In my kitchen - October 2019

October arrives with glorious spring weather to banish the chilly September weather from our minds. Can you believe it is forecast to be 29 C today in Melbourne!  The sun is shining.  I am on holidays.  That means time for outings, cleaning and gardening.  So we start my monthly peek into my kitchen with a friendly jar of nutella that is waiting on the shelves for the right moment!  I could not resist the fun g'day label.

Another chocolatey treat was this batch of Dorie Greenspan's famous World Peace Cookies.  I baked these for a work morning tea and they were wonderful.  They are egg free so easy to make vegan if you have vegan margarine and vegan chocolate.

We've made sushi a few times lately.  Usually plain.  Sylvia likes her with cucumber in it.

I decided to revisit a sushi rice salad I haven't made for a while.  But I didn't have the ingredients.  So I made pickled cabbage and carrot (riffing on these pickles), chopped some tofu nuggets and added other vegies I had on hand (capsicum, cucumber, corn).  It was delicious and I loved how the pickled cabbage made it purple so I might work on this so I can blog it.

Sylvia made beach cupcakes one night after school.  While they didn't all work out, this one in the picture was great.  (Note to self: if batter too thin and has been added to muffin tins, don't add flour to remaining batter and dollop over thin batter, just return the thin batter to the bowl and wash out the muffin tins.)  It had blue icing, ground marie biscuits (which got soft in the icing), icy pole lollies, and an umbrella.

Coles supermarkets had their third round of little shop giveaways.  As with last year I was torn between admiring how cute they were and being horrified at how wrong they are.  Sylvia collected the lot but the excitement was more subdued this year.

We went shopping for a bundt tin.  The one I wanted was the only one left and nailed to the rack!  So instead we bought a cute cat cookie cutter and a melon baller that had been reduced frequently to $1.  It is Sylvia's dream to make watermelon balls but I am not such a melon person.  Perhaps in summer we will get some use out of it.

I always have besan (chickpea flour) in the kitchen.  One of my favourite dishes to make it vegan omelette.  I recently bought this packet from a local Indian shop and took a photo to share the fancy packaging.

Sylvia's school had an art show.  We purchased some of her pictures for charity.  Coloured.

Black and white.

Art show also means art and craft sessions.  I learnt how to make gods eye weaving.  It seemed I was one of the only people in the world to never have done this before.  We enjoyed it so much that Sylvia and I found some icy pole sticks and wool at home to have a gods eye craft session.

As a kid I loved dim sims from the fish and chip shop.  So I had to try these from the supermarket freezer.  I served them with some oven chips.  Sadly these dimmies and chippies were a sad and sorry shadow of my wonderful childhood memories.

I remember when kombucha was new and exciting.  Now it is in so many stores and cafes.  I even bought a bottle of Cola flavoured kombucha recently.  It was lovely.  I still have dreams of making my own kombucha.  The store bought stuff is nice but relies too much on artificial sweeteners for flavour.

This Messy Monkeys choc crunch cereal had a lot less sugar than Coco Pops.  I liked that it was also more chocolatey.  But I had a bad experience with buying a packet of Messy Monkeys burger rings at a petrol station.  They smelled old, stale and disgusting and left a really bad taste in my mouth.  I gave one to my niece who said she usually loves them.  Luckily Ashy had some at home to give me a taste of the regular ones which are nice.  I must have got a really dodgy pack (not out of date) so now I am a little wary but glad to have tasted the better ones.

Sylvia decided she wanted to try Gerry's Pitas because a friend at school had them.  They were really good but got a bit lost in the fridge.

That one day in September is the AFL grand final lunch.  We love putting together a platter and started buying crisps earlier in September.  It was hard to resist the lure of Grilled Cheese Toastie
Pringles.  A friend made me laugh when she said she could taste the burnt corners.  They were good but I am still not quite sure of the difference between Grilled Cheese Toastie and Cheese flavours.

The Smiths Garlic Bread crisps were marketed to the footy crowd with the picture on the packet and we fell for these too.

While Coles has had great success with little shop giveaways, Woolworths has made more effort to be environmentally friendly with their giveaways.  At the moment they are giving away seeds.  Sylvia had had great fun planting them.  I am not sure how we will go for growing them in pots in our concrete yard but Sylvia is not keen on them being transplanted in my mum's roomy backyard.

Continuing on with our garden, we have embraced spring fever and bought cherry tomatoes (Tommy Toes) and edible flowers (Johnny Jump Ups) that we have repotted into bigger pots in the yard.  Now I have to remember to get back into regular watering with the weather warming up.

I am sending this post to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings for the In My Kitchen event, that was started by Celia of Fig Jam and Lime Cordial,  If you would like to join in, send your post to Sherry by 13th of the month.  Or just head over to her blog to visit more kitchens.