o frabjous day!

o frabjous day! books, recipes & other things

  • Beetroot and Chickpea Dip

    This is a recipe from Lana, who often seems to come up with fabulous vegetarian recipes I haven’t tried before. This is a very thick and delicious dip or spread, and is such a gorgeous colour, I don’t know how you can resist making it. Perfect picnic food. 2-3 large fresh beetroots 4 cups dried…

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  • Roast Garlic Pasta

    This is a delicious recipe from The Daily Bread, which I’ve altered a little, and renamed. It’s a very garlicky pasta dish, and is also fairly oily – in a lovely way, but it mightn’t suit delicate stomachs. Good both warm and cold, this is a wonderfully versatile dish. I can foresee it appearing in…

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  • Cranberry and Chocolate Chip Biscuits

    I haven’t made biscuits for years, but suddenly felt the urge to today. I’m planning on taking my excess baking to work tomorrow, and I thought a few biscuits would go down well. This is a chocolate chip recipe from a generic cookbook called Better Baking, which I’ve altered by adding the cranberries. They’re very…

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  • Sweet Potato and Couscous Salad

    This is a light, warm, lemony salad. I had a slightly different version at a friend’s house, and have since adapted it for taste, and to suit what I’ve had in the fridge. The roast sweet potato goes well with a green crunch – here I’ve used green capsicum, but baby spinach is lovely as…

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  • Prune and Chocolate Cake

    This is a delicious, richly spiced and dense cake. It’s a recipe from Doris Brett’s Australian Bread Book, which I think is now out of print, but is a wonderful book full of unusual cakes and breads. This particular cake is not only very easy and quick to make, but also versatile – it can…

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  • Roast Pumpkin and Feta Salad

    This is more of an idea than a strict recipe. I like it during the week, as it’s the sort of thing you can start, wander off and do something else, and then return to the kitchen, and put the salad together. It’s a delicious light dinner, although it can easily be made more filling.…

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  • Brownies

    This is a recipe for utterly divine, dense, rich brownies. It’s a huge recipe, and I haven’t been brave enough to experiment with halving it. I’ve found people quite enjoy being pressed to eat brownies, so I haven’t minded having enormous amounts of them. The original cooking time in Nigella’s recipe (from her book How to…

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  • Leek and Ham Cannelloni

    This is the first time I’ve attempted to make cannelloni, and I decided to try after reading a recipe of Rick Stein’s, which this recipe has been rather loosely adapted from. It’s an easy recipe, using fresh lasagne sheets to roll up the filling – very cheesy and satisfying. It is fiddly, wrapping up each…

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  • A Trip to Mt Tamborine

    We drove up to Mt Tamborine this morning, ostensibly to go to the local produce markets, although we arrived a little late and there wasn’t much of anything left. We did grab some beautifully fresh avocados and mushrooms, and couldn’t resist a bottle of mulberry and rhubarb jam – dark and delicious looking. After peeking…

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