Hot honey prawns & fruit juice gummies 🍇

And an ideal dinner for Mondays

Hello!

Have you eaten anything good lately? I had a delightful butterscotch latte from a Hobart cafe called Sunbear (a lovely find from Diem Tran's recent trip). It was perfect for a drizzly morning that speckled my glasses with rain and periodically blew my umbrella inside out.

But onto some meals and snacks you can make at home. Last month flew by in a flurry of work and life admin. In order to stay fed and afloat, I made lots of quick and colourful dinners, like Melissa Clark’s prawns that bake in 5 minutes flat, and many batches of fruit juice gummies for afternoon snacks. 

Also in this edition, a simple dinner to ease you into a new week and a recipe that makes one big choc chip cookie.

Hot honey prawns with jalapeño and lime

Hot honey prawns are a revelation. They’re baked on a tray and the prep is just mixing them in a bowl with honey, lime zest, grated ginger, garlic and cayenne pepper. Once they’re out of the oven, they’re sprinkled with fresh lime juice and chopped jalapeño. Then it’s time to dunk them in mayo!

The recipe is easy enough to follow from this video or if you have a NYT Cooking subscription, find it here.

A simple meal for Mondays

If you’re looking for a veggie-filled meal to start the week, I highly recommend Heidi Sze’s green baked eggs with leek and feta. I often have all the ingredients in my fridge to make this 20 minute meal. I always eat it with buttered toast, but the recipe has gnocchi as another option.

I have pre-pandemic memories of whipping this up in between getting home from work and heading over to my sister’s house for my niece’s birthday cake. Feels like forever ago.

Never not making fruit juice gummies

I love this recipe so much I made it three times last month and almost know it by heart (the fact it has just three ingredients helps). It’s another Heidi Sze recipe and I have been seen running to the fridge between meetings to scoff these sweet, refreshing treats. So far I’ve made blueberry gummies (I found a big bottle of blueberry juice at the local fruit shop). Sour cherry will be next.

Extremely comforting one-pot mattar paneer

This recipe popped up on YouTube and I loved all the shortcuts within it — the pre-minced ginger and garlic and the tip about using cashew spread. Plus, the idea of eating a big bowl of cheese curry over steaming rice was very appealing. If you have a NYT Cooking subscription, the full recipe is here. I ended up eating this one while watching old episodes of Nigella’s At My Table and it was perfect.

Juicy pork buns

This recipe for nikumen, steamed Japanese pork buns, comes from Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s latest cookbook, Around the Table. My local bookstore had a handwritten card recommending the book and this recipe. I loved the specificity of the the suggestion and made them after work one night when I was feeling ambitious. They’re probably better suited to a weekend (we ate dinner close to 9pm!) but that didn’t stop me from making even more the following night. To split the work up, make the filling the day before. This was my first taste of a Japanese pork bun and I loved that the filling stays juicy, so it’s a bit like biting into a big, fluffy xiao long bao.

A single choc chip cookie 🍪

This recipe from Instagram yields one big choc chip cookie and it was the nicest thing to make when my after work walk was rained out. This is one for fans of chewy choc chip cookies. Is it silly that I doubled the recipe?

A solo Sunday breakfast run

On Sundays I’ve been getting up and heading straight out the door for some freshly baked goods.

It started with a month-long obsession with the Sunday loaf, an ever-changing special from the bakery in town, which could be anything from caramelised onion sourdough (my favourite so far), an iced apple and walnut tea bun (so nostalgic!) to an OTT loaf made from croissant pastry (I bailed on this one). 

Now that we don’t wake to a car covered in ice, it feels nice to wash my face, pull on a jumper and head out into the morning for a still-warm loaf and coffees to drink in bed. 

The other day I drove a little further, to a nearby town with a Sunday market where you pay fifty cents at the gate to enter. You can buy fluffy milk and honey doughnuts and get your half-knitted sock checked for mistakes by a smiley local pro.

This joyful mini mission is now a favourite Sunday ritual. There’s something so nice about being out on my own while the streets are quiet and the day is just warming up.

Catch you in December when I’ll be sharing a round up of my favourite cookbooks for gifting (four new ones landed in my mailbox just this month!) ✨