My Creative Space

I've not sewn or created anything crafty since finished Mia's apron. In fact, the other apron gift for our little friend is still sitting in the sewing room on the dining table along with a half packed up sewing machine. Life seems to have gotten in the way at the moment. I'm involved in starting up a Transition Town in our town (more info to come) and the kindy committee meetings have begun and the boys just seem to be going through a phase of being more demanding of my time.

Anway, it's a bit of a stretch but I still wanted to participate in My Creative Space this week so we've been creating a new flavour (for us) of ice cream .... HONEY!

This little man was so excited to make some ice cream!!!

Look at this amazingly thick cream! When I went to the dairy I spoke to the lady who makes the butter and cream and she said the thick cream (instead of the thin I usually get) makes much better ice cream and she is soooooo right!

When we went to the dairy to get milk yesterday Archie announced from the back seat that he'd like to make ice cream. Alas we don't have any vanilla so I bought some cream and tried to come up with something different to do, we're out of peppermint essence too so choc-mint was off the list. Then it hit me - honey!

I just omitted the sugar and vanilla and added 1/2 cup of honey. I used Iron Bark honey, it is really strongly flavoured so I thought it would go well with the richness of the cream but I think it's too much. Matt (not at all and ice cream person, odd man that he is) and the boys really liked it though. Plus I just wanted to use up a good chunk of the Iron Bark cause it is way too strong for me, I prefer a Macadamia or Brushbox but anyway, that is another post!

So the recipe looked like this:

Honey Ice Cream

1.5 cups milk

3 cups cream

1/2 cup honey

Warm the honey slightly to make it easier to mix with other ingredients

Mix together all ingredients and churn 25 - 30 minutes or until frozen like soft serve

Transfer to container and freeze until hard

 

Of course two boys wanted to help do the dishes!

Passionfruit Ice Cream

It's an exciting time in our house when the passionfruit lady is back at the markets! Hurrah! Unfortunately do to all the rain and flooding the only crop they've got at the moment is passionfruit, she told me last week that they lost over 15 acres of tomatoes and cucumbers in the recent flooding and three lots of earlier crops over the past 6 or so months.

This is why I love going to the farmers markets. I get to talk to and get to know the people who are producing our food. They know the boys, give them a free bit of this or that every now and then. Yes, we could get all our fruit and veg from the grocery but then we'd be giving our money to big corporations and the farmers that supplied them would be getting a pittance for all their hard work. I know that when we give the passionfruit lady $2.50 for a bag of passionfruit that all of that $2.50 is going to her, her hard working husband and their children that help them on the farm.

I now have two helpers in the kitchen!

These passionfruit were the first of their harvest and oh so delicious. We decided to add to that deliciousness by making passionfruit ice cream! It's just our basic ice cream recipe with the pulp from a few passionfruit stirred through and the vanilla omitted. I can't remember how many passionfruit and even if I could it wouldn't be accurate because it was a case of 'one spoon for the ice cream, one spoon for the boy helping'!

Don't you just love chubby toddler hands?

Our Basic Ice Cream Recipe

Makes 2 litres

1 cup white sugar

1.5 cups milk

3 cups cream

2tbls vanilla essence

Whisk together the sugar and milk to dissolve the milk.

Whisk in the cream and vanilla until combine.

Churn in the ice cream machine for about 30 minutes or frozen like soft serve. 

Transfer to a 2L container and freeze.

Lick the paddle and scoop out the super frozen remnants with a plastic spatula!

Pineapple and Cherry Upside Down Cake

Made by Elliot. Inspired by Playschool

This was Elliot's idea so I just provided the ingredients and he led the way after watching them make this cake on an episode of Playschool.

This is one of his favourite episodes so Elliot has dictated the recipe for you, I've just typed his words.

1. Put brown sugar and melted butter in the cake tin. Then the pineapple and cherries. Make it look pretty with the cherries in the middle of the pineapple circles.

2. Get Mummy's big mixer and mix normal sugar and butter for ages and ages. Put the eggs in (but not the shells) and mix for ages longer.

3. Put in a bit of flour and a bit of milk and a bit of flour and a bit of milk and then some 'wanilla' and keep on mixing and mixing.

4. When the mixing is finished put it on top of the pineapple and cherry and put it in the oven. It's very hot!

5. We can't open it straight from the oven so you've got to wait. When Mummy says it's ok, flip it onto a plate and eat it!

 

Playing with our Food

I have been so blessed with my boys that I haven't had to struggle to find healthy food that they will eat. Sure, Archie picks and chooses his vegies (he's going through a zucchini phase at the moment) and he's always been a big lover of meat and carbs. Elliot on the other hand, lives for vegies and cries if he can't actually see them on his plate (funny wee man that he is) but on the whole, I have two healthy, strong, growing boys who love good food.

This doesn't mean though, that we can't have fun with our food!

Over a year ago our town hosted a Children's Day in the Park where all the local Kindys and Pre-schools, Child care centres, ABA, and basically anything child related set up a stall and had activities for the kids. Despite the snakes and lizards, fire engines and police cars, painting and playdough Elliot's favourite stand was the Government's Health Department that were giving away 'apple slinkies'. Now, I had no idea what an apple slinky was, but thought it sounded fun so over we went. Well, was it ever fun! A fancy machine that cored and sliced the apple into a spiral! (They were giving away the apples, not the machines! LOL!) After he devoured the first one, he asked me for another, but being the altruistic girl I am I said that one was enough and we had to make sure there were enough for everyone else. Turns out they were donated lots of boxes of apples and they didn't have many takers! Well, after a friend who works for QLD Health told us that I had to limit Elliot to 4!!!

So after all that waffling, here is the point of this post, a while back, I found an apple slinky machine! Yippee! Both the boys love having apple slinkies and it actually has proved to be a useful appliance for grown ups too because it can peel the apple, I use it when making apple crumble or stewed apples. It makes the job so much quicker! All I do is run it through the maching, which cores, peels and spirals the apple, then I just cut it into quarters. Done and done!

My wonderful boy loves the 'green spaghetti'!

Who wouldn't love this?

Food has never been so fun!

Kenny Gets His First Workout

Now that we're all (mostly) settled and I'm back to getting the good, bulk wholemeal flour I've started making our bread again. And boy, how I missed homemade bread! I'm sure my waistline hasn't missed it though!

Elliot loves Kenny too! And yes, my benches are normally this cluttered!

I'm not using the breadmaker anymore, I now much prefer to use Kenny to mix and knead the dough and then shape by hand. For our everyday loaf (which I make about every second day) I get two loaves from the following recipe. I've also been making raisin/fruit bread too so I'll post that recipe once I've perfected it.

The verandah is a great, sunny place for the bread to prove. Especially when Matt is out mowing the grass!

The original recipe that I used was from the Kenwood recipe book that came with Kenny but I've tweaked it a bit.

Everyday Wholemeal Bread

Makes two 700ish gram loaves

750g wholemeal flour

150g white flour

3tsp dried yeast

1 tbls salt

1 tbls bread improver

2 tbls honey

500-600 ml warm water

Mix dry ingredients together. Mix through water until it forms a dough. 

Mix on minimum speed setting for 1 minute and then turn speed up to 1 and knead for 4 minutes or until dough is smooth and elastic.

Let rise for 1 hour.

Knock down dough with hook on minimum speed and then slowly knead for another minute or so.

Remove from bowl and shape into two loaves. 

Place in oiled bread tins and let rise for at least 30 minutes.

Bake in preheated 230C oven for 10 minutes then reduce 

temperature to 200C and bake for another 15-20 minutes. 

Remove from tins and cool on wire rack.

Cooler Weather, Warmer Lunches and 30 cobs of Corn!

I've been thinking a lot lately about our lunches at home and have come to the conclusion that they could be a lot more exciting! Normally it's just a sandwich on our homemade wholemeal bread. Elliot is going through a ham, cheese, lettuce and avocado phase while Archie is addicted to cheese in any form! With the weather cooling down I'm going to try and be organised enough to have a hot lunch at least a couple of days through the week. Elliot loves helping in the kitchen and as most recipes I cook can freeze well I'm hoping to not have to cook everyday, but maybe just reheat something I've prepared earlier or defrost something from the freezer. I'm hoping as well that Matt will be inspired to take lunch to work instead of buying something everyday. Something that I'm sure our budget will be thankful for!

Right about the corn in the title! When I did our grocery shop this week I picked up a packet of three cobs of corn without really looking at it. We normally get a pack or two a week so I didn't take much notice until El told me that the pack had an extra sticker on it. When I looked I saw that it had been marked down to 59c! So I went back to the fruit and veg section and got all the rest of the marked down packets, 10 in total! I'm sure the checkout boy thought I was a bit crazy!

So what will we do with all this corn? Freeze it of course! I've previously blanched and frozen our home grown corn and it steamed from frozen really well. I'm doing a bit of an experiment and have cut the kernels off a few cobs and frozen them without blanching and will see if there is any difference. If there's no difference in the end product between blanching and not-blanching before freezing I'm sure you can guess which one I'll be doing!

For our lunch today I thought we'd use some of our corn to make some Polenta and Corn Fritters from this great book. I substituted the canned corn for the same weight of fresh (unfortunately it was only one cob, I was hoping to use more!) and also added some homemade ricotta cheese. They turned out really well, the boys ate a few each and there are enough for lunch tomorrow too!

Elliot learning how to grate cheese, he did a really good job apart from eating a fair bit!

I thought Archie was just sitting on El's step while I was at the stove with the fritters but then I turned around and saw this! Cheeky little man reaching for a banana!

Fritters on to cook, I think next time we'll add some grated onion and zucchini for a bit more zing. The polenta added a really crunchy texture, very yummy!

Calm in the Kitchen

It's probably a fair assumption that not many people find cooking with kids calming, especially two male toddlers under the age of 3! However, after the stressful morning that I had today I couldn't wait to get home and stuck into some cutting, mixing, kneading, baking and then, eating!

Tuesdays are Playgroup days. Most Tuesdays I enjoy Playgroup, but sadly not today. For a start Elliot and I had been up since 4am. That's enough to put anyone on the back burner, but then Archie didn't go down for his morning sleep so I had to get everything ready for Playgroup plus all my other jobs done with both of them following me around. Once we got to Playgroup (oh, we were late too) it was my job to set up the Mother's Day craft activity with two tired and clingy boys. Then there were some fundraising issues (I'm fundraising coordinator). Anyway by the end of it I was just wanting to get home, get the boys into bed and have a sit down. So I did. They both had good sleeps at the same time so I got to have some lunch and a cup of tea in peace while I planned our afternoon in the kitchen.

First on the list was Muesli, then wholemeal bread rolls and Spiced Pumpkin Soup for dinner. It was a whole afternoon affair with Elliot wandering in and out to help as he felt like it and Archie making a mess with the Tupperware drawer and generally getting underfoot, but that is cooking with toddlers and why I like it so much. We're at home, doing the things that make us happy.

Muesli is so good to make at home because you can easily change the ingredients around to suit your tastes. I'm yet to find a packaged muesli that I love as much as homemade because there is always either something missing or something there that I don't like! The base recipe that I use is from Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food but I add and change all the ingredients around every time I make it.

Today the recipe would have looked like this:
400g of a mix of organic traditional rolled oats and rolled spelt flakes
a handful of bran straw thingys
300g mixed nuts (macadamia, brazil, hazel, cashew)
100g seeds (I use pepitas and sunflower seeds)
100g dessicated coconut
sprinkle each of mixed spice and ground ginger
150ml macadamia honey
50ml molasses
100ml of oil
300g dried fruit (apricots, mango, sultanas)

Mix all the dry indredients except fruit in a large bowl.



Add combined wet ingredients and stir to coat.


Spread onto an oven tray and cook at 180C for about 20 minutes stirring every 5 minutes so that it browns evenly.

Return to large bowl and mix through dried fruit. Cool and store in an airtight container.


I make a big batch like this so that it'll last a few weeks with enough spare to give some to my Dad who is a big muesli fan.