Left The Homestead For Van Life

We just got to a little camping spot on Mahia Beach. It's beautiful, it's sunny, which is so lovely. Alex just made me a coffee, it's a little cappuccino situation. It's very good. I have you guys on a tripod right now, it's a chai tea spiced kind of instant chai situation. So I'll definitely be having this too later, but right now I'm using it as my tripod. It's so good. We are driving down the coast right now to check out different beaches. Alex is looking at the surf right now to see if he's going to have a surf here. We just stopped into a little pub, the only pub in town to get a little bit of work done, check emails. I needed to check a couple of things and reply to a couple of emails and then we popped into the pretty much only little store that they have here and just got salt, pepper, some olive oil and some dish soap because we needed all those things for the caravan. They were on my list from this morning, so that's good. We're sorted there and I'm going to be jumping into the ocean pretty soon. I think I'm going to set up my umbrella at the beach and just enjoy jumping in the water. Sun, salt, sea. We are having some Albarino, but we only have one mug, so we're going to share this mug. Remind us to go get some glasses to keep in the caravan. Don't know why they're not in here, but I'm snacking on some green olives and I'm going to chop some mushrooms. This is a serious knife. Cozy cup of tea. My duvet. I love it with a little waffle texture on it and the sun is still going down. It's 8 45 and it's this beautiful pink hue. Monica's all cozied up right in between us, is sleeping right here in between the two of us. I got a box light. Alex is lighting my shot for my camera just died, so now I'm using my phone and Alex is actually holding this light for me. Come here, say hello. You're being shy. I'm in my pajamas. We're both in our pajamas and we're getting ready to go to sleep and it's going to be a beautiful, sunny, warm day, which has been lovely. I'm going to finish my cup of tea while I read one of my many Rupi Kaur. I have all three of her poetry books, so I think I'm going to do Sun and Her Flowers. While I have my tea. We're back at the homestead. We didn't plan to be back this early. We planned to continue our trip, but several things kind of compiled together and kind of gave us the want and need to come back to the Wellington region right now. We actually booked a comedy show for tomorrow night months ago and they said it was cancelled and then now it's back on. So we're going to that tomorrow night in the city, which will be really fun. We're going to have dinner, go to the show. We're staying in Wellington and then we're seeing friends on Saturday, so that will be really good. And then last second, some of our friends asked us to film their wedding for them, so that was super last minute too. We found out maybe a couple days ago and so we're going to do that. For now, I'm back and yesterday we went to the grocery store. We went to this kind of fancier grocery store called More Wilson that they have around here and I saw this herb paste and it was like $16 or something like that. And I looked at the back of it and I was like, I have all of the ingredients to make this. It's essentially an herb paste to like throw over a nice piece of like sourdough bread or you can put it in pasta. You can put it as a marinade on a meat, like whatever you want, but it just looks so good and so I'm going to try making it today. Before I go and collect all the herbs to make that herb paste, I need to get something in my belly first because I'm pretty hungry right now. I made these chickpeas last night in the slow cooker. Maybe should have cooked them a little bit longer, but they're still soft enough. Look who came into the kitchen as soon as he heard there was food happening. These cucumbers are from the garden. I've been eating them up because they're delicious. Pickled red onion. I usually like to make my own pickled red onion, but I haven't made any in a minute. So I was craving them for salads like this. So I just picked that up from the market the other day. We love this. Goat's milk feta cheese. Sweet pepper. So good. Cucumber grows so wonderfully here and I think it's just because it's wet but also sunny this time of year. There she is. Just a simple veggie lunch. I haven't worn my apron in a hot minute. I feel like once it gets warmer here in New Zealand, I enjoy being in the kitchen more. Like I love doing recipes and stuff. Alex loves doing stews and like pot roasts and things like that. So in the winter, he's cooking the majority of the time. But once it starts getting warmer, I start having fun with recipes because I really love cooking like Mediterranean style dishes and just lighter meals, I guess. And so that's when I start coming out of my shell a little bit and I start making things a lot more. So I am gonna go get the herbs from the garden. I'm using this rounded herb slicer. And I know that I could just probably use a food processor, which we have one. But there's something so satisfying about this and it smells so good. I wish you guys could smell this through the camera. And just, you know, it's fun for me. I'd rather do this. And I love this little contraption. It is like the best way to slice herbs and it works so well. It really does. And then if I see the stem, I just pull it out and throw it in that bowl. I think I've cut it down to a good place. I see a couple pieces of sage that need chopping here. But for the most part, it's looking really good. And this is so simple. I'm just going to be adding some olive oil and a little bit of salt. And we're going to try it out on a piece of lovely local sourdough that I got in town. I'm very excited. I've been craving it ever since I saw it in the market. I've added some more olive oil and I'm adding some pinches of salt. And I think we're almost ready to try it. Okay, so we've got this beautiful bread. It's local. And I've already been picking out pieces. I'm going to put a little bit of butter on it first. I love room temperature butter. Oh, it's the best. And then the herb paste. Kind of go. Oh, it's so good. Yes. It's delicious. It just adds an extra touch to a piece of toast. Yum. And it would be extra good if the bread was warm, toasted. So I'll definitely do that. I just couldn't wait to try it. So I didn't.