In My Kitchen: April 2024

April has been a busy month for my blog. It was good to finish the European holiday post, get a new email subscription service, refresh my recipe index and put together a new header before my 17th blog anniversary.  Now I have lots of drafts to catch up on.  As usual!  Only worse than usual because life has gone on while I been blog busy.  I wont go into detail now that I have My Monthly Chronicles April post (coming soon) as a catch up on what is going on outside my kitchen.  I will just huddle down under my warm blanket as it gets colder and darker each evening!

The above photo is a very pleasing lunch from Zaatar.  We love the Zaatar pizzas that folded in half over the wonderful seedy spicy mixture.  They were $1 when the cafe first opened 12 years ago.  Now they are $2.80.  Which is still a bargain when you look at how other prices have risen.  We also shared a cheese and vegemite pie.  They are always good but often a bit weepy.  I tried a new treat - the halva biscuit sandwiches.  They were excellent with a slab of halva between crisp tea biscuits.  And some seasonal grapes that I have been enjoying at home.

Sylvia made amazing Zucchini stuffed shells recently.  They had thin fried zucchini slices mixed with ricotta, stuffed into large pasta shells, covered in tomato sauce and cheese and baked into deliciousness.  We ended up making two lots of this dish because there were only so many stuffed shells we could fit on a single layer into the rectangular baking dish.  It seemed so easy to assemble the second lot compared to all the work on the first night.  I would have liked more vegetables with the sauce but Sylvia wanted to try a seasoned passata.

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I revisited an old favourite: Spinach rice gratin.  It was actually more carrot than spinach on this occasion but it was a great way to use up half a slab of tofu.  As well as crumbled tofu, it was a good way to use up some scraps of vegies from the fridge.  Sylvia was not interested in it so I enjoyed loading it with seeds on top of the cheese.

We tried a batch of maple mustard tofu.  It looked amazing on the video with some simple ingredients.  I pressed the tofu and left it overnight with the marinade.  It ended up quite dry and chewy rather than soft and saucy as in the video.  Plus the sweet flavours overwhelmed the savoury and weren't quite right for us.

This No boil baked vegan mushroom straganoff was excellent.  It was what the In My Bowl blog, where it was originally posted, calls dump and bake.  Sylvia only noticed she had accidentally dumped a 750g family pack of pasta rather than specified 500g once it was too late.  That made a lot of pasta bake!  This also meant it wasn't very creamy but I loved the flavour and texture.  In fact I loved it more than the stovetop mushroom stroganoff that she made last year.  On both occasions she has used cream cheese rather than cashew butter.  I would love to try the oven bake again with the right amount of pasta and cashew butter rather than cream cheese.

Sylvia loves making the Smashing Potato Salad from Enid Blyton Jolly Good Food by Allegra McEvedy.  She always adapts it but it is a favourite side dish.  We had it with sausages and greens.

We also did a From My Bowl dump and bake Cheesy Broccoli Casserole.  It was excellent.  I halved the nutritional yeast flakes and added some cheese and some extra beans.  This is the comfort food I wish to eat all winter!

When I posted my Dumpling Okonomiyaki recipe last year, I noted that the okonomiyaki mixture is slightly too big for mu cast iron frypan and so sometimes I set some aside to fry separately the next day.  This photo is some leftover okonomiyaki fried up and served with a variation of Crimson coleslaw, with some spinach added to the plate. It was a great quick lunch.

Another excellent recipe from In My Bowl that we made recently is a Creamy Mushroom Udon Soup.  This vegan recipe was made creamy by coconut cream.  Sylvia was not keen on the taste of the coconut cream and would prefer to try it with dairy cream.  I think maybe we needed to tweak the seasoning but am far more amenable to coconut cream than dairy cream. It was quick to make and delicious with fried tofu puffs, fried onion, fried cabbage and raw spinach as well as the spring onion garnish.

When we made the Creamy mushroom udon soup, we bought this Exotic Mushroom Blend packet from the supermarket.  It had fresh shitake, oyster and king oyster mushroom.  We also used some Swiss browns and button mushrooms.  Sylvia loved trying different mushrooms in a recipe.  I am less into mushrooms than her and was interested but a bit wary of paying $46 a kilo for the exotics as opposed to $12 a kilo for the button mushrooms.

Sylvia is really into matcha so it was no surprise when she made a batch of Matcha and raspberry muffins based on this matcha muffin recipe.  They were really good with a soft and vibrant crumb.  Sylvia hasn't use much of her matcha  latte powder from the Borough Market in London.  It was a great way to use some of it, especially as it has some vanilla and spices added to the powder.  The pleasant warm matcha flavour was offset nicely by the tang of the raspberries.

This edible Happy Shawn sheep cake was brought home from Linger Patisserie Cafe in Camberwell.  It was a heavenly combination of yuzu mousse, raspberry jelly, strawberry compote, matcha biscuit and white chocolate coating.  I usually am neither a mousse or a white chocolate person but this combination was really delicious.  When I read that it had white chocolate coating, I thought it meant a hard shell of white chocolate but it was more like a delicate mousse.  We just shared one sheep because they weren't cheap at $12.50 and we just wanted a small taste after a big lunch.

These Vegemite mini wraps were nice.  They had a touch of that intense umami Vegemite flavour.  I liked them with cream cheese but am not sure they were amazing enough to buy regularly.

I took this picture just after Easter.  The Lindt bees and ladybugs were better chocolate but just as enjoyable as the Cadbury Caramello mini easter eggs.  Even better than the Easter eggs were the Whittaker chocolate bars.  The Restore pear and manuka honey was our favourite but the Reflect sea salt and caramel brittle was also very good.  Best of all was the packaging and I could not resist a green polka-a-dot handkerchief for Easter!

When I was a kid, breakfast cereal meant either Corn Flakes or rice bubbles.  I don't eat cornflakes for breakfast any more but Sylvia loves them as a snack.  Best of all, they are excellent in the crumb coating on our favourite tofu nuggets. I loved this nostalgic packaging to celebrate 100 years of Corn Flakes in Australia.

I stumbled upon these Siafa chocolate dates on the specials shelves in the supermarket.  I had never seen them before but really loved the dates, although I was not so keen on all the packaging.  The dates had a creamy biscoff spread and were coated in milk chocolate.  They are neither vegan nor gluten free, even though they seem like they could be.

I was tempted to try these Kettle Native Honey and Orange Crisps with Black Pepper.  The flavouring was quite subtle but pleasing.  I had some with some excellent grilled Turkish bread with pizza sauce, mushrooms, spinach, olives and cheese.  Sylvia took the rest of the packet to her dad's place to snack on while they waiting for their pizza to be delivered.
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This photo is from an outing last weekend when we had an indulgent lunch at Calle Bakery.  It is such as wonderful bakery that I bought this beautiful loaf of fig and walnut bread.  We got a free Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread at the bakery because it was a giveaway when spending over $20.  I also brought home my leftover kombucha.  After lunch we went to Bunnings where we found a white pansy plant, a cute ceramic plant pot, and some paint colour samples but no dill plants.  The colour samples are ideas for if and when we get our walls painted.

Finally here are some of Sylvia's little potted plants which are starting to take over the garden.  They interest our Shadow but not as much as he loves his catnip which is also trying to colonise the garden.  You can see the catnip growing at some rate in the concrete between the large pots with my lemon and lime trees.  I am still battling the citrus leaf miner but pleased to see some lemons getting ready to ripen.  The lime tree is struggling more but has a few hopeful signs of fruit.

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.