The Kitchen Playground

It’s possible that I often mention scrambled eggs. Or maybe not. What is certain is that I eat them a lot. They’re my staple weekend breakfast and I often make myself a serving for lunch too. Perfect after a cold morning in the pool. In fact, Lil Miss and I had scrambled eggs with feta on toast today. Which got me thinking about how people generally cook them.

Most people I know (home cooks) make their scrambled eggs in a fry pan over direct heat. In fact I’ve been known to do that myself when Son and Heir is having a complete meltdown because his neglectful mother has been browsing blogs all morning and he is starving to death. This method will produce adequate scrambled eggs. Perfectly edible.

On the other hand. For perfect scrambled eggs, take a little longer. Beat your eggs and cream together, throw in anything else that turns you on. Now, get a really big frypan, half fill it with water and bring it to the boil. Now find a slightly smaller pot, place it in the frypan and add butter. Now cook your eggs in that, slowly, bain marie style. Allow nice big curds to form and stir it gently. Now I know I’ve mentioned this before. Turn off the heat before the eggs are properly cooked through. Leave it a little moist. This is critical.

If you’ve not cooked scrambled eggs this way before, try it and tell me what you think. I’ll be surprised if you don’t find it a huge improvement.

Tags: Breakfast, Cooking basics, scrambled eggs

Indoor play centres suck. The food is ridden with chemical preservatives and colours, the children are feral, visibility bad and there is always some unsupervised brat beating up on at least one of my children. Just to top it all off, you’re lucky to escape under $30. So it’s a long time since I’ve been to one.

Personally, I’m a picnic in the park girl in pretty much all weather but sometimes it just isn’t possible. So three times lately, I’ve found myself having a play date at the Doncaster Inn. It serves good, honest pub fare in the $18 - $30 price range. The kids menu is wonderful, of course the ubiquitous nuggets and fish and chips are there but there are also wholesome options like a vegie pasta bake and baked chicken and vegetable tortillas. Kids meals come with a free drink. Best of all, as far as kids are concerned, there is a big play room!

Sounds pretty sweet right? But wait, there’s more! Monday and Tuesday lunches there is a free kids meal deal. One free kids meal for every adult main meal purchased. As the Lil Miss doesn’t eat a massive amount, there are free bread rolls and the serves are massive, I can get away with buying lunch for myself and getting a free pasta bake for the kids. I end up feeding the end of mine to the kids too as I can’t manage to finish a main. I’m a big eater but the serves really are huge. So far I’ve sampled the steak sandwich, the vegetarian gnocchi and the chicken parmagiana. I can recommend them all. The service is great too. Nice friendly pub staff.

So if you’re ever in the area and need to entertain both yourself and children around a meal time, it has my stamp of approval.

Tags: Reviews

Saturday night was my 20 year high school reunion. Great fun to get out and see how people have turned out and what they’ve done with themselves over the last twenty years. The reunion was held at Canvas Restaurant in Hawthorn.

According to the invitation it was to be a standing dinner and it was held in a separate bar area, not the main dining area. We were asked to pay $65 which apparently included a ‘donation’ to the school alimni fund and a contribution towards door prizes. So I am assuming that $45 was headed Canvas’ way. Drinks were to be paid for separately at he bar.  I was a little unsure exactly what a standing dinner would entail but for $45, I expected it to be reasonably substantial.

It seems that a standing dinner is finger food. Nice, unremarkable finger food. Spinach pastizi’s, very tasty and obviously made in house. Thai style meatballs, quite tasty. Tiny vol au vent case filled with a sundried tomato puree and topped with half a kalamata olive. The pastry was a little underdone but they were otherwise fine. Dishes of calamari, piping hot and very tender.

A glass of wine, on average was around the $!0 mark. So whilst I had a great time and can’t complain about either the food or the service, definitely not good value for money. I hope the restaurant proper offers better in the value department.

Tags: Reviews

Porridge is quite the popular topic at the moment. Wonderful warming stuff that it is. Before I give you my method, I must emphasise that they key for me is thick cut oats. The thicker the better. Instant oats are an abomination. Carmen’s do a good conventional oat and Kialla Pure Foods do a great organic oat. I’ve not found a bulk supply of an oat that meets my personal oat standards.

Porridge
warning: amounts are totally imprecise but it works for me.
2 big handfuls oats
2 - 3 tablespoons linseeds
small handful goji berries
heaping tablespoon yoghurt
milk - maybe a cup and a half?
large dob butter
slurp of cream
1/2 - 1 cup stewed apple
maple syrup to serve

1. Place oats, linseeds, berries and yoghurt in a large bowl. Cover with water and stir. Cover and leave over night
2. Place in thermomix or saucepan with milk and apples. Cook at 90 degrees for 10 minutes on reverse speed 1 or cook on hotplate, stirring constantly for about 10 minutes or until porridge has thickened.
3. Stir in butter and cream, drizzle with maple syrup and enjoy!

On a non-edible note, here is my hair, all glammed up about to head off to my 20 year high school reunion.

Tags: Breakfast, porridge

Porridge is our weekday staple, particularly in the cooler months. We never eat porridge on the weekends though. Never. I think there may even be an unwritten rule against it. Or maybe even written. Maybe I just wrote it.

Weekend breakfasts hover between eggs, toast, pancakes, benedict if I’m feeling fancy. I felt like breaking away a little this morning. I hatched this plan yesterday which was fortunate as I needed to slow roast tomatoes. Of course you could use any ready dried or semi dried tomatoes but where is the fun in that?

Feta, Tomato and Pesto Toast
4 - 5 tomatoes, cut into wedges
pesto
feta
toast

1. Place tomato wedges on oven tray. Sprinkle lightly with seasoning, muscovado and olive oil. Slow roast in 150 degree oven for about 4 hours.
2. Toast one side of bread. Smear other side with pesto. Top with tomato and chunks of feta.
3. Grill

The Bread Winner did come home last night. It’s his turn to sleep in. I’ll make his when he gets up. Or he can do it himself if he sleeps too late as I’m off for my first hair cut in 18 months this morning. Wow. I’m totally living dangerously. Last time I had my hair cut it was a little shorter than this.

Now the fringe reaches my shoulders and the rest is half way down my back. Sorry, I got distracted, I hope the squinting woman with a bad dye job didn’t put you off the food. I’ll get back to the point now.

I served a side of scrambled eggs for the Ankle BIters as I didn’t think the toast would be enough for them.

This could become part of the regular rotation, especially in summer when tomatoes are in season.

Tags: Breakfast, pesto, tomato, Vegetarian

Whilst conducting some research for tonight’s dinner, I discovered that one should NEVER check the meaning of steaming sausage in urban dictionary. Really. Never. Just trust me on this one OK?

Friday night I don’t dig cooking. Friday is cleaning day at Chez KP and often supermarket day as well. Plus swimming lesson day just to make it all harder to achieve. So cooking is pretty much out. Usually I just pull a pre-cooked meal out of the freezer but I didn’t feel like anything tat I had in stock today. So I decided to make a plain old meal in the varoma. Just to see what would happen.

Happily, it worked a treat! In the comforting way of the plainest of meals, we all enjoyed it very much. Little Creek Cattle Company roast beef and mustard sausages, potatoes and Brussel sprouts. Simplicity itself. I don’t believe the sausages lost any flavour at all for nor having been browned.

Small nicola potatoes were peeled and placed in the base of the varoma. The sausages were placed on the top tray. 500ml of water in the thermomix bowl. Twenty five minutes at varoma temperature on speed 2 with the sprouts (ends and coarse outer leaves removed) thrown in with the sausages for the last three minutes. The vegetables were tossed in salt, pepper, butter and grated parmesan. That’s it. Done. As much cooking as I’m prepared to deal with on a Friday night.

Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not on a mission to starve my family. The pictures above only show food for the Ankle Biters and myself. I’ll cook the Bread Winner’s when he gets home. The picture below was my meagre helping. Feral Ankle Biters + sleep deprivation + lingering cold = severe loss of appetite

Approx. cost per serving $1.88

Full disclosure. I also made pesto and have tomatoes roasting but that’s because I have a vision for breakfast in the morning. Neither of those things takes much of my time though so really don’t count as cooking.

Tags: bimby, budget meals, sausages, thermomix, Varoma

Roast dinner tonight. For some reason I decided to make a roast with the world’s smallest piece of meat. I felt justified because I had two little butternut pumpkins which I decided to halve and use as bowls of a sort. Nice chunky little pumpkins with small balls of pips and lots of flesh. Everyone certainly had sufficient, small meat portions notwithstanding.

Approx. cost per serve $1.40

Tags: budget meals, roast dinner

Sometimes it’s easy to interpret the linguistic leaps of a four year old. Sometimes not. Son and Heir’s request for piggy tail bread was one of the easy ones.

a plait loaf

Tags: Ankle Biters, bread

Dana at Old Red Barn is giving away a simply stunning quilt. Isn’t it just gorgeous?

Tags: Competitions

In response to Alli’s food challenge, here is my current list of packed lunch suggestions for fussy eaters. I know that honey sandwiches are in and cold cuts are out. Other than that I’m winging it so I’m sure many suggestions won’t hit the nail on the head. My Ankle Biters are more of the glutton variety than fussy so my field of expertise is more in packing very large lunches.

Cheese, Lot’s can be done with cheese. Slices cut in enticing shapes (think cookie cutters) and crackers. Little salads with chunks and cheese and cherry tomatoes and whatever else might be acceptable (I guess tuna would be out of the question). Cottage cheese can be a little salad unto itself with something flavourful like chives or gherkin or even a tablespoon of honey if you’re desperate. mixed through. Mini pizzas covered in cheese.

Think about the bread as well. I use a blend of wheat and spelt to take advantage of the increased protein in the spelt whilst still getting a nice fluffy sandwich bread.

Eggs. Another great source of protein. Hard boiled are easy to pack. Little quail eggs hardboiled can be enticing just because they’re downright cute. Well that’s how it works in my house anyway. They can be a stand alone snack or part of a salad. Mini quiches can be filed with both egg and cheese.

Yoghurt. This is a good time of year to send yoghurt in lunches as it’s cold and it will keep. Summer can be a little tricky though.

Mini chicken drumsticks could potentially be interesting. Unless cold meat is out altogether.

Homemade muesli bars packed with seeds (and nuts if allowed).

I almost forgot! Things that dip. It’s a fussy Ankle Biter indeed that doesn’t like things that dip. Try a hommus sweetened with orange juice or a white bean and rosemary dip.

If you have any other great lunch box ideas that focus on protein, please leave them in the comments.

Tags: Packed lunch