Sooner than I thought... Little Foodies Australia

That was a quick one... the males in the house woke up feeling fit, healthy and very hungry. I can quite honestly see myself and my husband with a business and several jobs on the side just to feed them when they're older. After they'd performed their 'plague of locusts have been in the fridge trick' I decided to cook Bill Granger's famous scrambled eggs. I wish I hadn't they are superb.

The recipe is widely available in books, old magazines or for free at the UKTV Food website but suggests you use 2 eggs, 80ml/2 1/2 fl oz/1/3 cup pouring cream, pinch of salt and 10g/1/4 oz butter. You whisk everything but the butter together in a bowl and melt the butter in a non-stick frying pan. You then pour the whisked egg mix into the frying pan and cook gently, slowly bringing the outside into the middle as it cooks. He suggests that you fold the eggs not scramble them. I have to say I'm not a big scrambled egg fan, until today. Now though, I could eat Bill's scrambled eggs every day, especially with the additional slices of fresh red chilli that I had on mine.... Mmmmm! A hit with Little, Small said he wanted my scrambled eggs. He's been disagreeable about a lot of things today so we'll try it this way again.

Little Foodies Australia & The Daily Tiffin

We're sticking with Australia for a little bit longer. Various reasons, all too boring to go into but include a sickness bug and a very bruised stubbed toe. Besides we're rather taken with Australia and as we're not having to cancel flights for real it's something we can do easily. I'll post in a day or two when things are back to normal.

Added later at 8.30pm -I almost forgot, well actually I didn't, it's just being a little english I'm sometimes a bit hesitant about coming forward. The lovely Meeta of 'What's for lunch, honey?' very kindly asked if I would like to be involved with The Daily Tiffin. I didn't have to think for more than a few seconds and was honoured to accept. I just did my first post today (it was my down time away from ill children and husband. I know they were ill only last month, it's the terrible food I serve them!!). Please do head over to the Daily Tiffin and take a look. As well as Meeta there are several other fantastic ladies who write for the DT, their blogs include: FitSugar, Humble Pie, Lunch in a Box, Malabar Spices, Saffron Trail, Tartelette and Were Rabbits.

Back soon...

Little Foodies Australia and the TIM TAM SLAM

It wasn't difficult to find recipes this week. Australia after all is now noted for its amazing food scene. We could argue that many countries are right there next to them and were there well before, but we wont. For this week we'll allow them pole position. The food and recipes coming out of Australia include influences from cuisines all over the world, particularly Asia, so sometimes it can be familiar, simple, other times complex and new. With labels like fusion food, which often gets called pretentious but really it's not.

The children have loved Australia week, and want to visit again soon. I guess the food is not that different to what we usually eat but they've loved all the details about Australia, the fact we have family there, the different animals, they speak the same but have some very funny slang words, the Aborigine people and their history. I would truly love to take them there for real.

I'll post about the exact food we've eaten over the weekend but I have two books that I referred to a lot this week.

the accidental foodie by Neale Whitaker which includes recipes from both Australian and British chefs & food writers, among the Australians (not necessarily born in Oz or still living there) are Joan Campbell, Bill Granger, Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack, Cherry Ripe, Donna Hay, Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander. This is a very beautiful and cool book, with fabulous pictures and a nice read. Neale's own story makes good reading, alongside his choice of chefs' in the book that he calls his food heroes. Until this week, it had just been a picture book for me. I'd dipped in and out, read a few paragraphs but I will now read the whole thing and I will certainly be cooking more recipes from it. I bought it for £8.00 in our local discount book shop but it's definitely worth the £12.99 that Amazon are currently asking for it, I'd even stick my neck on the line and say it's worth the full RRP of £25.00.

Wholefood by Jude Blereau who co-founded the Earth Market, a wholefood store and cafe in Perth, Australia. She also started the Whole Food Cooking School. The book quotes 'Wholefood celebrates food that has the ability to heal, nourish and delight.' It's a lovely book with a dark plum coloured cover. Inside there are simple recipes and pictures, right through the book it's very muted and calming, you do feel that anything you cook from it is going to be really good for you. So far I haven't, but I will.

For today I wanted to leave you with the Australian delight of Arnott's Chocolate Tim Tams and what you do with them, sometimes referred to as the Tim Tam Slam, among other things.

TIM TAM SLAM
Tim Tams are a chocolate biscuit (a little like Penguins but totally different if you understand). They're made by Arnott's in Australia and the Australians' do a peculiar thing with them. Not sure if it's frowned upon as it's not exactly polite, but my best friend introduced me to the practice fairly recently when she saw them for sale in Sainsbury's and she'd remembered doing it in Australia (You can buy them in Sainsbury's at the moment for £1.39 a packet). If you're not dieting and you have the willpower not to become addicted I urge you to get some and try it.
First make yourself a hot drink. (My choice is coffee). Make sure it's cool enough not to burn you. Bite one corner off each end (alternate corners). Then dip one bitten end in the drink and suck through the other bitten end, as soon as you start to feel the liquid you need to flip the whole thing into your mouth and eat. The taste and sensation is fantastic. As my boys don't drink tea or coffee and I'm not about to encourage them to do so, they did theirs with warm milk. It can make an almighty mess - but great fun! Go on - you know you want to! Makes me feel about 10 years old again - great!

Little Foodies Australia - Vegemite V Marmite

There are all sorts of things to consider when choosing your yeast extract spread. Mainly taste and spreadability. But then there's the decision English or Australian?

Being English we tend to have marmite in the house and although we don't seem to follow the love it, hate it theme, we do like it. We don't have it often, possibly once a month, and when we do, we like it on toast or soft sliced bread (brown or white). I also like it with peanut butter. About as far away as you can get from a peanut butter jelly sandwich. (Sorry Culinary Cowgirl, see link on left as I can't get it to work here.)

Every so often I see a jar of vegemite and I buy it. I can't fathom why as having marmite in the house anyway it tends to sit there, get used once or twice and then goes out of date. It's not that we don't like it, we're just not massive yeast extract eaters, although for the first time I've just noticed on the side of the vegemite jar a recipe for honey and vegemite chicken fillets. Not entirely sure I'd like them but it may just be worth a try - for the experience you know.

For the purpose of this debate, test, debarcle, the following people were included. Me - Age 36, Little - Age 5, Small - Age 2 (Hubby was probably thanking his lucky stars that he was at work and would most undoubtably think it not very important to compare the difference between marmite and vegemite. He'd much prefer to argue about the health benefits of red wine or some other more exciting topic.)

Anyway... Marmite versus Vegemite. The jars are very different. Little preferred the vegemite jar "because its shape is more like a jam jar and I love jam." Small and I preferred the marmite jar, it's squat and cute looking.

Both jars have yellow lids. The logos are not that different to each other both having the colours - red and yellow. Little again preferred the vegemite jar, saying it looked more veg like but the marmite looked meaty (I think it's the picture of a pot on the front??)

On to texture and spreadability. The vegemite is much thicker but so long as you have enough butter on the bread or toast it seems to spread easily enough. Marmite is more runny and so long as it's not very cold spreads easily.

Now for taste. We couldn't decide which we liked best. They're both good. We came to the conclusion that marmite has a more meaty taste and the vegemite is slightly blander (my word). Little just said not so strong. So no debate conclusion really. We could live with either and we could also live without both.

Little Foodies Australia & Something Seasonal & English

The Little Foodies are loving Australia... and I'm hardly surprised.

I worked for this company for many years. It's where I met my husband, it also allowed me to travel the world staying in luxury hotels all in the name of work. (Something I probably would never have been able to do otherwise - the luxury bit that is!). One of my trips was Australia. It was a whistlestop tour - in 10 days, I visited, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Kangaroo Island and Sydney. It was a tiring trip and left me feeling that I'd somehow missed something. Being a work trip I had to see all the tourist sights, visit all the hotels and fit in many meals hosted by various restaurants and hotels. All of which were delicious and this was before the whole Australian food scene thing had taken off.

One of the best bits about my trip was meeting one of my distant cousins. It was his 30th birthday and he came to collect me from my hotel in Sydney. He had a small party in his apartment and it was so lovely to be included in that. I think the reason I felt I'd missed something was because it was all at such a frenetic pace. I didn't have time to stop and just take it all in. I was there and then I was home again, so I'm enjoying this week learning all about the Australia I missed.

So far we've learned about kangaroos, koalas, possums, wombats, tasmanian devils, dingos, wallabies, emus, kookaburrahs, barramundi, sea lions, fur seals and of course the very cute fairy penguins. We've also learned about sheilas and tinnies, the didgeridoo and not forgetting the Aboriginal people. We've talked about Kylie and Australian soaps. We've done tourist sites and I've shown them about 1000 photos from my own little tour.

We really are loving our virtual trip to Australia and with all the bbq'g we haven't felt the need yet to sample any of the other great recipes on offer from famous Australian chefs like Bill Granger and all... I also have a book with a great title. Cooking under the influence, by Ben Canaider & Greg Duncan Powell. There are some fun recipes in there but as this is really for the children we wont be going down that route. I have a whole pile of stuff I want to cook this week. Bill Granger seems to be my favourite, recipe wise, don't know how anybody else feels..?

This picture is the dinner that Little assembled for himself... with the minty lamb burgers that his Daddy cooked this evening. Look at all that lovely salad. (Boring as anything without dressing and I couldn't eat it like that, but good for him!)

Something not so Australian but seasonal and English. I made this up today and I really like it. It's not too sweet, it's quite moist and it's gone down very well with the house.
Rhubarb and Elderflower Syrup Cake
125m sunflower oil
225g light muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
225g self raising flour
150ml natural yogurt (I used organic fat free live bio)

5 big stalks of rhubarb
80ml/third of a cup elderflower syrup



Wash and chop the rhubarb into 2cm /1 inch pieces. Put in a pan with the elderflower syrup and cook on a medium heat for 5-10 minutes, until the rhubarb breaks down. Leave to one side to cool down. You could make less but I wanted to serve some with the cake, as shown.
In a large bowl add the sugar and oil. Mix with a whisk for a few minutes.
Add the eggs one at a time and whisk each time you add one.
Add the flour and fold in gently so as not to make it too tough (A bit like you would for muffins).
Then add 1 cup of the cooled rhubarb & elderflower syrup mix and the 150ml yogurt and fold in. It will look all gloopy - that's fine.
Pour into a greased tin or silicone ware. I used a 12 inch silicone round.
Bake for 1 hour at180C/Gas Mark 4
Leave to cool before turning out.

I was reminded of the elderflower syrup from Joanna's food. She also wrote of elderflower champagne. Yes, we know, we can't call it champagne, we know that champagne is French so we could call it Eldeflower Cava, Elderflower bubbly, whatever, it's good!