In My Tropical Kitchen, September 2026

It's Spring, it's September, and I am loving the freshness of it all, despite what else is happening in this crazy world of ours. It's been an incredibly busy couple of months, hence my late submission to Sherry from Sherry's Pickings who hosts In My Kitchen each month. Thanks Sherry for taking the time to host the achievements of so many amazing home cooks around the world. Our French family has arrived from Montpellier in France to take up residence in Australia and we are over the moon about it. There's a lot of other good stuff from my kitchen to share with you which I hope you will enjoy.

It's absolutely wonderful to know that we can now talk on the phone or Whatsapp to our grandchildren and Matthew and Myrtille during Australian Eastern Standard Time hours. They only arrived in Victoria just over a week ago and are settling in beautifully to their new home in Northern Victoria. The friendliness and welcoming attitudes from the people they have met so far has really made them feel very accepted. Apparently it is in real contrast to what they have been experiencing in the cities of France in recent times. 

I hosted my Book club group at our house during the month and I baked a favourite cake of mine, as I needed to bake it on the day prior to the meeting. Not all cakes last well with being baked a day ahead, this one does. This is a Lemon and Sour Cream cake, with sifted icing sugar to top it off. Lemon icing is also delicious on this cake. It bakes up beautifully as a Bundt Cake as well. This link takes you to this recipe where I baked it as a Bundt Cake. Take a look, I think you will be tempted to bake it  for a special occasion.

These dainty Lemon Curd tartlets were a real hit, and perfect for the ladies afternoon tea for Book club. There were a dozen of them on the plate to begin with. I had bottles of  homemade Lemon Curd in the freezer, a packet of tart shells in the pantry, and a packet of dehydrated Cumquat (Kumquat)  slices which were perfect to decorate them with. Who doesn't love a Lemon curd tartlet? Of course there was a bowl of thickened cream on the table as well. Since the success of these little tartlets, and thanks to friends P & J for gifting these dehydrated cumquats  to me ages ago, Mr. HRK has now run with the idea, and plucked the last small crop of cumquats from our tree and dehydrated them. They look like these, and are really quite palatable to eat on their own as well.

The book we read and discussed for our book club meeting was Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. Whilst quite a sombre and haunting tale, it is loosely based on the life of Shakespeare and the loss of his son at a young age to the Black Plague, and his life in London as a writer. His wife Agnes was the central character, I think so anyway, she was a herbalist with a gift for prophecy. Maggie O'Farrell is a brilliant writer. I read this book before we travelled overseas in April, and then I watched Hamnet the movie on the plane.

We had our lovely friends over for dinner when we were still experimenting with our newly purchased gas fired  pizza oven. No promotion intended here, except that we love our new oven. Mr. HRK also cooked flatbreads in it on Father' Day, amazing.

Home cooked Flatbreads

Good friends of ours are always happy to be experimented on and to add to the bounty of food, Jules brought over smashed potatoes with cheese and bacon, very tasty, and a box of Pork Belly Bites which we cooked in our air fryer. I cannot believe how delicious those tasty little pork morsels are. It's impossible to stop at eating just a couple of them.

Pork Belly Bites cooked in the Air Fryer, so delicious in moderation, she says very guiltily.

This is the packet to look for at Coles.

 I made a Burnt Basque Cheesecake for dessert, and Jules also brought a dessert which is a You tube sensation at the moment. So delicious, no photos though. Some of the You tube sensations that we hear about are really interesting. 

This one which I just have to share with you, is a packet of Chocolate Ripple biscuits,  laid out in a baking tray, with a can or bottle of cherries poured over the biscuits, and then we baked it in the Air Fryer. So decadent and so delicious and so simple. Jules and I have a lot of fun with food when we get together, and go back a long way to our Library days. Mr. HRK and Dave really enjoy what comes out of the kitchen.

This Basque Burnt Cheescake is  a simple dessert to make and is delicious. Leftovers are also very enjoyable the following day. Here's the link to my recipe.

I made a delicious batch of Sweet Chilli Jam to use up another bag of frozen chillies from last years crop.

My orchids (Dendrobiums) are flowering, after all it is Spring.

Baking sourdough bread again, so good.

It was the day in my kitchen before travelling North again to Cairns. so I baked a batch of  

Ginger scones to use up flour and cream, and some of our homemade stocks of dehydrated ginger  and this became my submission for International Scone Week.

 A batch of chicken soup was on the boil to use up a chicken carcass and a few frozen necks and wings that I found in the freezer, and lots of vegetables from the crisper. It was a rushed exercise, but I was really pleased with how the stock turned out. It is still in the freezer for when therapeutic soups are needed.

When in Cairns, a drive up the range to Mareeba on the Atherton Tablelands, is a must to visit the magnificent Italian deli at Mareeba. Their pizzas are what inspired us to buy a new gas fired pizza oven at nearby Atherton.

We were also treated to delicious homemade lasagna, chips and coleslaw in Cairns when we enjoyed a family dinner at Shannons.

I made another batch of Cumquat (Kumquat) Marmalade, with the cumquats originating from an old seedy cumquat tree with a history and a story. I've just realised I wrote the story but never posted it. Is it too late, now that cumquat season is nearly over? I'll read through it and perhaps I'll post it. Thanks to Greg and Anne for these cumquats from a very old tree on their farm out in the country, which has survived against all odds probably. The marmalade tasted great but was a completely different colour to marmalades from recent varieties of cumquat trees. I find that very fascinating.

Cumquat (Kumquat) marmalade

Do you own a a dehydrator in your kitchen? While freezing foods is a wonderful way of preserving them, we love dehydrating surplus produce as well. Over the last couple of months we have dehydrated cumquats, lemons and grapefruit, and fresh ginger. Mr HRK loves to take the dehydrator stacked with slices of fresh fruit or vegetables or certain herbs, off to his shed and let it do it's work overnight.

Dehydrating fresh parsley

Other memorable dishes that we enjoyed throughout July/August:

Roast Garlic Chicken on Potato and Leek. Delicious and I made this again just last week, on rotation here.

Hot buttered Fruit and Sourdough Toast

Blueberry and Bran Muffins

Spanish Chicken with Chorizo and Gnocchi

Homemade pizza in our new Pizza Oven; Chicken Stroganoff with pickled red onion (first photo and recipe to come)

Spanish Vegetable Stew with Chorizo

My month since returning home, has also been about some Kitchen and Pantry Maintenance, after all there is a lot of activity in our kitchens, requiring ongoing cleaning, updating essential pantry supplies, which we often underestimate the importance of, and checking the expiry dates in the frig and pantry. When I'm preparing to bake a cake for example, there is also often a certain amount of work that needs to be done, particularly if I needed to shop for ingredients. Topping up flour and sugar containers, making lists, reorganising the herb and spice drawer, is this what you find yourself doing as a result of baking a cake and cooking? 

Things I've learned about blogging recently, just saying:

Nothing stays the same. Just when I feel I am coasting along happily, there's a change in some technology detail, that can upset the applecart.

It is much easier to comment on other blogs on the computer, than on my phone. Many of the bloggers I follow are on Word press, sometimes it's easy to comment, sometimes not. 

A lot of lovely friends who talk to me about my blog, don't actually leave any comments, I'm not sure why, but I can understand them being tentative about it, even though commenting is very secure on my blog.

I am getting an enormous number of hits on my posts these days, are they real people though? Perhaps AI is having an impact as well.

For the sake of convenience sometimes I find myself leaving comments on fellow blogger's pages on my phone, then I will leave comments on their websites on my laptop and it is so much easier. I just don't know why there is that difference, is it in my settings or in the bloggers settings? Sometime Word press in particular has such an issue with passwords when I comment on my phone, but not on my laptop. However, that is not always consistent. So now if I am on my phone I don't leave long comments just in case I lose them, and I am very careful with identifying myself. I guess if I published through Word press there wouldn't be an issue, however it all costs money.

The Substack platform seems to be overtaking the blogging world, but I really wonder if it is more suited to contributors who enjoy the process of writing, more than the process of cooking and sharing recipes. I really enjoy the writing process involved with sharing recipes with you, but creating recipes, cooking them, photographing them, and then writing up each blog entry, takes a lot of time. Perhaps that is why Substack writers are now asking readers to pay an annual fee before giving access to their recipes, or asking them to buy them a cup of coffee through an online link. There is only so much money to go around with supporting so many talented cooks and writers. I don't mean what I have just written to sound like whinge, it's just an observation. And now that AI is very much a part of our world, crikey, everything is changing. At least I know that all of my recipes and thoughts originate from me, or perhaps some other very good cooks, but always with full credit to them.

The times are changing constantly.

Warm wishes

Pauline