Next time you cook mashed potato, do a bit extra and keep it aside to make these quick and easy patties. They’re great by themselves or served up with a salad.

In years gone by baked apples served with a nice thick custard or ice cream was a pretty standard family winter dessert. Inexpensive, tasty and filling, not to mention quick and easy to make. This old 60s recipe Mum kept is a little more fancy as it wraps the apples in a sweet crusty coating. A little more trouble to make, but it is still inexpensive, tasty and filling.

There was a time when everyone seemed to grow zucchinis in their backyards and happily gave them away, so lots of zucchini recipes were published. This is one of the more unusual ideas published in The Sun newspaper. The mix of vegetables, curry, sultanas and chutney all wrapped in pastry sounds good, although I think you’d want to watch that it wasn’t too moist and soaked through the pastry. It would make a change from meat filled sausage rolls though.

You can definitely tell the age of this recipe by the ingredients – jelly and Carnation Evaporated Milk and in fact I found the recipe is in a Carnation Evaporated Milk pamphlet. The combination of the jelly and evaporated milk makes a really light dessert, almost like a flummery, which was one of Mum’s favourite desserts to make. It has the advantage of also not been very expensive, a bit of a bonus these days.

I haven’t actually made these meatballs, but I do make a version with pork mince, chicken noodle soup and a dash of soy sauce that work really well. I make them for picnic lunches on driving holidays and to take to the F1 motor racing at Albert Park. Mine don’t have the cream cheese, but I think that’s a great idea and I’ll add it into the next batch I make.

Although Christmas is still quite a few weeks away shops have put up their decorations, so I guess it’s time to start to work on Christmas menus. I found this old cutting in Mum’s collection and thought that the Guinness, mustard, ginger and cardamom basting combo sounded interesting and I thought that the carving instructions were useful bonus.
