Spicy leftover leg of lamb

If you have a roast leg of lamb on Sunday, then on Monday or Tuesday you should almost certainly make this. For one thing, that leg of lamb was probably eye-wateringly expensive, wasn’t it? I tremblingly handed over around £20 for one last week, so I was jolly sure I was going to make the most of it. It fed the four of us a very merry Sunday dinner the first time around (teddy-bear-shaped Yorkshire puddings were involved and so was good Claret - it was the first Sunday meal following a dry January), and would easily have fed four in its second incarnation, had I stirred myself to make it in time for the children’s tea. In the end, husband and I snarfed it between us, with just a tiny bit leftover for my lunch today.

Soup opera

We took a family field trip last weekend to the wilds of Walthamstow, to see some great friends and to have a brief poke around the International Supermarket, one of my favourite food shops anywhere. Really, I'll take a well-stocked supermarket catering to a community with a vibrant food culture any day over a posh deli. Fresh and lovely produce, intriguing grains stacked ceiling high and fragrant breads and baklava. I couldn't spend as long as I would have liked (pesky family! pesky dinner reservation!) but I grabbed a bag of these lovely lentils.

Famous biscuits

"Mum! These biscuits should be famous!"

"Shall I put them on my blog then?"

"Yes! And don't forget the rules."

Much as I think the Beautiful Girl has radically over-estimated the impact of this little blog, these scrummy biscuits are most definitely worthy of note. Crisp, buttery and with a faint tang of lemon, they came about because the BG received some new biscuit cutters for her eighth birthday from one of her friends and wanted to use them STRAIGHT AWAY. A quick Google turned this up on the BBC Good Food website - easy peasy, though short on 'rules' (which, as Monica Geller and I both know "help control the fun").

For your budding chocolatiers...

Wait…. a…. minute. I might be just about to write something mildly topical. Hold on to your Easter bonnets, because, just in time for the school holidays, when you might be in the market for a fun activity for children, and Easter, when you might have a large amount of chocolate lurking around, here’s this!

Yes!

What is it?

Umm… Rocky road? A sort of chocolate collage? The result of an accident in a sweetie factory?

Read on, reader...

Actual cooking by real children

We're supposed to interest our children in food by allowing them to get involved with the selection and preparation of food and I'm all for it. Perhaps today after the children have cheerfully completed all their homework we'll slip into our matching Cath Kidston aprons, and work together carefully and co-operatively (perhaps while doing some close-harmony singing) to produce a healthy, satisfying meal that we will all enthusiastically yet tidily consume, while conversing politely about the day's events. After we've shared in the washing and cleaning up perhaps we'll probably retreat, laughing, to the sofa where we'll enjoy some improving literature before bed. Yes, yes I'm sure that's how it will go.

Fish pie

I didn’t much like fish pie when I was a child, I seem to remember. Possibly it was the colourlessness of it – white fish, in a white sauce, topped with white mashed potatoes. Maybe I thought it was a tad bland, taste-wise, too. Or maybe it was just because it was my brother’s favourite.

Now I love it. There’s just something so natural about the combination of fish and potatoes (like in those fishcakes). It’s a comforting, comfortable, rainy-day kind of food.

We all love chips

I don't have a problem with frozen food - why would I? Freezing is a great way of keeping food 'fresh' without adding nasty ingredients. If it weren't for frozen peas, GB wouldn't eat any vegetables at all (let's draw a veil over the fact that his preferred way of eating them is in their still-frozen state, with a spoon...) and I really love those bags of mixed berries you can buy (I think Sainsbury's Basics version costs all of £1 a bag) which make the most fantastic smoothies.

But I think I take some persuading when it comes to oven chips. Because it just takes so little time and energy to slice up a few potatoes, sprinkle them with olive oil and maybe a few herbs and/or spices, and shove them in the oven. And while a bag of pre-prepared 'lightly spiced oven wedges' will cost you £2.47 a kilo and cook in 18 minutes, according to the packet instructions, Maris Piper potatoes cost 78p a kilo and, when cut into wedges, cook in about... 18 minutes.

In which we make a gingerbread house

It's hard work, making all these magical memories, isn't it? It's Christmas Eve and the children broke up from school a week ago. I tried to get as much of the shopping, wrapping and general preparation done ahead of time in order to be able to gaze in hushed wonder at the twinkling Christmas lights, take long walks through frosty fields and generally drink in the awe and majesty of this special time of year.

Let's have two minutes' silence to mourn the death of another lofty ideal.

The reality is that the children are simultaneously exhausted from a busy school term, hopped up on all the sugar they've come to expect as an inalienable right, excited at the prospect of a visit from you-know-who and bored/frustrated with all the endless WAITING. It's the perfect storm, and it has resulted in plenty of shouting, crying and sulking. The kids have also been pretty badly behaved.

One accomplishment I am proud of, though, is our lovely gingerbread house. Do you like it? OK, OK, I know, I know, a nano-second spent Googling 'gingerbread house' will yield some amazing specimens (like this one) to which ours does not begin to compare. BUT as my Dad always says, "if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly" and I can honestly say that the children and I got a lot of pleasure out of completing this project together. I'd like to think it will become an annual ritual.

First blogging challenge...

Here's a picture of some bread to give you a clue as to what I came up with...

It gets kinda lonely around here (not that I want to guilt-trip you into leaving comments. Much). So I decided I would dip a toe in the blogging community pool, so to speak, in order to try and make some connections. How? I hear you ask. Why, by participating in a food blogging challenge, of course.

There are tons of these out there in Blog Land. They seem to consist of various bloggers getting together and coming up with a theme for a monthly (or one-off) recipe-related challenge in which they invite fellow bloggers to participate. Other bloggers create a recipe to fulfil the brief and submit their entries to the challenger (or 'host', as I believe they're called) for them to collate so we can all compare notes as to who has the worst photography skillz (erm... that would be me).  Not really. I mean, so we can see what recipes everybody came up with and hopefully get some new ideas for our own cooking along the way.

I came across this one via Dom at the Belleau Kitchen (thank you! You're an inspiration!):

and decided to try and come up with an idea. This is a monthly blogging challenge on the subject of ... you guessed it... breakfast. Check it out here. It's being hosted this month by Susan at A Little Bit of Heaven on a Plate. (Hello, Susan! I hope you like my entry!)

The tyranny of chicken

Everybody loves chicken, right? Because it's mild-tasting? Can be subjected to myriad different treatments and cooking methods? Takes on the flavour of the ingredients it's paired with really well?

Whatever the reason, it has become one of the things my children will generally eat fairly reliably (oh, I wish I hadn't just written that...) so we eat it at least once a week and I'm always keen to try something new to do with it. This idea came from the marvellous Epicurious, which I've been a huge fan of for years (I have printouts in my moth-eaten, sticky, mouldering ideas folders that date back to 2001! That's like the Jurassic!) and I'm sharing it with you because a) everybody loved it and b) it's the kind of amazingly quick, easy recipe that can be whipped up in about 15 minutes, the time it takes to set the table and steam some cous cous. And re-heat some roast potatoes for the cous cous-hater.

Bonfire toffee

You wait six months for a festival, then two come along in one week (much like Mealtime Meltdown blog posts… ahem…). Hot on the heels of Hallowe’en* comes Bonfire Night** at the weekend, so you’ll be needing a treacle toffee recipe, won’t you?

A pumpkin explosion

We carved this monstrous trio from pumpkins grown for us by our lovely neighbour. She didn't know what variety they were but I decided to have a go at cooking the flesh anyway. It was a rather haphazard affair. I roasted some of the larger chunks, steamed the smaller bits in the microwave... but then just mixed it all together anyway and blended it to what turned out to be a rather looser puree than I might have hoped for. The answer seemed to be to reduce the water content by simmering it in an open saucepan... The answer, that is, if the question had been: "What's the best way to spread volcanic splashes of pumpkin over the widest available area?"

Cheesy corn bread

“Can’t we have something regular that you get from the shops and you don’t even have to make?”

Sigh.

OK, I’ll admit that the children (who, you'll have gathered, are not exactly adventurous) have had a fair amount of new stuff foisted on them this week. I’ve been researching recipes for a parent and toddler cooking class that a friend and I are going to be running this autumn.

A nugget of the purest green

We didn’t eat many meals together as a family when our children were just learning to eat solid foods. This was because DH was working long hours and was rarely home to see – let alone eat with – the children and because I’d convinced myself that I couldn’t make food that satisfied their needs and tastes as well as my own (now is not the time or the place to have the conversation about how dieting WRECKS LIVES, though).

I wish I’d had Nikki Duffy’s book back then. Nikki (who happens to be a former colleague) has written a fantastic book (under the aegis of River Cottage) all about feeding babies and toddlers and it’s crammed with useful, reassuring, practical and pragmatic advice, as well as some really, really terrific recipes. I plan to write in more detail about the book in a future post BUT suffice it to say that the most iron-clad advice that she gives and that anybody could give anybody about feeding young children is MAKE THEM EAT WHAT YOU EAT FROM AN EARLY AGE.

So I – clearly – feel like I’ve already failed in this regard, even if the two of us dining together regularly (telly off, candle on table, good bottle of wine) has felt like a sanity-saver on occasion. But I think what I mean to say here is that if I was eating regularly with a young child, this – as well as the amazing recipes in Nikki’s book - is what I would be making.

Pizza, and some observations on dough

I know I’m supposed to be pushing the boundaries, using this blog as a way of challenging myself to make innovative, interesting family food that takes us out of our comfort zone… but the Gorgeous Boy looked at up me the other day with his beautiful, liquid brown eyes and asked for pizza. I was pretty powerless to resist.

In theory, at least, pizza-making is a fun activity in which to get the kids involved. They can slap the dough around a bit, and, look! Here are some vegetables! Make a funny face with them on top of your pizza!

I have two observations to make at this point.

Quickie post: Best. Chicken. Sandwich. Ever.

Hi, howareya? Yeah, I know I haven't been around much lately. I have been thinking about you, though! And as my last post (way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) featured roast chicken, I thought I'd offer my take on what to do with some of the leftovers.

Roast chicken with leek

Oh, man. Is there anything (anything?) finer in this world than a chicken, roasted to crisp, golden, salty perfection? Amazingly enough, even the children seem to agree, so I’m taking it to the next level by introducing an accompaniment that makes the most of the marriage made in heaven that is chicken + leek + pasta. Wait a minute, that’s bigamy. Ha ha.

For this dish, a plump, farm-fresh, free-range chicken is roasted atop a mound of snowy white, aromatic leeks. When it’s done the bird is removed to reveal the cooked leeks (some tantalizingly crisp, some melting and soft) resting in a pool of intensely flavoured chicken juices. A heap of cooked wide papardelle pasta – I’m afraid I’m talking non-PC, refined white pasta that will absorb all those lovely juices – is mixed in. The ribbons of leek get lost and melt into the pasta, making the kind of slippery, flavourful mouthful that will have you picking at the dish until lo-o-o-ng after you’re full.

That’s the theory, anyway. But will the kids go for it? Here’s the recipe.

Cakes, cakes, cakes!

Ah, the half-termly PSA cake sale. The letter sent out too late, the last-minute change of setting, the clash with various clubs... But we all love a bit of cake, don't we? And at 30p each (four for £1), you can't argue. Especially when they're as amazing as this!

But all offerings - including, and, in fact, especially 'confectionery applied to breakfast cereal' as a friend of mine described her own contributions - are gleefully, and remarkably indiscriminatingly pounced upon by hungry children craving sugar. So we beg, implore and bully people to bake some cakes if they possibly have time (people start to back away in the playground when they see us coming), we bake, we ice, we eat several too many of the ersatz chocolate decorations we've bought, we breathe a sigh of relief when we see children other than our own heading to school cradling plastic boxes and biscuit tins.

You say baby food, I say soup...

Soup. Not baby food. OK?

It's disheartening, isn't it, when you think back to all the lovely vegetables your small babies ate when they were first eating solid food. Lovely purees of sweet potato, butternut squash, spinach and potato. Delicious risotti, stews and casseroles... they couldn't gobble them fast enough. Fast forward to now: "I'm not eating THAT", "I think I'm going to be sick", "Is THAT what's for tea???"

All of which is, clearly, a ringing endorsement for a blog that claims to be about feeding kids well (I'll get me coat...)

Sunshine, birthday cake, pageantry

Here's what's been up with me recently.

Hiking in the glorious, sunny Yorkshire Dales. Careful not to look at those white legs for too long, you'll go blind.