In My Kitchen - May 2024

May has been alternately sunshine and rain.  A bit like life really.  One minute I am feeling good from more bike riding and making interesting plans.  The next I have a cold and am cancelling lunch with a friend.  We have been eating well at home and the garden is doing better.  The nights are so dark now that I am looking forward to the Winter Solstice in a few weeks.  May was a busy month with Mothers Day, a visit from abroad, lots of beautiful meals at cafes, and crazy politics (such as the Trump hush money trial and the Murdoch pile on of ABCs Laura Tingle).  I have writtenan overview at My Monthly Chronicles - May 2024 post about eating, outings and reflections outside my kitchen.

The photo above is of Shadow in the garden among Sylvia's pots.  One of the latest additions is a pot of dill.  You can see it under the netting.  A few months ago we planted dill and it was eaten overnight by some naughty night critter.  So when we planted it again, at what I am told is a better time of year, it has been covered in netting.  I have some new stakes and netting so we can give the dill more room to grow.  It is amazing how many meals would improve with some sprigs of dill.  We have many plans.

One amazing meal I made in the last month was French Onion pasta. The sauce was so tasty after frying the onion in lots of butter and oil but it was a bit soupy.  I added an extra tablespoon of flour and doubled the amount of pasta so it was thick enough.  I wonder if a little less butter and oil would mean we need less flour but what we did worked.  It was so delicious and comforting.

I made our favourite vegetarian sausage rolls to take to my mum's high tea supper for Mothers Day.  For a change, I shaped them after cutting because the knife often makes them uneven.  It improved how they looked.  We had half a square of pastry over so I put it into some mini pie tins to make quiche.  For the filling I mixed 2 eggs, 2 tbsp milk 2 chopped mushrooms, a handful of chopped spinach, some parmesan and seasoning.  I didn't eat it but Sylvia really enjoyed it.

We have had a few trips to KFL supermarket in Coburg lately.  It has so much interesting Asian food that we don't get at our regular supermarkets.  The vegetable buns that we bought were so good that Sylvia bought more to eat at her dad's place while watching the Eurovision final.  When we had them I used a steamer but Sylvia found she could microwave them at her dad's which seems even easier.  We also bought rice cakes (also see below picture and reflections) and tofu puffs.  The latter sat in the fridge too long and when I was about to use them in a stirfry I found that they were a couple of days past their use by date and too manky to use. So disappointing!

When it comes to Korean rice cakes or Tteokbokki, Sylvia still dreams of recreating the amazing Tteokbokki in mushroom sauce at Romeow cat cafe in Rome.  So when we bought the sliced rice cakes, I made a vegan mushroom gravy that had previously been a success.  It seemed thinner than last time so I added some extra flour.  I think that was a mistake because it made the gravy slightly too thick.  Sylvia was not impressed.  It did not come near to the highs of that Romeow dish.  I quite liked it, and the leftovers were even better the next day.

I always find reading In My Kitchen on other blogs an inspiration.  When I saw these cute cat chopsticks on Sammie's IMK on The Annoyed Thyroid, I had to have them.  Sylvia is loving using chopsticks for her noodles but they needed some new life.  We found a cheap set of the cat chopsticks online and are very happy to have them in our house.  Thanks Sammie!

While hurrying through KFL one evening, we saw inari skins on the end of an aisle.  Sylvia had been keen to try making inari at home so we bought a packet.  The deep fried tofu skins - also known as Aburaage - are marinated in a sweet seasoning and filled with sushi seasoned rice.  Inari and handrolls are easy to find at sushi counters in food halls in Melbourne and a convenient vegan snack or lunch.  We have tried making handrolls at home but never inari. Until now!

As well as being brilliant for inari, the Aburaage could be used for salads, sandwiches, miso soup and sushi handroll fillings.  I read that when cooked with udon noodles in Kitsune Udon or Fox's Noodles, they are the Japanese equivalent of chicken soup for illness.  We plan to buy more.

The packet said it had 40 inari skins.  We used them in two batches of inarizushi (ie filled with sushi seasoned rice) that together were filled with about three and half cups of raw sushi rice.  The skins opened fairly easily though I was surprised how fragile they were.  The second batch was bigger than the first because Sylvia made lots of extra inari to keep in the fridge for snacks.

My neighbour has had foot surgery and was given some apples she did not want.  I stewed them and made a delicious apple crumble using my favourite crumble recipe.

My citrus trees in pots have had too much neglect over the past year or so.  I am hoping I can nurture them back to better health.  The citrus leaf miner is a curse.  Every time I look at the trees I see more leaves that have the telltale silver trails of the leaf miner and am constantly removing them.  We have only had a handful of fruit over the past year.  It was a relief to have more in May.  They were quite speckled rather than their usual gleaming yellow skins.  There are ripening lemons and limes on the trees that look more promising if I can just keep an eye on them.

On a recent bike ride, I stopped to pick up these choc-a-block filled focaccia from Pickles Milkbar in Lygon Street, North Carlton, after I read about the place on Where's the Beef.  A vegan "milkbar" offering sandwiches, gyros, banh mi and pies is a real treat.  I had the Hot Breakfast #1: tofu bacon, tofu egg, fried onion, cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, hot and sweet jam.  Sylvia had the Hot Breakfast #2: tofu bacon, hash brown, cheese, pickled onion, mayo, bbq hot sauce.  We really enjoyed them although they were so big, it was quite a challenge to eat them without a knife and fork.  I would have liked my tofu bacon a bit crisper but it was pretty good.  We hope to return soon.

Here's some pretty fruit and veg.  Sylvia made a batch of tofu bacon at the beginning of the past week and it was great to have it in a few different meals - pasta, pizza and salads.  She had fried slices of tofu bacon with fried egg, burger cheese, rocket, smoky chipotle sauce and slices of this lovely heirloom tomato.  I liked the medley of colours in the cherry tomatoes that I have had with some meals.  And I was disappointed that there weren't any more of the amazing crunchy packham pears from the previous week at the supermarket so I decided to try the rosy PiQa Boo pears.  They were nice with a crunchy skin but the flesh was softer than I prefer.

I bought these Vegemite 2-minute noodles because I hadn't seen them before.  They were nice but, as with these sort of 2 minute noodles, not amazing with just the vegemite seasoning.  We followed the suggestions to add a little butter and parmesan but even that wasn't enough to make me want to buy them again.

Ramen is high on Sylvia's list right now so she is interested in ramen products.  Sylvia loves noodles far more than me.  These Spiral Foods instant ramen are a treat.  We had hoped to find the mushroom ones as the seasoning had been great in a pasta dish.  But Sylvia was happy to have the brown rice noodles in shoyu soup.  She was also very keen to try the Spicy Ramen Twisties.  They were very spicy.  I prefer the classic cheese flavour and let Sylvia eat most of the packet.

 

 

We found Potato noodles at KFL.  They are chewier than the wheat noodles and Sylvia is smitten.  I enjoyed them with broth and lots of vegies but regretted adding two packets to a batch of tempeh and corn soup.

Sylvia has plans for these dinosaur cookie cutters from the supermarket.

This baked beer mac and cheese was on our list of meals to make for a few weeks.  When Sylvia finally made it, she merged these two recipes but did not add any milk or cream.  The final result was not as creamy as we expected but the fantastic crispy cheesy breadcrumb topping made it very moreish.

We have been making pizza on Friday nights.  A couple of weeks ago we were both very pleased with our pizzas.  Sylvia's had spicy tomato sauce, hash browns, veg schnitzel, egg, tofu bacon, burger cheese and parmesan, Mine was tomato sauce, mushrooms, roast pumpkin, red capsicum, kalamata olives and mozzarella cheese.  We have also taken to using scissors to cut the pizza, like my mum does.  Our pizzas have too much topping to do this when they are piping hot out of the oven but once it cools slightly the scissors are an easy way to cut it.

We tried this new Lindt Salty Liquorice block.  It was wonderful.  I have never really understood the appeal of salty licorice.  This dark chocolate is quite crunchy with salty chunks and the slightly bitter licorice flavour.  

I love chocolate so much but was sad to read in this article ("Scientists develop method of making healthier, more sustainable chocolate") that chocolate has a very large carbon footprint.  Together with Mae's blogging about chocolate shortages, I have even more reason to eat less chocolate.  Maybe I should try that salty licorice.  Wonder what its ethics are!

I am still making my fruit mince muesli to have with fruit and yoghurt for breakfast most mornings.  As I have used up all my Christmas fruit mince, the muesli is now made with a cup of dried fruit rather than fruit mince.  I really miss the fresh stone fruit and berries of summer.  Often I defrost some frozen raspberries to have with it.  

Recently I found a tub of apricots from my mum's tree in January.  They were chopped up so I only had to simmer them with some chia seeds and maple syrup to make a great variation on my strawberry chia seed jam.  It went so quickly.  Both of us could have just eaten it out of the jar with a spoon.  It was very good on the yoghurt.  We only had black chia seeds so it looks a little murky in the photo but I want to make more of this when stone fruit season comes around again.

One of our favourite side dishes is the Smashing Potato Salad from Enid Blyton Jolly Good Food by Allegra McEvedy.  Sylvia loves making it and eating it.  I think she made one of her best the other night to have with vegetarian sausages.  It had a creamy dressing with celery, tofu bacon, spring onions and parsley.  We can't wait until the dill is growing more so that we can add some to this salad.

 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.