In My Kitchen: October 2024

October was busy but the supermarkets are already putting the pressure on about Christmas with festive foods carrying a shouty sign saying "while stocks last".  Really!  It just isn't getting any quieter for the rest of the year.  Meanwhile I am still trying to catch up on inductions at work, I don't have the energy to read books and even finding time for bike rides is difficult.  The weather is warming up and we are eating more salads.  I am glad of longer evenings because our kitchen light is dimming and when I got the spare light bulb out it had smashed to pieces.  I have had some really tiring weeks but am pleased I had a chance to clean the house the last couple of weekends. More about my month can be found on My Monthly Chronicals (coming soon)!

It has been ages since I have baked bread.  My sourdough starter is mainly used on pizza and flatbreads and scallion pancakes lately.  So I was pleased to have a quiet weekend where I baked a fried leek and red leceister cheese version of my favourite overnight sourdough bread.  It was quite soft but so good fresh out of the oven.  The flavour was so good that no butter or spreads  were needed.  

You can see the bread above with Lemony Chickpea Soup with Spinach and Potatoes.  It was really good although I was too lazy to blend half of it separately and instead just whizzed the blender in the soup for a short enough time that it was only partly blended.  Sylvia loved it too.  She has made the happy discovery that she loves soup if she can mix some cooked pasta in it.  The recipe comes from a blog called The First Mess which I discovered this month and have already made three recipes from it.

As I have said, Sylvia has learned the joy of pasta in soup.  The Creamy Tuscan Tortellini Soup is based on one in Brita Cooks but we used cannelini beans instead of chicken among a few little tweaks.  We had it early in the month when it was more chilly and enjoyed its comforting creamy vibe.

We love RecipeTin Eats's broccoli fritters.  So when Sylvia fancied some broccoli soup I made Nagi's Easy Broccoli Cheese Soup. It was nice but not as amazing or as green as the fritters.  It surprised me how thin it was on the first night, compared to Nagi's photos but thickened up nicely overnight.  Although it was quite thin, this did not bother me because I have been enjoying making my soups thinner rather than thicker lately.  If I need bulk I can add it like I did with this one.  The photo above is from the first night with added brown rice, frozen peas, frozen corn and red tomatoes. 

Zucchini has been very popular in our house recently.  These chickpea stuffed zucchini were lovely.  I used pesto instead of the spices.  I cooked mine until the cheese was golden brown, which I think took longer than the recipe said but was worth it.

We had leftover stuffed zucchini the following night with chickpea salad and rice.  Sylvia has been making chickpea salad a lot.  She mixes chickpeas with lots of vegetables like tomato, cucumber, avocado parsley rocket and spinach.  On this occasion she also mix in feta.  Delicious!

When my mum gave us some rhubarb from her garden and we had neglected apples in the fridge, we loved the resulting Rhubarb and apple crumble.  It was so good.  I used my favourite crumble recipe to top the fruit.  After a recent ho hum crumble topping at the Royal Melbourne Show, it was good to have a home made crispy golden crumble.

Halloween is one of Sylvia's favourite times of the year.  We watched the Corpse Bride.  Her dad got her a box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.  The theme this year was Ghostbusters but I don't think the kids have a great knowledge of the movie, based on the young people I spoke to.  We had cute ghost toast at Humble Rays cafe and I have also posted about our Halloween lunch lunch for her brothers' birthday.

A recent favourite meal is Miso butter noodles from Okonomikitchen.  It is pretty simple but involves frozen udon noodles.  They are so much better than dried or vaccum packed.  We can only get them as our local Asian supermarket but it is worth the extra trip. 

The Asian supermarket holds a few temptations, especially of the dumpling kind.  Now I have a steamer for the microwave, they are even more tempting.  I bought some vegetable buns and glutinous rice dumplings.  I haven't had any yet but I hope they might be like some really nice noodles my Chinese colleagues brought to morning tea in another job.

I went out early evening to a Pentridge Prison tour so I got pizza from Heaven with Sylvia for dinner.  It was a wet rainy day and bucketing down as we ran into the pizza shop.  I had ordered over the phone before we left to make sure we got it quickly (UberEats can be so slow and unreliable).  We took our piping hot pizza to the car and Sylvia checked it.  The potato pizza had something odd on it.  Meat!  So I took it back and they baked another quickly - I was running back and forward to the car to check with Sylvia . It is ages since we had takeaway pizza and it was really good, especially the nutella doughnuts. They kept me warm and satiated on my tour and when we had a drink at the bar afterwards.

This Vegan green soup with kale and celery was served with chickpeas and black rice.  I used blended raw cashews instead of the coconut milk, I used some pickled rather than fresh ginger and also added some finely chopped sandwich pickles.  It was lovely though not as bright green or beautiful as the photo on The First Mess.

The golden gaytime ice cream was my favourite when I was a kid so I am a big of a sucker for them and have passed this weakness on to Sylvia!  She was very keen to try the caramel slice version of Golden Gaytime.  They were really good.  Not surprising, given that I loved caramel slice as a child too.

We were also tempted by these Halloween Freddo Frogs that had glow in the dark wrappers.  Yes, we fell for the gimmick but I could not even be bothered going into the dark to check if the wrapper glowed.  Sylvia checked and said it glowed a bit.

Not long ago, my dad was around and helped fix a break in a kitchen chair.  It was a relief but soon after the chair broke in a different place.  It was its time!  So we are missing one of our kitchen chairs.  We have decided it would be nice to get an op shop chair to replace it.  I am now keen an eye on the other 3 chairs in the set in case 11 years is also too much for them.

And, in case you were wondering, the chair is on a bed because it kept falling over so Sylvia thought it would like to lie down in bed.

 

So many great new recipes.  One of my favourites is this Charred corn and quinoa salad with tahini ranch dressing.   I made some changes and forgot he avocado but really want to try this again.  I also made Cheesy creamy  tomato cannelini beans and Creamy cannelini beans with kale.  It has been a week of many beans and pulses, also including an ugly lentil stew that I did not photograph, but it tasted great.

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.

A brie and blackberry Scream platter and a Halloween lunch

Yesterday we had a wonderful Halloween lunch with most of the food preparation being done by my daughter and my mum.  Sylvia's Scream platter and my mum's black forest cake were the highlights.  I struggled to find inspiration, especially when I found my collection of Halloween ideas had disappeared from my Pinterest account.  But Sylvia was full of great ideas.  She managed to keep it simple with no baking this year, unless you include mummy sausages.

Soon after Alex and Ian were stillborn, we started our tradition of a lunch on the day (or nearby) each year in their memory.  At first it was just a birthday lunch of sorts but over the years it has morphed into a Halloween themed lunch because the kids love it.   Their birthday, 1 November, is the Day of the Dead in Mexico is a day to honour dead children and infants so I assume it is not so unusual to have a Halloween lunch on this date each year to remember dead babies there but I am not sure many others do this in Melbourne.

The accidental inclusion in the Halloween lunch was the mushroom skull pizza that Sylvia made the previous night.  She had seen it on social media and wanted to try it.  We used quite small button mushrooms which were quite shrunken on the first night and even harder to find in the crispy pizza pieces that I reheated the next day.

Sylvia found that a metal straw was the best for the eyes, a skewer to make nostril holes and a knife to make the teeth marks on the stems.  This meant quite a bit of cleaning out a metal straw with a skewer and a thin bottle cleaner for straws.  It was a year of straw cleaning as you will see below.

Here is Sylvia's piece de resistance.  She found the Ghost Face shaped brie on social media and decided she must make it.  It looks impressive is quite simple.  A round of brie is carved into the famous face from the Scream movie franchise.  Holes are made for the face that are then filled with jam.  Blackberries around it add to the effect.  It is the perfect centrepiece for a cheese and fruit board.

Fortunately I had made some blackberry chia jam (based on this recipe) earlier in the week.  It was just the thing for the eyes, nostrils and mouth.  Chia jam is easy and far more fruity than sugary compared to regular jam and I much preferred it here.  Honestly I find that Ghost Face really creepy, though I am not sure I have ever seen Scream.  But there was something quite fun about doing it this way.

While Sylvia was the creative genius behind all the platters I helped with some chopping and arrangements.  Even then I did not feel there was much for me to chop once Sylvia had made all her Halloween pieces.  Which was probably just as well because I spent a lot of the morning giving the lounge room a much-needed clean.

This platter was to be our vegies and fruit platter but once I had added some cherry tomatoes and chopped some nectarines (praise be the arrival of stone fruit in our supermarkets!) I realised there was not much room once we had added all Sylvia's preparations.  I have already mentioned the mushroom ghost pizza above.  It also had cucumber ghosts, carrot ghosts, banana ghosts, hotdog mummies (made previously) and vampire doughnuts.

The vampire doughuts were a social media idea that involved squeezing plastic vampire teeth into a ring doughnut.  The doughnuts were brought along by E close to when we were to start lunch and Sylvia found it quite challening to fit the teeth into the hole (we had chosen the Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts for a bigger hole than other doughnuts we saw).  We also had to hunt down our candy eyes which were in the first place Sylvia looked but sometimes we need to look a few times!  I thought they were cute but looked more like grandpa doughnut than vampire doughnut.

Sylvia also wanted to make ghosts of cucumbers and carrots with two different sized metal straws.  She discovered that tiny pieces of carrot are very difficult to get out a a metal straw but she managed to clean them out.  She also made ghosts out of bananas and choc chips.

As so often happens, we ran out of energy and didn't make as much as planned.  There just wasn't time to make the apple slices with rice bubble teeth and fruit roll up tongues not to do the smores with chocolate covered digestives, marshmallows and candy eyeballs on top of the melted marshmallow.

Another easy Halloween snack was the baguettes with black olive spiders on a pesto and cream cheese mixture.  They were really tasty
.

Here is our cat Shadow eyeing off the olive spiders.  He loves to bat at a spider or insect if it comes his way so I have an idea what he might have been thinking.  

I didn't take photos of Sylvia's punch but it was lovely with all the food.  (It usually has a good handful of mint but not this year when the mint in our garden was parched.)  She used apricot nectar, pineapple juice, ginger ale and sparkling water.

Finally we sliced up the delicious black forest cake that my mum had made the previous day to give it time to absorb the cherry juice and soften.  It was really good but very filling after all our snacking the platters.  A fine lunch was had by all.

On the Stereo:
When the Pawn... - Fiona Apple

Remembering Alex and Ian 17

Today it is 17 years since our twin sons Alex and Ian were stillborn.  It is still sad and painful to think about it, to wonder what they would be like today if they were alive.  So I will end my reflections here and share with you articles about others' experiences and their words of wisdom on stillbirth and grief. 

'Manifestation of worst fear': They lost a child to stillbirth. No one knew what to say, by David Oliver in USA Today, 18 December 2023.

Twin oaks in the hedgerows: Gypsy child burial tradition (referring to gypsy tradition that when their children die they are buried with an acorn in each hand) by Beck Hemsley in Our Warickshire.

When my doctor couldn't save my pregnancy he did the next best thing, by Ranjana Srivastava in in The Guardian 17 January 2024.

Six Things Everyone Needs to Know About Stillbirths by Sydney Burrows in the University of Rochester Medical Centre Newsroom, 1 March 2024.

Stillbirth rates remain unchanged for 20 years — and data delays are hurting families, experts say by Bethanie Alderson in ABC News on 19 April 2024.

My twin babies didn’t survive their premature birth – and I’m left to wonder why (women of colour), by Sara Mussa in The Guardian, 22 April 2024. 

Attending my friends' stillborn baby's funeral was a privilege I won't forget by Ben Millington, in ABC News 10 July 2024.

'I've found my babies' graves 67 years on, by Suzanne Hailey in BBC News, 23 July 2024

First Nations women are at greater risk of stillbirth. Here’s why – and what we can do about it, by Deanna Stuart-Butler, Aleena Wojcieszek, Sarah Graham, Valerie Ah Chee, Vicki Flenady in The Conversation, 1 August, 2024.

The grief of childlessness on Fathers Day, by Michael Hughes, as told to Kellie Scott on ABC News, 30 August 2024.

How tattoos became the ultimate conversation starter about miscarriage by Frances Howe in The Age, 2 September 2024.

A moment that changed me: My miscarriages were devastating – but an orca gave me comfort and hope by Zeynep Gurtin in The Guardian on 30 October 2024.