Monday Menu

We are still eating very well, thanks to dear Rob. Come 5pm the girls hit full volume and seem to forget how to sleep until 8pm. So often Rob's lovingly prepared food is wolfed down, watching the girls waiting to see who will cry next. Or indeed holding one. On weekends we've been trying to eat our dinner at lunch as the girls are usually happier then (i.e. asleep).

Rob was very proud of his meatloaf yesterday, and he should be. One of those dishes I swore I'd never eat again, with memories of a soggy bread filled mix, with raw onions and those rubbery boiled eggs, had me coming back for seconds yesterday.

Rob's garden is still producing well (horticultural fleece was a good investment), we're enjoying leeks, garlic, carrots, parsnips, spinach, lettuce, broccoli and rhubarb.

A belated Monday Menu

A busy couple of days with a child health nurse visit and yesterday a trip to hospital for blood samples. Leaving at 8am for a 9am appointment we still didn't get home until 11.45am!
The girls are so brave, the blood sampling is quite an ordeal, the initial needle prick in their heel then 5 minutes of squeezing blood into vials, doesn't make for happy babies even with a sucrose bribe. So at least they sleep all the way home.

The girls are growing well Maggie is 3340g and Elisabeth 3850g. Rob is keeping me so well fed, I am afraid that I do view food at the moment as fuel, but I still enjoy good tasty fuel!

M: Chilli con carne with baked potatoes and pumpkin.
T: Spaghetti alla puttanesca.
W: Pumpkin risotto.
T: Sausages, eggs and salad.
F: Beef curry.
S: Beef curry (always better on day 2).
S: Salmon cakes.

What was in the menu at your place?

P.s. still working on that birth story.

Monday's Menu

Loving daylight savings, but I struggled this morning to wake up.

This weeks Monday's Menu collage looks a little bare.

Monday: Mushroom, asparagus and bacon risotto.
Tuesday: Broccoli and potato frittata (our own broccoli) with a side of wilted silver beet.
Wednesday: I ate so many left overs for lunch I just snacked on some nuts for dinner. Rob, having been to the gym tucked into a big plate of you guessed it, cooked greens from the garden.
Thursday: We had dinner at my parents, my mother had made lasagne.
Friday: Rib eye steak with baked potatoes and asparagus.
Saturday: Beef curry with chickpeas, lentils, silver beet and carrots, with pappadums.
Sunday: Curry take two, with added steamed pumpkin and little waxy potatoes.

The curry is a winner, and I'm pretty sure we'll have it for dinner tonight, if not tomorrow night. I may sound like I'm sick of silver beet, but we're not. Harvesting greens just prior to eating them has totally changed my appreciation of them. They taste so much better. I know everyone tells you that, but it's true. Try it.

What's been on the menu at your place?

Monday's Menu {and beauty}

Last night Rob took the dogs out for what we call "a wee on a wallaby" around 10.30. Don't worry no wallabies are harmed in this procedure.
He came straight back inside to get me. The night sky is spectacular at the hut anyway, as there are no street lights around the stars are so clear and bright. But last night there was an Aurora Australis happening. Our first at the hut.
Despite the cold -- thank goodness I'd grabbed a beanie and polar fleece -- we stood in the dark at the end of the terrace and watched in awe as a shaft of silvery light shot up from the horizon and then became a series of shimmering waves, that slowly moved across the sky. The light was like a translucent curtain moving in a breeze. Beautiful. Stunning. Luminous.

I didn't even bother trying to take a photo. For once I was content to capture the memory in my mind, confident that I could record it in words here.


This morning the mist hung over the hills as the sun started to rise. I don't know why but Rob and I have become so much more aware of the beauty of where we live since moving to the hut. It was hard to tear ourselves away this morning for work.


So the menu this week:

Monday: Massaman curry, I used a paste I admit and the end result wasn't as good as I had hoped, but still tasted pretty good with rice and poppadums.
Tuesday: We fixed the curry, by adding some almond meal to thicken the sauce and some silverbeet. We ate it with poppadums again and some natural yoghurt.
Wednesday: Lemon linguine.
Thursday: Tomato, vegetable and meatball soup.
Friday: same soup with freshly baked bread (Rob stayed home to work!)
Saturday: Egg and Bacon pie with rocket salad.
Sunday: Rocket salad with soft boiled eggs, blood pudding (sorry Sarah), and sourdough croutons.


Yesterday we headed to the Cygnet market (which is held on the 1st and 3rd Sunday of every month, from 10am-2pm). We love Cygnet on market days. Even better they have an atm for our bank now! So we picked up free range eggs, vegetable seeds, almonds, spices, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, swede, leeks, and silverbeet. We couldn't resist a couple of Eccles cakes from Lotus Eaters, a browse in the second hand clothes shop behind the cafe, a loaf of Steve's sourdough rye and a couple of his jam doughnuts. There was a cute new fruit and vegetable shop in town, and we found some coffee beans (we'd totally run out so we were on the hunt for some) and I spied a beautiful dark grey salad bowl, made by Emile Henry. Rob indulged me and bought it.

I'm thinking of collecting my recipe posts in a separate page as a list, what do you think?

Monday's Menu {Mother's Day megamix}

Trying saying that really fast.
We finished our week on a culinary high with a Mother's Day lunch for my parents and brother at the hut.
The weather was FOUL all weekend. Horizontal sleety rain, gale force winds, snow on the mountain, winter temperatures.
So we hibernated inside.

The menu:
Monday: our weekend curry with the addition of silver beet and served with rice, papadams and yoghurt.
Tuesday: the 2nd encore of the curry, with more silver beet, butternut pumpkin and potatoes. I think it was the best version of the three!
Wednesday: our cheat's ravioli (made with wonton wrappers). Stuffed with Elgar cottage cheese, spinach, pine nuts, and parmesan, served in a tomato sauce.
Thursday: Pan-fried potatoes, speck and onions.
Saturday: vegetable soup.


On Friday we treated ourselves to meal at our favourite Tasmanian restaurant, the Red Velvet Lounge. Quite luckily for us, it's only 15 minutes down the road to Cygnet. We ran in from the rain, and felt warmer as soon as we saw the wood fire. Our neighbour is the front of house, so we caught up on neighbourhood comings and goings, the current mouse plague our gardens. Steve came out for a quick chat too. A small group of musicians sat in the corner of the restaurants singing and playing music, adding to the ambience. I can't get enough of this place, and would go every week for dinner (or lunch, or breakfast or for a piece of Banoffee pie) if we could.

I had been thinking about a steak with chips and Bearnaise sauce all week. Rob had read an article on how to best eat out. Apparently you should order the item that sounds the least appetising. Don't order the steak (like me), but the item that at first glance you wonder why it's there. Because it will be there for a good reason. The theory goes that the chef has to cook steak all the time, so won't find that interesting, but the different item, may not be ordered very often and therefore will be more exciting for the chef to cook. He thought he'd test it out at RVL. Which isn't very risky because all of the food looked delicious. So he picked the lambs fry.

We enjoyed a glass of Blighs cider each and a Chicken liver parfait, with red wine jelly, sourdough toast and cornichons.

Then our mains arrived, my steak was cooked perfectly, smothered in a the Bearnaise sauce and the chips were nice and crunchy, just how I like them. The lambs fry was served with bacon, slow cooked onions, potato puree and sherry sauce. We decided to share so ate half and swapped. I had never tried lambs fry before. But it was tender and delicious with the sides and the herbs. But I found it very rich (especially after the liver parfait and steak, so couldn't get through my half). Happily full, we stumbled out into the cold and headed home to the hut with smiles on our faces.

Weekend baking included pancakes with stewed apple and blackberry jam (Rob), date loaf (me, found this recipe on BabyMac's blog, so easy and so good) and Coconut rough slice (me).

Sunday menu for Mother's Day

Nigella's Union Square Cafe Bar Nuts

Annabel's baked Sicilian olives

with Jansz NV sparkling

Nick Nairn's potato stacks

Roasted onions, neeps, carrots, parsnips, and leeks.

Wilted silver beet

Margaret Fulton's Roast tarragon Chicken with brandy cream sauce.

Rye dinner rolls.

Nick Nairn's chocolate souffles with brandy cream.

I think the guest of honour was suitably impressed, she liked her present too (slightly narcissistically I gave her two photos, one of Rob and I on our wedding day and one of us on the day of my PhD graduation) for her photo wall. She had been hinting that she didn't have any photos of us.

After they left (and Rob took the dogs for a walk) we lazed on the window seat. 

We didn't get around to much mouse proofing, however, we did catch three in the humane trap (ie we let them go in the bush). They are so cheeky. On Saturday night we heard much squeaking coming from the heat pump. We opened it up and out hopped a mouse, it must have been fighting with another mouse cause we could hear scuffling. He brazenly looked us in the eyes and ran back in before we could do anything!

Hope you had a lovely weekend, particularly those of you who are mothers to children young or old.

Monday's Menu, with a side of beach walk

The menu was for warming comfort food this week, with grey skies and plenty of rain, we get home in the dark and need something to warm ourselves up. Autumn is slipping into winter. For some reason, this year I don't mind as much as normal. Although I do mind the mouse that has set up home in our heat pump!

Monday: we ate left over French onion soup (which was so rich for such a small serve), potato gratin with a salad.
Tuesday: we had a late lunch, so all I could contemplate was a rocket salad with pear, walnuts and shaved parmesan.
Wednesday: Pasta puttanesca.
Thursday: we stopped at my parents place for dinner. Mum made us her Italian beef with potatoes, and a delicious lemon cream dessert (I ate it too quickly to take a photo).
Friday: Baked potatoes topped with cheese and bacon.
Saturday: Beef curry with rice and papadams. The sauce was thick with spices, lentils, onions, garlic and chickpeas.
Sunday: Shepherds pie.
Baking wise, Rob made some rye baguettes and I made a cherry, almond and coconut slice from the Primrose Bakery cookbook. The slice hasn't lasted long, the container is nearly empty!
What have you been cooking recently?


We spent a happy afternoon on Saturday planting out my spring bulbs, carefully lining the paths with the tulips, and the ranunculus and anemones are spread randomly around the triangular beds. Now I just have to wait to see them pop up.
Yesterday after cleaning the hut, we realised that we were free to do anything, as the garden didn't need any further attention. It was an unusual feeling. We decided to go find some plants for Rob's botany practical, he wanted something new. So we grabbed the dogs and headed south. We didn't go far. stopping at Trial Bay. The dogs were super keen, after being cooped up all week because of the weather. Once off their leads they ran around on the rocky beach, sniffing seaweed, and cheekily looking over their shoulder to see if we approved as they waded into the water. I made a pathetic attempt at only letting them go in up to their legs, but as you can see that didn't work.
Rob walked at the back, taking photos of the plants, while I went ahead, determined to get to a jetty that I could see at the point. The rocks were beautiful colours, one even a bright aqua colour. Others were covered in bright yellow and orange lichen. I got to the jetty with two dogs hot on my heels, it was a bit rickety, but I encouraged them to walk along it, so I could take some photos. Those brave dogs, they ran up and down the jetty and looked back to where Rob was wandering along.
Once he got there I think they both wanted to show off a bit, Nigella spied a submerged branch and she swam out to get it, Claudia (who isn't as keen on swimming) even followed her out there. The water was so clear (and must have been freezing) but Nigella loved swimming around us out on the jetty even swimming under it. From our highpoint on the jetty, we were able to see her cute legs purposefully swimming under the surface. Nigella has hip dysplasia, so can't actually run very well anymore, but you could tell she was so happy to be swimming so freely in the water.
We could see a misty grey cloud coming so high tailed it back to the car. But it was a lovely way to spend the afternoon.

Photo collage from my iPhone. Some tweaked in Instagram.



These last three taken by Rob with the real camera.

Monday's Menu {cheat's ravioli}

How can it be the last week of March already?
This last week flew by, with my trip up to Brisbane, the weekend was upon us before we knew it. Poor Rob had a cold this week, so with the cold weather on the weekend a pot of soup and a casserole was in order.

This weeks menu:
Monday: After making a zillion spinach and ricotta triangles (Claudia Roden's recipe) for a Harmony Day lunch, I came home with the leftovers. We reheated them and made a Lebanese salad to match. I finally used the purslane I insisted we grow, it's nice and crunchy in salads. We froze the remaining triangles for an emergency meal some time.
Tuesday: Another salad with soft boiled eggs, prosciutto, Meredith Dairy Goat Cheese.
Wednesday: Our cheat's ravioli - see below for the recipe.
Thursday: Massaman Curry, whilst I was in Brisbane. I need to cook this one at home, I haven't eaten it before I don't think, if anyone has a favourite recipe for this curry please pass it on. Oh, and I couldn't resist the chocolate tart either.
Friday: Beef pho in the Canberra airport.
Saturday: Vegetable and barley soup.
Sunday: River Cottage Chicken and mushroom casserole with Cider. Best thing was there are enough leftovers to eat on pasta tonight after work and the gym.

The Hut Ravioli

As we ran through the supermarket the week before, we grabbed a packet of wonton wrappers from the refrigerated section.

Image from Supreme Quality Foods

We hadn't used these in a long time. But we had a faint memory of seeing Simon Bryant use them on the Cook and the Chef as ravioli instead of fresh pasta.

It was a week night, which means by the time we've been to the gym, collected our dogs from doggie day care (ie my parents place) and driven to the hut it was probably around 7. We decided to "make" ravioli for dinner. A week before I made a batch of Nigella's meatballs and frozen them for use in pasta and soups.

Nigella's meatballs

250 g pork, minced

250 g beef, minced (or we used 500g pork and veal mince)

1 eggs

2 tbsp parmesan, freshly grated

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp oregano

3 tbsp semolina, or breadcrumbs

1 pinches pepper

1 tsp salt

To make the meatballs, just put everything in a large bowl, and then, using your hands (if you wet them with a little water the mix doesn't stick as much), mix to combine, before shaping into small balls.

So I wrapped (a still frozen) meatball in between two wrappers (sealing the edge with a little water and squishing it out a little so the joins were not too thick).  Meanwhile Rob quickly fried a chopped onion and some garlic in a little olive oil before adding a bottle of tomato passata. We quickly boiled the ravioli then added them to the tomato sauce to finish off.

We served them with some dollops of ricotta cheese (left over from the triangles I'd made earlier), lots of chopped fresh basil and some grated parmesan.

They were good. I think we might have to try another filling this week. Any suggestions?

Monday's Menu

A varied menu at the hut this week-
Lamb ribs with mash and peas
Beef curry with pappadums and beer.
Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.
Oysters with chilli, lime and salt.
Seafood paella.
Boiled eggs on toast.
Roast lamb for one: quince jelly roasted lamb shanks with vegetables.
One-pan chicken, sausages and sage (marinade the chicken for a couple of hours then throw it in a pan with some sausages, very tasty, a Nigella recipe from Feast).
Lamb and vegetable soup - I promised the recipe to Ally on Instagram but I'm running short on time so I might post it later or tomorrow.


The Easter bunny arrived at the hut a little early this week. I'd better stop eating them though cause Easter is still over a month away!