In My Kitchen: March 2026

 

March brought darker evenings and cooler days.  Our salad days were transitioning to days of hearty fare.  It was such a busy month that we cooked less at home but brought home lots of good food.  Over the month I had the the Sydney Road Street Festival, a Pulp concert, a family wedding, a short trip to Sydney, a trip to the hospital Emergency Dept, the Cake Picnic, local theatre, a vegan market and a trip to the cinema.  It was exhausting though (mostly) lots of fun.  I will write up a lot more about it in My Monthly Chronicles (March 2026) but you will see quite a bit of it below.

The Iran war has put pressure on budgets with rising petrol costs and another interest rate rise.  In addition I have had a plumber call-out  and holes to repair at the dentist.  I am fortunate that we have some backpay coming up from the implementation of our Enterprise Bargaining Agreement at work (they always have a lag between agreement and implementation).

Above is my brilliantly green St Patrick's Day dinner.  I was sad I forgot to wear green at work in the morning so when I got home that evening - soaked by riding in a rain that would have made Ireland proud - I changed into green tracky daks and a green t-shirt.  Sylvia celebrated by making Zucchini pesto pasta -  which was lovely with lettuce, green capsicum, rocket and celery, and a squeeze of lime juice (from the garden).

It is nice to see that the Take Me Home Gnoccheria at 89B Harding Street has expanded into a Grocer and Mangia (cafe) to replace the space that was Harding Street Convenience Store at number 89A.  The milk bar had been run for 18 years by Andy and Phoebe Lee until the landlord sold the building last year.  I am glad the space continues to be one for community, albeit a more gentrified version of the once common milk bar.

We enjoyed browsing through the interesting rage of groceries with some vegan offerings - pistachio spread, choc top ice cream cones, burgers, fresh fruit and vegetables and Back Alley Bakes breads.  We left with a bar of Alessandro Luppolo smoked dark chocolate.  It was a very nice smooth chocolate with ingredients listed as cocoa beans, sugar and paperbark smoke! But at $13.50 for a 68g block it would be a rare treat.  Sylvia caved to the temptation of a vegan tiramisu. The ingredients list was longer with a lentil-based cinnamon cream layered with chocolate and biscuits soaked in coffee.  She was most impressed.  Later in the month, we also had a packet of Take Me Home's delicious green olive, parsley & chilli gnocchi from their stall at Coburg farmers market.

We have had this excellent  TikTok viral dumpling bake twice in March (we got the recipe from #kuzyinks).  Vegetables, coconut milk and Thai curry paste are mixedin a large baking dish and then gyoza dumplings are arranged on top so the bottoms are soft and their tops crisp..  The first time Sylvia made it with enoki, been sprouts and bok choy as on the recipe but the second time (photo above) we wnt with our preferred combination of edamame, napa cabbage and enoki mushrooms.  On the second outing, we also mixed about a teaspoon of cornflour into the sauce, which has to be thin to cook the dumplings but a slight thickening was prefereable to the watery sauce of our first go.  The dumpling bake is great with basmati rice.

We returned to the  crispy rice salad (from emily's eatings on tik tok) that we enjoyed only weeks before.  This time we didn't have most of the ingredients so we winged it and made the crispy rice to serve with lettuce, chickpeas, corn, green capsicum, and celery.  It was really good, yet again!

Another favourite salad is this Carrot, couscous, bean and feta salad that we enjoyed over the past couple of summers.  This time we veganised it with Damona feta and garnished it with cornichon pickles.  Sylvia had a few weeks where she was eating cornichons on everything.  I think life got so busy that she forgot about them and this week we found one of the jars at the back of the fridge and put it to good use.

We recently had too much cabbage and I looked up ways to use it up.   I found a recipe suggesting that it goes well with gnocchi in the way cabbage and potato go well in pierogi.  Then I found a couple of recipes that added sausage to the mix and I was sold.  The photo looks pretty beige but it was a really nice way to fry up the cabbage as a meal.
 

Another TikTok recipe from rhi.scran,  Sylvia was really keen to make these veagn meatballs (cheatballs?).  They were a matter of squeezing vegan sausages from their skins (we used Beefy Brats from the 'unreal co'.  These were air fried until crispy.  While they fried, Sylvia made a sauce of coconut milk and Thai curry paste and served it over the meatballs and rice.  I served mine with Japanese cucumber salad, red cabbage and red capsicum.  The success of the meatballs depends on the sausages and if we tried them again, we would use different sausages.  It was a pretty good meal, nonetheless!  

After our trip to Sydney, we brought home a wonderful loaf of light rye bread from the Bourke Street Bakery in Surry Hills.  It was so good I could have eaten it slice but slice but needed more veg in my life.  So I rescued a box of neglected Casarecce pasta and added it to a stew of old cherry tomatoes, the remains of a bunch of celery, as well as reliable onion, carrot, a tin of tomatoes, a tin of chickpeas and frozen peas for a token green vegetable, plus tahini and seasonings.  It was lovely with the bread and I stored some in the freezer for work lunches.

Here is another of Sylvia's gorgeous collage cards that she made for my sister's wedding in March.  The wedding was a great and I was very relieved to be able to wash my hair before the wedding after a bit of pre-wedding drama.

A couple of days prior, our washer gave out and we could not turn off the kitchen sink tap without turning it off at the mains.  I had a look at the tap but it was so old it was probably the original from the 1960s and I could not get the handle off the spindle.  It was the Friday night before the long weekend.  We had to do an after hours call out because 3 days were a long time without running water.  My regular plumbers were not available.  I asked for advice but ended going to HiPages to find a plumber with a reasonable rate who was able to get to our place in about 30 minutes and replace the kitchen taps. An experience like that really made me appreciate being able to turn on and off the tap.

I have written about our experiences at the amazing Cake Picnic, Melbourne 2026 run as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in March.  I still plan to write more about the chocolate coconut layer cake I made.  Today I will share a bit of the cake picnic in my kitchen.  Above is our fridge when we parked our cakes into cake boxes there overnight after hours of baking and decorating.  You can see that we had to squeeze everything else in the fridge on other shelves.

After the cake picnic we brought home some of the goodies.  Queen was a sponsor and as part of our entrance price, we got the merch bag of a tote bag, vanilla essence, fondant letters and a choice of a wooden spoon or a tea towel.  We got one of each.  

The cake picnic vanilla essence bottle was gorgeous.  When the organisers announced at the picnic that there were lots of leftover bottles of vanilla essence if anyone wanted more.  We were about to get more until we saw the queues the announcement had created.  It wasn't worth that much hassle!

This is my cake picnic box of slices.  A lot of them went into the freezer and I still cannot face all the sugary cake.  So much frosting!  I was sad that it was such a mess that I could not take it to work or share it with my neighbours.  I don't think I will be able to eat a lot of it but will probably pick at a bit of it eventually.

The day after the cake picnic, I went to a community play (Little Voice) with a couple of neighbours to see one of our neighbours perform in the play.  We brought food to eat at the tables and it was fun that we were the cabaret audience in the play.  There was some great singing and great piano, but a lot of sadness in the story line!  I took along hummus and vegies with some Arnotts seeded crackers.  One of my neighbours was very happy that the crackers were gluten free.  It was good to eat some fresh vegies after the sugar fest at the cake picnic.

Sylvia had tickets but needed a day of rest after the cake picnic.  She had been so determined to go there after being in the Emergency Department at hospital for acute tonsillitis only two days prior to the picnic.  After making a big effort to attend the picnic, she was pretty worn out and needed a quiet day.

We went to the Vegan Market at the Coburg Town Hall at the end of the month.  By then I was so tired and had eaten such indulgent food that I wasn't that keen on buying a lot.  However, I will always ben tempted by Dubai chocolate and really loved it in a slice from the Little Sweet Things stall.  

Sylvia was excited about the Better Now Bakes stall.  They do amazing baking (as any former Great Australian Bake-Off contestant should) and bought a great though a bit spicy kimchi and cheese scroll; a lovely pandan lamington that was green under the coconut; and a slice of the superb "Jai's wedding cake: lemon myrtle cake slices with a strawberry & pepperberry jam filling, dressed in hibiscus buttercream".  We ate well when we got home.

Sylvia was keen to eat a borek and a burger but I really really loved the South-Co panisse.  I admit to tasting a few of the crispy fried squares of chickpea 'tofu' with smooth soft flavoured insides.  It was all I wanted for lunch so we walked across the road to the Coburg farmers market to buy a fine loaf of Flinders Sourdough bread.  We also bought kale, tomatoes and yellow zucchini.  This was the sort of good food I really needed.

Here is a close up of the slab of pesto-flavoured Panisse that I crisped up in the air fryer and ate on sourdough with relish the next day.   Right after the market we had air-fried panisse with lettuce, tomato and mayo in a sourdough sandwich.  Fried panisse is the best!  It is not just how wonderfully soft it is inside but the delicious mellow chickpea flavour with the addition of aromatic pesto.  

When Sylvia found that Sebby Scrolls were serving vegan cinnamon scrolls in the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival Bakers Dozen in Fed Square, she organised to go with her dad.  They told me it was very busy and bought back some of the lovely mini scrolls - that were sold in pairs - for us to enjoy at home.  They were very soft and very sticky with all that frosting.

As the fickle autumn weather veered from balmy warmth into a rainy day, I made gravy. We don't have it often but it is great comfort food.  I had planned to serve baked potatoes for tea but had a problem when I remembered I had forgotten to buy some big potatoes. We had sausages and a couple of small potatoes.  Sylvia was delighted to have sausages covered in hearty gravy.  I didn't use a recipe but just fried onions, added flour, vegemite, tomato sauce, seasoning and water.  It was so so good.  I must make it again now that the weather is cooling as we gallop towards winter!

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