Hey, dough face!

It looks a bit like a dog's breakfast, but it tastes like vegetable

As you've guessed, I'm on a food wastage free bandwagon. I've been trying to get our weekly food bill down to around $50 and it's bloody tough. The best I have done is $68 and I was hardcore hanging for a steak by the end of the week. But I'm determined as hell to work this out. Why should we have to spend $5200 + a year on food.

Alfie is a morning sleeper - he has a snooze around 9.30am on a Friday for about three hours - he is so knackered from three hardcore days at daycare. This gives me heaps of time to make some excellent food.

Today I've smashed out a good ol' minestrone using the remaining items of last week's veggie box:
Carrots, sweet potato, potato, zucchini, mushies, kidney beans, end-of-packet pasta, stock and the special ingredient is Rocco's passata sauce purchased from my local Italian deli in West Footscray. Nothing tastes better than a nonna's homemade passata!

Whack it all in a pot and bam, there's lunch for the kid and I. The plan is to pick up some yum pumpkin bread from Sourdough Kitchen in Seddon to dip into the veggie mass. I'm going to have to coat the top of Alfie's dish in Parmesan cheese to disguise all the green veg.

For tea, I've made a quick-as-hell pizza dough, from a recipe on Taste. It's a fucking freezing day so I'm hoping it rises in time - it's got only seven hours to do so.

The dough has already started to rise!

It's a little tradition for Alfie and I to head to Rocco's Deli every Friday and stock up with pastas, pestos and other goodies for the week. I'm going to add prosciutto or parma ham to the pizza and maybe a little bit of pineapple... we all deserve a bit of Tropicana in our lives during winter.

It's going to be a lot of funny making these sweet pizzas with my little man this evening.

How good is it when meals for the day are sorted by 11am?A rarity in our house, but what the Helen-of-Troy, it makes me feel freakin' excellent.

Happy Friday punks.

xx

Heather Dell High

When I was ridiculously pregnant and enormous, I had daily cravings for Neenish Tarts. The pink and brown pattern would wake me in the middle of the night and I would stare at the ceiling, counting the hours until Heather Dell Cakes opened.

There’s something so charming about Heather Dell. It represents your nanna, through its sweet smell, its window display, its tin canisters on the shelves, the curried egg sandwiches, the biscuits and treats, the photos on the fridge, right down to the local fruit and veg supplier calendar with its perforated months highlighting birthdays, anniversaries and special events.

Summer Dreams and Ice Creams

There’s something in the air and it smells. It’s not just the smell of teen spirit. It’s the smell of summer. But it’s different this year and it smells so good.

The smell is popping up everywhere I go. At a recent dumpling showdown with friends, an argument broke out about whether it is ‘Creaming’ or ‘Creamy’ soda and then it reached new heights on the difference between brown or red soda, then it went even further as to who made it better: Kirks or Tarax? (In my opinion it’s Creamy, it’s brown and Tarax did a ripper version in a black can with a gold stripe).

As a kid, my brothers and I were only ever allowed soft drink at special occasions. We would have Creamy Soda or Pasito at Christmas and it was such a treat.