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.
The moral of tonight’s dinner is: Do not settle down to a cuppa and a chat with a girlfriend while cooking beans, if your brain has been eroded by five years of breastfeeding, punctuated only by 42 weeks of pregnancy. Yes, I said 42. Which is how old she’ll be before I forgive her for […]
I was just loving the thought of this afternoon. Lot’s of kitchen pottering to do. Dinner to make, lunches to prepare for tomorrow, yoghurt cheese, goats milk yoghurt to make, bread to bake, kombucha to brew. So much fun to be had. One thing I didn’t factor in though…fighting Ankle Biters. I swear the little […]
Today, it’s the Bread Winner and my anniversary. Our wedding anniversary that is. We celebrate both our wedding anniversary and our original anniversary. Because we can and because it seems kind of strange to discount the years we were shacked up before we decided to go all traditional. Anyway, organising a baby sitter and a […]
I found a 1kg Otway free range scotch pork roast reduced to $10. Happy days. Then I threw Lil Miss on the back of my bike and set off for the local farmer’s market. Nashi. Local. $3/kg. This is something in the realms of died and went to heaven kind of stuff. So obviously, roast […]
Lately, on a fortnightly basis, I throw meal planning to the wind with reckless abandon and simply buy up enough seasonal fruit and vegetables to get me through the week. Then, on a daily basis I think of a way of combining the fresh fruit and vegetables with something from the freezer or pantry to […]
But oh so good. Curses be that Pioneer Woman. Her onion strings recipe made this evil concoction pop into my brain. Then it manifested onto my dinner plate. Now I’m going to have to spend forever at the gym tonight removing it from my butt. The only change I made to the onion strings recipe […]
This is an adaptation of a spatchcock recipe from the 2007 Annual Gourmet Travellers Cook Book. Conceptually, I love spatchcock but the reality of all those teeny tiny bones, particularly with Ankle Biters at the dinner table puts me off. I remember in my younger child free days having a dinner party one night for […]
This little number was born of a medley of things I had been wanting to try, a change in weather and a great deal at the fishmongers. The salt baked fish idea came to me via Stone Soup and the marinara concept from a prawn ceviche recipe in the 2007 Annual Gourmet Traveller Cookbook. Salt […]
As generated by random.org Random Integer Generator Here are your random numbers: 1 Timestamp: 2008-03-25 21:06:15 UTC Which means, the winner is… (drum roll) Adele! Congratulations Adele, I have emailed you for your details and will send you your prize as soon as I have received them. Everyone else, thank you for playing! I hope […]
For some reason, it’s even harder than normal to coax Son and Heir to the supermarket without excessive whinging during school holidays. It’s like he expects to be tortured with the mundane during term time but holidays should be constant razzle dazzle. Dream on sunshine. He’s still only a pre-schooler too, heaven help me. A […]