soup & spiders

Before we got married my husband knew my lack of cooking skills but I was bound and determined to be the best possible wife and learn to cook for my husband. Well 7 months later, all I can say is i'm very thankful my husband is a better cook than myself! My husband is a great cook and he's a great teacher. Slowly my cooking skills are improving and one day when we have a kitchen thats big enough for more than one person to fit in, an oven that works and a dishwasher i'm sure i'll become a fabulous cook! I can however follow most recipes. I received a few cookbooks when we got married but there was one I bought after hearing about it from a friend that has become my favorite! Its called the 4 Ingredients Cookbook by Kim McCosker & Rachael Bermingham. I love it! How hard can cooking be if you can make a yummy meal with only 4 ingredients?! One of my new favorite recipes is Thai Pumpkin Soup. It is so yummy! I'll share the recipe with you, but I recommend you go buy the cookbook because it has over 300 recipes that are just as yummy and simple!

Thai Pumpkin Soup (serves 4)

Ingredients: 1kg butternut pumpkin peeled and diced (for my American friends, I believe butternut squash is the same as our butternut pumpkin...I think), 2 tbs red curry paste, 300 ml coconut cream, 1/4 cup coriander chopped

Steps:
1. Saute pumpkin and red curry paste until it starts to catch on the saucepan
2. Add coconut cream to deglaze the pan, top with enough water to level with the pumpkin and bring to a boil
3. Reduce heat simmering until the pumpkin becomes soft and mushy
4. Puree (I use a hand mixer), season with salt and pepper and fold in chopped coriander
5. Enjoy!!

It is a thai soup, but its not too hot/spicy for those who may be wondering.

Besides my cooking skills slightly improving this week, its been interesting around here...I was bitten by a spider. When I first moved to Australia I kept hearing stories about the wildlife here and how they have some of the most dangerous spiders, snakes etc. For those of you who don't know I hate, HATE spiders. Any kind of spider and especially the dangerous ones! I'm the girl who always has bug spray under my kitchen sink! So naturally I would be the one to get bitten by one of those dangerous spiders. We aren't 100 percent sure as I didn't see it, but the bite and all the symptoms I experienced match the red back spider. I got super sick on Tuesday with what I thought was a migraine as I had a bad headache, nausea, etc but later that night I woke up in tears with intense stomach pains. A few other crazy, random symptoms and 2 days later I was feeling more like myself. I didn't go to the hospital because silly me didn't tell my husband about this really sore bite I had on my ankle until the next day. I didn't think anything about it and just thought it was a mosquito bite, but once I showed him the bite he immediately started putting the pieces together and told me what it was and how all my crazy symptoms made sense now. We called his mum who was a nurse and she said I was in the clear. Afterwards once the shock wore off, I'm pretty sure I told him this goes on the cons list for us living in Australia! No...we don't really have a list, we joke every once in a while when certain things come up. And yes, I realize spiders are everywhere, even the dangerous ones. Lets just hope this was my only encounter with one!