In My Kitchen: June 2023

June brings chilly days and dark nights.  And life continues to be busy.  Two weekends in Geelong with family, lunches out with Sylvia.  Not to mention the jolt of an earthquake.  Work has been intense lately with preparing for an Indonesian workshop.  Mothers Day was a lovely sunny afternoon with my mum, sisters and nieces at a wine bar called Archive in Belmont where I was happy to have some choices of non-alcoholic drinks.  Sylvia and I had a fun day out the previous day with pizza at Kewpie, croissants from Lune and white chocolate vegemite ice cream from Fluffy Torpedo in Fitzroy.  I am not finding time to write about these places but maybe some day soon I will.  We also got to the cinema to see Guardians of the Galaxy III which was great fun.  

The above plate is from a trip to the Mill Markets in Geelong.  More purchases are below.

As the nights close in, the weather turns very hot cocoa and slippers.  A mug of hot tomato soup brings warming comfort.  I took this photo to remind myself not to heat tomato soup in a cup in the microwave.

Here is a meal where a past passion met a future passion.  I am just holding onto my sourdough.  These days I have less energy and time for it but I love it still.  My current passion is my cast iron frypan which just makes every meal better and hopefully is good for my iron levels.  I made sourdough flatbreads on the cast iron frypan and they were lovely and scorched.  I think had a little leftover baked beans that I spread over it and then sprinkled some cheese and placed it under the grill.  It made a really good and easy pizza.

Sylvia has tried a bit of cooking with eggs lately.  Unlike me, she is quite fond of eggs.  This was a recipe from Tik Tok for marinating hard boiled eggs in soy sauce, maple syrup,  mirin and water overnight.  She served them with two minute noodles and used the marinating liquid to flavour the noodles.

I had a visit to Geelong and walked around the Mill Markets with my dad.  The stalls with have a lot of fascinating second hand goods, lots of retro items, some that make me feel quite nostalgic.  I loved this remnant fabric and asked a friend, who is far better with a sewing machine than me, to make handkerchiefs out of them (thanks Kerin).  I also bought the flower as I thought maybe I could work out how to make some myself.  I live in hope of more time for such activities.

I also bought some new knives and forks.  I bought some that were bagged up in a op shop lately that turned out to be cheap and flimsy.  So I spent a bit more and bought these lovely and quite substantial knives and forks that are made by Rodd.  I've never heard of the company before but a quick Google showed them to be a quality product that was made in Australia at least from 1930s to 1960s.  The pattern on my utensils is called Carmen and sold second hand as vintage, but that is all I have found for now.

I also found this herbal Blue Magic Tea in the Mill Markets.  It is made of butterfly pea, camomile flowers and rose petals as well as some natural flavour. I have been fascinated by the natural blue of the butterfly pea and was very pleased to bring this home but am yet to try it.  Apparently it is blue and turns purple when you add lemon juice.

In this meal Sylvia wrapped fingers of tofu in rice paper roll wrappers to fry up to be crisp and then in a marinade.  She saw it on Tik Tok.  With some vegies and rice, it made for an interesting meal - quite chewy but good.

There has been quite a bit of rice around the kitchen lately.  Fried rice with tofu scramble has been on regular rotation for dinner.  I really liked a meal I made recently from leftover rice with lots of spinach, potatoes, red capsicum, peas, maple syrup, vegetarian fish sauce, soy sauce and sesame oil.  Cooked together and served with spring rolls.

We watched MasterChef (RIP Jock Zonfrillo) on the night Amy made caramel dumplings from her childhood.  It looked so easy when she made it in the microwave.  And it used the sort of ingredients we always have in our pantry.  The caramel sauce smelled and tasted amazing, albeit a little too sweet.  But the dumplings seemed too dry when I rolled them.  I should have followed my gut as they were barely edible.  I am surprised a recipe from MasterChef did not work and wonder if I made a mistake but would prefer my golden syrup dumplings.

A few weeks back, Sylvia wanted to try a pizza base from the supermarket on a Friday pizza night.  I had extra fast track sourdough pizza dough left after making my pizza.  So we made a dessert pizza - it was a masterpiece of nutella, cream cheese, marshmallows, banana and raspberries.  So good!

Last weekend after an extremely busy week of work I had a long sleep over 14 hours and woke at 4.30pm in the afternoon.  Sylvia and I had fluffy pancakes with lots of raspberry sauce, bananas, yoghurt and maple syrup.  Breakfast for dessert is great after a satisfyingly long sleep.

I am sending this post to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings for the In My Kitchen event. 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 and her gorgeous hand drawn header.