In My Kitchen: September

I'm finally back in my kitchen and cooking up a storm (aka making a mess). Look, here's my stove just to prove that I do in fact own my very own stove. Of course with cooking comes the washing up...or the "I cooked so you wash up" battle.  As I mostly cook, The Boy mostly washes up...but somehow the two don't seem to occur on the same night often enough. Hmmm...

I put in a meat order this month with The Free Range Butcher - the whole process was so convenient as we could pick up the order from the Castle Hill Markets (or any market we choose).  I'm hoping this meat will last us the whole month as I'm trying to eat less meat so we have less of an impact on the demand for meat.  Buying meat is becoming more + more difficult for me as I'm trying so hard to do the "ethical thing". I recently found out that Lilydale Chickens are not in fact "really" free range as I think of free-range. Their chooks are housed in barns with "access" to the outdoors. The thing is, if the chickens food + water is inside, they really have no reason to venture outside do they?  And if the barn is so full of chooks how do they even get outside if they're stuck in the middle of the barn. And with so many chickens wouldn't outside just be a dusty, poopy, unpleasant dirt patch with no grass or bugs to dig for?  Anyway - here is what we bought. It's all pasture raised...grown on the Free Range Butchers own farms. The Lamb is from Drover's Choice - raised outdoors and fed on Saltbush. We love these ribs. LOVE!

I recently bought these eggs from a lady at work whose neighbour's backyard chooks are laying more eggs than they can eat ($4.00 for a dozen).  I love the way the eggs are all different sizes - you'd never see anything other than 100% uniformity in a dozen supermarket eggs. Some of the chooks are younger than the others hence the different sized eggs.  I used the MOST enormous egg to make a googy-egg on toast.

A recent trip to hell-on-earth (IKEA) saw us come home with a bottle of this Elderflower Cordial. It's pretty tasty - especially with soda water + ice. The Boy had to return to Ikea to return a whole bunch of stuff and came back with two more bottles of Elderflower Cordial plus a Lingonberry Cordial (that I don't really rate - Ribena kicks its arse to be honest).

And what month/week/day/hour is complete without chocolate. I'm trying to cut back on naughty snacks and junk food as Miss Piggy is officially porky.  I've been told that 'raw' chocolate is better for you than regular chocolate - I have no idea why. The other theory is that because it is less sweet + more bitter you tend to eat less of it (I have proved that theory to be totally incorrect).  The Loving Earth block was pretty tasty (about $8 for 100g block) - I liked the big chunks of sour cherry in it.  So far I've only tried the Mint Conscious Chocolate. It's great too - very very minty (flavoured with peppermint oil), but much more expensive than the other brand at about $8 for a 45g block.

See you next month!

Thanks to Celia from Fig Jam + Lime Cordial for hosting this blog hop.