In My Kitchen, June 2025, looking back on Marvellous May

Dear friends, How can it be June already? It's been a big month of enjoying the magnificent weather here right now in North Queensland and keeping busy with harvesting and preserving all of the fresh and surplus produce coming our way, not to mention eating it. 

 Once again it's time to be sending this post to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings for the monthly In My Kitchen event. If you would like to join in, send your post to Sherry by the 13th of the month. Or just head over to her blog to visit more kitchens. Thanks for hosting this event once again Sherry, it's a lovely initiative and unites all of the keen bloggers and cooks around the world.

I grew up in an era when any surplus produce that came into our home was either pickled, chutneyed, relished, or made into jars of jams and into sauces. My Mother was so good at all of these culinary activities. I think this was probably a result of how tough it was for the average person and the poorer demographic to make financial ends meet during the Great Depression. My generation's parents and relatives and sometimes their parents lived through those hard times in the early 1930's and all of these skills were recognised by good cooks and homemakers as being important to ensure they could still put good food on the table despite limited money and resources. Now that we are constantly hearing about how difficult it is for people to make ends meet, and inflated supermarket prices etc. are making life difficult, perhaps it's time to get back to basics by preserving what is in season, and filling our pantries with pickles, chutneys, jams and even dehydrated herbs and spices. All of these often bottled food items cost a lot at the supermarkets, and can be made in your own home, and can be the difference between making a simple meal taste really interesting and delicious, or quite ordinary. Vinegars, sugars, and a few herbs and spices, which are the foundation of many preserves can be purchased quite cheaply by shopping around for home brands. 

We can cook in flavourtown with a little improvisation. Any leftover ingredients can be repurposed, in various ways. When the pickle jar is devoid of pickles, the remaining pickle liquor can be used instead of vinegar, to add extra flavour, and even tenderise meat. Dear readers, do you have any other ideas on this topic? 

I didn't mention the value of fermenting surplus vegetables as well. The probiotic benefits to our gut from eating fermented foods is immeasurable. Cabbage is a good vegetable to start with when fermenting, and here are a few links to how I have fermented vegetables over the years.

Green Cabbage Sauerkraut

A spicy kraut with Green Cabbage, carrot and chilli

Purple Sauerkraut, fermenting with Red Cabbage

Here in North Queensland, our friends are harvesting their home grown produce and sharing surplus at a rapid rate. It's just the best time of year for cooking, planting, gardening and harvesting. Which means, any surplus produce is being given away to friends and family to deal with and enjoy. Just in this past week, I have been given some beautiful pink grapefruit by M, a large paw paw which we are waiting to ripen with anticipation, I've harvested some very large cucumbers on steroids from our friend's garden, and a couple of large globe eggplants. These cucumbers are only half the size of some of the ones I gave away to my Mahjong friends.

I have realised that very large cucumbers, bigger than anything you will see at the supermarket, straight from the garden can still be crispy and delicious to eat, and also perfect for pickling. The end result being that I have been pickling the cucumbers, and eating fresh pink grapefruit for breakfast every morning. My friend Lulu, who was also given some of these pink grapefruit made marmalade, and gave me a couple of bottles of 3 fruits marmalade, so delicious, and in return I gave her a jar of my Stem Ginger in Syrup. Lulu loves anything ginger. Throughout this whole process, there has been a lot of reciprocity. That is also so important, to share and share alike, which also includes the sharing of recipes. I've shared my delicious Pickled Eggplant recipe twice already this week to friends, including Anne, my friend who gave us the paw paw, and who shared with me her tips and tricks for pickling cucumbers. What a lovely community to be a part of.

My Pickled Cucumbers, as good as anything you can buy

Anne's Pickled Eggplant, her first batch, looks delicious

I pickled a kilo of zucchini whilst the prices are good here. Here's the link to the 

Pickled Zucchini recipe which many of my friends now have. This recipe originally came from the lovely Lorraine Elliott's blog, at Not Quite Nigella. It's perfect to serve with a cheese platter and many other dishes. I now have two large jars sitting in my pantry.

There's been a ginger and turmeric theme meandering through my cooking projects this past month, thanks to the annual ginger and turmeric harvest, so there's been some spicy heat in my kitchen of late.

You can read all about it here, if you missed it.

A few of the Sweet things I baked this month

Delicious Ginger Crunch slice

Nigella's Apricot Almond Cake With Rosewater and Pistachio

Paul's Cherry and Brandy Fruit Cake

Mexican Chicken Traybake with homemade Arriabbata sauce was a delicious and different type of cuisine to what we normally eat.

 

Our basil plants are still flourishing, so I made another batch of delicious Basil Pesto. I'll be writing a post for the pesto at some stage just so that I can find it easily, and to share it with you as well. If I intend to use pesto with pasta I make it quite runny, but thicker for a dip. It works a treat and is delicious. Sweet basil and Thai basil grow so well in our Summer garden, however I've learned from experience that to make pesto from Sweet basil leaves the bushes need to be quite young. 

In Summer the sweet basil  grows large quite quickly here, but these bushes towards the end of Summer become woody, and whilst the leaves can still be used in Italian cooking such as pasta sauces, the leaves bruise too easily for pesto. A hint of bruising or brown on the leaves will show in the pesto, and we don't want that. I have only just pulled out a few of my older and woodier basil plants, which I hate doing, but we have a few younger ones growing now to replace them. I just need to keep removing the flowers from them to ensure they keep growing well. Although if our Winter turns really cold, which I doubt, they will suffer. I like to keep the flowers on one of our plants for the bees to feed on.

1 cup of delicious pesto

Why buy celery and rosemary seedlings when I can grow them myself on a sunny windowsill in my laundry, next door to my kitchen. This celery plant is growing in a bowl of water and is almost ready to plant out in the garden. Whenever I buy a whole bunch of celery in one plant, I cut off the base, place it in a bowl of water and wait for small roots to grow from the base. I've had a lot of success when I replant it in the garden. This way I have an ongoing supply of celery ribs for cooking.

A miniature celery plant

I'm waiting for these rosemary cuttings to produce enough fine white roots to plant out in the garden or in a pot. Can you see the fine roots? I need to have rosemary which I can pick at anytime.

I made this quick and easy, and most delicious Asian Pork stir fry, inspired by the ingredients in my Asian Pork Meatball recipe, just a different cooking method required. I just love the flavours.

 

I ordered this selection of herbs and spices online from Herbies Spices and I'm thrilled with the result. They arrived within a week, bonus.

And now for the curveball. I hope you can see the humour and value in this, it's important, it's a necessity and it is kitchen related. I buy my Kitchen Paper Towelling and Loo paper, from an Australian company called, "who gives a crap".  I think they use clever marketing to sell their products. They donate 50% of their profits to help build toilets and improve sanitation in the developing world, which is really needed. So I'm not going to harp on the loo paper, which by the way comes beautifully packaged with all kinds of interesting slogans printed on it, and all on recycled and bamboo paper. They are an amazing company to deal with, and their kitchen paper towelling is wonderful to use. And by the way, this is not any kind of paid promotion for me or from them. I just wanted to give this company a big shout out. It is such fun when a box is delivered.

Loo paper

Bye for now,

Warm wishes,

Pauline