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.
Tonight we are eating Hainan chicken and rice. I made all three sauces to go with it. Sadly I have no cilantro, nor do I have enough cucumber left to garnish. Steamed broccoli with a dash of oyster sauce will do nicely as a side dish. The cost of tonight’s meal? I bought the chicken […]
It really helps the budget when you get free food sent to you. Tonight’s meal featured a 150g packet of hazelnut meal that I was sent (along with a couple of others) as a ‘gesture of good will’ as I had emailed the company who sells it to report that a packet I had bought […]
We did! It’s true. We ate out for under $8 for the 4 of us tonight. OK, so I’m being a little misleading. I packed dinner into the car fridge and cooked it on the free barbecue at a local park. It’s a beautiful autumn day in Melbourne. Sunny and warm, not too windy. Plus […]
Seafood and yoghurt cheese ravioli with mushroom sauce. 250g good quality marinara mix yoghurt cheese 300g flour 3 eggs 10ml olive oil For the Sauce: 8 or so mushrooms 2 cloves garlic 2 anchovies dob of butter dash cream grated parmesan Combine flour, eggs and oil and knead well. In the thermomix, combine for 5 […]
Kris of Cheap Healthy Good suggests that Cheesy Eggplant Bake is not a name that does the dish justice. I disagree. It’s a name that screams scrumptious, filling comfort food to me. I don’t need fancy names to be excited by a recipe. A promise of cheesy goodness will never fail. My variations to the […]
Left over pho noodles. Mmm, something long soup like. Leftover wonton wrappers. Mmm, something short soup like. Or both together. That’s pretty much how my brain works. And reckless abandon week seems to be having more than it’s fair share at the moment. Which is cool. So, fish stock from the freezer, a couple of […]
Sounds fancy doesn’t it? I picked up some quail eggs at the market, mostly because Son and Heir was fascinated by them. I’ve never cooked them for the kids before. Once up on a time in a world before kids I used to do crazy things like de-bone quail, I can’t imagine ever being motivated […]
How it warms my heart. I practically nailed the stock this weekend too. Not perfect but a 99.5 as judged by the Bread Winner. I blame the lack of licorice root which I couldn’t get for love nor money. Despite wild wind storms and days of lost power, I manged to finally get to the […]
I made pho for dinner on the weekend. It was delicious. Must post about it. Not now though. It presented me with somewhat of a dilemma. The stock calls for 3 kg beef spare ribs. The meat does not get used in the actual dish. So I was left with all the meat that had […]
The Bread Winner only got a passing bite of tortilla last night as he went out to the Comedy Festival with some friends. He did pause briefly to comment on it’s deliciousness. Knowing that Mexican food is to him as Vietnamese food is to me, I thought it only fair to have some form of […]