Holiday Eating

During the most recent school holidays we went to the country. Dinners were fab, one night was hot dogs, another homemade pizza and oven baked chips and the last night, a trip to the local takeaway for fish and chips. This snap is our homemade pizza and salad. Pizza is topped with chopped sundried tomato, anchovy paste, mushrooms and onions.

Gingerbread Biscuits

Still cooking from Women's Weekly "Kids in the Kitchen", here we have gingerbread biscuits. I felt like baking but not going out to shop for ingredients. This recipe called for household staples such as self raising flour, brown sugar, treacle, egg yolk, ground ginger, mixed spice and bicarb of soda.

The royal icing was made using one egg white beaten to soft peaks, with icing sugar sifted and beaten in. I gave myself a pat on the back for making piping bags out of sandwich bags.

A spoonful of plain white icing was placed in the bag along with a drop or two of food colouring (in the case of orange, that's 2 drops yellow to 1 drop red), tie a knot and mix so that the colour is evenly distributed. Then snip the corner and ice. Some choc chips were added to some smiley stars, to add something extra. My favourite was the carrot shape which iced nicely and looks cute.

Home Grown

In addition to the lovely mushrooms I blogged about earlier, we had also planted some vegetables in the garden. The selection includes baby carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, baby cos lettuce and silverbeet. The silverbeet was picked today in order to make a new version of lasagne with angel hair pasta in place of the regular wide lasagne sheets. Here are the silverbeet leaves fresh from the garden.

Glamour potato photos

This baked potato looks good from all angles (so I included both). This was another work night dinner recipe found by opening the "fast food" cookbook to a random page and there it was. Scrub and prick potato all over with a fork. Place into a hot oven directly onto the oven shelf and leave for one hour. Remove from oven using oven mitts and cut a cross into the top. Using thumb and forefinger of both hands, push into sides of potato to open along the cross. Fill with leben (the thinking man's sour cream), avocado salsa, warmed baked beans and serve. A tasty meal which combines protein, starchy carbohydrate and fresh veggies. YUM.

Avocado salsa: Chopped avocado, tomato, canned corn, lime juice (lots) and fresh coriander or parsley.

Lime coconut cake and Red vegetable curry.

The red vegetable curry is a Donna Hay recipe which I was quite impressed with. I've found that homemade vegetarian curries don't have much variation in taste. This one however, was different due to ingredients (pumkin and eggplant) and curry paste - I used our jar of korma curry paste that was already opened. Served with steamed rice it was a nice quick meal to prepare on a work night and was easy to eat too.

Lime & Coconut cake comes from the cookbook "Fast Food" which is a short thick cookery book I recieved for my birthday last year (I think). It was originally a lime, ginger and coconut cake but we didn'y have any crystallised ginger in the house. It turned out well - very moist and flavourful and most importantly, well recieved.

Mum's Lasagne

This took up the whole frame and, as you can tell, it was mightly big. The lasagne consists of instant lasagne sheets, mushroom pasta sauce, cottage cheese and defrosted spinach and grated tasty cheese.

When I make it I like to add other veggies such as sliced pre-roasted pumpkin, capsicum, zucchini and eggplant (salted and rinsed beforehand) and I usually use condensed tomato soup and a tin of diced tomato in place of the pasta sauce. Some combos I'd like to try include artichoke hearts, leeks and roasted sweet potato.

The lasagne was served with baby lettuce leaves from our garden and an avocado fan (I was working on my garnishing skills that week).