It's the countdown to Christmas, and I really hope that Christmas still brings lots of excitement and love to most families on Christmas Day. We generally try to keep it simple with the catering, leaving the traditional Christmas favourites to make yet another appearance, such as my Mum's Brandy Plum Pudding with homemade Vanilla Custard or ice-cream for dessert, and the traditional Christmas Cake.
This is one of those recipes which makes me wonder how can anything so simple taste so good. We were gifted a few Globe or American eggplants, and we also harvested a few Japanese eggplants from our garden. The numbers exceeded even my ability to make meals out of them, so of course that inspired me to do some pickling. Let's pickle!
What is it about December each year which means the pace of living ramps up, and we are trying to cram too much into our lives in these last few weeks before Christmas. I refuse to be hurried or succumb to too much Christmas hype, and I think by now I have met all of the deadlines on my list. Christmas cards? Not sent yet. Do you still send them? I am wavering.
When I first made this vegetarian dish with Mediterranean ingredients and flavours, I wasn't sure if it would pass muster for my recipe blog, or be tasty and substantial enough to stand alone as our main meal. Well, it ticked both of those boxes, in fact Mr. HRK loved it. So did I, and I felt much healthier after eating it, with all that delicious vegetable within.
Mushrooms and white or red miso paste are a marvellous combination bringing stacks of umami flavours to this dish to tantalise our palate. There are many varieties of mushrooms available these days, and I have used the standard white cap variety for this recipe. I also used white miso paste. More about that later.
This stem ginger and pear cake is so easy to make, resulting in a top layer of pear, a very moist cake texture and lots of warm, cosy spice and ginger flavours. We love using stem ginger when baking sweet things, and this cake gives a perfect result. It is now one of my favourites to bake.
What an action packed month October was! It was Mr. HRK's birthday so we dined out twice in one day, and why not? During October we included some essential kitchen maintenance and reorganising, some cooking (of course) and food blogging, gardening, talking to our son and grandchildren each week in Montpellier, France, and catching up with our daughter and lovely friends. We also played some pickleball a few times a week and I wrote up a few articles about our Mackay Indoor Pickleball Club for the local free weekly newspaper. How did we ever find time to go out to work?
