In My Kitchen: August 2025

Welcome Spring!  I look forward to stone fruit, less dark and rainy rides home from work and some lighter evenings.  It's not that I hate Winter.  I have enjoyed the steaming soups, fluffy blankets and feeling toasty warm inside on dark wet evenings.  And there have been little victories.  I managed to delete 13GB of photos from my phone so I could install updates.  I was still eating fresh fruit daily at the end of Winter for the first time in years.  Using salt, vinegar and bicarb I scrubbed a badly burnt saucepan clean, though I am still working on another stained saucepan.  Life is still very busy but, with the daffodils, daisies and wonga wonga vine flowering in the front garden, Spring brings hope! 

I have written plenty about the new coat of paint and unpacking after the painting in my post on Our house painting experience.   Sylvia has enjoyed adding and arranging coloured glassware in the glass cabinet in the kitchen.  It looks so new and fresh!

We came home with beautiful handkerchiefs, stickers, jewellery and vintage folding scissors from the Camberwell Market.  You can read more about  our visit to the Camberwell Sunday Market.

 

We had fun at the farmers market and made some purchases: plump rhubarb, a loaf of rye sourdough bread,  huge bunch of kale, an intriguing white chocolate gochujang caramel cookie, two unevenly sized mac and cheese sticks, excellent canele, great seeded tempeh, a messy blueberry danish, and apple juice.  Also in picture is the Gorilla glue we bought on the way home which is used a lot in our house right now!  All good stuff!  the rhubarb was wonderful with apple in a crumble and the kale went into a few soups and the remainder was frozen.  Read my Coburg Farmers Market post for more about it.

I made a warming pea soup with green split peas, kale, celery, tomatoes, potatoes, green peas and whatever else I could find to throw in.  I managed to take a quick photo of the last half cup of soup together with the bread, honey and margarine I had after it.  We have been quite partial to honey on toast lately.

I recently bookmarked a recipe for a Pesto Soup with Gnocchi, Beans and Greens by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.  It looked just my sort of meal.  So perhaps it was not so surprising to find that actually I had made it before when I wrote a review of Isa Does It, which is a great cookbook.  We made it again and it was so good, yet again!

Shepherd's pie is such wonderful childhood comfort food.  It was so lovely to make it this winter for the first time in years.  I tried a Shepherd's Pie recipe I found in From My Bowl.  The filling was a roux made with mushrooms and lentils and lots of tomato paste.  It was great with intense creamy meatiness.  I topped it with leftover mashed potato.

 

Last year Sylvia made an amazing lasagna soup.  She didn't have a recipe so I made one this year based on a few different recipes.  I was won over by the idea of a soup that tastes like a lasagna but does not have the faff of layering and baking the lasanga.  As a bonus, it used up lasanga sheets that were years out of date.  I found them while I packed up the house for painting.  It is so good to have yet more proof that I should be wary of the the best-by date. 

We tried Shannon Martinez's vegan cacio e pepe with silken tofu.  Although the recipe called for vegan parmesan we used dairy parmesan.  So I can't really comment on it as a vegan dish.  I can say that compared to the cacio e pepe with the creaminess coming from the emulsification of butter, pasta water and parmesan.  Shannon's version was good but just not the best I have had.

One of our winter favourites has been minestrone from By the Forkful.   A hearty stew of celery, carrot, tomato, potato, beans, kale and pasta.

We have also been making favourite soups: Creamy vegan gnocchi soup with sausage and kale and Tomato sausage barley soup.  So good!

A new product to try was  this packet of Made with Plants meat-free bacon.  It was weird.  After only a week or so, the packet started to swell with gases.  When it was like a taut balloon that looks like it might keep growing until it exploded in the fridge, I poked a pin in it.  I expected to have gone off but it was well within the due date and tasted fine.  

So I put it under the grill and tried to work out what would mean it was cooked.  It curled oddly and dried so much that I could not give it much char.  It was crisp and it tasted bacony.  So it was nice enough.  I much prefer our home made tofu bacon.  There were no plans for these snappy rashers.  I had expected to have to throw it out.

The bacon was salvaged - oops, I mean used - along with kale and rice that I had frozen, the remainder of the ricotta from the lasagna soup, and the end of a bag of grated cheese.  I also added carrots and peas, seasonings and egg.  Then I took scraps from the end of a packet of frozen puff pastry to wrap spoonfuls of the mixture.  When I ran out of pastry, I baked the rest of the mixture as a loaf.  

On the same Sunday evening I made a big dish of a fresh ravioli with lots of beans, zucchini, passata and a topping of cheese and sesame seeds.  It was inspired by this Cheesy bean bake.

I baked overnight sourdough bread for the first time in ages.  I made it half wholemeal.  It did not rise much.  Perhaps it was the wholemeal flour, the cold weather or the starter.  It was nice but not my finest.  I made a sandwich with it filled with a slice of red lentil loaf, coleslaw and lettuce.  It was very satisfying.  (Sylvia was not so keen on the lentil loaf.)

We had a small bowl of leftovers from a No-boil baked vegan mushroom straganoff that Sylvia made for dinner.  She used cream cheese instead of the cashew butter.  I made salad by stirring in yoghurt, red capsicum, cabbage, spring onion, smoked almonds and parsley.  It was a delicious quick lunch.

When I go into Zaatar  where we go regularly for their wonderful cheap zaatar pizza, I sometimes check out their zoccacias in the display cabinet.  They are the pizzas folded in half and stuffed with various fillings.  It inspired me to make a wonderful lunch with a zaatar pizza that was filled with two Half Moon Cafe falafels, hummus, tomato and lettuce.and half moon cafe.

Note that when I first wrote about Zaatar in 2012, their zaatar pizza was $1 but today it is $2.80.  That is still pretty cheap! 

 

We tried the Cheezels CCs corn chips.  They were like cheese flavoured corn chips.  I did not see the point.  After all they lacked the fun of cheezels being in rings so you can wear them on your fingers.  I was not surprised soon after to see them in the sale shelves.

When Sylvia went for lunch at Calle Bakery she brought me home a chocolate lava cake croissant wheel.  It was up to their usual standard of amazing baking with a rich creamy chocolate filling and a little chunk of chocolate cake on top.

I grabbed my ladder and helped my neighbour climb her fence to get her spare key when she got locked out of her home.  She bought me this bunch of flowers as a thank you.

Sylvia had a day out with her dad.  She was delighted with a Collage Kit book for crafting, The Hipster book for laughs, fun badges and cute stickers. 

They also got The Onigiri map #2.  Yes it is happening again!  This year it is $2 per map. I wrote about The Onigiri map last year, which covered the same venues. It it was a fun adventure finding some delicious onigiri (rice balls) at the cafes on the map.

 

Sylvia is quite partial to Asian ice creams.  She has recently found a few on special and so now have plenty of choice in our freezer.  She loves the brown sugar boba ice creams, is happy with the honey roasted pistachio mochi and loves the matcha icy poles.  I also had some scraps of collage pictures lying about because there has been some crafting going on in our house.

This is the lamp shade that Sylvia bought at an op shop.  She added hanging crystals and painted a stand to make it a special part of her room.  You can see it here on a floral bedside table I bought in Geelong's Mill Markets.  Behind you ca see the bookshelves with a shelf that is mostly green and part of a giraffe themed shelf.  Lots of change around here.

Sylvia also made herself a seashell jewellery stand with a bag of shells from an op shop.  She added some pearls and glitter dust and is very pleased with her work.

And there have been collages.  Here are four of Sylvia's recent cards she has made all with the whimsy that characterises her work.  She has loved using the Collage Kit above.

Lastly here is our cat Shadow in the back garden.  As you can see, some of our pots have been somewhat neglected over winter and need attention.

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's url 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.