Saturday, April 20, 2024

What we ate: the 2023–24 edition

I've been keeping an Excel spreadsheet listing the meals I cook at home since 2009. (Oh. My. Goodness.) Around 20 April each year I sum up what we ate most in the past year and write about it on this blog. I guess I'd hoped my cooking would become more sophisticated or more creative with time; not sure that has happened! Though the spreadsheet now has 296 rows, suggesting a reasonable amount of variety over the years. 

The data for this year still shows we're in comfort food mode … or, perhaps, that as I get older and more attached to my garden, I become less interested in trying whiz-bang new recipes. Ah well. We're alive and kicking so I assume we're meeting our nutritional requirements. Here's what we ate most times this year:

scrambled eggs with feta and crispy chilli
cheese and kimchi jaffles
cheese and spinach triangles with veges
creamy tuna pasta
roasted veges (probably featuring yams!)
vegetable curry (Indian, Thai, Malaysian or Sri Lankan)
macaroni cheese
nachos

Despite the old favourites, there have been a couple of new entrants to the menu this year … following my fabulous trip to Sri Lanka in November I started making this lovely cashew and pea curry, and another new fave is zucchini, eggplant and pumpkin rendang using a curry base from Zest Byron Bay. Oh, and I went through a rash of making Middle Eastern-style casseroles (soooo good!) when Exotic Bazaar was selling cooking sauces; unfortunately they have stopped making the sauces and are now specialising in Persian Love Cakes. I may need to google how to make my own sauces from scratch …

On an unrelated note, here's a photo of some coffees purchased recently at the University of Canberra. Is it just me or does one of them depict a vaping seahorse??

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