Dandenong Ranges where we recently got married and will be about an hour each way. I think I'll barely notice it because I'll be so excited.

I think most people that do PDCs do it out of personal interest really, but I have met so many people who said it really was a lifechanging experience for them. The principles and philosophy behind permaculture are really holistic applicable to so many areas of life, not just the backyard!

So I rang up 9am the morning after I saw this ad and signed up! There have been courses before that I've been interested in and tried to enrol but they were booked out already so I certainly didn't want to miss out this time, especially at that price. And it's being taught by Pete The Permie who I've heard from about the traps. I believe he's a bit of an expert in heirloom fruit trees and has an except nursery up in Monbulk.

FURTHERMORE this works out rather perfectly as our newly-wed Permablitz has been postponed until October as POW's activities have been halved while I was in the midst of wedding planning and incommunicado. Which means we will now be having a Spring-time 'blitz, which is quite good really because the warmer months are always a bit easier to get the volunteers along to. We were originally aiming for August, mainly so we could get some barerooted fruit trees in BUT as it turns out, POW are taking over helping manage the heirloom orchard at Werribee Mansion and soon there will be grafting workshops and it will be possible to get grafts for really cheap! Funny how these things fall into place.

PLUS by that time I will have a several weeks of the PDC under my belt and will be able to apply some of this in our own back yard. Stay tuned...

mrs moo!

Hey there! I'm back! And Mrs Moo now thank you very much.

I must say, we had THE MOST FUN EVER! And really, it was a fabulous wedding week - it really was a whole week of celebration shenanigans and happenings. A festival of wedding!

Before we set off to the marriage registry the Costa's Episode we featured in aired, AND we did an interview and photo shoot for the local newspaper about our unusual wedding gift registry.

As we've been living together for some years already now, in lieu of a traditional registry we instead requested, if our guests wished to give us a gift, if they could contribute some money to us getting a rainwater tank. And as luck would have it, just weeks before our wedding our local council announced a bulk-buy discount scheme they are organising for rainwater tanks and the like!

Their info session was scheduled for when we were to be on our mini-honeymoon so when I rang up to find out more info and mentioned our registry they got very excited and asked if they could include it on their press release... and we ended up with this:

click picture to enlarge

We had some generous donations and I'm very excited to report we have enough to cover a slimline tank and installation.

moo has moved

Just a heads up that the blog has undergone a REVAMP and has relocated from Wordpress to Blogger.

The website address remains the same - www.mooimadeit.com but any old links probably won't be working I'm afraid. All the posts are here though so if you're having trouble finding something please just let me know!

And as I realise I post about a variety of things and not all my gardening readers may be interested in my sewing posts and vice versa, it's now possible to just subscribe to the rss and/ or email updates of my 'grow', 'sew', 'taste', or 'what's on' posts if you wish (as well as the full blog of course). Just head to the main page to do so!

Oh yes, I do love to file.