Diana’s Chicken Liver Paté with Mushroom and Brandy Ingredients 500 g fresh chicken livers trimmed of all white sinew 2 slices of bacon (no rind) chopped 1 onion finely chopped 2 tablespoons of mixed herbs (lemon thyme, rosemary, parsley and a bay leaf) 1 large clove of garlic ½ cup chopped mushrooms 200 g butter 1 […]

This recipe has been a favourite of ours since before blenders and the internet, note the original text from our handwritten recipe book,  even with the spelling mistakes. We need to double it for 2 of our really large glasses, and these days we have really good blender to make soft,  fluffy ice. That said, […]

I have loads of rhubarb and need to pick it as part of cleaning up and resting the vegetable garden as part of preparing it for us to be away for 8 weeks. I make great rhubarb jam, it is beautiful with a bit of tang. I don’t have a really sweet tooth so to […]

This is a good recipe for a healthy cheese that can be served with an antipasto platter. It looks great and the flavours are flexible – can be adjusted to the audience and can be made ahead. It took a lot of effort and time to get this recipe together. I had a recipe that […]

I have been threatening to make eggnog every Christmas for at least 10 years but each year I have run out of energy and time by Christmas Eve and all I want to do is sleep. This year I got it made and we actually played board games and drank eggnog and laughed a lot […]

I have tried lots of different combinations of ice cream to make ice cream cakes but this one was almost perfect. Five layers – the first a biscuit base with a difference because it was a vanilla ice cream with a lot of crumbed chocolate biscuit stirred through. I make either egg custard based ice […]

This is a raw fish recipe that I learnt from Ba in a cooking class on an island out of Fiji. It was so good that I immediately returned to my room to write it down. In Fiji the sound d is ‘nd’ so they pronounce this as ‘kokonda’, just as Nadi is pronounced ‘Nandi’. […]

As is not unusual we have a glut of things, and being me I don’t like to throw anything away so when I was given a bag of kumquats or cumquats (both spellings are acceptable) I went looking for a brandied version. I recalled being horrified by the taste of them in my earlier, less […]

When I make ice cream,  mayonnaise or aeoli or bearnaise sauce there are always egg whites left over that either get fed to the dog or go into zip lock bags in that never-never place called the freezer. There they get to stay until I do the annual freezer clean out just before Christmas and then they get […]

This cake defies description. It is pure white, lacking any texture and is sliced and served with cream and fruit as you would a meringue. It is a cross between a cake and a meringue. It actually has far more egg whites in it than any pavlova I have ever made. I make it in […]

As usual for this time of the year we are blessed with an over-abundance of citrus fruit. Having made limoncellos with lime, tangelo and of course lemons, squeezed and frozen tangelo juice into large ice cube trays and given away heaps I was still left with loads of lemons so in the interests of furthering […]

This is so simple and makes heaps – make up mix,  divide into bowls,  colour each one, put each into zip lock bags,  cut off corner – WRITING ICING! WRITING ICING Ingredients 2 egg whites   ¼ tsp cream of tartar 3 cups icing sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract Few teaspoons water Method Mix the egg […]

This is the Mexican version of layered dip phenomenon I also make a Greek version of this. I choose not to make the easy version but it can be made more easily by buying pre-made ingredients so the biggest decision becomes what bowl/dish to serve it in. This recipe fits perfectly into a long shallow […]

Because I have been making sour dough bread I have been creating a fair bit of starter that is excess to my bread-making needs. I use excess starter mainly for pancakes and muffins – both taste pretty good. These muffins are flexible, use the basic ingredients and play with the fruit, vegetables, cheese, nuts and […]

My sister-in-law started me off making sourdough bread by giving me a tub of her home-made starter and a bunch of recipes. I followed this up with spending hours on YouTube and the internet watching and reading about the “magic” of this art. There seem to be as many recipes and ways of creating this […]

This couldn’t be easier and more pure – there is almost nothing in it and as breakfast when you are totally over no carb days then it fills the gap. There is enough here for 4 serves – it is so easy that to make enough for two or six is just a matter of […]

This recipe originated when looking for something to do with a 10kg bag of carrots that I had bought. The donkey got what I didn’t use but I made a pretty good attempt at using them. I fermented some, made carrots with cumin, pureed them, roasted them, made carrot hummus, carrot and beetroot salad, a few […]

This is in deference to the massive quantity of rhubarb that I get during the Spring/Summer and Autumn. I hate waste so in addition to the rhubarb jam and cordial and stewed rhubarb, rhubarb relish, rhubarb ice-cream I made by stirring very lightly stewed rhubarb and limoncello into the no churn ice-cream recipe, rhubarb chutney based ham glaze, […]

Made this for Christmas instead of my normal antipasto platter. It was a great success and can easily be made a day in advance and still keeps well. The ingredients are totally flexible – any combination of ingredients works. It was hard to guess what sized dish to serve it on – next time I […]

There are a lot of things out there that are purely for our convenience, that can easily be made at a much lower cost and in a much larger quantity, see the Dukkah recipe for a great example of this. Until recently I thought that spice mixes were a waste of time and money, if […]

All pumpkin soups are very easy and every one can taste different depending on what is added to it, either in spices or other vegetables. Sweet potato or potatoes make great additions to change the flavour slightly, and curry spices or simply a rich stock can make the soup different. Roasting the pumpkin changes the flavour […]

Every year, for Christmas, I buy the best ham that I can and glaze and cook it. This makes the ham moist and flavoursome. The glaze is pretty much whatever you feel like putting in the mixture.I have put together a list of what I used in each year’s glaze. Cooking instructions are pretty much […]

Ingredients Head of cauliflower, cut into large florets 3 garlic cloves, or 3 tsp minced garlic 2 tbs vegetta Freshly ground black pepper 2 tbs chopped chives or other herb Instructions In a microwave dish, combine cauliflower, garlic, and Vegetta, cover with plastic wrap and cook in the microwave until tender. Transfer cauliflower and garlic to […]

This has become a real go-to dish, simple and made quickly. We grow our own sweet potatoes in season and when not we still have them in the cupboard as the preferred carbohydrate. Ingredients Quantities in the ingredients are not listed, make as much as is needed for the number of people being served Sweet […]