I am not a big TV watcher, my attention span doesn’t allow it and nor does my husband. Not that he doesn’t physically allow it but lord, he really likes to watch stuff that has no appeal to me and I couldn’t be bothered arguing with him or taking the remote control off him.
The other issue I have is that TV makes me grumpy, not so much the actual programming but the ads. Clearly a lot of them are aimed at the witless, uninformed chump who is not immune to be spoken down to.
I always thought I would be the mother in the Disney movie remake of real life. Not the evil witch mother but the caring, nurturing, play on the floor and bake cookies kind of mother. I loved children long before I had my own and after enduring a childhood fairy tales most definitely aren’t based on, I had it firmly in my mind that I would make my child’s life magical and wonderful. Wistful and dreamy even.
But, as every mother of young children knows, that’s not always how life goes. My attempts at doing craft quickly became sessions that will no doubt be relived in his therapy sessions when he’s older. I would not be surprised if the sight of craft paper or a glue stick instils fear in him even now. Let’s just say patience is not one of my virtues, in fact I embarrassingly remember screaming at him once for ruining my vision of his year K project. (Why on earth do they give Year K students projects?).
I have been trying for a long time to perfect the chocolate chip cookie, yeah I know, lofty goals. Anyway I am happy to admit that I may have indeed got there, that’s the thing with creating achievable goals, you can actually celebrate getting there.
There’s something that feels very nurturing and loving (other things I aspire to) about making your own baked goods. I like to think that my son will eat them, put on some weight and absorb the love that has gone into them. In reality he takes them to school and gives them to his friends.
Anyway I found a recipe that works well for me (and Teenage Pencil’s friends). It comes from Matt Preston’s book The Simple Secrets To Cooking Everything Better and, like everything in this book that I’ve cooked (a lot), the recipe is easy to follow and magnificent to eat.
His is actually for choc chip cookie dough (which he says his son wanted as a birthday cake) but I baked mine because my son‘s friends doesn’t like dough.
Here’s what to use:
125grams unsalted butter
3/4cup soft brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2cups self raising flour
150grams white chocolate bits
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150grams mile chocolate bits
Here’s what to do:
Combine the butter and sugar and whisk until pale, light and fluffy.
Whisk in the egg and vanilla extract, when evenly combined stir in the flour and chocolate bits with a wooden spoon.
Now this is the most important part I learned from the clever people on my Facebook page – I took the dough and rolled it up in baking paper and refrigerated it for hours. In fact I made two rolls and froze one for use at a later date.
Working with a log of hardened dough it was easy to cut into discs that were nice and thick and, best of all, kept their shape in the oven. That’s a big part of the trick I was missing before and making biscuits that totally lost their shape in the oven, and were also paper thin. This log method allowed me nice shape and thickness.
The other night I served them to my son with a wodge of ice-cream in the middle. I took the photo (while it was already melting) and then he broke it up into pieces and stirred it around a bit. He may have tasted a bite. Have I mentioned he’s not a big eater?
The ice cream sandwich (sliding apart)
Not sure what that little bit on the side of the top biscuit is – but I am going with taste and very general shape.
Quite by chance I have come across a well of unexpected angst in a corner of the web I thought was reserved for foodies or hungry people. This angst, often manifested as anger, It’s literally bubbling away in online recipes. Yes, simple solutions for dinner are the new heartland of irate commenters.
This shouldn’t have been such a big surprise for me, after all I was hated for daring to mention I didn’t love the Thermomix, but I naively thought the anger was coming from the obsessive cult of the kitchen gadget not from everyday cooks. However, in my continued search for dinner inspiration I have begun to look at the comments on online recipes to see if the recipe is going to be as easy to follow as I was lead to believe and that’s where I have found the hangry (when hunger meets anger) commenters.
On Saturday night my husband and I hosted a “party for absolutely no reason at all”. It wasn’t a birthday or an anniversary, there were no milestones or occasions we just decided to invite our friends round and party. Just because.
The idea was just to get together. Eat, drink, chat, laugh. Just be. I make it sound so simple you probably almost believe me. But if you know me, you know nothing is simple. I’m a neurotic anxious over- planner who had just emerged from under a pile of to do lists.
Luckily my husband knows that I can be slightly anxious about things and so to make the night easier we were going to outsource the catering. This would mean we would have to neither cook nor worrying about cleaning up the whole night – we would literally be free to party. And when I say we I mean me – because Mr Pencil is excellent at partying but crap at cooking and cleaning. [Read more…]
The best thing about having a blog with no niche or genre is that I can write about whatever I like – this serves me well because I have the attention span of a small gnat on speed. Jumping from anxiety on the weekend, through cuddling your kids yesterday to a recipe today is no big leap for me. And when you make these cinnamon brioches you’ll be happy I am so flighty.
If you’ve been on any social media platform today you’ve probably heard people ranting about bacon. Not in the traditional “I love bacon” kind of way but in the more frenzied “help the sky is falling in” kind of way. Processed meats are the new food to hate. The New York Times reports
“An international panel of experts convened by the World Health Organization concluded Monday that eating processed meat like hot dogs, ham and bacon raises the risk of colon cancer and that consuming other red meats “probably” raises the risk as well. But the increase in risk is so slight that experts said most people should not be overly worried about it.
The panel did not offer specific guidelines on red meat consumption. But its conclusions add support to recommendations made by other scientific groups like the federal government’s dietary guidelines advisory committee, which has long discouraged the consumption of red and processed meat.”
I have tried to convince myself (and my son) that when my husband travels for work, it IS actually for work. I mean deep down in my heart I know that it’s not fun and it’s awful to be away from home, stressed, jet lagged and in meetings that go on for hours only to get back to an empty hotel room or worse (in my opinion) dinner with people who you wouldn’t ordinarliy eat dinner with. I know from my own fleeting work related trips that there is no fun element to rushing from airport to office and there’s hardly ever time to do anything else.
Today I entered a level of cooking prep that I hadn’t gone to before. Understanding that I regularly cook for big groups of people (thanks extended family) and I cook daily for a fussy vegetarian (myself) , a carb–avoiding man (my husband) and a growing teenager (my son) , I am well versed with cooking prep.
But today was different. I was cooking for a family who have had some difficult times lately. Someone at Little Pencil’s school has put a roster together for people who want to help to prepare a meal to ensure there is one thing less to worry about for a while.
The roster was a very well organised, online schedule where you could choose the date that suited you best and then insert the meal you would be providing with your name next to that date.
I am not new to giving up sugar, I gave it up once before and wrote about it here. At the time of writing I had given up for 10 days and I ended my post with the words “I am discovering a new way of eating, not feeling fantastic YET but at least my focus is expanding (and hopefully my waist isn’t)”. I think I ate some nutella soon after that. The no sugar thing didn’t last. Maybe I didn’t give it long enough back then.