Clipping recipes - the great magazine cull

I started collecting food magazines about fifteen years ago. I was obsessed with food, cooking and the ins and outs of the Australian food scene.

Fast forward to late last year, the top shelf of Olive's wardrobe was groaning with back issues of Delicious, Donna Hay, Good Taste, Vogue Entertaining, Gourmet Traveller & Cuisine.

They were organised by title and season so I could pull out a set of Autumnal issues in March and seek inspiration. But truth be told, less and less of the recipes grabbed my interest. I'm not interested in cheffy tricks and complicated processes anymore. Nowadays I'm looking for quick, simple recipes that get me through the week and stand up to being reheated when Mr Di-licious comes home late from work.

Faced with the prospect of moving boxes and boxes of magazines that I hardly looked at anymore, I decided to get rid of them...but not before one last flick through in order to clip any recipes that still caught my eye.

I made a big dent in the pile but I still ended up moving boxes of them to our new place..three months ago. This afternoon I pulled an armful down off the shelf and started clipping again.

I've found a stack of recipes using plums that'll come in handy next December - roasted plums & spiced plum chutney. An awesome sounding lavender jelly recipe and more cake recipes. The nicest surprise was finding notes scrawled in the margins of meals we loved 10 years ago. Unsurprisingly, they're the type of recipes I want to cook now.

Of course clipping recipes is all well and good. Instead of shelves of magazines I now have multiple boxes of recipes waiting to be filed. A project for another day......

Comments

Olive's Carrot Cupcakes {Recipe}

"Mummy, I'm hungry. Hungry for something sweet." Sound familiar? If only it were "Mummy, I'm hungry for green vegetables!" Sometimes getting kids to eat something healthy is a battle. The harder you try, the more they resist. We've been pretty lucky with Olive - she devours fruit. And while she's adamant she'll never eat a tomato (too many Charlie and Lola bedtime stories), she will eat green beans, peas and corn (and sometimes raw broccoli!) without fuss. The one veg she absolutely adores though are carrots. A carrot stick is a great snack for a hungry preschooler but when they're pining for something sweet, why not make them something healthy and sweet and bake some mini carrot cupcakes? These mini cupcakes are based on Stephanie Alexander's Simple Carrot Cake from The Cook's Companion . I like this recipe a lot because it uses olive oil which has lots of health benefits. If you have a food processor, you could ea...

Rainy Day Double Choc Cookies {Recipe}

This week Olive and I went on an eBay road trip to pick up her 'new' tap shoes. I could have just had them posted but I had an ulterior motive. The pick-up location, although right over the other side of town, was reasonably close to my old neighbourhood which happens to be a mecca for great food and coffee. After picking up the tap shoes (and bonus ballet shoes the seller thoughtfully included) I was looking forward to lunch. But as soon as I pulled out of the car park, the sky turned black and the rain started to pour. Bugger. I kissed my lovely lunch dreams goodbye and did what any sane parent of a three year old would do in the same situation - I headed for the nearest shopping centre with an underground car park. Ten minutes later I was sitting in the food court eating ricepaper rolls while Olive got Happy (I think you know what I'm talking about). Not quite the foodie experience I'd been hoping for. Every cloud has a silver li...

How to make sugar carrot cupcake decorations

The internet gods have not been kind to us this past week. Apparently a static-y phone line can interfere with our ADSL connection, putting to bed any hopes I had to bring you this tutorial and Mr Di-licious completing an online test for his law course. Sigh. At least I had my iPhone - I was still connected to the world so to speak, even if in a limited, small screen kind of way. But I digress. As promised, here is a 'tutorial' to help you make the cute as a button sugar carrots for the carrot cupcakes I made last week. They are embarrassingly easy to make. Before you know it you'll have a carrot patch that's the envy of Don Burke (sorry, Aussie joke). Tutorial: Making sugar carrot decorations To make the sugar carrots, you will need: orange fondant (I used Americolor Orange to colour) green fondant (I used Americolor Avocado to colour) a skewer or pointy modelling tool to make a dent in end of carrot small, fine paintbrush water ...

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