Hectic....

Philips birthday party seems like a zillion years ago as so much has happened in the last week.
On Wednesday we flew to Brisbane and then picked up a hire car and drove to Toowoomba to visit my mum.  Mum has had a "mini" stroke, and although she appears to be okay, I wanted to see for myself that all is well.  Stroke is a pretty scary thing as Mum can attest.  Getting her words out is a struggle at the moment but is improving.  She will be having a head scan tomorrow so we hope that there is no damage and that it will be a one off situation.
We stayed with Mum for a couple of days because she had asked me to clean out her pantry for her.  Its something I don't mind doing and now that it is once again in order Mum should be able to see what she has so that she can avoid having 8 rolls of cling wrap, 3 rolls of Foil, 5 rolls of baking paper, 9 rolls of paper towel and 3 packets (100) of serviettes!

My sister was also staying with Mum as her mother-in-law was in ICU at St. Vincents Hospital. She was admitted with severe headaches and extremely low blood pressure.  After tests it was ascertained that she had a severe salt deficiency that the doctors put down to taking Nurofen.  Panadol my friends not Nurofen for headaches. My youngest sister is a very caring person and went to the hospital every day just to sit and talk with her MIL.
On Friday my sister, mum hubby and I then drove to Beaudesert where little sis lives. We had lunch with my niece who has a new baby.  Little Lucas was born 4 weeks premature in January but is now  six weeks old.  He suffers from severe Colic so it has not been an easy time for my niece who also has a four year old.

Baby Lucas

We stayed the night with my sister who prepared a delicious meal for all nine of us.  They had bought some fillets of snapper and served them grilled with Porcupine Potatoes, tossed salad and a lovely sauce to go with the fish.  Yummmm. While we were waiting for the fish to cook we feasted on a Sourdough Cob filled with gooey cheese and bacon.  Also yummmmm!
The next day we drove to Ashgrove (Brisbane) to visit my middle sister and her gorgeous husband.  Wow.....what a lovely lunch we had.  We started with a choice of either Spinach and Cheese or Bacon and Cheese pastries that had been hand made.  Next we devoured stuffed mushrooms and for the main we had Moussaka and Greek Salad. Both my sisters are great cooks and I love the food they make.  Sisters rock!
At 2.05 pm we once again boarded our plane for the return trip to Cairns.  We settled back in our seats and I watched "The Intern".  A fantastic Robert De Niro movie and of course who doesn't love Anne Hathaway.  This De Niro movie was about 300000 times better than the one we saw him in last week.....Dirty Grandad.  I would NEVER recommend that movie.
At 4.30 we touched down and quickly collected our suitcase because we had a dinner date with some friends at Trinity Park.  We made a detour to Dans to collect some beer and wine and arrived at the designated time of 5.00pm just as the other guests also arrived.  Perfect timing.
Yesterday was a day filled with eating delicious food and our friends kept up the trend.  They had just come back from Singapore and had purchased a steamboat while they were there.  It is something I have never seen before and I am a complete convert.  It will be my next kitchen purchase.  We cooked up lobster (brought with them from PNG where they live) prawns, chicken, and tossed them into the delicious broth along with bok choy, snow peas, mushrooms, bean sprouts, broccoli.  For sides we had rice, chilli, garlic and so many sauces!  Yum, yum, yum!

This steamboat has a hotplate above the broth so that you can brown the seafood before tossing them into the broth.

We were completely stuffed and waited awhile before we then devoured dessert of mini cheesecake, mini eclairs and vanilla bean ice-cream.  We left our friends at 11.00 pm and were tucked up in bed by 12.30am and I slept without moving a muscle until 8.00 am.