A week of food

One of the delicious new bakery treats I made this week!

I use a menu planner to keep the week from becoming just too absolutely hectic, and I'm sure many of you do too! However I do just throw the menu out at the end of each week, which is a shame really. It'd be useful to know which weeks worked well, which new recipes were a hit or a miss, and old menus could be useful when I'm having a total mental blank when faced with a new menu plan to fill in!

So here is this weeks plan. I only plan dinners, with the occasional new weekend breakfast or bit of baking thrown in.

Dinners

Monday: Meatballs and pasta
Monday nights I'm exhausted, so this will be an easy dinner, with pre-made meatballs. I'll probably use a pre-made pasta sauce or tinned tomatoes and add some finely diced or grated vegetables to it.

Tuesday: Risotto or barley with chicken, red capsicum, onion and peas
This meal was planned to use up some bits and bobs left over from the week before! Tuesday is our shopping day.

Wednesday: Kedgeree
Cooked by the Mr, recipe from 'Slow Cookers' by Jane Price

Thursday: Pizza, homemade dough
Cooked by the Mr (I know, I'm a lucky girl!), he used our new pizza stone for the first time, I highly recommend getting one! He used the pizza dough recipe that came with the stone. Was fab.

Friday: Baked tuna casserole
I found the recipe here, pinned it here. See I do use the recipes I pin in Pinterest!

Saturday: Black bean tacos

Sunday: Chilli con carne sweet potato cottage pie
This is an adaptation of this recipe. I'm just turning it into a pie by adding sweet potato mash on top.

Other stuff

Bacon and fresh herb muffins, from 'Baking Day' by the Woman's Weekly, see photo above!

For breakfast this week I'm going to try this porridge recipe on the Healthy Chef website. No oats! Not that I have anything against oats, I love them, but looked interesting.

I'm also hoping to make another Pear cake, to refine my recipe, and I'm working on an adaptation of a muesli bar style slice that I hope to share soon.


So that's my week in food! Do you do a weekly menu plan? If you've blogged it please share!

Pear and Oat Cake

Today I was in a baking mood, and had some lovely pears needing to be eaten. Pear cake! Perfect! We love a fruit based dessert here, and I knew a freshly baked dessert would make everybody here happy.

This recipe was based on my strawberry cake recipe, with slight modifications because I wanted to use pears, and have it be more of a dessert cake than a tea cake. Plus I love sticking rolled oats in things. It's an ad hoc recipe, and has only been tested once, if you decide to try it let me know how it goes!



Pear and Oat Dessert Cake

• 100g of butter
•  half cup of brown sugar
• a quarter cup of golden syrup
• half a cup of rolled oats
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 egg
• one and a half cups of self raising flour
• about third a cup of milk - as needed
• two ripe william bartlett style pears
• an extra tablespoon of rolled oats
• raw sugar for sprinkling on top of cake before baking

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees, fan forced. Line a standard loaf tin with baking paper.

Soften the butter, mix it with the sugar. Add remaining ingredients except the milk and pear. Mix to combine, gradually start adding milk, until the consistency seems right. (Sorry about the vague instructions!)

Peel and roughly chop the pears into inch dice. Gently fold the pear through the mix, and tip into loaf tin, smooth the top and sprinkle with extra rolled oats and a sprinkle of raw sugar. Bake for about 60minutes, but keep an eye on it and check with skewer when it appears done. The skewer may not come out clean if you pierce a lump of pear! So check a couple of spots.

I intended this cake to be quite dense with fruit, quite 'desserty' so it was lovely served warm with a dollop of plain yoghurt.

yellow still rocks

And because yellow still rocks we have our party 'theme' sorted. It's just got to be yellow. I've started to get preparations underway, although I think I should have got more done by now! Pretty sure I need way more straws too. A visit to Little Paper Lane helped my Loot Bag ideas crystallize, I picked up those snazzy little brown paper bags with windows and I'm going to make some tags to match the invite and sew them to the bag as I sew the top of the bag shut. I'll have to take a photo and show you that later, hope I'm making sense!

1. Wooden forks for the fruit salad, from The Party Studio
2. Biodegradeable gelato cups for the fruit salad, from The Bio Packaging Company on Ebay
3. Adorable polka dot baking cups (not sure for what yet, chocolate crackles?) from The Party Studio
4. Yellow stripey straws, from The Party Studio
5. Mini yellow chevron snack bags for my smartie cookies, from The Party Studio
6. Loot bags from Little Paper Lane
7. Scalloped kraft paper baking cups for blueberry and apple oat muffins, from Little Betsy Baker

the fluffy kookaburra

I captured a few (okay about 50) photos of a kookaburra that had decided to perch awhile on our deck railing yesterday. So fluffy! And big! We wondered whether or not it was okay for a bit there, as it seemed completely unconcerned as I gradually sidled closer and closer, trying to get a better view. In the end it sat there long after I took all my photos, just keeping the occasional eye on the young fella as he showed him various toys that may have been of interest to a kookaburra.

"yeah, close enough lady..."

a quick status update on blankie

Believe it or not, 80 squares are now done! I'm slower than I hoped, but not too surprised - I always hope I'll get more done than I can. I've introduced some more colours since the last update - but have been quite frustrated in my search for a good range of colours in cotton yarn. Does no-one else find wool itchy?

At this stage I am planning to do the final join-as-you-go round in the same grey that edges all of the squares. I think introducing white at this stage would be a bit jarring, or better suited if it was a babies blanket. Here's a quick photo of my stacks of squares - there are ten squares per stack, and then I'd better get back to it!

mmm macarons!

It's been all about macarons lately! You know when that coincidence thing happens, when you hear about something or bump into someone three times in a row? Well that's what happened to me with macarons! First I spotted the Donna Hay Macaron Kit in the local supermarket, and couldn't resist. I've been wanting to try making them but been too intimidated, the kit provided the perfect opportunity.

Not too shabby for my first macaron!

Yes, they were completely and utterly scrumptious!

Super easy to make, and impressively delicious, I'd highly recommend giving it a go unless you already know how to make them! Here's a tip from a pro if you do - instead of waiting the ten minutes recommended on the box before putting them in the oven, wait until they don't stick to your finger when you lightly touch them. And here's a tip from me - check out the instructions on the website because I think they instruct you to make the ganache filling after baking the biscuits, rather than on the box where they tell you to make it before. I made the ganache first, and I took so long doing the biscuits I had to add more cream over low heat to the ganache to get it back to a spreadable consistency.

Then, I received the Woman's Weekly Macaroon and Biscuits cookbook for my birthday! I'm so loving my Woman's Weekly cookbooks, (and my Donna Hay ones too actually), and this new cookbook not only has macaron recipes, but loads of other traditional biscuits too, like Monte Carlo biscuits, just like my grandma used to make. Watch this space, I'll be reporting back on recipes from it soon! Meanwhile checkout the cover and the chocolate macarons inside, lovely right?

And finally, on my birthday my son and I went to Manly and stopped in at Adriano Zumbo's, and took home a selection of five delicious little crispy treats. Salted caramel was by far our favourite flavour! Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the Zumbo macarons, but follow this link to his website for the Manly patisserie, and check out the super cool floor detail in the shop. Monkey was completely impressed with the miniature building site under the clear section of floor, which gave me lots of time to make up my mind about which macarons to buy!

So that was the week that was all about macarons!

grey blue green and yellow

I said I'd blog my second crochet project, and here it is! The plan for this one is that it will be a blanket for my son's bed. When I first started crocheting up some left-over cotton I hadn't thought that far ahead, but looking at the colours I think it will be good for his room. If he gets too old for it then it would probably suit our bed too, as a blanket across the bottom of the bed.

Just looking at this photo I'm realising how different in size some of the squares are! Because I'm using leftovers, and buying odd balls here and there, the yarns are quite different thicknesses, even though they all recommend the same needle size. Some of the yarns I've used so far are:

• Jo Sharp Soho Summer dk cotton in Fog (I need so much more of this! It's the grey every square will be finished in!)
• Jo Sharp Soho Summer dk cotton in Shamrock
• Heirloom cotton 8-ply in denim blue (I have some of this in a dark navy blue too)
• Heirloom cotton 8-ply in yellow
• Heirloom cotton 8-ply in pale lime (the heirloom yarns are by far the thinnest yarn)
• Sugar'n'cream cotton 8-ply in turquoise (very thick, would love more of this in various colours)
• Twilley's of Stamford Freedom Denim - desperately seeking more of this discontinued yarn, it's the middle colour in the top right square
• Some unknown yellow cotton, middle of bottom left and right squares
• Katia Mississippi, the dark lime/pistachio green, which is actually only 60% cotton

What I'm craving is more yellows! I have an interim solution for this, and that is to dye some plain white yarn. We'll see how that idea pans out after the Easter break.

My plan for this blanket is to do 10 squares of each colour combination, and then finish the blanket off by doing a final round in white, joining as I go. I have roughly estimated I will need about 192 squares, which quite frankly is terrifying! It seems an awful lot of squares! I'll need 15 more colour combinations! I'm hoping to have something about 1.5m x 2m, so it will be a large single bed blanket. I just hope he still likes it by the time I've finished it!

Here is how far along I am - as of today, I have 26 squares done, roughly an eighth of the way.

Wish me luck! I think I'm going to need it!