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.