Category: Home-Made
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A January Dinner Party – For a Birthday!
Dinner parties are hard work if you try to do all the catering yourself. And they are made more daunting by the need to “perform”, given Australians’ growing knowledge and expectations about what is good food. Apart from working out a “modern” menu and doing the actual cooking, much time is also taken up doing…
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Made At Home – No. 5 : Three Hot and Spicy Sauces!
Updated Sept 12, 2021 In reading the contents of this post, also check: Food Safety Is Paramount Here we give three recipes for hot and spicy sauces. The last one is a chilli jam – full recipe details and photos are given below. First is an Indian-style fruit sauce-relish-chutney using plums or other stone fruit.…
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Made At Home – No. 4
In reading the contents of this post, also check: Food Safety Is Paramount Flavoured oils are simple to make, however, you need to be cognisant of potential problems from contamination. Hence, check the link given above. Shake them or stir them from time to time. Use good quality extra virgin olive oil. Store out of…
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Made At Home – No. 3
In reading the contents of this post, also check: Food Safety Is Paramount It makes sense that dill pickles should involve dill. However, the key ingredient is the seed, not the herb part. While green dill is relatively easy to find, the seeds can be difficult to track down. You might have more luck finding…
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Making The Impossible! No. 1
It is impossible to make croissants at home! Right? Well I think so! Decent ones, anyway. I did try to make croissants once but I have selectively cleared my mind of the details of that unfortunate experience. The complexity of the process and the dismal result warrant the jettisoning from the memory bank. Despite this…
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Made At Home – No. 2
Over the last two decades, harissa, like preserved lemons, has become known largely through Moroccan recipes. Jars or tubes of harissa can be found but they tend to have a ‘mass produced’ texture and flavour, and thus they are often somewhat less satisfying than homemade versions. The key ingredients to harissa are chillies – hot…
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Made At Home – No. 1
We have just returned from staying at Olive’s Cottage in Windermere for several days. With autumn well under way in Tasmania, the herbs were looking a little ragged and needing trimming while the lemon tree had a handful of fruit that needed to be picked. We were thus prompted to make three items we regularly…
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Our Herb Garden
We don’t have a garden big enough in Melbourne to grow vegetables, which is rather fortunate: unlike my father, I am a hopeless gardener! We do, however, manage to maintain a reasonable selection of herbs. Paradoxically, while my father had an extraordinary vegetable garden, he grew little in the way of herbs – mint, parsley…
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Kaffir in the Limelight
If you have the space in your garden or on your balcony, consider obtaining a kaffir lime tree for both looks and flavours. We have had one surviving quite happily in a large planter pot for about ten years. It hasn’t ever grown actual fruit, but we use the leaves frequently, picking them almost as…