Good children's meals

Speight's Ale House, Christchurch.


The cheese is covered by the eating hand. It was on the large side, but did solve the problem of snacks for the next day!

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Baking bread

I'm having a bit of a bread love affair at the moment.  Earlier in the week I bought a book from the 'withdrawn' bin at the local library containing a random mix of bread recipes by passionate advocates of self sufficiency.  The book is approximately half sour dough recipes and each recipe has an accompanying story by the author of the recipe.  It is a world away from your typical, highly edited glossy cookbook.  I'm not trying to be mean about the book, just trying to describe it.  The passion this group of people have for good quality bread is patent and a little contagious.  Most home mill their own grain.  I'm not going to do this, but I am a lot more interested in the type of grain I use for making bread now.  I've also learnt a lot in a short time about improving the quality of home-made bread.

I made the most delicious loaf of beer bread using some of the tips that I gleaned from the book, so I thought I would share them here.

• The second rise is the most important.  After you have risen the dough for the first time gently mix the dough (not a full-on knead) and then shape.  If you knead it too hard the second time you will knock out some of the air that has developed in the dough.
• If you want a beautifully cooked loaf of bread then what you cook it in really does matter.  I find that my non-stick breadmaker makes kind of average bread.  That is because the tin doesn't really get hot, and a lot of steam is produced in a small crowded environment.  The bread is often very soft.  If you have proper metal tins, great.  I don't so I used my Le Creuset 'dutch oven' to cook the bread.  I put the pan and lid separately into the oven (i.e. the lid wasn't on the pot) and got them both really hot.  After twenty minutes I put the dough into the pan and put the lid on top.  After twenty minutes I took the lid off to get some great colour.  About ten minutes after that I flipped over the loaf of bread so that the bottom could crisp up.  It was my best loaf of bread ever.
• You cannot just substitute white and wholemeal grains directly in recipes.  Wholegrain flours contain naturally present sugars so often an adjustment to the sugar in the recipe is required.  The more white flour you use, the more sugar will be required.
• It is my experience that the best bread flavour (robust, earthy, nutty) come using at least a small amount of wholegrain flour.  I used wholegrain spelt flour in the beer bread I made - delicious. 
• I found a really interesting range of wheat flours at Commonsense Organics.  I bought some NZ Purple Wheat flour as well as wholemeal spelt.  I'm currently using it to make a sour dough starter.  It looks slightly purple so I'm hopeful that a purple loaf of bread will be the result!

I've had the worst time with formatting my photos below!  I haven't felt much cooking mojo of late, but I was so happy baking bread that the rest of the meal followed.  We had mutton with lentils, beans and vegetables and a yummy walnut and pear salad.

 

Most beautiful beer bread.

Wednesday nights

I don't know what it is about Wednesdays but if the meal production cycle falls down it is usually Wednesday.

The children are boring and predictable in their dinner choices so it isn't hard to throw something together for them: frozen stock, frozen prawns, mushrooms and egg noodles can go from fridge to plate in under ten minutes (tonight's dinner for example). But strangely given that I enjoy cooking for adults I don't like doing it in a rush; I like to put some time into it. But that energy tends to disappear on Wednesdays.

So: dinner. Whatever was open!




Because I don't think I could call myself a Make-do Mum in the truest sense of the world unless I acknowledged my Wednesday support organisations!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Handmade 2012: a really late post.

Last year I attended Handmade 2011.  It was a celebration of all things craft, held over Queen's Birthday weekend.  I learned how to create dresses, bags and aprons out of pillowcases and had a generally fantastic time.  It was mostly fantastic getting some time away from the kids - at the time I think that it was the longest I'd been away from my then ten month old daughter.  Prior to attending I had done a little sewing, and over the last year I have quite enjoyed making a hobby out of sewing.  I now attend a community sewing group and have made a lot of clothes for the girls over the last year.

But I'm still quite an amateur when it comes to sewing.  Every now and then I'll be working on something and will do something quite wrong - I just don't have a lot of basic technique under my belt.  So I thought that it would be good to do another sewing class.   I enrolled in a class where we learnt how to make padded bags for storage.  The day before Handmade began I was fortunate enough to win tickets to a Masterclass with Linda Hallinan from NZ Garden.  I was thrilled.  I'd seriously considered attending this class as I love her writing style and her enthusiastic approach so free tickets were very appreciated!

The bag class was great fun and has been a good way to use up some small ends from my rather amateur curtain making.  It was quite easy to make one bag in the two hour time slot and I cut out enough extra material to make two more that night (I figured that it would help me to reinforce what I learnt).  I had a bit of a disaster trying to add the handles myself - something I hate about sewing is all the complexity that comes when you are sewing things inside out (and it is worse with lined objects) as my mind does not visualise this kind of thing well. Oh well.  Good practice I suppose (gritted teeth).

I had thirty minutes BY MYSELF between classes (if you are a parent you will understand).  I had trouble dealing with the freedom, but enjoyed an interruption free lunch and a look around the gift shop.

The masterclass was awesome.  Lynda Hallinan is a great speaker - managed to make the session feel very intimate and friendly even though we were in a large theatre.  She brought along her damson plum gin (amazing) and quince gin to try.  She also brought along ingredients to make a ginger beer bug and packaged it up for everyone to take home.  I learnt a a lot - I have about ten pages of notes!  Much of this information, and the recipe for making a ginger beer bug is on her website.

I've made the bug and actually grown some bug babies.  I've read online that bugs can improve with age so I'm keen to see if that worked.  The first batch was very fizzy - it seemed simply dense with bubbles.  I've got a batch from my fourth generation batch brewing right now and I'll see how that one works.

Play dough/ pasta

I made nutella play dough the other day. It smells heavenly and was very popular with the girls and their friends.

Tonight I was mass producing lasagna so was making pasta. I really enjoy making pasta, because it is pretty easy with a bread maker/ mixer and a pasta roller.

Making pasta is very similar to playing with play dough. Both girls congregated to the kitchen, competing for the stepladder. They took turns pushing dough through the roller and generally playing with the leftover dough. I was impressed with the two year old's arm strength!

The five year old was determined to make spaghetti and linguine and used those functions on the roller. Even though dinner was long finished I offered to boil up some water so she could cook her noodles (she couldn't wait for the noodles to dry)!

I put a thermometer in the pot so she could learn about temperature and boiling. She got very excited as the temperature rose and then sprinkled the pasta into the water. She doesn't really like tomato based sauces so I tried something I'd heard about in a book about French food and added a little butter and cheese. She was very happy :)

Cooking with the baby

The baby is 23 months old but will I suspect be called the baby until we either have another or she is old enough to tell us to stop calling her one.

She loves copying what we do and her favourite thing to copy at the moment is cooking! I used to do the same thing with her big sister. I'm still impressed at how quickly they learn recipes.

The baby loves eggs and knows that we will normally get one out for real baking. Three weeks ago I discovered four smashed eggs on the floor. The baby had dragged a chair to the bench, wiggled on to the bench, dropped four eggs and then left. I was speechless.

Today the baby is fake cooking. She is using the leftover flour from crumbling katsudon and mixing it. I have provided some porridge oats and water.

This will last forty minutes or so. Meanwhile I will tidy the other end of the kitchen. When finished she typically gets the brush and shovel, as well as a tea towel to clean up. It is very sweet.

A busy evening - 200th post!

I've been a bit uninspired blog-wise lately.  Cooking mainly for young children day- in and day-out is exhausting.  My oldest daughter is going through a bit of a fussy phase while my youngest continues the infuriating toddler eat-heaps-one-day and then hardly anything the next. 

I'm also at the end of two weeks of travel, sickness and injury within the family.  My husband and I have taken turns sleeping in shifts all weekend and so a little cooking mojo came back.

I attended Handmade 2012 a few weekends back and Lynda Hallinan of NZ Gardner fame brought along her ginger beer bug and sent home attendees of her masterclass with their own bug starter in a jar.  I bottled my first batch at the weekend and hopefully I will have a good news story about it later in the week.  This is my second batch of the bug and it is very, very active.

Ginger beer bug.  Ten minutes later it frothed over on to the bench.  It took nearly half an hour to calm down.

 At the same time as I was making the bug I was waiting for my apple and mint jelly to set.  I seem to have some kind of jam making impairment at the moment and end up having to re-boil all my jam.  I've even taken to using the temperature method (boiling to 102C).  I have a few jam making friend experts so I'm hoping to pick their brains. Apple and mint jelly made with green apples though is a very easy jam to make - all the pectin in the apples helps a lot!

Taking photos at night with a flash using a window as a backdrop is rarely successful but I quite like this one.  I like the idea that the apple and mint jelly (Edmond's style) has a bit of a cheeky taste.

Since I was up late I decided to get some bread baking for the next morning.  I tried a new recipe from the newer version of Alison and Simon Holst's bread making book.  I was intrigued because it used two kinds of yeast.  Even though it was the same yeast as in the very frothy bug I found that there was not much of a good rise in this bread.  I felt that it was a little doughy and way too yeasty tasting.  However, I'm sure it was something to do with the process not the recipe (I have never yet found a problem with an Alison Holst recipe).  I love how mysterious bread making can be.

Bread maker.  Sadly the bread was really disgusting.



I also decided to try something a bit different and come up with something to do with a bag of persimmons that had gone soft.  There are not that many options out there, even with the whole of the internet as a resource.  I decided to go with an apple and persimmon butter.  I cooked them on low over night in the slow cooker, then squished through a sieve and boiled down on the stove top.  The final colour is a deep blood red/orange.  It tastes nice, but is quite sweet.  I don't like it as much as plain apple butter.

Persimmon and green apple butter - early stages.



Making pectin stock.  I couldn't bear to let the cores go unused.

The time that I stopped cooking!