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.