Thursday 3 October 2019

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. 

15 comments:

  1. You always have a wonderful selection of treats and snacks to show us each month! A melon baller is indeed challenging, as it's always much faster and less wasteful to cut the melon into cubes. I use my melon baller to get capers out of a narrow jar. The little hole drains them.

    best... mae at maefood.blogspot.com

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    1. Thanks Mae - you are right about the melon baller - it is the sort of single use item I usually avoid buying if not for pester power and it being so cheap - hopefully we will use it over summer. Good to have the alternative for a caper spoon!

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  2. My favourite sushi rolls are the small rolls with just cucumber or cucumber and a sliver of pickled gourd. I eat the others too of course but to me they are the essence of elegant Japanese food. Re; Bundt tins. I picked up a fantastic one at an op shop – never used. I think people love the idea but are then find the prospect daunting, so they give the tins away. I have quite a collection of pots from Woolies and am looking forward to growing them once we build our raised beds.


    http://www.tiffinbitesized.com.au/2019/10/01/in-my-kitchen-october-2019/

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    1. Thanks Fiona - we love those mini cucumber sushi rolls (I usually get the mini avo sushi rolls). Since this I got a cheap bundt tin - not at op shops but if I saw one there I would snap it up - just never seen one in the shops I go to. Our radishes are doing well in the woolies pots so hopefully they might take when we repot them - sadly we have no raised garden beds - just pots!

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  3. As always so many delightful things in your kitchen. The rice salad looks good, i look forward to seeing the recipe. I also ways love the covers of some of the besan packets, see here v. similar
    Yur weather turns warm, ours is getting much colder...brrr
    Adores Sylvia's beach cakes, even if not perfect. And those garlic bread crisps have me interested
    https://allotment2kitchen.blogspot.com/2009/03/caerphilly-cheese-and-welsh-pakoras.html

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    1. Thanks shaheen - I have been experimenting with other pickling recipes so I can retry the rice salad - will be good for summer, methinks! The weather is cooled again but everyone is saying it will be a hot summer - argh! Loved your besan packaging - my besan usually comes in very prosaic packaging so I liked the pictures!

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  4. hi johanna
    i love nutella - what a funny label. the cat cookie cutter is so cute. I have a moose cutter but it has so many weird corners it's really hard to get the dough out:) Love sylvia's beach cupcakes - very adorable. Sylvia's artwork is really good too. and what about those limited edition crisps? such fun! thanks so much for joining in this month. cheers sherry

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    1. Thanks Sherry - we have another cat cookie cutter that is hard to get the dough out of the tail so will have to see how this is! Loved the garlic crisps - and limited edition is good to just taste and move on!

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  5. I really must try those World Peace cookies at least once. What is in plain sushi? Is there no filling? I would rather go without than have no filling LOL. The filling is the best bit.

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    1. Thanks Lorraine - plain sushi is just sushi rice and nori - sylvia loves it - I prefer a filling but when I feel lazy I am quite happy with plain. And highly recommend the world peace cookies!

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  6. Mmhh sushi rice salad, sounds great! I have been craving vegan sushi lately, I need to make some soon.

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    1. Thanks veghog - sushi salad is great - I find I get more vegies in that way!

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  7. Johanna, g'day to YOU, too! Loved your homemade sushi, sushi salad, Sylvia's beach cupcakes, and art -- such talent -- like mother, like daughter. :) Just turned on the heat today lest I get hypothermic; hope you didn't' have to switch on your A/C yet, but we're blessed to have both options. Fun post! xo

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  8. I love Dorie Greenspan cookie recipes and never knew the World Peace Cookies were egg free - what a bonus! I'll have to make them again soon. We've been loving the Woolies Discovery Garden seedlings in our house. Ours have grown stacks this week. =)

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  9. My little pots did not grow so well, so hope you have better luck (but I did read somewhere the ones in Australia had issues). We also had the little shop and my favourite comment was that like in the normal store there were not enough cashiers :) I have a friend who will love the g'day jar.

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