Entries Tagged 'Food for Babies and Children' ↓

Rachel of Thus Bakes Zarathustra is presently sojourning with a bunch of Yankee pointyheads in pursuit of her PhD. Writing at TBZ’s previous incarnation she said:

… The thing is the next day I came home from the library starving and sick of books, and there was a bowl of carrot and avocado salad in the fridge and this cake, and I ate it and I felt a rush of righteous maturity akin to flossing my teeth or getting a pap smear.

We all need that feeling sometimes, don’t we?

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Five weeks now without a car, although the insurance company promises me it’ll be fixed on Wednesday. Promises, promises.

Having no car, even in Canberra, even in winter, has been absolutely fine until this last week when I’d already been sick for a week when both the kids got really crook. Bit of a bugger walking a five year old home from the doctor and having to wait while he vomits because he’s been coughing so hard. Could be worse, of course, as no-one has cancer (we hope) and everyone has all their limbs, but I felt sorry for the little bugger all the same.

So on Saturday morning I pounced on my dear friend Steevy when he dropped by IN HIS CAR and inveigled him into taking us to Choku Bai Jo. It was lovely to see Cristy, Paul and Lily there, even though I had to confess that I was buying a bunch of baby turnips just because they were tiny! (the largest nearly an inch wide) and cute! although I had no idea what I was going to do with them.

Pasta with baby turnips, bacon and turnip greens

This needs about 10 minutes preparation time and up to 15 minutes to cook, depending on the pasta you choose (wholemeal spirals for us). Will serve 3 adults or 2 adults and two kids.

Ingredients

1 bunch baby turnips, washed thoroughly with the greens cut into 3-4 cm lengths.
2 rashers bacon
2 cloves garlic, crushed or finely chopped
fresh flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
toasted walnut fragments
romano cheese, grated finely
black pepper
a sturdy pasta that you like

Preparation

Put on a big pot of water to boil.

I’d planned to leave a little of the stems on the turnip bulbs, Japanese-style but was defeated by the tiny grit filled folds of stem and cleanly beheaded them before slicing each one into two or three thick slices. Go with whatever you’ve got the patience for.

Parboil the turnips for a minute or so and retrieve them. Add the turnip greens to the pot for just a minute and drain them, then add salt and the pasta to the pot.

Chop the bacon into 1 cm slices and fry gently. I only had that poxy flabby packet bacon - thanks, Dad - so cooked it veerrrrrrry slowly until it had crisped gently and then splashed on some some Camellia Oil. I have fallen in love with Camellia Oil thanks (again) to Fuchsia Dunlop - it’s earthy, peppery and delicious. Add in the crushed garlic and turnips and after a few minutes stir through the greens. In just a minute the pasta will be ready, and you can throw some in the pan.

Serving

Serve in a nice deep bowl, and sprinkle generously with parsley and walnuts and a bit less generously with cheese and pepper. The turnips are mellow and subtle, the greens are zingy and delicious and the pasta gives you enough energy to chase children all afternoon. Ann, you may omit the bacon, but then you’d want to add some salt.

So now I have to work out what to do with the cavolo nero (aka Tuscan kale, black kale or dinosaur kale) that was the other thing I couldn’t resist …

I’ve been sick for nearly two weeks (I’m never sick!) and both the kids are feverish snot covered whirlwinds. So yeah, not cooking much.

Thank God for my friends Nigel and Willa. Nigel turned up early yesterday morning bearing his mother’s heirloom casserole dish full of a beautiful tomato and silverbeet soup (with cinnamon) made by Willa.

Some cous cous to improve the child spoonability factor, and lots of pepper and a squeeze of one neighbour Billy’s Meyer lemons for the grown ups. Wonderful.

Giving food is a beautiful gift, particularly for new parents or single parents. Don’t be shy, just make up a big tray of something delicious and take it around. This is the one situation where I think disposable foil cooking trays can be a Good Thing, because the new parents feel no obligation to clean and return other people’s cooking equipment. (I prefer the beautiful dish this came in and will enjoy returning it, but I don’t have a newborn. Which is also a Good Thing.)

When my dear friend Jude had her second child, her neighbour arranged seven households into a roster, and for one night a week for six weeks, we cooked for the enlarged family. It was such a wonderful thing to turn up, drop off the food and see the relieved faces. Sometimes I would stay for a glass of wine, but usually I would just scoot off after no more than ten minutes or so. And how I loved cooking for them! I would turn up with things like a big bowl of washed and picked over leaves, a little bag of really good vinaigrette and a container of marinated and grilled chicken, baked sweet potato and very fresh nuts. And always a dessert. Breastfeeding women need sweets.

There’s a simpler way we can give food too, by just clicking at the hunger site.

I’m conscious that I haven’t posted much yet about what or how I cook - bit of an oversight, really. This was last night’s dinner - trimmed lamb chops marinated for a couple of hours, cooked in a grill pan and served in flatbread with mixed greens (the leftovers from my Choku Bai Jo shop ten days ago - still crisp and fresh), red chilli oil and a sesame sauce.

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I first got the idea for a food blog by posting some cookery related stuff on my personal blog, crazybrave. This is my favourite of those posts, from June 2007.

A word of warning. Some of my best friends are vegan, a choice I respect. This post is not for them, and it and other posts of this ilk will be in the category “Not Safe for Vegans”. Check the category list under the post titles if you’d rather avoid them.)

Under the fold we have chicken four ways: Continue reading →

I nearly called this post “I can believe they’re not Nigella’s Breakfast Bars!”

Like the lipsmacking voluptuary, I’m not much of a morning eater. I also like the idea of yummy home-made snacky bars to shove down the throats of starving children. I remembered hearing that Lawson’s recipe was a good one, and a quick googlescout unearthed it here.

It involves mixing a large quantity of relatively healthy sounding muesli-ish things with a whopping great can of sweetened condensed milk. It didn’t say “sweetened” but I that’s the only kind, isn’t it? The dulce de leche kind? I had everything but in the cupboard, so I decided to make it up as I went along.

I had some evaporated (unsweetened, low-fat) milk, but it seemed utterly wrong. What I needed was a certain … an unctuousness, a delectable musky sweetness - as Nigella well might say and indeed probably has ; ) Best I could do was mixing up a bunch of fruity sugary sticky things and hoping like hell that would bind the oats, coconut, seeds, nuts and dried fruit:

Not a can of sweetened condensed milk

3/4 C sliced dried figs
1 T apple juice concentrate
dried orange peel
1/2 C water

Bring all ingredients to the boil in a small saucepan then cover and turn the heat off. (That is if you use proper dried figs that are actually dry, not those odd “soft juicy figs” that have a weird cola aroma and no texture to speak of. If you’re using those ones just carry on and never mind waiting.)

Stabblender the cooled mix with half a cup of apricot jam, and then add water to make it up to 1 1/2 cups and stir it into your dry ingredients. Bake for an hour at 130 C, grateful that you sniffed something awry with the “250 degrees” the recipe stated on Northern hemisphere sites.

btw, THAT PICTURE IS EFFING LIES! The result was horribly crumbly - you could excavate a “bar” from the tin wtih some effort, but they were flaccid and unappetising. Even thought they were a complete failure in textural terms, they did turn out to be very tasty muesli once you’d properly crumbled them up. I’ve just made up a second batch for Owen at his request.

Notes:
I used half (soaked) goji berries and half currants, a mixture of sunflower, pumpkin and sesame seeds and cashews in place of peanuts. To make the recipe again in the hope of making sturdier bars would require increasing the quantity of binding fluid. I’d still use the figgy mix but I’d add the sweetened condensed milk to make up the quantity (and perhaps a bit more) instead of the water I used here.