Category: food and drink

Non-Alcoholic drinkies I’ve tried recently

I NEED to get this post done so I’ve cleared the backlog and can have a fresh start for summer, Christmas and party season. And cruising on our little tinny in creek, drinking non-alcoholic mojitos in the sun.

So, pretty much everything I’ve been drinking lately is from, or could be purchased from Sans Drinks. Use my referral code for $5 off your first order. Like this Duchess “Gin” and tonic. An import from South Africa that came in the bonus Spring Sample box from Sans Drinks. It has the botanicals, the quinine and most of the features. A common complaint for me is the sugar substitutes used in most of these – I don’t really care for stevia and other “natural” sweeteners that aren’t just good old sugar, they leave a taste. Even as a diet coke girl, I never liked the artificially sweetened mixers like Smirnoff Blacks – at least they had the vodka as an incentive to drink them, but yeah, gross compared to real sugar drinks.

The reds have been nicer than the whites, but then I’m not so much of a white wine drinker anyway. Some have been a tad sweet for me, but then that’s more my taste inn wine, I want the driest red you can give me. But without alcohol these days.

Been working my way through this Spring selection from Naked Life Spirits cocktails. I think these can also be bought at the end of the soft drink aisle at my local woolies. More and more there when I visit to pick up my Diet Coke. I drank the mojito the other day in the boat from the boys (Bruce and Maxi). I liked it a lot! Nice mint taste! Yumyum. The Classic G&T is also nice, not so keen on the espresso martini – I’ll stick to actual coffee. The pink cans – The Negroni, Sangria and Cosmo all were great, again aside from the hint of artificial sweetener. I’m such a Nutrasweet girl.

This spicy little number I got in the swag bag at the Logitech event I went down to Sydney for. Very much a ginger bite in this Dark and Stormy Yes You Can cocktail. Oh I love ginger. I want more ginger in my life!

These guys were also in the sampler at the top. The Daquiri from Nocktail was SWEET as you’d expected and tasted of pink, and the Ish was interesting and complex and I’m glad I have another in the cupboard ready to chill for next weekend!

Then there’s our yellow sources of caffeine – the new Sprite+ and the V Refresh. I have to say I’m disappointed in the decision from Coke to remove Lift from their range and push this Sprite+, mostly because it’s not a straight swap being caffeinated and all that. It’s not for kids and not for me to have with fish and chips if I’ve had my caffeine for the day, not that it matters too much to me, but will for some. It tastes fine. Not as lemon tho. And the V was nice, but I shouldn’t have poured it, that colour is wrong :p

And I’m relieved to say that the dry white sparklings on offer have been satisfactory so far. Good with the Japanese takeaway or the other nibblies. I can’t really get through the whole bottle myself and without the alcohol there’s no motivation to skull the last drips any more!

Please hit me up with your recommendations and things to steer clear of ahead of summer though! I’m about 20 months without an alcoholic drink as of this week, so yay!

Fox Coffee Dusk Blend

I have a coffee subscription. Every pension day, money gets taken out of my account, and usually the Monday after a kilo of fresh Dusk Blend beans from Fox Coffee gets placed in my letterbox for the very acceptable $45. It’s usually enough for the fortnight for me and Bruce, for my morning coffee 9which you’ll usually get to share with me on Twitter), and his several through the da. Every few months I have to order an extra bag, which is just a couple of clicks to get at the subscription price (full price for 1kg is $50.00 with free postage) usually if we’ve had more days at home, or visitors. But that’s super easy and tasty 🙂 And way cheaper than Bruce getting takeaways!

Chicken and Leek Pie

A square pie

I HAVE to re-post this recipe after making it for the first time in the life of this blog – it turned out super well too! Well, not really a recipe, just a brief guide to the ingredients and method with you left to add flair depending on what you have on hand and what you score at the supermarket. I pretty much had to start from scratch when buying the ingredients this time around since I’d reasonably recently done fridge and pantry culls and cleanouts and we’ve been mostly making EVeryplate meals lately.

 

Ingredients used:

  • 500g chicken thigh, diced
  • A couple of rashers of bacon, diced
  • Half a thing each of white and swiss brown mushrooms chopped roughly
  • A leek, sliced thinly
  • Butter for frying up stuff
  • Some fresh thyme. picked and then chopped finely
  • Garlic (not pictured)
  • Half a jar of light cream
  • Tsp vegetable stock, cup boiling water
  • 3 sheets frozen puff pastry 
  • An egg and some milk for the egg wash on top of the pie

Method:

  1. Chop everything up and put into bowls on your bench ready to fry up
  2. Melt some butter in the frypan. Fry up leek and mushroom with some of the thyme. Transfer to bowl.
  3. Fry up the bacon.
  4. Melt more butter. Fry up garlic and the chicken with the rest of the thyme, in batches if you prefer.
  5. Return it all to the pan.
  6. Add stock powder and boiling water. Or stock if you’re fancy like that.
  7. Simmer down til there’s very little liquid. Add in cream and cook through. Add pepper to taste.
  8. Preheat oven to 180 degrees, get pastry out of freezer and place on bench to thaw.
  9. Use one piece of pastry as pie base, put in filling, then top with pastry and use third piece for decorations. Brush with egg and milk wash.
  10. Cook for at least 45min, until pastry is browned to your liking.

Remove from oven and let stand for 5 minutes, Then serve up. I do like to serve it with fresh green beans if they’re in season, but it’s great by itself too!

Sometimes we add a little seed mustard to it to change up the flavour a little. Or use chicken breast, or different mushrooms. Or some sour cream. But this is the base recipe that is universally loved!

As an aside, my “lemon” kitchen is coming along, with actual lemons, lemon tea towels and mitts and an apron and a mat even. I got these amazing vintage curtains (well my sister got them for me and even hemmed them to size) for $4 at The Makers Place in Teralba. I love how it’s all coming together! 

 

Logitech G Aurora Pop-Up

A hand hlding a green iced mini cupcake in front of flowers

oh my it’s been ages since I’ve done any events so this intimate customer-focused pop-up afternoon tea and gaming sesh with Logitech was a nice easing back into chatting with PRs, trialing products (I neglected to test out the mics so that’ll be on my list for another time!), remembering to take all the photos, instagramming on the fly, and having some fun!

I’d gotten on their mailing list after winning a mouse, keyboard and headset off a twitter contest where I confessed that I’d be using the gear for the Sims (hey there’s AWESOME light integrations for that game on the logitech and Razer gear I have) since that’s about all my PC can run (I mean it can run more, but I don’t have a video card, and my motherboard needs replacing and I can’t run too many things at once. It’s a push some days to stream Duolingo with my webcam on lol, never can do a game with cam on sorry!)

After a bit of an epic trackwork-impacted journey down – remind me again that catching the all stations bus is hell on earth and you’re better off waiting for the next express no matter how long away it is – it was lovely to be greeted with cupcakes and drinks, though a downed a couple of waters first after forgetting how steep the hill from Central to Crown street is. Last time did it in heels, so my glitter mary-janes were a blessing!

It was no accident that I matched in with the colours of the room quite well – I’ve been watching Emiloo on Twitch a quite a lot the past few weeks, and she did a coloured themed Sims challenge, so knew they were pushing the colours.

The Maybelline touch up also made me even PINKER *blush*

I got to play Stray and Fall Guys for the first time and pushed things off surfaces as the cat. Lost VERY quickly in Fall Guys but it was still fun. Sounds was brilliant of course through the headsets. Kinda cool the mix and match colours! And yeah, regrets not playing with the microphones, they are HUGE though! :/ Happy with my headset mic for now I think!

Bruce has possession of the headset I won, it’s great and lightweight and he wears it for work 🙂 Plus I’m not moving on from my Razer kitty ears just yet, but I do like the Logitech offerings I’ve tried. And my keyboard I won is AWESOME and the ones yesterday were the CUTEST! I’d need to get all the keycaps to constantly change them up, so it’s probably best my current setup in lights I can change rather than snapping on and off keys and overlays.

And there was SWAG to take home *yay!!* Bruce loves the hat and shirt and I’m painting my toes lilac today, and the mascara will replace all the ones I chucked out in my recent cleanout so yay! Timing! There’s also a non-alcohol beverage that I need to add to the list of things to review because I still have that backlog to blog about.

Yep, trying to re-become an influential blogger and social media type. It’d be better if the trains were running though. phonakins. e-girl and activist. I’m back!

 

EveryPlate Bulk Cook meals

I decided to give the “bulk cook” weekly meal options a try from EveryPlate by cooking them up for my sister and her kids. For them, there’s a few I’ve taken or minimised the dairy from for them – using almond milk, or just not using butter and cheese. There’s a different recipe each week (I’m sure there’s repeats), though the ones you’ll see are similar in some ways. Using tinned legumes, mince, one had chicken tenderloins which were quick to cut up. I’ve added veges  – zucchini in the first photo – when I’ve gotten something I can throw in at our Friday foodbank run.

Like all other EveryPlate meals, you get the recipe card, the fresh ingredients, herbs and spices, stock, and any grains like rice or cous cous. The price for the bulk cook meal is $25 as an optional add-on when you go through and select your recipes for the week. Some I didn’t get – like a tomato spaghetti that just didn’t inspire me as freezable, but yeah, the casseroles, stews, and potato pies have gone down well.

You then supply things like olive oil, salt and pepper, butter/milk (that I leave out for my sister so some of these are easily made vegetarian and vegan). They get you to use the water from the chickpeas and beans so there’s no rinsing and you can use that salty water as stock.

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There’s a mix of stovetop cooking – which my huge Misen pot is great for both frying and simmering the large amounts, oh and boiling potatoes. There’s roasting of vegetables too. And things like the cous cous to make up to serve I just send along dry and Jen can take care of that as she needs it, along with any toppings like almonds, or the cheese for melting over for the big kids.

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I tinker a little – I find sometimes if you add all the stock powder things start to get a little too salty, so I’ll use less rather than more and add in later if I think it could do with it.

This pork mince/cottage pie I made at home, but took over to Jen’s that evening and we finished it off in the oven there, and I got to eat with them. I left a mini-pie for my partner in the noodle bowl to heat for himself :p

The recipes also give you other time-saving options, like not peeling the carrots of potatoes, I I prefer to.

As far as value for money, the way that prices have been going up at the shops for fresh veges and even tinned ones with transport costs, $25 for the supplied ingredients, recipe card, and inspiration and motivation to then get it cooked up works out well for me. Giving me a tangible way to help out and getting to cook too.

I also gave the $20 fruit add-on box a go. I couldn’t really justify it. After pricing the items I got in this one at $13 on woolies online. But you might like the convenience, there is a larger $25 option which might be better value too

I’m still getting the weekly boxes, and it’s still working well for me. I like that I can still put together a nice healthy meal even if I’ve had a big day and my brain is a little used up! The box I get has gone up in price, but given the semi hyper inflation at the moment it’s still great value for us. You can see my overview of them in this previous post.

I also regularly get free trial boxes to share – I currently have three, you just pay $10 shipping. If you want to try EveryPlate, let me know below or use my referral link for $60 off.

What have you been doing to keep fresh veges on that table with inflation and supply issues?