Tuesday, 30 September 2025

Mushroom, Walnut and Brie Pâté for a Grand Final platter

I am not a football person but I like to watch the Grand Final each year. Nor am I a mushroom fan and yet I sometimes find those little Fun Guys oddly irresistible. So this year for our grand final platter, I decided to make a mushroom, walnut and brie pâté. It was really the brie and the walnuts that made it worth playing with mushrooms and it was worth it.

We went out to the farmers market in the morning to buy some fine baking because if I was going to be eating mushroom pâté I wanted some good bread to eat with it. But I did not buy the beautiful mushrooms at the market. They are so gorgeous with their tiny enoki and fluffy lion's mane and blue oyster mushrooms. A bit too fancy for my mushroom aversion. I prefer the neat little Swiss brown mushrooms from the supermarket.

WanderCooks where I found the recipe called it an easy 20 minute recipe and they were right. I took a bit of time to go and snip some fresh herbs from the garden. Then I went searching for sherry and could only find a bottle of red wine. But the roasting walnuts, frying mushrooms and melting brie were quick and before I knew it I had a creamy mixture to blend into a smooth pâté.

I had the pâté ready before the grand final pre-match entertainment but was still arranging the platter when Snoop Dog played. I had a quick look every now and again but it looked so American that I wished they had chosen a local musician. I know I am old school when it comes to aussie rules football. For me, seeing Mike Brady sing Up there Gazaly was the highlight of the entertainment.

Finally we had our platter and could sit down to the watch the match. I was surprised how much I loved the mushroom pâté. It was full of flavour and silky smooth. I liked it far more than I liked the grand final. While I am not a huge football fan, I loved Geelong as a kid and still get my hopes up when they play in the "granny".

It was an intense game for the first two quarters with so much holding the ball and stopping the play and the two sides neck and neck. But by half time I had seen enough football and the prevalence of Brisbane in the second half was enough to bore me. Yet again my team let me down. I was sad. But it is ok. After all I don't really follow them during the season. I just like them to win a grand final. And it was a good excuse for a platter.

I loved the grand final pâté platter. We had a mix of healthy food and junk food: red capsicum, guacamole corn chips, brie, cashews, carrot, asparagus, Vegemite cheese crackers, sourdough bread, snow peas and Twisties. The Flinders Sourdough hi top was excellent with the pâté. I could not believe that something with mushroom could be so good. Sylvia, who loves mushroom didn't like it much because there were too many walnuts. You can't please them all. For me it was a good mushroom day and a great pâté.

More mushroom recipes on Green Gourmet Giraffe:

Creamy vegan mushroom and wild rice soup (v)
Festive Mushroom Pie
Gyoza with mushrooms and lime leaves (v)
Haggis stuffed mushrooms
Lentil and mushroom nut roast (v)
Mixed Asian mushrooms with dashi (gf, v)
Mushroom and chocolate risotto (gf, v)
Mushroom, chestnut and couscous sausages
Mushroom whisky gravy (v)
Steamed mushroom buns (v)

Mushroom Walnut Brie Pâté

Adapted from WanderCooks

1/2 cup walnuts

2 tbsp olive oil

1/2 onion, chopped

5-6 medium cloves, roughly chopped

300 g mushrooms, thickly sliced, (I used Swiss brown)

1-2 tbsp leaves of fresh thyme

2 tbsp red wine (or water/ port/sherry)

1/2 cup fresh parsley and chopped

100 g brie 1/2 wheel ), chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

Fry walnuts over medium heat in a cast iron frypan while you prepare the vegies. When they smell done, roughly chop and set aside.

Pour oil into the frypan and fry the onions and garlic for a few minutes until the onion is translucent. Add mushrooms and thyme for about 5 minutes until soft and swimming in their juices. Stir in red wine and parsley for a minute or so. Then dot with chunks of brie and give them a few minutes to get all melty.

Mix in the frypan with a spoon to make it a nice creamy mixture. Spoon mixture into a tall jug and smoosh with a handheld blender to make a smooth pâté.

Serve warm or keep in the fridge until you are ready to eat it cool or at room temperature. (They say to top pâté with butter in the fridge but I had it in a airtight container for a few days in the fridge and it was fine without butter or oil on top!)

On the Stereo:
Remember us to Life: Regina Spektor

Friday, 26 September 2025

Easy brownies - mix in tin

I am sharing this recipe for easy brownies for anyone who craves chocolate baking but has no energy for it. It is a recipe I found on The Kitchn but has since disappeared. These brownies are so effortlessly amazing that I could not let the recipe linger in my draft folders any longer. It is made with no mixing bowl, no chocolate and no lining of the tin. When you next want the easiest way to bake brownies, I am here for you!

The miracle of this recipe is that you swish some oil around in a square cake tin, mix all the ingredients in the tin, bake and the brownie comes out like a dream. I don't understand how the magic happens. It sounds impossible. Sure there needed to be a little care in cooling them slightly and using a gentle knife to coax them out. Yet it works!

The first time I made it I couldn't believe my eyes. I was raised to always line and/or grease a cake tin. When I was a child, my mum usually lined cake tins with butter wrappers - the residual butter was easier than having to rub butter over the tin. Then I discovered a canister of oil spray (once the threat of CFCs in aerosols had passed) and then I moved onto baking paper. We went through a phase where both Sylvia and I made these brownies.

The batter has the glossiness of a good brownie batter. I find that a firm square edged silicone spatula is great for getting to the corners of the tin to make the ingredients are all mixed in. It is beautiful to see just how clean the bottom of the tin is as the spatula pulls the batter away.

The fact that the recipe I had found on The Kitchn just disappeared makes the recipe all the more mysterious. I went to the link in the draft and the recipe it went to was not the one I had discovered last year. I have searched The Kitchn. I have searched all of the World Wide Web. Either it is no longer online or it is lost in all the brownie recipes online! Thank goodness I wrote recipe notes.

I made the recipe again this week to check I wasn't dreaming. It still worked. Nothing I could do could destroy the magic. I used half a cup of wholemeal flour and 1/4 cup of white flour. No problem. I forgot to mix the dry ingredients before adding the egg and water. All good. I tipped all the choc chips into the batter but remembered in time to grab some back to dot the top. These brownies are so good they do not need choc chips. And they are so easy that the only equipment needed a cake tin, a tablespoon, a teaspoon, a spatula and a couple of cup measures.

While the brownies bake, they smell amazing. It has made me so happy to come home from work to the warm embrace of Sylvia baking these. They have such an alluring aroma that that is so good it would make you want to buy a house. When the brownies are warm out of the oven, they are quite squidgy but wonderfully intense. As they cool, they get more dense and slightly chewy, especially around the edges. They are so difficult to share but I am sure they would be welcome at any gathering.

More brownie recipes on Green Gourmet Giraffe blog:
Brownie in a mug (v)
Chocolate brownies with chickpea flour (gf)
Donna Hay Brownies (gf)
Nigel's Brownies
Nutella brownies
Vegan brownies with optional dulce de leche swirl (v)
Walnut brownies

Easy Brownies - mix in tin
Slightly adapted from The Kitchn
Makes 16 squares

1/2 cup neutral oil, such as canola or rice bran
1 1/4 cups castor sugar
3/4 cup plain flour

1/2 cup natural cocoa powder - try an extra 2 tbsp cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 tablespoons water
1/2 cup chocolate chips or chopped chocolate (optional)

Preheat oven to 180 C. Pour oil into a 20 square cake tin and swirl to cover base and halfway up the sides.

Place sugar, flour, coco and salt in the tin. Use a firm spatula or wooden spoon to roughly mix and make a well for the eggs. Add eggs and water. Stir until well combined - use the spatula to push mixture clean off the base so it does not stick. Mix in most of choc chips, leaving a few to dot over the top. Smooth down mixture and top with remaining choc chips.

Bake for about 25-28 minutes or until mixture pulls away from the side and top is slightly dry. Remove from oven and wait 15 minutes. Slice into 16 pieces in the tin. Best to wait until cooled before removing from the tin but if you are careful you can have warm brownies from the tin. They are great warm, at room temperature or over the next few days.

Notes:

Works with 1/2 wholemeal flour and 1/4 cup white flour
You can use dark or milk choc chips
A firm silicone spatula is good for mixing the mixture and making sure it comes clean off the bottom of the tin.
Love and Lemons has a similar brownie ingredients that she finds similar to boxed brownie mixture she had as a child.
They are best warm or room temperature but I don't recommendation when really hot out of the oven.

On the Stereo:
Why Dr Ranjana Srivastava tells the whole truth about cancer in ABC RN Conversations podcast, 9 September 2025.

Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Making a magical miniature bookshelf

Last week we went to a Laneway Learning class called "Make your own enchanted bookshelf with Megan". It was so much fun. Two hours were not enough so we finished our bookshelves at home. So today I share what we did, with many thanks to the delightful Megan for kick-starting our project. This project gave us some new skills and ideas

This is the starter box on the left that we were given when we arrived at the class. Beside it is an example of a bookshelf that Megan had made earlier. We all knew that none of of would complete a bookshelf like this by the end of the class.

What we did achieve by the end of the class was a pile of books and box with shelves to take home. Megan had made a lot of books for us to decorate but she also gave us some time to make more books.

The books were made by painting cardboard, cutting it and folding it and then gluing it in place with a hot glue gun. (I tried one with PVA glue and it was not pretty!)

We had some scraps of painted cardboard and gold paint to decorate the books. The painted cardboard could be cut into thin strips and glued onto the books as binding. While initially I did this binding across the full book, I got to realise we only had to do part of the book. The gold paint was used to paint tiny details with a very fine paintbrush.

As soon as we got home, Sylvia was keen to put together her bookshelf so a couple of days later we headed out to Spotlight for PVA glue and balsa wood. Everything else we needed was around our house. We took Megan's advice and bought WeldBond PVA which works really well.

She took very little time to glue the shelves in the box and then fill the shelves with her cardboard books, tiny paper scrolls, a few small jars and a tiny pot plant holder.

The Balsa wood was for the frame. We bought a balsa dowell rod and a wooden lino tool set to carve it. This was totally new to us but we also had a retractable craft knife and a cutting mat that we had bought for collaging. I was surprised how easy it was to cut balsa wood with the craft knife and to carve thin lines with the lino tools to make the dowel look like branches. It was easier to carve lines along the grain than against it.

To paint the shelves and the frames, we dug into the old acrylic paints we had used when Sylvia was younger. I was so glad we didn't throw them out as they did the job!

We mixed paints to find the colours that we needed. You can see on the newspaper above how Sylvia mixed different colours and painted a splodge on the paper after each addition of colour to see if it was the brown that she wanted.

Sylvia filled her bookshelf and glued on the balsa wood frames before painting. This meant that she left the insides of the shelves white and found it harder to get into all the crevices of the frames. It looks amazing.

We already had these miniature jars because Sylvia loves tiny things. She filled these with dried herbs, crystal chips, and paper scrolls. Sprinkles would work too. She then got out her jewellery pliers to make coloured bottles out of random beads with a smaller bead attached to the top with wire. She also wrote tiny labels on paper that could be glued onto the bottles. She even had a tiny jar that she painted the lid gold. And she painted some gold onto the top of tiny scrolls.

I was much slower in getting my bookself together and learnt from watching Sylvia do hers. I was going to try and give my painting the lines of wood grain but it was not something I am familiar with and in the end would not have been seen very clearly. I had to trim my shelves to fit the box.

I halved my balsa wood dowel by using a ruler and pencil to make a line along the dowel to make cuts along with my craft knife and then turned it over and did the same thing on the other side. I used the craft knife to cut some curves on the insides of the frame which looked rustic. The photo above is when I placed my carved sticks to put together as a wooden frame. I had to use a little bluetak to get it to sit together. It was clear that I needed to cut it to fit but painted it before doing this.

With my bookshelf and frame painted, it was time to assemble the bookshelves with my trusty bottle of glue. As Sylvia and Megan had done, I had a few piles of books and some that did not sit straight. Scrolls were used in the spaces and I had bottles and a pot plant in a few gaps. I also found a giraffe that I used ot have on a key chain that I added to the shelves.

I arranged everything in the shelves and then took it out in order, shelf by shelf so I was clear what I was gluing in place. I was surprised when discussing this with Sylvia that she had not arranged her shelves before gluing. In doing craft projects with her, I have noticed that I like to plan but she just wings it and manages to get it looking great much quicker than me. It is interesting how we have our own styles.

Once the shelves were filled I was ready to frame them. I had been concerned that the frames would be quite dark so I decided to use a fine paintbrush to brush lightly over the painted sticks to make the carving stand out more. Arranging the frame sticks to be cut to fit was fiddly. In the above picture you can see that I tried to fill some of the gaps in the corners with the PVA glue but it did not make a difference once it dried. I had to hold down some sticks which were not even to sit on the edges of the box. While it was drying it seemed fragile and liable to move and fall off. Once dried it seemed fine even where there were gaps along the edges. (I have included a ruler in the above photos so you can see how big it is - about 15cm or 6 inches high.)

Finally our shelves were finished. Sylvia is keen to do more but I feel like once is enough for me. I do not have the time and space in my life for more. Mine is currently on a bookshelf in the lounge room but I plan for it to go into the dolls house at some point. It feels like a great achievement to get this done and I am so glad we went to the class to start us on this path.

More craft projects on Green Gourmet Giraffe:

Saturday, 20 September 2025

Pepe's Italian & Liquor, Melbourne CBD

We were delighted that our night out for dinner and a play started with a wonderful meal at Pepe's Italian and Liquor. A fun winter ski chalet theme welcomed us with a sleigh in the courtyard and snowshoes at the door.

The heiritage building that is now Pepe's in Melbourne's city centre has seen many changes since it was built in 1859, a mere 14 years after John Batman that this would be a place for a village, with no care about what the place already meant to the Aboriginal people who lived there. It was one of Melbourne earliest Synagogues and has been a Jewish School, a State School and a kindergarten since then. It was designed by the same architects that designed the nearby Victorian Parliament House.

Most buildings in Melbourne Central Business District open directly onto the footpath. Pepe's would catch my eye as I rode home from working in the city because it has a delightful courtyard in the front with trees and fairy lights. It always looked welcoming but pricey. The night we were there was a drizzling early Spring day and we opted to eat inside.

As we enter Pepe's, we are delighted by the cosy warm apres-ski vibe. Retro Winter Olympics banners hand from the rafters. Old wooden skis, cowbells and the occasional stag head adorn the walls. We are led to seats at the bench along the wall that is scattered with large fluffy cushions that look made for hugging. The bar along the opposite wall is warmly lit while the photos covering the windows simulate the views of snowy mountains. It is delightful. We love our corner seat with a view of it all.

The gorgeous artwork of skiers on the menu spells out Pepe's in the tracks in the snow. Inside it has a note saying "If you want it to snow, please ask Jo". I don't know what it meant - perhaps we missed the opportunity to ask Jo - but it amused us! We had plenty of vegetarian options in the antipasti, pasta, pizza and side dish sections.

The beverage menu was named the Italian Chalet and Liquor. The introduction invites us to "Step into our 150-year-old brick and timber chalet, mysteriously transported from the Dolomites to Melbourne’s streets. Our winter wonderland awaits..." The cocktails had fun names like the Olympic Torch, Jamaican Bobsled, and Pistachio Polar Bear. The ingredients also looked really interesting: Gingerbread cocnac, Hazlenut maple syrup, Black walnut bitters, Rhubarb vermouth, and activated charcoal.

I was really happy that there was a page called "Pepe's non-alcoholics" with alcohol free mocktails, spirits, wine and beer as well as the usual soft drinks. I was tempted by the NON 3 toasted cinnamon and yuzu wine. Then I ordered a glass of Cos-No: Lyre’s London Spirit, cranberry, rhubarb bitters, and lime ($16). It was nice but smelled like a cleaning product. As it is decades since I drank cocktails, I could not say how it compared to the alcoholic Cosmopolitan that it was imitating. Despite the smell, the taste was nice and fruity and not too sweet. Importantly, I did not feel I will missing out on the cocktails as I sipped at my colourful drink in a cool glass. Sylvia had an apple juice.

Then our meal arrived. The plates hardly fitted on our table but we were really happy to see the spread. Each dish was lovely but together they were amazing. It was a great balance of carbs, vegetables, textures, flavours and colours. Even the plates were beautiful. Here is what we ate:

House baked focaccia ($14.5): This was the best focaccia I have ever had. When it arrived it smells so wonderfully fresh baked that it was hard to even wait to take a photo. It was a small thick loaf with a slightly charred crust and a soft and chewy crumb.

Beetroot carpaccio: smoked cashew cheese, pomegranate (vg) $22.5. This was a vegan take on a beefo carpaccio. The thin pickled beetroot slices were amazing when mixed with the smoked cashew cheese and nuts. (We checked and there were no peanuts.) It also looked so beautiful. The only problem was that there was only a small blob of cashew cheese under the slices and I wanted so much more. It was so good!

Spicy rigatoni vodka: tomato, onion, Calabrian chilli ($34). This pasta dish was lovely with a delicious creamy tomato sauce that was not too spicy. This is the sort of dish I would not find very satisfying by itself but was fantastic with all the side dishes.

Insalata di farro: ancient grains, broccoli, zucchini, snowpeas, edamame, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, mixed leaves ($26). I had initially considered having this as a main dish but it was really a side dish. Despite its promise of grains in the title, there were not many grains in the salad. This excellent salad of a variety of leaves, lightly cooked green vegetables and crunchy seeds had a perfect dressing, was beautiful to look at and made the other dishes sing.

We had two desserts. Sylvia ordered the Bombolini al pistacchi: 5 warm Italian donuts, crema al pistachio ($16.5). I wanted chocolate so I ordered the Rocher de chalet: 2 hazelnut ganache, praline, cremeux, chocolate shell ( $19). The doughnuts were amazing sugar coated fried balls with creamy green filling. My dessert looked cute but inside the crisp chocolate shells was an odd creamy filling with nuts mixed in and a hazelnut paste that did not appeal to me. I put it aside and enjoyed the superb doughnuts.

This was such an amazing experience that was worth a hefty price tag! The service was excellent. The wait staff were prompt and friendly. Our request to move our booked seating to a corner table was no problem and when I mentioned to a waiter that I did not like the chocolate dessert she responded graciously that some people loved it and others didn't. With delightful food and a cosy vibe, it was no surprise that by the time we left, the place was buzzing.

Pepes Italian and Liquor
275-285 Exhibition Street, Melbourne CBD
Open: Mon: 4pm til late, Tues-Sun: noon til late
https://pepesitalian.com.au

More places for pre-show meals on Green Gourmet Giraffe:

Thursday, 18 September 2025

Street Art in Melbourne: Northcote, Thornbury, Fairfield

Recently I took some street art photos while out on a ride around Fairfield, Northcote and Thornbury. The fun images reminded me of more from around that area I had taken in the past and meant to blog. So these photos are a mix of weeks old and years old. They will make you laugh along, enjoy the whimsy and beauty, wonder what goes on in the artist's mind and reflect on the political issues!