Welcome to The Kitchen Playground. Cooking can bring great joy and great despair. I hope that the recipes you find here, many of which are very quick to make with the weeknight in mind, help you to experience more joy than despair. Many recipes have instructions for the Thermomix 31 as well as traditional instructions. The emphasis is on real, fresh food that combines flavour, texture and scent to delight the senses.
Temperatures have been more than 20 degrees cooler this week in Melbourne than it was on Saturday. Which has brought about some difference in meals. We rely did get a little tired of salad variations. Yesterday I decided to soak some beans in preparation for tonight. Kidney beans were first to hand, bringing with them […]
We’re heavy hearted in Victoria. Ash Wednesday, 1983 is a day of devastation I remember well. This weekend has been worse. 84 live confirmed lost. That number will rise. More than 700 homes lost. That number will rise. There are ways to help Red Cross Appeal 1800 811 700 Give Blood
Before I get to the bread, a brief glimpse of the bundle of cute that is my mini me. In full mini me mode. Now that I have that short outburst of parental pride out of the way, I’ll get back to the bread. I had decided that I would manage bread production within my […]
A lovely thing about summer in Melbourne is the amount of free music events that can be found in gorgeous park settings. Which is a lovely way to spend a Sunday evening. Particularly as a picnic the evening before your First Born starts school and work resumes for the year and routine craziness consumes your […]
Just a quick one from me tonight as I am seriously knackered. This is not the best ice cream I have ever made but it is certainly good. One worth bearing in mind if you ever need to make ice cream for someone allergic to eggs. I love that it uses honey rather than sugar […]
The temperatures have soared even higher today with top of 45.1 (113) degrees so I did the cooking portion of the days food supplies before the sun had risen. Once all the domestic duties were complete, we headed back to the pool. THe gret thing about this weather and spending every day at the pool […]
Melbourne is not a place to cook this week. It reached 43.4 degrees in the city today and 44 degrees i my neck of the woods. That’s around 110 in Farenheit. Admittedly I did get up at 6am to cook some chickpeas I’d had soaking but as it is still 37.4 degrees at 9.30pm, I […]
I love this soap becuse it was primarily made from the fat of the Christmas ham we were given. The rest of the fats were other assorted leftover cooking fats. So frugal. Makes me happy.
Happy Australia Day people! Whilst tradition dictates that I should have spent the day having a barbecue, drinking beer and watching the cricket, practicality reared her ugly head. Which is not to say I didn’t watch the cricket. What I did do however, was to take advantage of the 28 degree weather to bake for […]
This week’s slow food market yielded a lovely little collection of eggplants. A handful of different varieties and colours that I simply could not walk past. Nor could I wait to eat them. They were required market evening eating. I had been eyeing off a recipe for eggplant and red miso for some time. It […]