Friday, 2 January 2026

Reflections on 2025

Happy New Year!  2025 has personally been a hopeful, busy and draining year.  I have seen progress in house maintenance (newly painted), healthier eating, the development of the centre where I work, Sylvia's online schooling, and reclaiming time for reading.  Not all has been smooth sailing but it has been two steps forward and one step back.  Politically, it has been a year of despair.  One step forward and two steps back.  I have been so tired at the end of the year that it has been a blessing to have a quiet peaceful Twixmas between Christmas and New Year.  This is a long meandering post so make yourself comfortable if you are in for a long read.

Overview 2025:

House painting. Walhalla holiday. Cat cafe in Traralgon. Cake painting at Meeya. New Melbourne Metro Train Tunnel. Mill Markets. Visit from my sister in Ireland. History society volunteering. New air fryer. Cycling the Merri Creek bike path.  Furikake.  Merri Community Shed craft market.  Australian federal election.  Discovered dubai chocolate.  Macbeth in the Botanical Gardens.  BlueSky.  Celebration meals for significant family birthdays. Unstable world politics. Friday night pizza. New plant shelf in the backyard (Thanks dad).  Moving offices at work.  Tennis elbow.  The Sunday Shot.  Art galleries and exhibitions.  New kitchen chairs.  Rising cost of living.  First Nations treaty in Victoria,  Daylesford holiday.  Craft workshops.  Making collages. Too many bike repairs. New kitchen light.  And much much more.

Significant deaths (to me):

David Lynch, Simon Townsend, Marianne Faithful, Val Kilmer, Richard Chamberlain, Ace Frehley, Roberta Flack, Col Joye, Peter Yarrow (Peter Paul and Mary), Kerry Greenwood, Loretta Swit, Connie Francis, Tom Stoppard, Brian Wilson, Peter Russell Clarke, Julian McMahon, Ozzie Osborne, Robert Redford, Jane Goodall, Diane Keaton, Patricia Routledge, Prunella Scales, Rob Reiner, Skye Gyngell, Prof Emma Johnston (Unimelb VC), Brigitte Bardot, Pope Francis, Gene Hackman, Joan Plowright, David Stratton.  It was very sad to hear of the death of E's family friend Sally, less than a year after her husband's death.  I was very glad I was able to visit them in Edinburgh in early 2024.

 

 Blogging update:

As I looked back over the year's posts to write this round up of the year, I reflected on how much proof reading is needed on my posts.  It is a sign that I need more hours in my day.  Sometimes the only way to get a post up in a timely way is to post now and promise myself to fix later.  As always, I have lots of ideas for posts and ways to improve my blog, but have had very little time for it this year.

I have spent a lot of my blog energy this year on monthly In My Kitchen and My Monthly Chronicles posts.  They are round ups of cooking, eating, outings and meal out. It has helped me give summaries of meals and outings that in the past I have meant to post and never found the time for.  

I had a huge spike in stats this year, but have more comments from spammers than community.  This makes me wonder if it is just marketers.  So I was really pleased recently to see that someone had put links to a couple of my nut roast posts on the Wikipedia nut roast page!  That is the sort of traffic I love.

I was also pleased to see my recipes inspired two blogs I have enjoyed following for many years.  Cindy and Michael from Where's the Beef? posted their version of udon microwave noodles this year.  Recently I was concerned they were no longer blogging because my blog feed was not updating.  It was a relief to find they are still posting and the problem is my blog feed.  They are my go to for local veg cafe reviews.  And Nupur of One Hot Stove wrote about a Dumpling pancake inspired by my Dumpling Okonomiyaki.  Check out her February post on 20 years of blogging.  Amazing.

Kudos also to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings who has hosted In My Kitchen monthly since 2017 with great cheer and kindness, bringing together bloggers to share what in in their kitchen and create a friendly blogging community.  As usual I love being able to visit blogs regularly and only wish I had the time and energy to do it more.

Favourite new recipes in 2025

I haven't posted lots of new recipes this year.  I used to post so many but now it is more limited to ones we make a few times, really love and want to record so I can easily return to the recipe. Here are favourite recipes we made many times this year:

There are plenty more I would love to blog about including:Spanikopita loaded baked potatoes, Cheesy miso stuffed mushrooms, and Mushroom Pot Pie.  Maybe next year.

Favourite Recipes from previous years

Having been blogging since 2007, I have an overwhelming recipe index with many dinners that deserve repeating.  I tend to go to my Favourites for dinner ideas when we plan our meals for the week but need to return to more recipes.  Meanwhile here are some oldies but goodies that we make over and over again.

 

Many anniversaries

 I looked up one anniversary (Jane Austen's) and ended up finding a whole lot that had me feeling nostalgic for stuff that had significance for me:

40 year anniversary of the release of Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Out of Africa, and Back to the Future.

50 year anniversary of the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister of Australia. (ie he was sacked by the representative of Queen Elizabeth II.  Much outrage ensued.)

60 year anniversary of the release of The Sound of Music. 

70 year anniversary of the release of Rebel without a Cause.

80 year anniversary of USA dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 

100 years since the discovery of quantum theory.  Celebrated by the UN Year of Quantum Science and Technology in 2025.  (I am no science person but I am fascinated at how quantum theory has influenced our world and can do so in the future.)

250 year anniversary of Jane Austen's birthday.

Posts in 2025 on favourite places to eat out:

More favourites that I mean to post (maybe in 2026) include Paddock bakery, Bake Alley Bakes, Beit Sitti, Luthers Scoops, Tokyo Lamington, and Melbourne Kebab Station. 


My favourites in 2025

Food-related

Best new recipe: Tomato sausage barley soup

Best meal out in Melbourne: Pepe's Italian & Liquor 

Best meal on out of town holidays: Daylesford hotel 

Best dessert out in Melbourne: Dubai chocolate ice cream from Good Daze Canteen (pictured top left in above Dubai Chocolate collage)

Best change to kitchen: painting the back of our display shelves when we had the house painted.

Best places to eat cute food:1985 Kafe and Son in Law

Culture 

Best book: Small island by Andrea Levy

Best new release film: The Ballad of Wallis Island

Best tv shows: The Great, Maid, and Dept Q

Best stage show: Water Music concert by the Brandenberg Orchestra Rrawun, 

Best exhibitions - Daylesford Convent Gallery, NGV Yayoi Kusama retrospective, and Potter Gallery First Nations exhibition: 65,000 Years 

Best talks: Richard Aitken - "Orontes Adventure: introducing the Jones Collection of the RHSV.” and  aitken and Dava Sobel - "2025 For Future Reference Lecture" (on Marie Curie’s and her contemporaries' lesser-known contributions to science).

Best craft project: Making a magical miniature bookshelf

Best podcast of the year: No one saw it coming by Mark Fennell

Best current affairs show of the year: The Sunday Shot

 

Links to delight and amuse:

Kristy Sellars’ Mesmerizing Pole Dance Blends Perfectly with Stunning Visuals on France's Got Talent, (YouTube) 30 October 2024.

Neurodiversity in the Arts: “Fitting In” by Colin Thompson, review by Donna Levin in Different Brains, 4 

Jimmy and Andy Samberg Perform "Plant Dad"  (YouTube) on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, 18 April 2023.

“Being Different isn’t Something to Take Lightly”: Jarvis Cocker Interviewed, in The Quietus, 6 June 2025.

'Fridge cigarettes' are the hilarious new nickname for everyone's favourite drink, in Food Bible, 27 June 2025.

A gladiator finds his arena by Rick Morton in Nervous Laughter, 15 September 2025. 

Keira Knightley stars in Waitrose’s Christmas ‘mini romcom’ ad (YouTube), 12 November 2025.

 

In the News - reflections 

This year I stopped reading X (formerly Twitter) for current affairs and moved to BlueSky as an alternative.  At first it was exciting and refreshing to move away from the cluttered algorithms of X and find people I wanted to follow.  However it has given me an appreciation for the algorithms.  The lack of algorithms on BlueSky mean I only see people I want to follow if they post around the same time I am reading.  Some of the shine has come off BlueSky so it will be interesting to see how it goes in 2026.

Getting my news from social media have given me less time (and respect) for the mainstream media (MSM).  I have found independent news sites and blogs online with the intelligence and compassion that is harder to find on MSM.   One of the biggest changes was when The Shot started to broadcast The Sunday Shot on Sunday mornings as an Australian current affairs alternative to the ABC's Insiders.  I have loved its depth, passion and diverse perspectives.

Not all MSM current affairs shows are terrible.  I have admired Linton Besser investigations into journalism on Media Watch and highly recommend The Yearly with Charlie Pickering if you want laugh uproariously as you catch up on 2025 current affairs


In the News - insightful online stories 

Above I mentioned that I have sought out different perspectives on the world news from that in the Mainstream Media.  Here are a few gems (If it is all too depressing then I suggest you skip to the last link in the list which has an hilarious summary of Trump's 2025 in one sentence with rhyming couplets.)

The myth of ‘social cohesion’ – do as they say, not as they do, "The term social cohesion is abused and used to hector and badger Australians into compliance while our political and business leaders do as they please, every minute of every day." by Ronni Salt, in The Shot, 3 October 2025.

How the ALP outsourced the soul of higher education, by  John Frew in Pearls and Irritations, 8 

We're having the wrong conversation about unemployment by Kasy Chambers, the Point (an initiative of the Australia Institute), 20 November 2025.

'Value per bite': The Ozempic-sized force turbocharging an Aussie food shake-up, in SBS News, 26 November 2025.

The great AI hype correction of 2025 

Two Histories, One Crime Scene (compassionate reflections on polarisation in politics after the Bondi shootings) by Andrew Nagy in Ink and Instinct, 15 December 2025.

Can Australian sport ever be environmentally sustainable?  by Camilla Brockett and Xu He, in the Conversation, 30  

The Year in Review: The collapse of the fourth estate: the diminishing state of the mainstream media 

Happy New Year? Anyone saying 2025 was a great year has holes in their head. Will the next one be any better? by Joel Jenkins in Bogan Intelligentsia, 30 December 2025.

Trump's calamitous 2025, summarized in one (long) sentence by Rex Huppke in USA Today, 30 December 2025.


There is not enough space to cover all 2025 current affairs here so I will briefly list some other big new stories of the year: Social media ban, Bondi beach shooting, Gaza protest marches, LA Wildfires, Sam Kerr found not guilty of racially aggravated harassment, e-bike safety, the bold daylight Louvre heist, the Mushroom poisoning murder trial.

Happy New Year

Life this year has been so interesting, challenging and busy.  I have ended 2025 with a to do list that gets longer rather than shorter (both for my life and for my blog) but I have enjoyed all the distractions and fun along the way.  And I am delighted that we finally had the house painted inside.  Thanks to everyone who has shared food with me, given recipe tips, inspired my cooking and commented on my blog.  It means a lot.  

Over the past week since Christmas it has been lovely to go for bike rides, read more, go swimming in the local pool and visit the beach.  And I would love more time for crafts including collages.  But soon I will return to work, and the year will start in earnest with less time to stop and smell the roses!  I hope to squeeze in a little time to blog about good food and good times.  I love to share these but also to have this record of recipes and outings. 

I hope you had a wonderful festive break and wish you a happy and healthy 2026 filled with good food, good books and good company.

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