Little Foodies Canada

Do you see this beautiful little package of figgy, fruity, nutty goodness? Can you tell just by looking at it that it's laced with booze?


Before I tell you where it came from. I first want to tell you a little story. Let me remind you before I begin that this little package is packed full of fruit, nuts, chocolate and booze.

The story of the Canadian Boooooze Cake...
Mama Bear could smell the alcohol as she cut little slices of the cake that had travelled from a long, long way away. She handed out small slices to her family. Papa Bear tasted it and loved it, Mama Bear tasted it and loved it. Small Bear tasted it and didn't like it at all. Little Bear tasted it and loved it and wanted some more immediately. When Mama Bear said 'You can't have any more now as it has alcohol in it.' Little Bear said 'Oh, come on Mama, it's about time I tasted alcohol.' Mama Bear and Papa Bear stood open mouthed for a moment. Mama Bear exclaimed 'But you're 6 years old!' Little Bear stayed silent just long enough for Mama Bear and Papa Bear to be slightly alarmed by this outburst before his Little Bear shoulders started to shake, and a bit of a giggle escaped, 'Only joking!' said Little Bear. Mama and Papa Bear relaxed a little...
... and family therapy was averted for another time.

This Canadian Booze Cake as it has come to be known in our house is absolutely sensational. It reminds me of something from my childhood and I still can't think what it is? I want to send some to my family Up North so they can taste it and see if they can tell me what it reminds me of. Alas I can't do that, because it's all gone! If you want to find out how to make it and see some great pictures of it being made then click here.

It arrived with some other wonderful goodies all the way from..... you guessed it, Canada, from that cool Mama that I've talked about before, who resides at the very cool Under the Highchair. Aimee, thank you so very much for the wonderful things. You are one talented lady.

I've more to tell you about this Canandian package. I'll write about this jewel like jelly and some of the other things soon.
Thanks again Aimee!

EDIT: It's finished ! Little Foodies and the Daring Bakers Lemon Meringue Pie

Not sure why I felt the need to leave this to the very last minute, it's becoming a bit of a habit.....

Posting day arrived and yet again I still haven't made the LMP (Lemon Meringue Pie). I've read a few things about this LMP. Throughout the month on the Daring Bakers Blog I've seen some stunning ones, some runny ones and well to be honest... meringue scares me, pastry scares me, making lemon curd scares me!

But out of my comfort zone I come - I WILL make the LMP today and I'll post it on time too! I have just under 12 hours and counting!


EDIT: These are in the oven OKAY, OKAY, Please should I ever leave another thing to the last minute have me taken outside and SHOT! I could excuse myself and say it's because of my back and how good I am to have done it anyway, blah, blah... Please order my wings and halo... more blah. But no, it's because I'm seriously good at procrastinating.. I'm tired, can't waffle on properly... Here in pictures is what I've been doing for the last few hours... As well as juggling a few other things... Daring Bakers... sounds about right to me!

I want to say thank you to Jen at The Canadian Baker for hosting this month. Such a good choice. I know that I've learned a lot but I have to sleep on it tonight before I can put in to words exactly what it is. I was afraid of pastry, and it was my first time for making lemon curd and meringue so I was seriously out of my comfort zone today. That can only be a good thing! You can check out how all the other DB's got on by going to the DB blogroll.

I know one lesson learned before I go lie parallel and watch television/sleep... I wish I hadn't let it get so brown, I like meringue to be pearly white.

Oh... and is my lemon curd runny? Nope! ...and is it delicious? Yes definitely! Even though I like meringue more cooked than this it's still really good.

What we actually ate... Week One

So I didn't quite stick to the meal plan every time, but when I did change things it was due to unforeseen circumstances (read that: change of mind), or I made a more frugal choice to use up leftovers or something that was on the turn. But did I manage to stick to the budget? That is the question... and what did we actually eat.

Midweek breakfasts were the same every day, cereal with milk, fruit, water.
Weekend breakfasts slight change in that we had bacon sandwiches one day (reading and writing about farmhouse breakfast week made us all crave some). The other day we had bubble and squeek haggis with a fried egg on top...

Midweek Lunches

• Cheese rolls (on wholemeal bread made by Hubs and the boys), salad, apple juice. I had quesadillas.
• Boys: pasta salad with boiled egg, mandarins, apple juice (Hubs & I had tuna pasta salad)
• Ham sandwiches, cucumber, kiwi fruit, mandarin, apple juice. I used up the cauliflower cheese.
• Hubs took a ham sandwich, salad, coffee cake and a mandarin. The boys were off ill so just picked at food through the day (bananas, blood oranges, cucumber, carrot, tiny chocolate cake).
• Leftover chicken, cous cous and courgettes. Hubs took the leftover vegetable soup.

I totally forgot to include after school snacks in the planning: as they were only at school Mon & Tues it was quesadillas & water one day, apple juice and biscuits the next. We also made the coffee and chocolate cakes as we had young guests on one of the days.

Midweek Dinners

• Mon: Meatballs in tomato sauce with penne pasta and cauliflower cheese. We were going to have them with spaghetti but as I needed pasta for the packed lunches the following day I didn't see the point in boiling two pans of water. The cauliflower cheese I made the night before as the cauliflower was on the turn.
• Tue: I bumped the spicy seafood rice to Wednesday. Instead I used up the last of the jamon and the leftover vegetables from Sunday to make a big stew, also added half a carton of passata which was lurking in the fridge and a few teaspoons of chipotle paste.
• Wed : Instead of the planned roast vegetables and fish we had the spicy seafood rice. I ended up cooking a creamy seafood risotto with a bit of a kick and some spice. I wish I'd written down how much of everything I put in because it was excellent!
• Thu : I made the boys a quick vegetable soup, blitzing it with the stick blender. Roast chicken with couscous and roasted courgettes for Hubs and I.
• Fri : Different again. Boys had leftover chicken and salad. I didn't feel like cooking so Hubs made us some pasta with the last of the leftover chicken and a hot creamy sauce - it was delicious! He even put the chicken carcass on to boil for chicken stock to make a soup for lunch on Saturday.

Saturday:
Lunch: Chicken and Pasta Soup, made from the leftover chicken carcass.
Dinner: Haggis, Mashed Potato, Mashed Carrot and Sweet Potato mix, Mashed Celeriac. It was the first time the children have tried haggis and they loved it!

Sunday: Cousin mixed up the date, it's next weekend that we are there for lunch.
Brunch: Bubble and Squeek Haggis with a Fried Egg on top.
Dinner: Still to be decided.

The organic veg box cost £44.31, it included veg, fruit, chicken, milk, eggs, butter & mayonnaise.
Extras Bought : cucumber, tomatoes, milk, bread, bacon, haggis, ham
Already had : jamon, apple juice, flour, pasta, cream, mandarins, cauliflower, extra carrots, cereal

Where we have things every week such as cereal, flour, etc. I took the monthly spend and divided it by 4 to get an approximate cost. I rounded figures up for things used every day such as apple juice. Taking this into account we spent an extra £24.13. This did not include spices and condiments. I will work on a figure for this as it's the sort of thing I buy in bulk and then we have enough to last a lifetime.

So the total was £68.44 , not including dried spices and condiments. That was eating mainly organic, and a lot of seasonal food. Anybody can do it for a week, I need to see if we can do it for the next three weeks.

Though I've thought many times about doing this it was my lovely friend Fiona over at the very brilliant Cottage Smallholder who inspired me to actually get on and do this whole budget thing. While e-mailing her yesterday I worked out that £70.00 a week saved over the year is £3,640.00 (that is approximately US$7,218.00, CAN$7,260.00, AUS$8,204.00, Euros4,915.00) Now when you think about it like that it makes it seem more than worthwhile! ... and suddenly the guilt of my other on-line shopping this week (more of which next week) doesn't seem so bad! No, I didn't order myself the F&M weekend hamper!

It's Farmhouse Breakfast Week in the UK

Sara over at Farming Friends mentioned that it was Farmhouse Breakfast Week. Farming Friends, by the way is a great blog, it's good for young ones too, you can read some of the interesting bits to them and look at the pictures together.

Farmhouse Breakfast Week is an annual campaign in the UK to promote how important it is to eat a healthy breakfast every day. The website has some great information on it such as... Breakfast means 'breaking the fast' which I never knew.
It also gives the figures for research done by Cardiff University School of Pyschology, led by Prof Andrew Smith, which is quite an eye opener. I'm sure some of us have heard them before, but here they are again. In a study children who ate cereal for breakfast were, 9% more alert, 11% less emotionally distressed, 13% less tired, 17% less anxious, 10% less likely to suffer memory and attention span difficulties and worryingly, 33% less likely to suffer from stomach complaints. Click here to check out the website for more facts and information.

I think promoting breakfast is a great idea, especially as I can't stand breakfast. I've mentioned it before, it's just too early. I think I'd like it if I could have something small and cooked at about 9.30/10.00am. By then of course the house is empty and I can't be bothered, if nobody is here I can sometimes forget about lunch too, ridiculous considering I might be reading or thinking about food for hours on end.

Come 3.30pm when the house has people in it again, I'm so hungry that I perform my 'plague of locusts have been in the fridge' trick. It is then that I understand it would have been a good idea to eat some breakfast and maybe some lunch. This is possibly one of the worst thing you can do to your body, starve it and then cram it full of food, often carb loaded and sweet!

The boys love breakfast. All thanks to my husband who is also a breakfast lover. During the week, he will more often than not get the three of them breakfast, then they sit and chat. I like to listen to them, sometimes I put the duvet over my head and pretend I'm still asleep. Sometimes I am still asleep.

The weekends are different. Now, Little and Small let their parents have a lie in (not what people without children would call a lie in mind). They make do with eating fruit and bits from the fridge, they sometimes get themselves some cereal (shockingly bad parenting). Then at a more reasonable hour we'll have something cooked - Eggs, Pancakes, or even a Full English.

During the week, this early morning breakfast hating person needs to go to bed earlier, get up to eat breakfast with her young and stop hiding away so they don't cotton on to her breakfast loathing ways. Do you eat breakfast? What's your favourite breakfast?

Another breakfast lover is Joey of 80 Breakfasts, a fab blog!

How to drop hints to your husband, boyfriend, beloved!

Hubs and I are not overly extravagant with gifts for each other. Often Valentine's Day passes and we've forgotten to exchange cards. This happens on our anniversay too sometimes. It's not that we're not romantic it's just that we're romantic when we feel like it throughout the rest of the year. Infact if I'm honest it could be something to do with... Hubs is bad at choosing presents for me. So bad, at Christmas I buy my own and then give them to him to wrap up... It's a seriously good idea but it might have to change, he's an intelligent man and surely if I give him a list with specifics he can hardly go wrong.

I wont tell you about the year he bought me the handbag that was so dire, NOBODY would have liked it. Not even Bridget Jones' mother and we know how much taste she had... Oops, I just did tell you about the year he bought me that handbag.

That said when an e-mail turned up from Fortnum and Mason I couldn't help but send dear Hubs the following link, Fortnum & Mason Weekend Hamper,
with the title 'If you're ever stuck and you want to spoil your wife...' and a note to go with the link saying... She loves the basket almost as much as the contents.

Now I'm not expecting this hamper to turn up anytime soon but I can whisper to THE fairy, keep my fingers crossed. Possibly send another e-mail saying... Your wife more than halved the weekly food shop bill! Now blow the money saved on something extravagant to show how much you appreciate that...

I don't think I've got the whole budget ethos yet... I'm working on it!

Toffee Coffee Cupcakes... #1

Mmmmm, cake....!

Mmmmm, lots of cake....!

Toffee Coffee Cupcake

Ah, gone!

Mmmm, more...

A question for your knowledge. These were a little experiment, you can see the toffee sank to the bottom. Anybody good at the whole science thing of baking? If so, please tell me why the toffee sank to the bottom and what could I do to suspend the toffee pieces throughout the cake. Possibly sprinkle the toffee pieces on the top prior to baking?


Why did I bake these, for Quirky Cupcake's beloved Jaos' birthday of course! Quirky Cupcake runs a monthly Cupcake Hero event, this month the theme was coffee. I LOVE coffee cake, always have done, even as a child when I didn't like coffee, I loved coffee cake.

As I said they were an experiment, I wanted to make coffee cake but I wanted to do something different to my normal coffee cake. I kept thinking.... and thinking... Then just as I was stuffing another left over from Christmas toffee in my mouth I thought toffee coffee. I quickly put the rest of the bag of toffees in the freezer.... and waited.

Toffee Coffee Cupcakes
4oz self raising flour
4oz soft butter, room temperature
4oz sugar
2 medium size eggs, room temperature
1 or 2 teaspoons of instant coffee, depending how strong you like your coffee cake
Splash of milk
10 frozen toffees

Pre-heat then oven to 175C (medium heat)
Unwrap the toffees and place in a small food processor, blitz until you have small pieces, some will be like sand.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, add the eggs and mix, sift in the flour and mix, add the coffee powder and mix, add a splash of milk to loosen.
Note: I mixed in the toffee pieces with the cake mixture before baking but next time I'd sprinkle them on the top just before putting in the oven. Unless someone tells me a better way - please?
Spoon into cake cases and then bake in the oven. The tiny ones take about 10 minutes, the larger ones 12-15 minutes, this will all depend on your oven.
Allow to cool and then ice as you please. We also made chocolate cupcakes as we had young guests who I didn't think should be eating coffee cake. This meant we had to make coffee icing (icing sugar, instant espresso powder and a tiny amount of hot water to make a paste) and chocolate icing, using cocoa powder instead of espresso powder. We then used both lots of icing to decorate the cakes.

Almost every morning I make a pot of stove top coffee and drink this all myself. I usually get 3 small cups out of it if mixed with hot milk. Please help me I've had 4 of these cakes this morning alongside my normal caffeine hit in liquid form - I'm seriously buzzing!

Little Foodies Budget Trial - Week One Plan

I've been sat here trying to think of some inspirational quotes, they are all evading me!

Meal Plan Week One

Midweek Breakfasts
Choice of cereal with milk, fruit, water
Weekend Breakfasts
Pancakes
Poached Eggs on Toast

Midweek Lunches
Cheese Roll and salad, fruit, apple juice
Tuna sandwich, salad, fruit, apple juice
Spicy rice salad (using leftovers), fruit, apple juice
Pasta salad, fruit, apple juice
Cous cous salad (using leftovers), fruit, apple juice
Weekend Lunches
Sat: Soup
Sun: At cousin's for Roast

Dinners for the week
Spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce
Spicy seafood rice
Roast vegetables with fish
Roast chicken with couscous & veg
Chicken and chard curry (for hubs & boys, I'm out for the evening)
Kohl Rabi & other veg stir fry with noodles
Soup

What should be coming in our trial Abel and Cole family organic box:
Bananas, blood oranges, kiwis, pineapple, broccoli, carrots, chard, kohl rabi, milva potatoes, mushrooms, white onions, there will also be 3 surprise things as I chose to forego the celery (yuk!), raddichio (not keen!) and beetroot (far too much of a good thing!).
To get a free cookbook we needed to spend over £40.00 so I also ordered an organic chicken, milk, eggs, butter and mayonnaise.

Other shopping to do:
More milk, tomatoes, possibly bread, possibly cucumber (I can't just remove cucumber from the equation, read this post, if you can't understand why. Besides Rome wasn't built in a day!).

It's 12.15pm on day one, so far okay. Hubs made some wholemeal bread rolls yesterday, they were used for the lunchboxes today.

Little Foodies set for a fall possibly?!

Before we've even started I have a feeling that I might fail with this whole budget thing. Maybe not the budget but staying away from Waitrose. That's before I even begin with the pain of meal planning. I'm the sort who likes to look at what we've got and decide on the spur of the moment what we're going to eat. With the flu and then my back, I hadn't been into Waitrose since before Christmas, infact I know the time and date that I was last there - Friday 21st December at 5pm. Saying it like that makes me think I may be some sort of addict! I've been trying to kid myself all these years that we do the right thing, but...

I'll admit that one reason I was able to commit to this whole different housekeeping trial thing is because, for now atleast, I'm not allowed to push a trolley and certainly shouldn't be carrying a basket, I thought it would be easy. However, after seeing Nan at the hospital today I popped into Waitrose (I wasn't breaking any rules - the trial starts tomorrow). My sole intention was to get some Thai Curry Pastes/Sauces (I'd like to do a taste test when we look at Thailand).

Anyway, blow me away if the whole marketing thing went and worked its magic, all of my senses were hit at once and I felt pleased to be there. Big NO NO!, I got a basket when I saw that pulses and couscous in the Wholesome range were on offer - I put a few in, it felt okay. I made my way to the eggs, I went for freerange and not organic and freerange, this was my way of trying to justify what I was doing. Onto the sauces aisle. WHAM! - it felt like I'd been kicked hard in the base of my spine. I put the basket down, quickly got the curry pastes and sauce, thought about asking a member of staff to pick the basket up for me but would have felt stupid doing that. I picked it up, trying to lift correctly (that's incase my physio or husband ever reads this!), and made my way to the cashier.

I picked up a copy of their free magazine, Waitrose Seasons January/February 2008. It still felt good to be in there, I also knew that if I was going to stick to the plan I wouldn't be going in there again for another month. (throws self to floor and sobs!)

I got home, by now sciatica running from my bum to my toes and realise that my physio talks a lot of sense. That will teach me!! I spent £10.19!! Was it worth it?! Well, I think so, as flicking through the free magazine I came across an article with the title - Waste not, want not... (I've always loved that phrase) - it continued ...it may sound quaint but as figures show we now throw away a third of the food we buy, Fran Quinn explains how the humble shopping list could help transform the environment. It then gave a seven day menu plan for main meals and a shopping list. How could I abandon this marvellous supermarket when they were so clearly in touch... and so very, very clever? Easy! Remember the plan Amanda! Remember the plan! So fairwell my humble supermarket - I'll see you in a month - maybe?!

If I had a crystal ball, I think it would show that at the end of this trial I will be better at budgeting and I probably won't be going into Waitrose so much. But I don't honestly think I can say I will be able to preclude Waitrose from my life altogether.

Tomorrow I will post our meal plan for the week, including breakfasts, lunches and dinners. I'll list what's coming in our organic veg box on Wednesday, (we're trialing Abel and Cole as they were doing an offer of a free cookbook if you spent over £40.00. ), and note any extra shopping we'll need to do. Then a week today I'll be honest about what we actually ate and how much I spent.

Little Foodies bids farewell to the Jamon

When I wrote the post here, about the annual jamon, I wasn't paying much attention and I certainly wasn't up to researching the inside leg measurements of said pig. I'd tasted it, knew it melted in my mouth, leaving a resonant sweet and deep taste. I realise now of course that even though ONLY glimpsed at from the utility room door, the colour of the hoof should have given it away. I realise now, the hoof was unmistakably black and deserved respect. It was the hoof of a Jamón Iberico de Bellota) . So, I did indeed insult the poor thing by referring to it as mere Jamon Serrano. I am wilfully naive, nay, ignorant!

So, giving thanks to the beautiful pig that has given us many feasts over the last few weeks, here are a few ways that we could eat Spanish Jamon in our house.

• Sliced from the bone and popped immediately into the mouth with small voices chirping in the background 'MORE' - 'I want more!' - 'He has a bigger piece than me.' 'I don't want it cooked, why can't we just eat it like this?' - 'I SAID I wanted more!'
• Jamon and Lentil Stew with root vegetables, good stock and a big glug of sherry.
• Jamon Croquetas
• Jamon and Scrambled Eggs
• Jamon and Cheese Scones
• Jamon Tortilla
• Jamon and Pea Soup
• Jamon Muffins
• Baked Jamon & Cauliflower Cheese
• Spicy Rice with Jamon
• Jamon & Tomato Pasta
  

and right now as I type the bone of the jamon is in a large pot of water, it's been on the boil for hours, hopefully resulting in a beautiful jamon stock.