The Sunny Days of May. Cooking.


It’s been lovely having the full two weeks off work.

The sun’s been out making rainbows on the most unexpected surfaces.

Whilst indoors, the grocers are radiant with all kinds of blooms.  I had no idea how beautiful kale flowers were.

With that bit of time up my sleeve, cooking hasn’t felt like a chore at all this week.  I made a batch of Karen Martini’s Maltese-style Baked Rice (ros il-forn) yesterday.

Which lead to the discovery of ready combined pork and beef mince at Coles.

Cooking with saffron always makes me feel adventurous.  There’s something about taking pinches of its delicate strands and sprinkling them over your cooking.

Ros il-forn is the ultimate all in one meal.  I added a grated carrot to my meat balls and some panko crumbs to counter the increased moisture from the stealth vegetable adding.

To make things more toddler friendly, I added some cheddar to the parmesan topping.

The verdict?  This is going to be a much needed new regular fixture on my tired rotation of batch cooking dishes.  The rice turned out to be briyani like in texture and taste after its baking with the eggs, tomato sauce, cheese and meatballs.  Fortunately, the spice and curry powder combination wasn’t too much for Toddler SSG and added a warm and unique diamension to the good old combination of tomatoes, garlic and onion.  Plus, it was oh so easy to make in the morning and reheat for dinner.

Today’s home cooking project took a little while to get off the ground.  Do you know how hard it is to find a 400g bag of almond meal you hid from your toddler a month ago?  I thought it was so ingenious hiding them in an old noodle carton way back in April.  In honour of these first lemons of the season from our tree, I baked this lemon drizzle cake from the AWW website.

It’s always such a soothing sound, the motor of your KitchenAid.  Especially on a Thursday morning of your annual leave.

You’ve gotta love a bit of syrup pour over too.  Don’t know why my skewered reservoirs for the syrup ended up being so large.

Despite the over stabbing and the poorly defined drizzle icing, it was one delicious lemon cake.  Very moist from the syrup and almond meal and not as sweet as you might have thought.  Even with the icing.  Not to mention the fact that lemon flavoured baked goods always test that much better when you’ve made them yourself with your own lemons.


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