Creamy ham, broccoli and mushroom pasta courtesy of my 12 year old, who picked out the recipe back when I made a resolution to have them starting to cook. Unlike the 14 year old who was dragged reluctantly into the kitchen when it was her turn (she chose fried rice, but had to have me hovering over her and doing a lot of it for her.)

Alison, however, was enthusiastic about the idea from the start, and has had that recipe earmarked for two weeks. I don't think that I've ever even made that one before either, so she was totally just following a recipe. (Which is pretty much the way I've got through my cooking life!)

So here we have one 12 year old who is streets ahead of her supposedly equally smart 2 yrs older sibling. She pretty much did the whole thing herself. Yes, she asked questions and advice, but I basically sat here at the computer, and only had to jump up and help a couple of times. I was so chuffed.

I was also pretty impressed that she chose a recipe with broccoli in it! And mushrooms. She's not even fond of mushrooms, but decided that (as her Dad and I have always said, they add flavour when cooked with other ingredients.) She used her chef's perogative to not put in as many as the recipe said, and I assured her that that was totally acceptable.

Ms 14 sat there and picked out the broccoli and mushroom. (Given she's still unwell with a sore throat I ignored it this time, but sheesh!)

I suppose you can't make kids be enthusiastic about cooking, but I'm already slightly peturbed that Ms Eldest here will be 20 something and incapable of making herself a healthy meal!

I still need to work on the cleaning up bit afterwards.

"Darling, you have no idea how wonderful it was to have someone else cook diner."

"Yes I do, I get that every other night."

"Not quite the same thing kiddo. Talk to me when you make the meal every other night!"

Labels: cooking, kids

I hadn't made scones in.. oh, more than 10 years, I'd say. There's an indication of just how domestic I am. Not. But there was something about a stay-inside-rainy weekend day (and some left over cream in the fridge) that found me, inexplicably, in the kitchen and pulling recipe books off the shelves to refresh my memory.

Seems I wasn't the only one!

Marc was rather surprised (like in a 'my god, what's got into you?!' kind of way.) Not that he was complaining. It really has been that long since I've turned out a batch of scones! I actually used to make them a bit (more than 10 years ago!) when we lived on the Southern Highlands - way back when I was a bit more domestic. (Zoe was a bit put out to hear that she'd missed out on all those occasions because that was before she was born!) Maybe we had more stay-inside-rainy weekend days there. (We certainly did in winter.) Maybe I wasn't as 'over' the cooking thing quite so much back in those days!! Also these days I am much less likely to have cream in the house, and jam and cream as accompaniments are seriously the only way to eat them! But there was still some cream left over from my birthday cake. Bingo.

So, apparently, there are all these tips and tricks to making the perfect scone. (BrissieMum from the link above has one theory.) I have always used the round cutter because I prefer the rounded look. I used to do a passable job at it but this lot (I did follow the 'hot oven' tip in my Women's Weekly cookbooks) actually ended up with a couple of them a bit burnt on top before they had properly cooked in the middle. A few more minutes with the oven turned down did the trick, and they didn't turn out half bad after all. They were demolished in pretty short order by the family, so they certainly weren't inedible, and I would put money on them being quite delighted if I made them more often! I probably made them a bit close to tea time, but, what the heck. Just what we needed to brighten up a grey, rainy day.

~~~~~
* CWA

Labels: cooking, daily

Check out the ingredients on a packet cake mix. Do you really need all that extra artificial crap? Really, truly, ruly, the butter and sugar is naughty enough. And packet mixes do taste like.. packet mixes.

My favourite cake recipe book is my Australian Womens Weekly Quick Mix cake book. With it, you never need to buy a packet mix again, ever! Because, seriously, how much harder is it to chuck a few ingredients in a mixmaster bowl. No creaming butter and sugar. No adding things slowly... no sifting flour, no complicated instructions. Chuck it all in one bowl, mix it up, chuck it in a cake pan and chuck that in the oven. Easy peasy.

Jeanie asked me for the recipe for the Golden Caramel Cake, so here is that one, plus the Lemon Delicious one I have possibly also mentioned in the past. I shall make a point of typing up some of our other favourites and adding them later.

(I guess some countries might need to convert this somehow to imperial measurements...all of these are metric cups. SR flour = Self Raising Flour, which is the flour with the rising agent added. ) * click on the pic to the right for the conversion tips from the book. [I never realised our tablespoons were different to even NZ !]

The baba tin is also called other names... which at the moment elude me - but essentially they are a ring tin with a molded base, so that the upturned cake has an attractive mold. I don't think mine is 21cm; I don't think it really matters.

Main tip is to make sure the butter is softened - you can't get away with slightly firm butter like you can when you are just creaming butter and sugar.

QUICK-MIX GOLDEN CARAMEL CAKE

185g butter
¾ cup (150g) firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cup (80 ml) golden syrup
1 ½ cups SR flour
½ cup plain flour
¾ cup milk

Grease 21 cm baba cake pan. Combine all ingredients in med bowl – beat on low speed till ingredients are combined, then on medium speed till mixture is smooth and changed in colour. Spread into prepared pan – bake mod oven about 45 mins – stand few mins before turning onto wire rack to cool.

* This is super yummy drizzled with melted chocolate. Fill the hole in the middle with strawberries, and serve with cream!

QUICK-MIX LEMON DELICIOUS CAKE

125g butter, chopped
2 tsp grated lemon rind
1 ¼ cups (275g) castor sugar
3 eggs
½ cup (125ml) milk
1 ½ cups (225g) SR flour
¼ cup lemon juice

Coat 21 cm baba cake pan with non-stick spray. Combine all ingredients in medium bowl of electric mixer, beat on low speed until ingredients are combined. Then, beat on medium speed until mixture is smooth and changed in colour. Pour and spread mixture into prepared pan. Bake in mod. Oven about 50 mins. Turn onto wire rack to cool.

Dust cold cake with sifted icing sugar if desired.

Labels: cooking, recipes

You could also call it "winging it". Or Chaos Theory, where, if you're lucky, sometimes, you can cobble up something special for someone out of the disorganisation, and you can pull it off as if you'd been planning it for ages.

It was Middle daughter's birthday yesterday - 12!! I did have the pressies sorted (I'm not that bad!), but we hadn't yet sorted out any sort of party or outing with friends. (I'm slack like that these days). It turned out that Marc had a late Touch game - he wouldn't get home till nearly 9pm - so the family birthday dinner concept wasn't really looking that flash.

An idea hit me during the morning, and I called her friend's grandmother and arranged for the friend to arrive for dinner at around 5.30 as a surprise. It turned out to be a surprise for her friend too, as she had gone straight from school to a 'physi' lesson, so she had no idea she was coming either till her grandmother turned off their normal route home.

The standard birthday M.O. in our house is for the birthday girl to choose what to have for dinner. If it's a weekend or Dad can get home from work in time, it would inevitably be something cooked by on the BBQ - but she was limited to me and my kitchen last night, and what I could produce around the usual afternoon taxi run. Caitlin had netball training from 4-5, and I still had to get to the shops to actually buy the ingredients!

She chose Fettucine Carbonara - which I made for once with real cream (and decided never to try and make a low fat version again because it's soooo much nicer this way - believe it or not!) And garlic bread. And I whipped up one of my fail-safe quick mix cakes. (Golden Caramel Cake - using brown sugar and golden syrup in.. Mmmmm).

She even got away without salad as I forgot to buy lettuce at the shops. (Actually, I refused to pay $4.90 !!! for an iceberg lettuce; had thought to try a different shop and then within 5 minutes of thinking that - and having a chat to someone in the shop - forgot to go there. Typical really.)

When it came to icing the cake after we'd had the carbonara, I thought I might melt some chocolate to drizzle over it. I didn't have any normal or even cooking chocolate in the cupboard, but I thought I could melt some of those choc bits. Hmmm, do you think the fact that choc bits retain their shape when you bake them might mean that they won't actually melt? And that they make 'melts' for that purpose if you are too lazy to use real chocolate ? Duh!

So, dusted icing sugar it would have to be. Till Cait suggested I do chocolate glace icing. Hmmm, what a good idea. So even though I'd already dusted the cake with the icing sugar, I drizzled choc icing over it, then scattered smashed Maltesers* on top, and filled the hole in the middle, and it looked kind of arty in a Blue Poles or Meester Hart! What A Mess!! fashion. (Ok, so maybe not actually that good.) Cait put an array of deliberately non-matching candles over it, including one glow in the dark one, 3 spherical smileys, and one that continually relights when you blow it out.

I think having her friend there made it just a bit better than it would have been.

I'm still vaguely thinking about when and where she could do something with her group of friends. When inspiration hits and/or I pull my finger out and decide, I'll call it spontaneity.


Over the weekend I also spontaneously bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and spontaneously read it and finished it by about 1 am on Sunday night. I am not obsessed by Harry (no really I'm not!) but I've always found it hard to put the books down when I read them. (Though I must confess not much of the previous one stuck in my memory - I did a quick Wikipedia-reconnaissance on the plot outline of The Half Blood Prince to refresh my memory, and was a bit peturbed that I hadn't retained that much of it at all! Part of me is somewhat relieved that they are all finished, so I don't have to read any more speculations about what was going to happen, and who was going to die. I guess I just don't get that obsessed about analysing books. I read 'em. I enjoy them. I move on.

On Sunday, Marc and I spontaneously went bike riding with some other BUG riders who we met up with about 10km from home. (Does organising it just the night before count as spontaneous?). We left the kids to sloth at home, and set off on our tandem. 36km each way, with lunch at a cafe.

On Sunday night, because I was reading Harry Potter, finally crawling into bed at 1am after not bothering to move from the dining room chair where I'd "picked it up to read for a few minutes"- seriously... I'm insane! - I forgot to wrap Alison's presents. A bit of angst there, snuggled up in bed. Do I get up and do it now, or get up early enough in the morning? I decided to risk the getting up bit, and even that worked out for me.

Planets and stars must have been in alignment for me these past couple of days.

~~~~

* Jamie Oliver dessert suggestion from one of his TV shows: smashed Maltesers over icecream. Yum!

Labels: birthdays, cooking, daily

Nearly 3pm and I don't have a clue yet. I am dropping a daughter at netball training at 4.15, so we will duck into the local supermarket, and I'll find something then. Nothing like leaving it to the last minute.

It's becoming a bit of a worry - this slackness of attitude in the kitchen department. (See, I can berate myself as well as my offspring!) Once upon a time I was pretty enthusiastic about coming up with a variety of decent meals for the family, and I even had a vague plan for the week of what meals we would have each night. Even stocked up meat in the freezer with a vague notion of what meals it was intended for. I've never been anything out of the box as a cook, but I can follow a recipe, and I'm quite capable of serving a fairly balanced meal. At one time I didn't mind doing so, although I do recall way back - after nearly 4 years of marriage (I was pregnant with #1), actually saying to my Mum "Thank you Mum for all those years of you cooking dinner every night. I never appreciated it when I was growing up, but I do now."

I'm not quite sure when 'the wheels fell off', but it's safe to say that I'm finding it all a real drag these days. I'm not sure if it's the annoyance factor (that I feel) of Marc rarely being home from work in time to eat with us. Two nights a week he is definitely late because he plays Touch.. the other three... who knows. (It's not that he ever complains about having to reheat stuff - It just annoys me.) And then there are the likes and dislikes spread across three children - not that they are particularly fussy. I've seen many who are much worse, and they are usually expected to eat what they are given. The one big pain is fish, because the eldest absolutely flatly refuses to eat it. With Marc not being fussed on 'tinned fish', it rules out a few easy tuna or salmon dishes.

Maybe it's that most afternoons I'm doing some sort of taxi run, so I don't have the luxury of a couple of hours preparation time leading up to it. I don't know how people who work manage to do it! And here is me who quite frequently has several hours up her sleeve during the day.. I am sure you can't imagine what the issue is. But I'm not into cutting up veggies for dinner early in the day, and it's also a bit hard to do that if you don't know what you're having yet!

I do like variety in meals, but I seem to get stuck on the same few things over and over again. (And always chicken, too much chicken!) I try to prepare relatively healthy meals, but I all too frequently get a complete slack-attack, and do what I did last night: I bought frozen pies to heat up. (It was that or no maths!) And you know what? The kids went "yummmm... I love pies". Hardly an incentive to go creating some other masterpiece, is it?

I don't grill meat at home anymore - not when it tastes so bloody good on the BBQ - so I leave that for weekend meals, which I guess limits my weeknight choices. If I do a random survey of what other people are cooking for dinner, just to give me ideas, I usually find that it isn't something the kids would be keen on, or me for that matter!!

A slow cooker is starting to look like a good idea, but I have two problems with that. Cupboard space (and a lack of energy to do a kitchen cupboard clean-out), and the fact that you actually DO have to know what you're having more than an hour in advance!

So, this week, so far - it has been... Monday night - chicken schnitzel (lazy, chicken shop prepared type, but I bake it, so no frying.), with pasta, corn, broccoli and carrot. Tuesday night - Zucchini slice - done in muffin tins, new potatoes, pre-boiled and then squashed flat on a tray, sprayed with oil, and baked till crisp, and salad. Last night, pies, peas and new potatoes.
Tomorrow night will have to be spag bol, as an easy meal to have when I get home from swimming at 7pm.

OK, here's an invitation. What's your favourite EASY midweek meal? Hit me with a recipe... (but let me know if it's in North American measurements so I can convert somehow, and bear in mind that there seems to be some common meal favourites over there that we don't really have here - which I won't know till I see, so please don't be offended if I ask 'what's that?!!)

The kids (and me) aren't into really spicy stuff - and I'm not really into cooking Asian cuisine (like Thai) apart from basic stirfries. Some stuff I'm just happy to save to enjoy in a restaurant!!!

And I'm not into stuff that uses a vast array of cooking utensils, pots and pans etc, to prepare. If there's one thing I'm more fed up with than cooking right now, it's washing up!

Labels: cooking, daily

It's becoming a bit of a specialty of mine. Part way into cooking dinner I realise that I don't have a particular ingredient. Sometimes it's kind of major - like spaghetti when I'm making spaghetti bol. Last night it was merely the chutney for the curried sausages. I am trying to think of other examples. There are many - like starting to prepare tacos, and I find I have no taco sauce. Or a salad and I'm out of lettuce. Sometimes I discover early enough to make a mercy dash the 400m to the corner store. It doesn't carry a lot - and certainly nothing much in fruit and veg. And you also need to discover this before their winter season closing time of 6pm, or summer time of 7pm. Last night I lucked out (UK vernacular) with the time factor.

I don't know.. I'm sure at some point I had chutney on a shopping list, but that was probably one of the times I forgot/lost the list, or didn't even think to take it out of my bag. (Yep, I do that too!) I would have wandered through the supermarket in my usual daze, using the 'trigger' method of shopping. [ie. Much like a flow chart, it goes something like this: Notice salad dressings -> do we need salad dressing? -> if yes, select a salad dressing and place in shopping trolley. If no -> continue pushing trolley down aisle -> Notice sauces -> Do we need sauce? .... etc etc.]

So last night I managed to substitute some spread and a bit of tomato paste, and the children pronounced the sausages 'different but still ok'. Phew. Gourmet (hah) meal crisis averted.

There's the flipside to this of course. Sometimes I end up overstocking. A glitch in The supermarket trigger approach, much like cracked record: "Oh yes, that's right - I'm out of Chinese 5 spice powder. ".... ... "Oh yes, that's right - I'm out of Chinese 5 spice powder."... ... "Oh yes, that's right - I'm out of Chinese 5 spice powder." I now have about 3 jars of Chinese 5 spice powder in my pantry, and given the rate at which I use it I will never need to buy it again until I am about 90. Either that, or when the children finally move out of home, I will be able to set them up with a jar of Chinese 5 spice powder each for their pantries.

It must have been the night for Misadventures in Cooking. It's a bit discombobulating to see that 'vague' genes can be so easily passed on to the next generation. Ms 11¾ decided to make a cake last night. One of our family favourites - a quick mix lemon delicious cake. Warning bells should have started ringing when she asked me to help her spoon the mixture into the pan, and then just as I started doing so, said "Oops, I haven't greased the pan yet!". [I slop the mixture back into bowl, casually thinking that it looks very smooth and less yellow than normal. Kid washes pan. Sprays pan. Start again.] When I take it out of the oven later, it looks different to normal.. and despite the greased pan, it is sticking. When I try to tip it out, it falls out in pieces. Hmmm - she's forgotten some ingredient....

This morning I ask her what she might have left out of the cake mix. Oh duh! .. she says. The eggs.

Marc is about to have a bit of a rant [he is still not quite over her banana smoothie spillage the night before - all over the bench, trickling down the cupboard doors, and a big lake of it on the kitchen floor] when I fix him with a 'look'. Forgetting the eggs?! Pffft. Been there done that. "Remember the time....?" Hmmm, yes, I won't forget that one. I was making someone's birthday cake the night before a party - a double batch of my tried and true butter cake mix so as to make a 'slab' to then cut or shape into a novelty cake - when, at about 10.30pm it comes out of the oven and it is a complete flop. Literally. That time I realised I had neglected to double the quantity of eggs when I doubled the rest of the ingredients. Who would have thought that only using half the number of eggs in a recipe would have such an effect! At least Ali's 'no-eggs' mishap last night is an education as to the role eggs play in a cake!

I'm sure we are not the only ones to do 'vague' so well when it comes to shopping and cooking. Go on, make me feel better, and let me know that you do it too.

Labels: cooking, daily

It's been a while since I've had something THIS bad happen. (In cooking terms, that is...)

Cait decided to make a cake. Unusually I had a packet mix in the cupboard (I normally prefer to make my cakes from scratch, but I'd bought this orange poppyseed one after a teammate made it for tennis one week.)

What went wrong? (Apart from it being a packet mix!) My theory is that it was because I 'helped' her and used melted lite margarine when I tried to do the 'right' thing by greasing and flouring the tin [Instead of using spray. I am normally a butter user, all the way (stuff the health issues) for the taste.] And it stuck, stuck, stuck to the pan. Big time.

Gah...

Still tastes ok.. It's the frosting that really makes it taste good... so that's going to be an interesting exercise!

Labels: cooking