In My Kitchen: April 2024

Is there anyone else shocked to find that it is already April?? Life with a newborn is so slow and fast at the same time, each day feels like it's taking forever but then somehow I don't get much done! I know, I know, expecting to get anything done with a newborn in tow is a bit of a challenge... Let's take a peek into my kitchen for the last month.

We are doing lots of meal prep so that we can do a big cook on the weekend and it can last a few days. Here it was mushroom rice, a veggie tofu stir fry and lentils with potato/ eggplant. 

Some canelés my mother in law bought on a whim one day, delicious! 

I'm very grateful for my local mums group, a bunch of expat mums who live in the area. My French is improving but when I'm tired and sleep deprived the ability to chat with others in English is priceless! Here I baked some vegemite cheese scrolls for them - the cheese was the "good stuff" because life is short you know, so let's just have the scrolls with 18 months aged comte :)  

(Shout out to Johanna from GGG for the recipe, I followed it with a tangzhong twist and they were excellent!) 

Our new regimen is to have salad or soup for lunch, and once a week when I have a lot of sourdough starter hanging around I chuck a can of corn in it and we have corn fritters. Delicious! 

A croissant from my favourite croissant place La Maison d'Isabelle. Excellent as always (this place has a separate queue just for croissants). This was the last dairy containing thing I ate before I started on my dairy free diet... (to see if it would help with G's reflux)

One day I think G cried for about 7 hours because he was so upset with reflux, and I finally cracked open the emergency chocolate. I have 4 of these from when my friend came to visit from Australia. A little taste of home

Tortellini with parma ham, from when S' sister came to visit us last month. Simple cherry tomato sauce and it was a treat as a light dinner. 

A romanesco cauliflower - they are just the most majestic vegetable, looking like they landed from outer space. Can anyone believe my son is 3 months old already! 

We finally had a friend over for a dinner "party" - as much as we can party with a 3 month old (although the boys did get quite drunk on excellent wine). I made these vegan meatballs with red kidney beans and quinoa  

We ate them along with this salad platter, sourdough pitas, hummus and the white stuff in the middle is vegan mayonnaise (from aquafaba). It was quite a bit of kitchen work but I really enjoyed the feeling of "getting back to normal" with having friends over again. Afterwards the boys had an enormous plate of magnificent cheeses while I went to bed with the baby. I was so sad to miss the cheeses but eliminating dairy has eliminated G's reflux, so maybe it's what I have to stick with... 

For Easter I made the traditional Italian Easter pie called torta pasqualina 

It's usually spinach, ricotta and egg - here I had to replace the ricotta with soy ricotta which was surprisingly easy to make but lacked the creaminess of normal ricotta. It was delicious anyway!

Lastly, some delicious sourdough hot cross buns that I made for mums group. Hot cross buns aren't a thing in France (it's more an UK-Commonwealth thing) so for those of us with hot X bun affiliations, it was a real treat. 

The curveball this month is this glorious cherry blossom tree from the Tuileries garden. We had a week of wonderful warm spring weather followed by a return to cool temps and lots of rain again.  Anyhow, spring is here! Spring reminds us that life is full of rejuvenation and regeneration, and watching the trees bud and grow new leaves and flower brings so many little joys.  

I'm sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings who hosts the monthly IMK series - thanks Sherry and have a good month everyone!