Rice bubble muesli bars

I like to put homemade muesli bars in the kids' lunchboxes for a sweet but (relatively) nutritious treat. Until recently I'd been using this recipe, which I like because it's vegan. But I've been on the lookout for something different, and I think I've finally found what I'm looking for: a muesli bar that is light, crunchy and tasty. The kids agree that this one's a keeper.

Rice bubble muesli bars (slightly adapted from this recipe)

Mix together in a large bowl:

1 cup rice bubbles
2 cups quick oats (not traditional - you must get the 'quick' or 'instant' variety)
1/2 cup sultanas
1/3 cup choc chips

Put in a small saucepan:

60g butter
1/3 cup honey
1/4 cup soft brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.

Put the saucepan on low/medium heat and stir until the butter melts and the sugar is dissolved. Bring gently to the boil. Once it boils it will start to froth up - turn the heat to low and simmer for 2-3 minutes, stirring. Add this mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well so that all the oats and rice bubbles are nicely coated.

Tip the mixture into a baking dish (I use a 20 x 30cm slice pan) lined with baking paper and spread it out evenly. Then, using a metal spatula - or whatever does the job well for you - press the mixture down firmly until the surface is nice and flat. Then press it again. The more you press, the better your bars will hold together.

Put the baking dish in the oven for 5-10 minutes, taking it out when it starts to brown a little on top (you can see how it should look in the photo above). Let it cool down for a while before slicing it into bars. It's easier to slice when it's still a little warm.

I store my bars in an airtight container and as they're always gone by the end of the week I can't say how long they last for - but I can tell you that they are absolutely delicious!

Autumn harvest

Our plants didn't fare too well when we went away for a week - I had them watered every second day but it was a relentlessly hot week in Melbourne and we arrived home to some sad and wilted-looking chillies, dried-up tomato plants and parched strawberries. Luckily we were able to revive almost all of the plants - and then came the rains, giving everything way more water than it actually needed (I have picked a lot of split tomatoes since then).

This weekend I made pesto from some of our basil and tossed some halved tommy toe tomatoes through the pasta just before eating. Sadly we are inbetween lettuce crops and had to use supermarket lettuce, but we did have a delicious supersize home-grown spring onion in our salad.  I used to think it wasn't worth growing spring onions, but I've come to appreciate the benefits of having a few handy for when I run out of bought ones, and they deserve credit for being the one plant that insects, snails and birds don't attack.

My husband has been getting huge crops of chillies from his various plants, although some late-harvest varieties are yet to ripen. He has rocotos, cayennes, Thai, birdseye, habaneros, jalapenos and several others (I've kind of lost track of what they all are at this point - all I know is that they're everywhere, in little collections of pots in every corner of the front and back garden!). Here are the chillies that he and K picked yesterday:

And here is the sauce he made from them today, which he based partly on this sambal oelek recipe from Suburban Tomato (thanks, Liz!) and partly on another recipe which included coriander and palm sugar:

He seems very pleased with the results but I can't vouch for the sauce because, embarrassingly, I'm too chicken to try it - some of M's chillies are way too hot for my taste. I am, however, keeping a basket of chillies from last week's harvest to dry out and use in cooking:

Not sure if I'll string them together in bunches (tempting, because they look so beautiful) or just toss them in a jar (far more practical) but I'm sure these will provide me with all the dried chillies I need for the next year or so - while M's sauce will last him a few weeks at best. Not that he'll be chilli-less after that, because by then the rocotos will be ripening. The rocoto is a Venezuelan chilli that can grow to 10 feet in height (that's over 3 metres for those who speak metric) and is notable for having black seeds. Last year we kept some of these exotic-looking seeds and, late in the year, managed to get some of them to germinate - a very slow process; we had just about given up when they finally came up. And now M has a precious bunch of seedlings, which we really hope will survive the winter:

Far easier to propagate have been the strawberries, which sent out runners like crazy. To get more fruit you are supposed to cut them off, but as a novice gardener I found it all very exciting so I let them keep on making their baby strawberry plants. I filled little seedling pots with soil, weighed down the leafy parts of the runners with stones so they could take root in the soil and separated them from the mother plants once they had done so. I have loads of them now, and the plants are still producing more and more:

I have to admit, I have no idea what I should do with them over winter. Advice, anyone?

Candy cane chocolate

Today was R's last day of 3-year-old kindergarten. While she was perfectly happy to say goodbye to her teacher, assistants and friends (she is going to a different kinder next year), I felt quite sad. I really hate goodbyes, and I'm not happy about the speed with which time marches on while my brain struggles to catch up. And of course at this stage of the year time compresses even further, with whole weeks rushing by in what feels like minutes. Before you know it the year is over and you're taking the kids back to school for term 1, hoping the rest of your life doesn't rush by like the final episode of Six Feet Under (in which the characters' futures unfold in fast forward, right up to their deaths. Best final episode of a TV series ever. And definitely a contender for best TV series ever).

Now how did I go from talking about kindergarten to musing about death? I do apologise. What I really wanted to say was that R and I had heaps of fun making candy cane chocolate (a.k.a. peppermint bark) as end-of-year gifts for her teacher and two assistants. This stuff is fantastic for making with kids because it involves a couple of super-fun things: smashing up candy canes and sprinkling smashed-up candy canes onto melted chocolate. I based mine on this recipe but really, no recipe is required. Here is what we did:

• Smashed up a 170g packet of large candy canes (sealed inside two plastic bags; bashed repeatedly with the base of a little milk-boiling pan. You could also use a hammer or a rolling pin)
• Melted a packet of white chocolate melts in the microwave; stirred til smooth; spread out on baking tray covered with baking paper
• Sprinkled half of candy-cane mixture on top, pressed in lightly with back of spoon
• Once chocolate had cooled, broke it into shards.

R did the smashing and sprinkling; I did the melting and spreading. Then we repeated the process with a packet of milk chocolate melts and the remainder of the smashed candy canes. She enjoyed it a lot, and K is looking forward to making a batch to give to his teachers for when school wraps up next week.

Oh, and it looks pretty and tastes rather good too!

Hey pesto!

The other day R asked if she could have 'hey pesto' for dinner. Hey what? 'Hey pesto pasta' (I was not even aware she knew the term 'hey presto', but K is into magic tricks so perhaps she has heard him say it. Either that or she learned it from a Disney movie, like everything else she knows).

So last night the three pesto-lovers in the house had our first homegrown 'hey pesto' of the season, and now I feel like it's really summer. Our entire last summer's crop was used for pesto, and this season's will go the same way too, because if there are other uses for large bunches of basil I have not yet discovered them.

My pesto is made with basil, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic and parmesan and is a wonderfully quick dish to make when it's late and I don't have the energy for anything complicated (which, sadly, is the case just about every night of the week). I make it by picking off the basil leaves (being careful to remove the odd caterpillar here and there), washing them and blending with a few tablespoons of olive oil and a small handful of pine nuts (raw, I don't bother toasting them). Then I add a finely chopped clove or two of garlic and about 1/4 cup of finely grated parmesan. I also like to put in a generous teaspoonful of chilli - usually sambal oelek, but fresh chilli is good too. Once the pasta is cooked and drained I return it to the pot, put in the pesto and toss to coat, sometimes adding a tiny bit of water or oil to thin it out. And - hey pesto! It's done.

If you like basil but have never made pesto, give it a go - it's so easy. To give an idea of how much basil to use, when I'm not using home-grown I find a whole supermarket bunch of basil is sufficient for a 500g packet of pasta.

Smiley faces and bath battles

R was desperate to make 'smiley face biscuits' so we baked gingerbread circles and iced them (she was in charge of smartie application). A very pleasant and successful project.

That evening when she refused to get in the bath I quickly put together this catamaran to persuade her. It was a little too successful - she and K fought over it all evening. Well, you win some, you lose some... At least the Barbies had fun.
 

Mi goreng with spices

I was lucky enough to be given Yotam Ottolenghi's vegetarian cookbook Plenty for my birthday recently. Lots of amazing-looking recipes, many with ingredients I don't typically have on hand (such as creme fraiche, sorrel, sherry vinegar, roquefort and tarragon, to pick a few at random). Mi goreng* had a more familiar ingredient list, and since I had a tub of tofu in the fridge I thought I'd try it for Saturday night dinner.

A quick trip to our local, fantastic Asian grocery...

Then a bit of preparation (good thing I did it well in advance, because the evening was taken up dealing with a sick child and it was 10pm before we had dinner!)...

 

The result: a rather delicious meal. Although to be honest, by 10pm I didn't much care what I ate. 

For anyone wanting to make this, it is seriously easy. And I don't even have a proper wok (shocking, I know). Here's my adaptation (with slight changes) of Ottolenghi's recipe, which serves 2:

Prepare: a 500g pack of 'fresh' egg noodles; a bunch of choi sum, chopped into pieces; 200g firm tofu, cut into 1cm thick strips; half an onion, diced; a handful of beanshoots; large handful of green beans, chopped in half.

In a small bowl mix: 3 tablespoons kecap manis/thick caramel sauce, 3 tablespoons light soy, a generous tablespoon of water, 1 teaspoon sambal oelek, 1.5 teaspoons ground coriander, 1 teaspoon ground cumin. 

Put aside for garnish: some shredded iceberg lettuce, lemon wedges and a heaped tablespoon of crisp-fried shallots (buy them in a little plastic jar at an Asian grocery).

Method: On a high heat fry the onion for a minute in 2 tablespoons oil (I used olive; the recipe called for groundnut), then add the tofu and beans and cook another few minutes, stirring gently now and then, til the tofu is browned a little. Add the choy sum. When wilted, add the noodles and spread them out around the wok so they can get plenty of heat. Cook for about 2 minutes. Then add the spice mixture and a good handful of beansprouts. Toss gently while cooking for a minute or two. 

To serve: Put noodles into two bowls, arrange lettuce on the side, sprinkle a teaspoon of shallots on each and serve with wedges of lemon. 

Mi want more goreng: Keep another pack of noodles handy in case your partner is still hungry. Cook them with more kecap manis, light soy sauce and whatever's at hand (in our case this was some tofu, a bit of zucchini, some beansprouts and an egg). Keep any uneaten noodles in the hope that a child will enjoy them the next day. 

Drink: Large glass of wine. Go to bed, praying for an uninterrupted night's sleep.  

*Ottolenghi calls it mee goreng (as opposed to mi, or mie). But I'll just be pedantic and change it to the spelling I prefer. 

Strike day

Lucky K scored a day off school due to a statewide teachers' strike. We thoroughly enjoyed our day at home, with friends visiting for morning tea and the kids' grandmother L coming over for the afternoon. 

In addition to the bagels, fruit salad and honey cake brought over by our lovely friends, we had this cake, which is the latest addition to my baking repertoire:

I found the recipe for the orange cake here, having tried out a tofu dish from the same blog, Bubala, a couple of months ago (it was fantastic). It's always good to hear what other vegetarians are cooking, and since the tofu was my kind of thing I though the cake might be, too. Besides being very easy to make, this cake is light and delicious, and best of all, it is VEGAN. Although I'm just plain old vegetarian I have been trying to cut down on the amount of dairy foods we eat, mainly for health reasons (I won't go into them here, but Professor T. Colin Campbell, a very eminent biochemist who conducted the world's largest study of health and nutrition, can tell you all the reasons you should adopt a plant-based diet on this website). Generally I have avoided dairy-free baking, thinking it would just be too depressing to eat cakes made without egg and butter, but this one has proved me wrong.

In the afternoon I told K about a puppet-making workshop he might like to go to during the holidays, which resulted in R demanding to make puppets right now. I gave them each a couple of brown paper bags and this is what she and K came up with:

Left and centre are R's; the one on the right is K's.

OK kids, fun's over now. It's back to school and the old routine tomorrow (but only two days til the weekend, hooray!).

 

Home, sick

Fancy a siesta beneath a palm tree, while little monkeys frolic nearby? Then consider spending your vacation at the House of Virus, where germs flourish and boxes of tissues are toted about like this season's must-have fashion accessory. Also in vogue are cracked lips, sore throats and the odd bout of vomiting. Here our days are leisurely, with short activities punctuated by naps (children only!) and temper tantrums from an exhausted and grizzly 4-year-old (and occasionally from an exhausted and grizzly mother, too). 

Here's the exciting story* of how this recent episode of illness (as opposed to last week's one, because according to our doctor this is a different virus) began. I wrote this last night but was unable to post it due to R waking up crying and taking up the rest of my evening and a good part of my night, too. So it's all about yesterday, rather than today. Which was much the same anyway, only grumpier, snottier and with an even more exhausted and impatient mother. So here it is:

*Disclaimer: story may not actually be exciting.

Because K has, of late, been less than enthusiastic about school, and because he's been inventing all sorts of ailments in order to avoid going, we were skeptical when he staggered out of bed groaning on Monday morning. Sure, he had a cold, but there was so much exaggeration and bad acting going on (clutching his head, collapsing on the couch saying he couldn't walk) that it was hard to be very sympathetic. So I marched him off to school despite his protestations. 

Two hours later they called me to fetch him. He looked so obviously unwell huddled up in the sick bay that I felt like the world's cruellest mother. Fortunately (or perhaps not so fortunately) I already had a doctor's appointment lined up for R later in the day. Both children were examined and officially declared unwell with high temperatures. Vindicated, K phoned his dad and said I TOLD YOU SO (or something to that effect) and received in exchange a recap of the story of the boy who cried wolf. 

K asleep in the play-house, where he spent much of the day...

So today was an at-home day, with K sleeping most of the time (in some rather odd places, too) and R feeling well enough to play Tumblin' Monkeys a thousand times but still not eating much and looking skinnier than ever. I made some blueberry pancakes just to try and get some food into her, and we sat outside with my mother-in-law L (who risked infection to come help me out) and had a little picnic while K slept inside.

More sunshine forecast for tomorrow! I hope the kids will be well enough to enjoy it.

Post script: They weren't. I dragged R out into the sun to make a little garden for her Peppa Pig toys to play in; she cried and demanded sunglasses and a jumper. After she had reluctantly assisted with construction and landscaping of the little garden she declined to play with it unless it came inside (it didn't). Well, I still think it looks sweet...

 

...and she'd bloody well better play with it tomorrow!

What the heck is a matzo ball?

 

The other day I was chatting to one of our neighbours while our children played footy in the street. As mothers often do, we discussed our fussy eaters and what we were planning to cook for them that evening. I told her I was making kneidlach - otherwise known as matzo (or matzah) balls - and she asked me what matzo balls are made of. 'They're made of matzo meal,' I answered, but not being Jewish, she had no idea what that was. 'It's crushed up matzo,' I said, 'kind of like breadcrumbs.' But what is matzo, she asked, puzzled. I ended up explaining that if you got a pack of table water crackers and smashed them you'd probably have something closely resembling matzo meal. And that these balls are quite easy to make, and, served in a bowl of soup, are one of the few things that we all love to have for dinner.

Our Friday night dinners are special, because that's when we celebrate Shabbat with blessings and a delicious (hopefully) family meal. Kneidlach/matzo balls (usually served with chicken soup) are a very traditional Jewish food. Being vegetarian we have them in a somewhat untraditional way, with minestrone. And this unusual combination is really, really good.

Every Jewish woman who cooks kneidlach has her own way of preparing them, but the ingredients don't vary much: eggs, oil, water, matzo meal, seasoning. My grandmother's recipe included two tablespoons of boiling water ('it MUST be boiling!'); the recipe I use specifies cold (I suspect it makes no difference). So, adapted from The Spice and Spirit of Kosher Jewish Cooking (which has three recipes - 'easy', 'fancy' and 'special'), here is how I make kneidlach:

Beat two eggs lightly, then add two tablespoons of oil (I use extra virgin olive oil), two tablespoons cold water, a pinch of salt and a few shakes of pepper. 

Stir in about 3/4 cup coarse matzo meal (I have no idea what anyone uses the fine matzo meal for, but don't buy it). The mixture should be a bit runny, so you freak out and think 'I will never be able to make these into balls!' Add a bit more matzo meal if it's dripping-off-the-spoon runny. 
  
Cover, and refrigerate for 30 minutes (longer is OK too. Sometimes I leave them in the fridge all day before cooking them at night and they turn out fine). 

The mixture will now be much thicker. With wet hands, roll little balls the size of walnuts. I get about 17 or 18 from this recipe, but you can make a smaller quantity of larger ones if you prefer. They do expand a fair bit when boiled.

Cook in a large pot of boiling water for 40 minutes, then remove with a slotted spoon. You can then put them straight into a soup, or let them cool before refrigerating or freezing them (they freeze very well). 

Here is K's bowl of strained soup with kneidlach. If you have a fussy eater, statements such as I DON'T WANT VEGIES IN MY SOUP may be all too familiar. We're hoping he'll grow out of it, because what sort of vegetarian doesn't like vegetables? R, pleasingly, has hers with plenty of vegies. And extra cannellini beans. 

Shabbat shalom!

Risotto, and 'Kate's Dress' in corduroy

I'm writing this post while cooking mushroom and pea risotto. Must remember to keep stirring in between typing and uploading pictures... 

I recently bought my first digital pattern, Kate's Dress by Lily Bird Studio. I had seen some beautifully soft orangey-red  fine-wale corduroy in Darn Cheap Fabrics and was looking for an excuse to buy some. For the lining and the piping trim on the yoke I used some fabric I had left over from when I made bias binding for R's Sunday Brunch Jacket a month or so ago. I've also used the same material for a hat (the free Oliver + S bucket hat pattern), so I hope R likes it! 

I'm not the most adventurous or experienced sewer, which is why I have, so far, stuck mostly with Oliver + S patterns (which have reliably clear instructions and plenty of online advice available) or simple things like skirts that I can draft myself. But the Lily Bird dress came together beautifully, and the downloadable pattern was packed with photos detailing every step of the process. The only change I made was adding a lining to the ruffle sleeves because I didn't like the idea of seeing the underside of the corduroy. And - most satisfyingly - I was able to use the fabric-covered buttons (in that same lining fabric again!) that I had made for the Sunday Brunch Jacket but decided against using.

The dress is a little wide in the chest (R is very skinny) and I probably should have checked the measurements before I made it... but it looks nice now and in a year or so it will fit her even better, albeit as a rather short dress. I like the simplicity of the style, the simple but effective yoke detail and the fact that it looks great with a long-sleeved top under. If I make the dress as a winter dress again I will line the entire thing instead of just the bodice to make it that little bit warmer. 

Risotto is ready now, and only a tiny bit stuck to the bottom of the saucepan. Now I'll let it sit for a while as I put R to bed, then Mr thirtynine and I will eat it with a salad. I heartily recommend Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian cookbook, where this recipe comes from. So many of my favourite meals come from this huge book, which has no pictures but is full of fantastic dishes. 

Yum!

first post

School holidays - kids fighting constantly. Big computer broken down so we are all sharing one laptop. A thousand bits of lego on the carpet, a play area that is so littered with toys and bits of junk that it's become impossible to walk through it, a desk that is piled high with papers, precious drawings and abandoned 'to do' lists. What better time to start a blog?

As my memory collapses under the strain of several years of child-rearing I've decided to outsource some of my brain's former duties. Pinterest takes care of creative things I might want to remember to do; this blog will take over remembering some of the things I actually do (kind of like the list I keep on the side of the fridge, reminding me of the meals I cook regularly, because otherwise I would forget one now and then and not realise til years later that we used to have tortilla a lot, but then it inexplicably dropped off the menu. And in fact I did forget about tortilla until this very moment, because I have failed to consult the list. This is especially sad because it is one of only three or four things that we all eat. Kids, expect tortilla next Friday night).

First post and already I digress. I was thinking I would devote this blog (a word I really dislike, but what can you do?) to documenting my art and craft activities with my own children and the playgroup session I run, and to keeping a record of the things I have sewn or made (most likely out of cardboard). Maybe I will even convince my son to write the odd guest post, since he once made me set up a blog for him and then failed to post even a single word. And maybe, given paragraph 2 above, I will keep a list of what's cooking in this almost vegetarian household (mostly pasta, mostly with napoletana sauce or some variation thereof). And speaking of which... it's dinnertime. Yes, it's spaghetti napoletana with lots of fresh parsley, accompanied by salad and a glass of something red. Buon appetito!