In My Kitchen - January 2024

Greetings dear friends and family, and Happy New Year! As January saunters along, I hope that your 2024 will be healthy (health is wealth as they say) and fulfilling for you in many ways and include some travel if that's your thing. My Kitchen is one of my happy and most fulfilling places to be, and this year whilst I love to prepare the occasional "fancy" meal, and doesn't everyone, I'll be challenging myself to mostly cook from scratch with what's in season, and using minimal ingredients when possible. There is still a cost of living crisis in the community, and most people are watching their dollars, but I think there are ways to still eat economical, delicious and healthy meals and with a minimum of waste. It is so important to cook nutritious food that we really enjoy. Food is one of the great pleasures in life.

 Having said all of that, the Christmas and holiday season is a time to celebrate, a time for a little indulgence,  and a  time to enjoy some special foods and "bubbly" in the company of family and friends. This IMK post is a taste of what I have been cooking, besides the essential Christmas Cake, Plum Pudding, Rum Balls etc. I've been cooking, but have had little time to write up the recipes on my Happy Retirees Kitchen food blog, so this is something of a food teaser, with the promise of recipes to come.  We travelled to Cairns earlier than expected for Christmas, braced for Cyclone Jasper, then severe flooding in parts of Far North Queensland ensued, and Shannon and I cooked up another storm to help out some friends whose home was flooded just to provide them with some Christmas cheer. That was a very fufilling exercise.

On our recent road trip along the Bruce Highway up to Cairns, we did a little detour into the village of Mourilyan for breakfast. This is just south of Innisfail. Mourilyan was first settled by immigrant Italian sugar cane farmers in the 1920's and subsequent generations still call Mourilyan and nearby Innisfail home.  Picture that here we are in sugarcane country, banana growing country, where the rain falls heavily during the wet, and where the vista is beautifully green and luscious at the moment.  

The Mourilyan bakery had been recommended, and it was quaint and cheerful and had most of the essential and delicious breads and bakery items.  However to be honest, the Babinda bakery just a little further North and just South of Cairns is still the best bakery on the Bruce Highway North of Prosperpine. The Proserpine bakery nearer to Mackay is also very good. We bought good coffees and bacon and egg pies for breakfast in Mourilyan, and I also bought some typically Italian items, which is a must.

This should be delicious for a quick pasta meal.

Nice packaging

Delicious, sweet and crunchy Italian biscotti. Perfect with a cup of coffee.

Locally grown paw paws from a farm just up the road were only $1.00 each. They should ripen quickly. Let's just say we supported the local Mourilyan economy during our visit. 

Paw paws ripening in the fruit bowl next to some homegrown bananas with reddish skins from Mackay.

The bakery is next door to the Mourilyan Police Station. We can safely presume the Police Station's  morning teas are well catered for. 

Baked Butterfly Chicken with dried Provencal herbs, white wine, butter and garlic was a delicious French style meal. The herbs are authentically from Provence. I brought them back with me from France when I visited last year and were a perfect substitute in this dish for fresh herbs. Fresh parsley from my garden is always the perfect garnish and when served with honey carrots, fresh zucchini and peas this meal really hit the spot. 

Vietnamese chicken salad made with a wombok cabbage and freshly poached chicken is the perfect dish to eat during the North Queensland Summer months. 

A pavlova for New Year's Eve with fresh cream, seasonal white peaches and blueberries was a simple and sweet remedy for the start of another year.

A mid-week chicken stir fry is coming together here.

This delicious potato salad from the cooking recipe repertoire of Nagi Maehashi is now on rotation in my kitchen. I'm looking forward to sharing this recipe with you in the future.

Who would have thought that a chicken, leek and frozen pea traybake could be so delicious? A stock of frozen vegetables in the freezer can be a lifesaver at times. We all have those days when we are low on fresh vegetables in our refrigerators, and can't handle a trip to the market or the supermarket. A bag of frozen peas was a lifesaver here. I dug up the last of my homegrown leeks, defrosted some chicken pieces and voila, Nigella Lawson's recipe, with a few variations was delicious. I think the white wine was the perfect finishing touch.

So I made it again, and added some chopped capsicum for interesting colour and extra flavour.  This recipe is the perfect midweek meal. It will be appearing on my blog at some stage soon.

Cairns has a thriving coffee culture both in the inner city and the suburbs, which supports the many coffee producers in the region. All of the independent coffee shops we have visited can serve a very nice coffee. One of our favourites is the Blackbird espresso which is situated in the Blackbird Laneway in Oceania Walk Arcade in Grafton Street in the centre of Cairns. This coffee shop always has an interesting and welcoming vibe to it and serves great coffee with nice coffee art topping it off. This time I was captivated by the beautiful wall mural of the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo which acts as a backdrop to the cafe. I think it must be a fairly new artwork. The black Cockatoos with their lovely black and red plumage are raucous and very active at the moment throughout the Casuarina trees in the coastal areas of North Queensland. 

We stopped for a meal break in Bowen on our most recent journey to Cairns, and the trees along the shore front were full of Red-tailed black cockatoos, completely undeterred by our presence, these beautiful creatures continued to squabble noisily and feast on the huge berries on the trees, which were dropping to the ground in front of us. 

Bowen is a fascinating coastal town in North Queensland, and was the setting for the iconic Baz Lurmann film "Australia" where it replicated Darwin. If you haven't seen "Australia", I recommend that you do. It has also now been made into a wonderful series on Netflix (I think) using all of the extra footage which wasn't used in the film.  If I had been living in Bowen during the filming, I would have signed up to be an extra, what fun that would be, with a chance to see Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman as they worked. Many of the locals had a lovely time during the filming.

A big shout out to my blogging friend Sherry at Sherry's Pickings who at the beginning of every month hosts this In My Kitchen event, which all of us at home Food Bloggers love to be a part of. I always enjoy reading what the other food bloggers from around the world have been doing in their kitchens, and any new cooking books and kitchen utensils they have acquired. I've bought a couple of new books which I'll feature next time.

Oops, are you finding you are still writing 2023 instead of 2024, just like I did when I first published this post. Now corrected, but I am wondering how many of you will think I've had a mental lapse thinking it is still 2023. It probably won't be the last time I do this but I'm OK.....

Warmest wishes,

Pauline