In My Kitchen: April 2025

April has been a month of big moments: Daylight savings ends, School holidays, birthdays, my annual leave, Easter, ANZAC Day and my blog birthday. And a federal election campaign squeezed in between all of this. (Spoiler: Labour won!)  My bike rides have been much colder in the morning.  In the evenings it is getting dark so early I need my lights on my bike on the way home from work.  At home the garden is enjoying cooler weather with some rain showers.  In the kitchen we've had creative moments, lazy evenings, exciting purchases, a few days without a door on a kitchen cupboard, 

We have had so much furikake sprinkled on our meals that I decided to try making it at home.  The seasoning needed a slight adjustment but it was very good.  As you can see on the label on the jar above it was made with sesame seeds, seaweed, nutritional yeast flakes, salt and sugar.  I will experiment further with roasting nori, adjusting seasoning and the best way to grind the mixture.  Stay tuned...

One of my favourite new recipes in April was Gnocchi with Broccoli Pesto.  It was so good we made it twice.  The first time, we didn't have spinach as there had been a recall of baby spinach in the supermarkets.  I added lemon juice, cooked the broccoli for a minute and substituted basil for mint.  We enjoyed it with tofu bacon.  The second time I had the spinach and peas in the recipe but added edamame and served it with goats cheese.  It is so easy and delicious for a quick meal after work.

This was a sandwich I made with the broccoli pesto that I made for the gnocchi above.  It was a simple sandwich of pesto, cheese tomato and lettuce.  I used Burgen bread which I have been buying quite a bit lately.  I especially love the soy and linseed which was a preferred bread in my student days.  Sylvia is not keen on seeded bread but I love it so I have been eating this bread myself.  When I have too much at the end of the week, it freezes well.  

I wish I had had some leftover tofucado to add to the sandwich.  Check out my Tofucado post this month for this easy dinner that is a cross between a stirfy and a salad.

I was excited to see the Lowland Celery Salad recipe on Joy the Baker recently.  I was enjoying raw celery over summer and loved the sound of this salad with lots of walnuts, dates, cheese and mint with the celery.  I even put in the shallots which I don't usually use.  It was lovely and made some great work lunches.  For fun I put my muppet lemon in the middle.  My lemons have not been great lately but I am hoping they might improve this winter.

We had a great meal of vegies, hummus , falafel and turkish bread.  We bought my favourite local falafel at Half Moon Cafe and the best soft fluffy Turkish bread at Melbourne Kebab Station.

 

A few weeks back I was having a stressful day and decided to make "grubs" which were my childhood fave.  I tweaked the recipe to have black cocoa and chocolate ripple biscuits so the mixture was particularly dark.  I also added 2 tablespoons of white miso.  It made the condensed milk mixture much less sweet but it was also quite sticky.  Instead of rolling into balls I made it into a slice with plenty of coconut sprinkled on the bottom and the top.  It was great comfort food and fun to experiment with a favourite recipe.

We went to a surprise birthday party at the Royal Hotel in Mornington.  Sylvia made a lovely birthday card (that our friend was keeping til his birthday which has now yet occurred.)  She ended up making quite a few cards.  I really loved this lighthouse one that she made (which was not the one that we gave to our friend).

In the week before Easter, I rode to Back Alley Bakes to buy some fancy hot cross buns.  It was busier than usual.  No wonder!  Their traditional hot cross buns were so good.  This was reflected in the prices with a single bun selling for $5.50 and half a dozen for $30. That's more for one bun than a 6 pack but it was worth it to have such good buns and support a local business.

I also enjoyed a vegan Tempeh-stuous Pastrami sandwich made with smoked tempeh coated in pastrami spices topped with dill pickles, sour cream and purple kraut.  The tempeh is from a local business called Wilder Foods.

While I was very happy with the traditional hot cross buns from Back Alley Bakes, Sylvia was delighted with her brulee hot cross buns.  She gathered that the baked hot cross buns had the top scooped out and filled with custard and caramlised on top with a flame.  She loved that it was crisp enough at the top to satisfyingly crack with the tap of a spoon.

On Good Friday I baked my own overnight sourdough hot cross buns that I have been making for years.  For the dried fruit I used currants and dried peach chunks.  As always I made the crosses a bit thicker than most commercial buns because I love thick chewy crosses.  We both loved these hot cross buns.

For Easter Sunday lunch in Geelong, I made these GF snickers nests with gluten free rice bubbles and  mini eggs on top.  The nests were made using Snickers bars in the Mars Bar Slice recipe, dabbing some melted choc chips into the groove and placing mini eggs on it.  Shaping the warm rice bubble mixture as nests in the cupcake holes was challenging.  Once they had cooled in the fridget I was gad I had put circles of baking paper at the bottom of each hole before adding the mixture.   They looked really cute as part of the Easter desserts. 

My parents did not have an Easter egg hunt this year.  Their grandkids are getting too old.  Instead they did an Easter quiz and each kid got a chocolate bilby when they had completed it.  My neighbour has younger grandkids.  We helped my neighbour hide the Easter eggs in the front garden while they were having an early Easter lunch on Good Friday.  Sylvia was very happy to go from being the egg hunter to the egg hider.

I dropped into KFL, our local Asian supermarket, for some supplies that are harder to find at the supermarket and a few temptations.  According to the owners' website, most of the food is from China.  So it is easy to find frozen udon noodles, edamame and dried bean curd.  These bean curd sticks were pretty odd when soaked as they became pretty flaccid but I fried them up so they had crispy edges and we enjoyed them in a stirfry.  The multicoloured chocolate wafer sticks were so cute I could not resist.  

I was disappointed that the furikake only came in sachets and not in larger containers.  Nor was there many vegan choices  The one on offer was almost $5 for 30g.  It was delicious (ingredients: sesame seeds, sugar, seaweed, salt, yeast extract, corn starch syrup, dextrin) but not a regular purchase.  Hence my decision to try home made furikake, as you can see at the top of the post.

During my week of annual leave after Easter, we were going to go to Pentridge Palace cinemas but could not find the right film at the right moment so instead we had lunch at Lucky Little Dumplings.  Afterwards we went to Pentridge IGA and bought a few treats.  Sour blueberry twisties, discount Lindt Easter chocolate, Dubai chocolate cake bar and Honest eggs.  Yes it has come to the point where eggs seem like a treat as they as so scarce in the supermarkets.  

It was great to try Dubai chocolate, which has been a viral sensation and for good reason.  The pistachio kunafa layer was delicious though Sylvia was less enamoured with the cake layer.  I have had the creamy kunafa dessert (aka knafeh) and it was not my thing but I loved how the spun pastry gave a pleasant crunch to the green creamy pistachio layer.  I heard recently that the popularilyt of Dubai chocolate had led to a shortage of pistachios.  I can see why.

The sour blueberry Twisties that we bought at IGA were unsurprisingly on special.  They were really odd and disturbing.  Even the fluoro green glow of them was so unnerving that I had to take a photo.  We decided they were truly alien food.  Sylvia refused to eat them.  I ate them in a car crash fashion - it was bad but I kept having to eat another to tell myself that the sour and sweet flavours were just wrong in what is usually a savoury Twistie.  I would not buy them again but I am glad we tried them, though I could have done without the blue tongue afterwards.

Onto more serious things, a hinge broke on a kitchen cupboard door.  It was just hanging in there on one hinge.  Literally.  I tend to think a 1960s kitchen is a bit retro but not in the vintage-don't-make-them-any-more category.  I thought it would be a quick fix by my dad.  He spent a while mulling over the oddly shaped hinge and then spent a few hours trailing through six different hardware stores before he found similar hinges.  The sixth was a cabinet maker who told him that these sort of hinges were no longer made.  

The last place was a restoration place with lots of old hinges that my dad sorted through to find some we could use.  I had a couple of days without a door on the cupboard and was constantly resisting the urge to shut the door.  Once my dad had done an amazing repair job, we found that there was another type of hinge in the kitchen that was easier to do but that the original hinges were fashioned to be hidden away neatly.  They really don't make kitchens like that any more!

I had a yen to ride to Iris the Baker in Brunswick for bread but by the time I arrived, they were sold out.  I consoled myself with a wonderful cinnamon and citrus Morning bun for Sylvia and I to share.  Then I rode on to the Village Bakery in West Brunswick to buy a Potato, rosemary and honey sourdough loaf.  Once I got home I made fantastic salad sandwiches.  If you have good bread, you can easily make a good sandwich.

A while back, my dad put up a shelf for Sylvia to put pot plants.  Sylvia has so many plants that she is looking at the real estate on the fence for places to put the plants.  You can see she also has some hanging baskets on the fence to plant in.  Once the shelf was up, we had fun painting flowers on it.  Now Sylvia needs to find some low maintenance plants to grow up there.

Lastly is what Sherry calls a curveball.  She hosts the In My Kitchen event (see below) and I am so pleased she continues to host each month with great enthusiasm and generosity.  Sherry's curveballs are something not quite kitchen.  Often her curveballs are fun local works of art.  My curveball is a pottery toadstool house that Sylvia made over a few months at her fortnightly art sessions.  It was so thoughtful of her because she knew that I had been admiring toadstool houses at markets.  Isn't it gorgeous!

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.  Thanks to Sherry for continuing to host this even that brings together some wonderful bloggers who share glimpses into their kitchens.

Note: although I would love to be organised enough to publish my In My Kitchen post on 1st of the month, I am pleased to post on 5 May 2025 which is Square Root Day because 5 x 5 is 25. Yay to days with fun numbers!