In My Kitchen-At Home & Camping

I’ve been doing all sorts of things over the last month. We had a couple of weeks camping at Depot Beach on the South Eastern NSW coast and when the rain persisted just a bit too much to maintain comfort, we headed inland to explore our Nation’s Capital, Canberra for a couple of days. We’ve had Easter and mixed in to all of that an obvious change of seasons leading to some very necessary jobs in the vegetable garden (I’ll be doing a separate post about those after this). A big thank you to Sherry from over at Sherry’s Pickings for linking bloggers who are happy to share what’s going on in their kitchens each month. So first up I’ll let you have a peek at our holiday/camping kitchen, some of which is what we ate along the way.

We both love pies, it’s always a necessity to check out bakeries at towns as we pass through to see the calibre of their pies. This heritage bakery in Milton was great to see for the historic building but that’s about where it stopped. One interesting thing was that this is totally cashless. I don’t have a problem at all with this concept but gee it slows down the service lever when the staff spend so much time explaining to the many customers who did seem to challenge their reasons. It also added to confusion when the EFTPOS  system wasn’t working. As I said, nice building!

At the opposite end of the spectrum we bought a pie at Poppy’s on Wallace at Braidwood. These would have to be the best pies we’ve ever bought. Mr ATMT said he never wanted to eat another pie again unless it was as good as this one.  Sorry, the pic was purely a grab as we ate walking down the street.

Back at camp we all know how much I still need to bake while on away and I played around with a new technique for baking our bread. I guessed that the camp oven fitted nicely into the top of our Ozpig and it worked really well.

The first loaf hit the top of the camp oven so I improvised and used a saucepan as a lid for the second loaf. Worked a treat! Before we headed off to Canberra I used up all the last bits and pieces to make a lovely camp stew. Left over roast lamb, bacon, vegetables, tomatoes, red wine and of course sourdough for soaking up the juice. While in Canberra we went to the massive farmers market at the racecourse on Saturday. What a wonderful market! Silly for us to buy fresh produce, so I had to make do with these delicious bombolini (doughnuts).  Don’t ask how many I managed to taste test! I also picked up a couple of souvenirs of freshly milled flour. This year I want to explore and understand more about grains and whole-wheat. These are a starting point. Then we came home to Easter! Roughly 16 dozen sourdough hot cross buns churned out in one bake. Might go away for Easter next year! Our daughter limits how much sugar the little fella gets, so we had a go at making some dyed Easter Eggs. I was really happy with the brightness of these. Simply a matter of boiling the eggs and rolling them around to crack the shells a little then they soaked in water with food colouring. Put in the fridge for a couple of hours and hey presto! These went into our picnic lunch on Easter Sunday.   I bought myself a little treat at the War Memorial in Canberra as I couldn’t resist the beautiful poppy design.  lovely china mug with infuser and what I think is beautiful artwork of my favourite flower, the poppy.What’s been going on in your kitchen? Pop over to Sherry’s and add a story for us to have a peek at.