A really bad smell is – In My Kitchen!

Yes, not a stunning way to start this month’s IMK post! Most of Celia’s lovely IMK participants over at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial,  share pictures of their delightful, gourmet treats, stunning new cookware and trinkets collected from afar, but no, not me this month! Due to my own stupidity and carelessness, the kitchen is full of foul smelling, black smoke which is due to this,

I stupidly put a Tupperware lid on top of the toaster and this particular toaster starts when the button is ever so lightly touched. I’ve hated this toaster since the day we got it and I now have a justifiable reason to get rid of it. It’s full of melted plastic that dripped down into its guts. Bye bye toaster! Next one will definitely be a good old push the lever down style.

On a lighter note, some other happenings this month In My Kitchen are:

The first firing up  of the wood fire stove this season. As much as I love the idea of this oven, the total inefficiency of it is why I don’t use it often. It takes a couple of hours to get to about ‘moderate’ temperature and I just hate seeing wood wastefully ‘go up in smoke’  without some return.  It is lovely though, on a miserable winter’s afternoon to listen to the crackle and feel the radiating warmth. I am planning on putting in a wood fire which also has  a baking chamber in it when we do the new kitchen/family room. Haven’t yet decided if this will stay or go and if it goes, what will fill the space.

And there is a great big mess! Glenda over at Passionfruit Garden has been doing some posts about using pumpkins in cakes and loaves and it made me think about a nut loaf my mum used to make. Mum wasn’t a great cook which might be why my dad bought her this book, 2 and a half months after they were married in 1943. Mum did cook, but like most post war Australian wives it was basic yet filling food and ‘tea’, not dinner, quite often sat on top of a saucepan full of water with the saucepan lid covering the plate while it ‘stayed warm’ for hours until dad was ready to eat it. 

I love this book, it has all the requirements a modern-day 1943 housewife should have and hints and tips on how to be a great homemaker. Nothing quite as OTT as The Good Wife, but it is interesting reading and the recipes are reliable and sometimes quite humorous. Luckily it was tagged to come to me when things were divided up. You can see by the way mum noted it as for me, she wasn’t a subtle person!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, back to why there is a mess in my kitchen. Inspired by Glenda, I decided to see if I could recreate a nut loaf that tasted like mums. I checked with my niece and she didn’t have the recipe amongst the ones she inherited and the one Glenda shared didn’t seem to be quite like the one I remember, so I searched Google and came up with this recipe that seemed more like the one I was looking for. Sure was close! I used brown sugar and upped the butter a bit and also added a teaspoon of mixed spice.

Cooked in an old nut loaf tin and the excess in a small loaf pan covered with a foil tent, It was a good start to searching and finding the lost memory. Not quite there but certainly on the way.

Quite a few IMK posts ago I mentioned we were looking for a tea that was as enjoyable as the tea we brought back from our trip to India. This ‘Good Morning Tea’ from Lupicia is proving to be a really enjoyable tea with plenty of flavour. Like my new tea cosies? I knitted these over a few nights while sitting in front of the fire. Knitting, winter and fire go so well together. I’m not really (in fact not at all) an artsy, crafty sort of person apart from a little knitting now and again.

That’s me for In My Kitchen this month. Thanks Celia for hosting these bloggers and joining us together. Go over to Fig Jam and Lime Cordial and check out what others have going on in their kitchens. I bet they smell better than mine!