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April was a busy month of Easter celebration food, including hot cross buns and vegan Easter chocolate ,and lots of easy meals. We were eating more stews and baked potatoes as the weather cooled in the first half of the month before it returned to the balmy mid 20s in the second half of the month. I made old faves (zucchini slice, lentil soup, mock tuna salad) and had fun with some new recipes (a polka dot nut roast of sorts, miso bean pasta and spanikopita). Sylvia made lots of scrambled tofu lunches.
As always, I will also write a My Monthly Chronicles post with more about outings and eating out in April. I also celebrated my 19th blog anniversary with post on the Coconut and chocolate layer cake that I made for the Cake picnic last month.
The above picture is from the polka dot nut roast I made for a bit of fun at Easter. I was inspired by my Christmas nut roast and my Aboriginal flag nut roast but needed to make it vegan for Sylvia. So I added some tahini as well as besan and aqua faba. Then I had to work out colours for each of the polka dots. They all needed tweaking. The beetroot colour was the best once I pureed it, I wanted the kale to be a brighter greener and the saffron was better in the Aboriginal flag than using turmeric. Another challenge was arranging the coloured dots and finding I needed more "white" batter around them and then realising I should have made the colours random rather than in a row. It took a few hours at night and was quite an achievement.
I took the polka dot nut roast to my parents place in Geelong for the Easter Sunday roast. I also made one for Sylvia and E to have for their Easter meal back in Melbourne. Sylvia did not like this nut roast as much as the Christmas one that inspired it and I will have another go at veganising it. However I was pleased with it and loved how the polka dots gave it pops of colour when slicing. I would love to try it again and really want to play more with colours in nut roasts. I just need more time for it.
On her first vegan Easter, Sylvia was able to find quite a few treats. Clockwise from top left: Nomo cookie dough chocolate bunny and Mummy Meegz chucki chocolate (vegan creme egg); Plant Cocoa Hot Cross Hazelnut Easter eggs; Nomo chocolate egg with crispy pieces and a cookie dough bunny; Barbie Vegan gummy carrots (package); the gummy carrots; hot cross buns. Sylvia loved all of it, though was disappointed she did not find any pana chocolate hot cross bun bars of chocolate. The Planet Chocolate eggs were the best.
I baked the Sourdough Hot Cross Buns - my fave HCB recipe I make each year and experimented with (and posted) a recipe for Matcha, white chocolate and coconut hot cross buns. They were pretty good except the matcha was too old to be very green.
I returned from Geelong with some good stuff, which is seen here with a couple of treats exchanged at home. Sylvia got the Nomo easter bunny from E, the Mummy Meegz Chickee Eggs (mini eggs) from me and I received the Health Lab Aussie lamington jam filled balls (amazing). My sister Susie kindly found a bar of Lindt vegan milk chocolate for Sylvia, my dad organised gorgeous personalised glass Easter eggs to be made for each grandkid (Sylvia's is green and came in the unicorn bag), my mum made hot cross buns and my sister Fran gave me a jar of her Frankly Raw peanut butter.
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Organising to buy vegan Easter eggs was more of a challenge than the regular milk ones in the supermarket. I rode to a few places one afternoon to find them. Pickles Milkbar had a good range of vegan Easter eggs. While there I purchased a cheeseymite pastry scroll. I asked about the sausage rolls and was given one to sample - it was a bit much mock meat for me but Sylvia loved it.
On my travels I also purchased the Sweet William white chocolate melts, were was disappointingly thin an so sweet and the DJ&AShitake, oyster and nameko mixed mushroom crisps. We have had the shitake crisps before and preferred those to the mix as the oyster mushrooms did not taste great.
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I went to a work symposium and had a lovely time chatting to people in the breaks but did not spend much time getting myself food. While riding home I found I was quite peckish and so I stopped at Cheaper Buy Miles in Sydney Road. It is a grocery store with cheap remainder stock. I bought all of this for $13: a packet of (tiny) vegetable mom, two dairy free almond Magnum ice creams, a tin of chunky pumpkin and chickpea soup, a packet of oregano Zeus Street Greek pita crackers, and a huge bag of mini potato cakes.
Those mini potato cakes were a delightful indulgence. I usually only have potato cakes with orders from a fish and chip shop. These ones were so cute and lasted a while in the freezer. They were great as a snack, a side and on pizza.
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A friend offered me a monster zucchini and I could not resist. It was from her friend's garden but she could not convince her kids to have zucchini fritters. I made it into a vegan Zucchini slice. Traditionally zucchini slice has been made in Australian households as an easy way to make dinner with surplus zucchini.
I weighed this zucchini by chopping it into parts. Initially it was more than I needed for the slice. I was surprised that the bulbous end weighed about 700g - and I thought the zucchini was much heavier than the 1kg I needed - but once I scooped out the seeds in this part, it weighed about 400g.
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This zucchini slice was much slower than the traditional one with eggs and bacon. This one took a few hours by the time I had made a batch of tofu bacon, the tofu besan omelette mixture, grated and squeezed out the zucchini, mixed it all up and baked it. It was amazing. Well worth the effort. While I used the Zucchini slice recipe from my blog, I added a bit of extra flour, besan and nooch which meant this time it was firm enough to slice. I wish I could say how much but it was a bit of this and bit of that. I also added panko breadcrumbs and sesame seeds on top. This is the best zucchini slice I have ever made.
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I made my first vegan spanikopita. I used a traditional spanikopita recipe from Somebody feed Seb with a bit of cross reference to the Lazy Cat Kitchen's vegan spinach and ricotta rolls. I also used this vegan cashew feta recipe with olive brine that I have made previously. I cooked it a bit longer this time and it was better for crumbling but still needs to be a bit thicker. Sylvia was keen on making the spanikopita as a coil. I learnt that a coil needs to be baked in a tin or it will crack and flick out at odd angles like a broken spring. It was pretty good. Could be better. I am determined to try this again.
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Sylvia's favourite lunch at the moment is scrambled tofu. She fries up some chopped sausage or tofu bacon, crumbles in unpressed firm tofu and adds in lots of seasoning: nutritional yeast flakes, stock powder, dijon mustard, turmeric, smoked paprika, garlic powder, black salt and black pepper. Then it just needs to be stirred for a few minutes until well combined and sometimes baby spinach is added after the gas jet is turned off. It doesn't take long at all. We had had it lots of ways. Above clockwise from the top are scramble and lettuce in a tortilla wrap; scramble and baby spinach on toast: scramble, tomato, lettuce and rice; and scramble with mini potato cakes and spinach. All were excellent. Sylvia told me that the rice bowl presentation was very la-di-dah!
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One lunchtime when we had a good sourdough bread I made a Mock tuna (chickpea) salad and stuffed it into a sandwich with lots of scramble and a generous handful of baby spinach. It was so good. I put a skewer in it to hold it together for the photo because it was so stuffed that it was struggling to fit together.
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I love tempeh but Sylvia is not so keen on it. She has been trying some dishes with tempeh that tempts her. tempting tempeh! This Creamy Orzo with Tempeh Crumbles was a great dish for the tempeh doubters. It had vegan cream, cannellini beans, roasted eggplant and sun dried tomato. I forgot to check the eggplant while roasting and it was pretty charred. Again I am more of an eggplant lover than Sylvia and was less fazed by her by the char. I hope we make it again - maybe with peas for a touch of green next time!
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Another delicious new meal was this Bean Miso Pasta with a creamy sauce made by blending a tin of butterbeans, including the liquid, with white miso, sesame oil, nutritional yeast flakes and lemon juice. It was so easy and tasty that it was made two weeks in a row.
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I have made this Creamy lentil and vegetable soup two weeks in a row. It is a great way to use up vegies in the fridge. I wonder how it would be with some pumpkin in it! I found it in a favourite Alison Holst cookbook years ago when I cooked from cookbooks so much more than online recipes. It has been so lovely that I have an urge to return to my cookbooks. I just need to find more time for them! I was pleased to update the photo in my original blog post as the first one was not pretty!!!!
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I returned to this Gnocchi, Cabbage and Sausage recipe that I had made from a couple of recipes and wrote about in last month's In my kitchen post. I tried it a different way by adding water after the initial frying so the cabbage was partly boiled and greener than when I had just fried it. I preferred it this way but Sylvia didn't. I think it might have had something to do with the gnocchi being cooked too much but can't remember. This needs more work but it is a good easy meal that I want to develop.
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We make pizza with my ridiculously easy Fast track sourdough pizza dough most Friday nights. This pizza pictured was a fantastic vegan pizza I made that was topped with tomato sauce, mushroom, capsicum, olives, chopped leftover baked potato, Damona almond feta and grated Damona American cheese. I usually put dairy cheese on mine but occasionally make it vegan so I can share with Sylvia.
This picture is from my bed when I had pizza leftover on a Saturday morning and was reading in bed. I don't do it too often but I am finding that occasionally reading in bed on a weekend morning is a great way to get more reading in. Perhaps this is why I have finished as many books in 4 months as I read in the whole of 2025! I started a couple that I could not finish as I kept losing track of them with infrequent reading.) In April I have enjoyed reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer, with Annie Barrows) and Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970 (Jacqueline Kent).
(I have passed on my copy (from the op shop) of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society to my dad who is on driving around Tasmania with my mum and family friends. He highly recommends it for holiday reading!)
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This Crispy rice salad is becoming a summer favourite. This time we made it with lettuce, avocado, edamame, cucumber with the dressing from the Japanese cucumber salad and a sprinkle of fukikake. It is really good. I think it wont be made much over winter but I hope it comes back into our meals again when it gets warmer later in the year.
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I wrote about buying panisse from the Vegan market in My Monthly Chronicles: March 2026. This is one of the ways we ate it. I air fried the panisse while Sylvia fried diced potatoes. (She preferred the panisse fried on the stovetop in our cast iron frypan). I served mine in a bowl with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, red cabbage, red capsicum, leftover Easter nut roast, yoghurt and pickles. I really love bringing together bits and pieces in a bowl.
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Here is our cat Shadow trying to work out how to open the kitchen door. My regular plumber (not the cheap one who is no longer answering my call and I fear has retired) came to fix some washers and leaks in the bathroom taps. He had installed my air con and checked if I was cleaning the filters. The shame! After a stern talking to, I smeared them with washing detergent and soaked them in the laundry sink before scrubbing them. He suggested they get cleaned whenever the season changes! Must try harder!
I moved a kitchen chair to get the filters out. Shadow will jump to grab at the round door handle to try and open it when he is desperate to go out. Yet he lives in hope and was happy to get closer where he could try and work it out. We were laughing to much to take a photo of him jumping to try and open the door. Sylvia managed to take a photo of him standing. He is such a long cat! He is more successful with door handles that we push down to open. We sometimes hear that thump as he jumps at a door handle. As the weather cools and we shut the doors more, I expect we will be hearing more thumping soon!
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My sister finally flew out from Ireland with her son, 6 weeks after her plane was turned back on her first try. We went to visit them in Geelong at my parents' home where they were staying. It was good to see them. My sister kindly brought presents. Fruit candles for me. Percy pig lollies from Marks and Spencer for both of us. Vegan chocolate truffles from Marks and two gorgeous hair clips that you can't see well in the photo - a peacock and a parrot. I also brought home leftover fried rice with tofu that my mum had made for lunch; it made a great work lunch. Sylvia declared the chocolate truffles were wonderful and made her feel so much better that Lindt balls are not vegan.
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My sister also visited us in Melbourne while she was on our side of the world. We had all sort of plans which changed as her plans changed. There is never enough time for her on a quick visit home. Sylvia and I went to Terre Mardre in Sydney Road where we bought lovely hummus, grapes, salad leaves, vegan tomato deli meat slices and a great sourdough baguette. We served these with some tofutti, carrots, red capsicum, and celery. The snack platters were great for my sister to fortify her for the epic journey back to my parents' on the bus that was so much slower than the train it was replacing. Sylvia grazed on them platters with Chris and ate the rest for our dinner!
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.
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