Leftovers & recycling

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This is the real guts of this website. The old website and its archived posts is still available at its old url. Newcomers might like to dip into it every now and then.

Welcome to you all. Amazingly I still don't seem to be running out of ideas on what to write - well occasionally - but I have my writer's block strategies to turn to - see the text on the right. Check this page for the latest posts and if something interests you just click on it. It's easy to leave a comment and I love to read them. And now you can subscribe to the blog and get emailed notifications of new posts. And sorry I just don't understand Facebook.

"We are not here for long. So let's at least make ourselves something good to eat."

Nigel Slater

"I was born hungry, not a cook."

Julia Child

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well"

Virginia Woolf

Writer's block

Every now and then I can't think of a suitable topic and so I have devised a few strategies to get around this.

Lucky dip

The first strategy I devised is to go to one of my three cook book bookshelves, close my eyes and pick a book. Close my eyes again and pick a page. It's really quite an enlightening method of getting over writer's block.

'A word from'

My second strategy is to devote a post to the thoughts of one of my favourite cooks. Hopefully it will introduce them to you

Or

I shall choose a picture I have come across and extemporise on that.

A second kind of lucky dip

I have been thinking about first recipes in cook books - so I shall choose a book not quite randomly and then look at the first recipe for inspiration.

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enjoy

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Deliciously bland?

"you need to be proper greedy to do leftovers well." Jay Rayner I know this photograph of yesterday's soup - now cold, contrived from the leftovers in my fridge, doesn't look that appetising, but David said I should write the recipe down because it was so delicious. He almost sort of went 'wow' when he took his first sip which was flattering - and honestly I'm not at all sure it was that good. Good, comforting, surprisingly tasty. But also unrepeatable, because of the way

5 days ago

Bibimbap - Korean leftovers

"The term comfort food doesn't quite suffice; therapy food is more like it, which makes sense, given that the notion of food as medicine is a fundamental one in Korean cooking." National Geographic I was flicking through my Ideas pages and came across Bibimbap, as originally mentioned in a Melbourne Food and Wine Festival review of a restaurant - Moon Mart - and decided to go ahead with this topic, because it had cropped up here and there recently. In fact it cropped up so

Mar 15

Sandbagging the David Chang way

sandbagging - "To force or coerce someone to do something." The Free Dictionary "Hiding the strength, skill or difficulty of something or someone in a sport or competition" Wikipedia I'm struggling a little today. Well I have all the past week really because of various minor troubles bubbling around, which have limited my powers of thinking coherently. So perhaps those two definitions above apply. I'm sort of forcing myself to write a post every day - except when I obvio

Mar 6

Quiet satisfaction

"Cooking at home, you don't need to hit the bull's-eye, you just need to hit the target." David Chang This is last night's dinner. We thought it looked impressive enough to photograph and also because it illustrated for me some of what I was saying in yesterday's post - and elsewhere in the past - about how important it seems to be that things look good. In every aspect of life really - beginning with ourselves, and leading to just about every choice we make in life. We a

Feb 16

Christmas done and dusted. Now you can play

"We can now all admit that the thing we really love about the festivities is the time after the day itself" Yotam Ottolenghi And the leftovers. For my son this is turkey sandwiches and - well - me too. And yesterday, that was what Christmas Day was almost all about. Well apart from being with family, the presents - not such a big deal now that there are no small children involved - the big thing was the leftovers and the opportunity to make sandwiches such as this one - m

Dec 26, 2025

Nasturtiums - a first recipe ramble

" Besides being delectable, these floral “greens” seem indulgent, whimsical, and oh-so-gourmet." Kitchen Lane The painting is by Monet. He loved them so much that one of the alleys in his garden at Giverny - the main one in fact - was lined with profuse beds of nasturtiums. Everybody says they grow like weeds - are weeds in fact - in the western world anyway - having originated in Central and South America - and then having been brought back by the conquistadores, they spr

Nov 27, 2025

Some party time recipes

I've spent the morning, no - most of yesterday afternoon as well, making marmalade from a gift of home-grown mandarins, from friends, and a whole lot of lemons that I had in the fridge - 12 assorted jars seen here being the result. It's very satisfying when you get to this point, although there's always the worry it won't set, although this time I think I marginally worry about the opposite - too set. Anyway it's left me feeling lazy, so I thought I would just provide a few

Nov 17, 2025

Bagatelles

Bagatelle: "a thing regarded as too unimportant or easy to be worth much consideration." Oxford Languages So yes 'bagatelle' is a French word for a trifle: "The French word bagatelle , from the Italian word bagatella , means a trifle or little decorative nothing." Wikipedia And this is an oddments post - full of trifles. A bagatelle trifle is also a specific French Canadian dish of which the magazine Saveur says "The typical bagatelle in La Beauce is a child's delight o

Oct 27, 2025