Apple Bear

Now, I am not normally a fan of face-on-food. I feel a strong rebelliousness against the idea that kiddie food needs to be kiddified. The fervent mango-passion that's gripping my son of late is not dependent on funny mango faces, it's all about sheer mango deliciousness. And I think food can excite kids because tasty food IS exciting.

I shall now get off my soapbox, and admit to my Apple Bear. With complete disregard for everything I've just said I think, when my daughter asked if I could make her apple 'surprising' this is what I did to it. It went down VERY well, perhaps making me think I should reconsider my position on face-food...Come to think of it, my husband does often make Em a 'rabbit shaped out of an egg' which is this Fried Egg Bread, but rabbit shaped - technically face-food I think. What do you think? What level of kiddification is acceptable??

If you want to recreate this masterpiece, it's just plonked in a cupcake case, the eyes are raisins, the nose is a dried cranberry and the ears are almonds. They're stuck on with the universal food glue known as Nutella.

Healthy Lunchbox Flapjacks

Healthy Lunchbox – the great oxymoron of the school age.  I was rather keen to do this shop for Collective Bias and Flora. You see, its focus is ‘Healthy Lunchboxes’ – something I’m interested in.We started off pretty healthy in September, but there has been crisp creep and sugar sneak. At five, Alex already compares his lunch to his friends; doesn’t want a squeezy yoghurt because he doesn’t want to ask for help opening it, hates having to take a spoon because he worries he’ll forget it. He said his friends though his dates and oranges with cinnamon looked ‘disgusting’, although on that count he did say he still wanted them and he didn’t care what they said, but it still bothered him. I’m hoping he doesn’t start to worry that his bread is seedy.

Now, I don’t mind the odd crisp, especially given that you can buy unsalted ones, but lunchbox contents were getting a bit repetitive and the fruit was starting to get overlooked. He’s eat it after school. In fact, he’d fall upon it like a starved kitten. I’m just not sure he’s getting enough calories for his manic five-year-old afternoons.

So, I wanted to try out this Flora Healthy Lunchbox shop to share some thoughts and offer some ideas.  

Obviously used the spread on a tasty sandwich – ham, Dijon and rocket. Rocket is a particularly easy sell to a young chap on the leaf front because it’s called rocket – nothing cooler than that. And I say the sandwich bit is obvious but any deviation from the straight and true sandwich road was not popular. He wants to be the same as his friends and I think it’s probably fair enough – there’s not a lot wrong with a sandwich after all, is there? But, I also wanted to bake something using Flora Buttery, meaning it would have 70% less saturated fat than if I’d made it with butter and that Alex would get a sweet treat that’s not just empty calories.

I went for flapjacks because Alex loves them and oats have the slow-release thing going for them, hopefully

this will mean he’ll get through the afternoon and not come home quivering with hunger. Now, flapjacks already have a ‘healthy’ aura around them, but most recipes use refined sugar and golden syrup. My idea was to use condensed milk instead of both. Obviously condensed milk is still sugar and is not a ‘healthy’ ingredient, but because it is SO sweet, you can use less. There’s also the whole porridge vibe you get from adding something milky to oats. Adding plenty of dried fruit ups the healthy stakes though and gives a good energy boost too.

I wanted Alex to be thoroughly behind these flapjacks, so he helped to research what we might put into them, wrote the shopping list and took part in the shopping trip (see my Google+ album showing how I got himinvolved in the shopping here). His sister was much more keep to help with the cooking bit, but he was a willing taster and gave the flapjacks the thumbs up, in fact he demolished his piece alarmingly fast – always a good sign.

In the recipe I just state ‘dried fruit’, because you can either use what you’ve got in or get the kids to choose what to put into them. Alex and Em choose dried mango and pineapple, so these became totally tropical.

The Flora Buttery is actually a bit of a dream to cook with, because you don’t need to melt it – in fact this recipe doesn’t need any heat in the putting together of it, meaning it’s a really good one to get the kids to do.

If you prefer a thinner, crispier flapjack, replace the flour with more oats, have half the quantity and bake for about 15 mins. The recipe below makes a whole traybake tray full of nice thick, soft textured flapjacks – they keep well and you can freeze them too. In fact a frozen flapjack in a lunchbox will keep it cool and be defrosted by lunchtime.

You need  - this makes a lot of flapjacks! Please feel free to make half in a smaller tin:

• 13oz Flora Buttery
• 1lb porridge oats
• 4oz plain flour
• 12oz dried fruit – we used mango and pineapple
• 7oz condensed milk

1. Preheat to 170 degrees
2. 'Butter' the traybake tin with Flora Buttery and line with greaseproof
3. Weigh out the Flora and condensed milk - give them a good mix
4. Weigh out the oats and flour. Add the dried fruits,cut, if necessary, into raisin size pieces - if the kids are doing this, get them to use scissors. Mix it to get the fruits coated, so they don't clump
5. Mix everything together - might need to do this bit yourself it takes a bit of mixing to get it to come together. It should come together okay, but you can always add a dribble more condensed milk.
6. Turn it out into the tin and use the backof a fork to press it down evenly
7. Bake for up to 30 minutes, but start checking it after 20 - it's ready when it's pale golden and golden brown at the edges.
8. Cool or a few minutes in the tin. Turn out and cut into small bars while still warm - a bread knife and gentle sawing action will give you nice, neat flapjacks. Let them fully cool before storing in a airtight tin or freezing.

So here's a few of my healthy lunchbox tips - what are yours?

• Make sandwiches with frozen bread, it'll be defrosted by lunchtime and keeps things cool.
• Buy little paper 'sweetie' bags for filling with dried fruit, chopped fresh fruit or vegetable sticks - somehow more appealing in a little bag
• Buy a decent drinks bottle, we use Camelbak bottles, which don't make the water taste of plastic and have cool designs on them - stick to water
• A cooked sausage always seems to go down well
• Chopped up fruit seems to get eaten more readily than a whole apple or whatever - I suspect this is a timing thing, they just want to eat fast! Fruit kebabs are good too, you can buy short wooden skewers on Ebay.
• Tomatoes make sandwiches go soggy, so either put them separate. Leaves don't, so put a few leaves in. 
• Don't forget you can buy unsalted crisps, it'll make you feel less guilty about putting them in most days.
• And...What do you do to make your lunchboxes healthier?
• 
  

I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community.  This content has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias® and their client. #CBias #SocialFabric. Any dangerous addiction to condensed milk you detect is mine and mine alone and I would in no way condone eating it straight from the tin...

Sesame Beef Salad - WITH SPRINKLES!

This has a couple of things to recommend it as a dinner dish. It’s thrifty, especially for steak because you just need one big rump steak for the whole family. It’s also a great big salad, so it’s pleasingly healthsome. It’s also something the kids will probably eat. I’ve done plenty of token salads in my time – a bit on the side, stuffed in a sandwich - that sort of thing. But it occurred to be recently that I didn’t really see salad as a children’s meal. Now I heartily disagree with myself on this one. Salad is a super food-genre for kids, not least because it’s primarily raw, so they can make it themselves. There was a time when their lack of teeth would have made leafy bits a challenge – I remember bits of lettuce being chewed for an age, only to reappear like a lolling green tongue hours later, but those days are long gone and there’s something that appeals to my two about nibbling on a leaf. So salads are to be embraced in our house.

This particular salad also employs the fail-safe kiddie buy-in technique of SPRINKLES. I have the view that you can offer anything to children with sprinkles on the side and it will instantly become appealing. In this case the sprinkles are sesame seeds. Sprinkles can be anything of course, if you can sprinkle it, you can call it sprinkles. In fact, any salad can have sprinkles – sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, pinenuts if you’re dead wealthy.

I serve this salad with pitta breads so you can sprinkle and stuff. And stuffing or constructing is another thing that always appeals to my kids – a bit of self-construction at the table goes a long way towards dinner ownership. Pitta bread is not particularly in keeping with the Asian vibe - but who cares? I serve little pots of sweet chilli sauce too. Dipping, sprinkling and stuffing – what more do you need?

In terms of family eating, if you want to eat later just make the salad then cook some of the beef for the kids and leave the rest marinating for you for later, it’s much better straight out of the pan. You could also add the rest of the red chilli to your marinade too if you want to up the heat a bit. Or, of course, keep it veggie by skipping the beef entirely, if you felt it needed a focus try roasting butternut squash with the same marinade; just add the honey towards the end of cooking.

You need:

• 1 large bit of rump steak or a butternut squash if you’re making the veggie version – cut into strips

For the marinade:

• Oil – a splash for the marinade and a bit for frying/roasting
• Juice of an orange
• 3 tbsp. soy sauce
• A good squeeze of honey – 2 tbsp. or so
• ½ tsp. Chinese 5 spice if you have it (optional)
• ½ a red chilli deseeded and chopped fine
• 1 clove garlic, smushed
• Plenty of ground black pepper
• Sesame seeds to toss the beef in

Mix the soy, oil, orange juice, honey and pepper – keep back a small amount to use as a salad dressing. Add the rest of the ingredients. Stick the beef or squash in a dish or bag with the marinade and let it sit for anything from a few minutes to all day.

Construct a delightful salad using as much of the following as you have in:

• Ripped up lettuce or whatever leaves you have – spinach etc.
• Use a peeler to make lovely strips of: carrot, cucumber, courgette, celery (ditch the first stringy peelings)
• Sliced radishes, peppers
• Sesame seeds to sprinkle over

To cook the beef: heat a pan until it’s really hot, add a splash of oil and then the beef – don’t chuck all the marinade in, just the beef at first. Stir fry for a few minutes – it won’t take long, but cook it how you like it. Add the marinade and let it bubble until the beef is sticky. Toss in a few sesame seeds and serve straight away.

To serve – a pack of pittas, extra sesame seeds to sprinkle, sweet chilli sauce

Pasta with Mussels (and no effort - honest)

Here’s a very easy idea if you kids like mussels - and don’t assume they don’t, if they haven’t tried them yet it’s totally worth just presenting them one day. They may not have the squeamishness of grown-ups and my kids love the fact that they are shells. Just be prepared to point out how pretty they are, use an empty shell as pincers to pinch out other mussels and promise to pick them off the beach in the summer.

Pasta with mussels might not seem like a simple kids dinner, but this is – honest. You see, it’s just a pack of those vacuum packed mussels from the supermarket with some pasta stirred through. I would consider these a treat because the packs are about £3, but you can stretch it to feed four if you want.

Now, these packs may be inferior to freshly picked mussels, but they do have several  things going for them:

• They are sustainable, rope-grown Scottish mussels
• They keep for about a week or so in the fridge
• They come in their own sauce, so you do literally just need to add cooked pasta and you’re done

That's it - no recipe needed and maybe worth a try because it's pretty darn cool thing to serve up for dinner isn't it? Any takers?

Nutella Danish Pastries

                       

        

I like a cooking challenge me.  I say ‘challenge’, but really the chance to tackle a new recipe and shop for the bits and bobs I need for it, is more of a pleasure than a chore. Having said that, the new recipe I decided to take on was Danish Pastries. Obviously the processor method in the style of Nigella, but it’s still a recipe that takes two days to complete, so I'm classing it as a challenge.

Because of this taxing two-day recipe I decided to treat myself to shopping for the ingredients from my local Waitrose. Not only Waitrose, but Waitrose sans kiddies. This is so not sounding like a challenge is it...

And if I’m entirely honest the recipe isn't hard either. The hardest thing is not getting to have your Danish Pastries on the first day of cooking. Skills wise it’s pretty simple too. The leaving over-night in the fridge bit means there’s no kneading needed. There is some fairly athletic rolling-out required but that’s the only thing that will make you sweat.

As part of my Social Fabric Shopportunity I had to photograph my shopping process, and it was whilst ambling through the terribly civilised aisles of Waitrose that I had an epiphany. A Danish Pastry filling epiphany. Yes, there were classy options a-plenty at Waitrose. Apricot Compotes and the like, but I spotted the Nutella. Now it’s hard to walk past the Nutella at the best of times, even if you know you’ve got plenty in already. Nutella could turn me into a prepper, stockpiling madly in case of a national shortage or apocalypse of some sort. So, my eye was draw by the Nutella, despite Waitrose putting on it the bottom shelf as though they were embarrassed by it.

So, it's Nutella Danishes. You just know they are going to be amazing. The Nutella clause in any recipe means instant deliciousness guarenteed.

The recipe itself has two distinct stages. Day one – a bit of mixing, food processor pulsing and the confrontation head on of how much butter is in a Danish.

Day two is a roll-athon, a bit of rising and baking.

The pastry recipe is basically Nigella’s which she (reassuringly) adapted from an actual real Danish person – so it’s definitely not cheating. The Nutella may well be, but I can bear the shame.

You need:

• 200ml milk at room temperature – if yours is fridge-cold, give it 30 seconds or so in the microwave
• 1 egg
• 350g Strong white bread flour (don’t you plain flour)
• 1 sachet of Easy-blend or easy-blend yeast*
• A couple of pinches of salt
• 25g caster sugar
• 250g cold butter**
• ½ cup Nutella (roughly)
• ¼ cup chopped roasted hazelnuts
• 1 egg beaten with a splash of milk to make an 'egg wash'

* Yeast in supermarkets is confusing, there are many different ones available – go for one that says ‘easy’ somewhere and comes in 7g sachets.

** Yes that is an ENTIRE pack of butter. Just embrace the calorific insanity of this and let the yumminess commence, here is a little photo collage, just to help you accept how much butter you're about to eat:

Day one:

1. Beat the egg into the milk
2. Measure the flour, sugar, salt and yeast into the food processor bowl and give it a pulse to mix
3. Slice the butter into thinish slices (see above) and add to the processor. Pulse until the butter is cut up; you want it fairly even but still big, centimetre or so chunks visible in the mix.
4. Do not then mix it by hand. I’m all game for hand splodginess but this is clag city. Best plan it to add nearly all the egg and milk mix to the processor and pulse it a bit. Then tip in into a bowl and give it another mix. It should be a big claggy lump, add the rest of the milk and egg if it needs it.
5. Cover in clingfilm and chill, also chill the dough in the fridge too. You now have to wait for your Danishes, so, just chill...

This is what you leave in the fridge over night.

Day two:

1. Allow the dough to come to room temperature – if you had any illusion of having these for breakfast bear in mind this will take about half an hour and then there’s rising time of one and half hours – so perhaps elevenses is more realistic…

2. Now do your rolling and folding. Flour your work-surface lightly and take your jumper off… get rolling. Roll to a big rectangle (ish) about the thickness of a pound coin. Fold like a letter, turn and repeat four times. I did an extra one for luck because I’d fully got my roll-on. Before your final roll, cut the pastry in half, wrap one half and keep in the fridge for up to four days or freeze. Or make more Danishes or a big of Pastry party.

3. Now you need to work your Nutella magic.

You need to brush the Nutella-free strip with egg wash to stick it down.

5. Put them on a lined baking tray and let them rise in a warm place for an hour and a half to two hours. They will rise but not as spectacularly as bread. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees

6. Bake for about 12 to 15 minutes. Let them cool if you can bear to. I drizzled some with white glace icing but they really didn't need it.

And that’s it, okay it was a marathon of sorts but here are a few reasons you should be bothered to make these:

1. Aside from the patience needed, these are not hard to make
2. They are delicious and way better than shop Danishes.
3. Where the hell else are you going to get a Nutella Danish?
4. They are Nutella Danishes
5. Nutella

And if you really, really can't face it - try making them with shop bought puff pastry, won't be as good, but there's always the Nutella Clause so they'll still be delicious.

I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community.  This content has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias® #CBias #SocialFabric. I should add, the post didn't have to be about Nutella in any way - any bias you detect there is just my enending love for Nutella. Neither did I have to shop at Waitrose, I just wanted to :) x

Cheaty Butterscotch Sauce

Ah Butterscotch - the name alone tastes good in your mouth. Butter, scotch, buttery, buttery butterscotch. You could serve up a repugnant, vile sauce, but if you call it butterscotch all will find it delicious.

Just to be clear, this recipe is not for a vile, repugnant sauce, it's for a very simple version of butterscotch that is pointlessly, annoyingly, calorifically delicious. Well it's butter and sugar primarily, so it's going to be good isn't it?

I like the brazenness of butterscotch. It's blatant use of cupboard basics, it's shocking flaunting of it's melted buttery, sugariness. This version is a bit cheaty because it uses brown sugar rather than bothering with careful caramelisation of normal sugar. It's intended to be a quick sauce to knock out when you haven't planned a pudding. Pour it warm over crap ice-cream, splodge it cold over tinned pears - you're not aiming for classy here.

Proper butterscotch uses double cream, if you have it in, use it and use double the quantity of milk in the recipe below. I just suggest milk here because it means you're likely to be able to make this sauce at any given moment without having to shop. It does, however mean that your sauce won't have quite the same perfect texture of traditional butterscotch - it you look closely you'll see it looks very slightly 'split' - it doesn't matter, just stir well and use it straightaway.

The recipe also makes a small amount - suitable a couple of kiddies' pud after a proper meal. Scale it up if you need to.

You need:

• 1 heaped tbsp butter 
• 1 heaped tbsp soft brown sugar or light brown Muscavado sugar
• 1 tbsp whole milk or 2tbsp double cream

1. Heat the butter and sugar together until melted
2. Heat it until it looks foamy. Give a good stir
3. Add the milk/cream and stir vigorously

Let it cool a bit before using, or you're basically serving napalm. Obviously pouring it onto ice-cream helps.

If you let it get cold it will become thicker - nice for blobbing on fruit.

Homemade Sausage Rolls

Here's a lovely, simple recipe for homemade sausage rolls over at The Soil Association: http://www.soilassociation.org/blogs/latestblog/article/713/organic-sausage-rolls

These use delicious organic sausages and carrot and apple in them too. Perfect for lunchboxes and picnic. Shop-bought puff pastry - so no stress :)