In My Kitchen - July 2020

Yay!  We've survived the first half of the year, and we're looking onwards and upwards.  Queensland is doing very well in the COVID-19 stakes, and we've had zero new cases for a while.  Our southern mates in Victoria on the other hand have been very naughty!  Heaps of new cases every day.  They just won't stay home!  

Well, as my birthday treat, Mr P. and I headed out of town for a (legal) weekend away.  We hit wine country about three and a half hours from Brisbane, where I bought - wine, and olive oil, and chocolate, and jams and relishes and ... well, you get the picture.  I will save those goodies for next month's IMK, but here we have:

local honey

This is a bit of a funny one:  pre-Covid, hubby and I had to pick up the car from the local Honda car dealer/repairer after a check-up.  The wee bottle says Southside Honda honey from our very own onsite beehives.  A lot of places around town actually have beehives on their rooves.  I love this idea!  So they were handing out tiny samples to their customers.  Lucky us.

chocolate cake

I've been baking madly since Covid.  Here we have a chocolate cake, with Nutella and cream cheese icing.  This was delicious (she says modestly), and rapidly disappeared to our neighbours, Mr P. and his two lady workers.  Am I allowed to say 'lady workers'?  Probably not, but anyways.  I used up lots of odd items like cream cheese in the freezer, old peanut butter chips, scrapings of Nutella and so on.  I felt so virtuous and thrifty.  And did I mention how delicious? :-)

pounding sauerkraut

(Sorry, badly lit daytime shot.)  Here I am, pounding away at the cabbage with my cocktail muddler.  So handy for making sauerkraut.  Then off went the crock into the wardrobe to sit and ferment for several weeks.  I'm going to put it into jars this week.

nachos casserole

This is one of Mr P.'s specialities - along with all the rice and pasta and so on in the kitchen.  This is nachos, but in a casserole.  He adds avocado chunks, and lots of hot salsa, and herbs, and maybe ham or chicken - this is a chicken one.  Deeelish!

gorgeous new pasta bowl

The colours are much more vibrant IRL.  Beautiful, hand-painted tomatoes on this Emma Bridgewater pasta bowl.  I adore her things!  Now I want the lemon one, and the zucchini blossom one, and the strawberry one...

limited edition Bailey's

This is delicious, my friends.  Hubby gave this to me for my birthday last week; luckily for me he doesn't drink it, so it's all for me.

almond milk heading to the freezer

Handy hint: I had a big carton of almond milk that I wasn't going to be able to use all at once, so I whacked most of it into the freezer.  I loooove my freezer!  (P.S. - the almond milk looks digusting when it thaws, but it's fine for smoothies, etc as it will be all blitzed up anyway.)

honey and marmalade

I ordered the honey and marmalade as part of the parcel I ordered online from Grecian Purveyor, a Sydney shop.  I am keen to try out that saffron honey. 

a whole heap of spices

After delving into that cookbook Zaitoun, I had to get me some spices so I ordered them online from Herbie's.  Black lime powder?  It's going into a chicken dish soon.  

definitely NOT in my kitchen

This is NOT my kitchen, but fascinating nonetheless.  The Queensland/New South Wales border is only about 35 kilometres from where we were staying for our weekend away.  We drove down to check it out, and found this on a side road.  Look at the huge fine for breaching COVID-19 restrictions - almost $67K!  The actual bit of highway into NSW had two Army fellas and two police officers stopping traffic.  We could have crossed over, but may not have been allowed back into QLD.  So we stayed on our side.  Reminds me of the Mexican border in California in our backpacking days - we could have gone in, but we wouldn't have been able to come back into the U.S. :-)

That's it for this month, my virtual friends.  Everyone is welcome to be part of In My Kitchen, so let's have a peek into yours, my fellow foodies.  Newbies very welcome! 

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In My Kitchen:

Happy Retirees Kitchen

Cooking for Kishore

Not Quite Nigella