Parsnip Mash

I came up with this recipe for Parsnip Mash on my new blog but thought I'd would share it here as well because it would be absolutely fantastic for babies too.

Banana and Honey Ice Lollies

I've never bought an ice lolly for my son which has led to full on, lying back, kicking, screaming because he wanted more.  Apart from my son's behaviour (and not wanting to reward it), it's not going to make you feel too bad giving him two.

It's also a great way to use up and store bananas which are past their best as you do want them slightly over-ripe.

Minestrone Soup for all ages

Soup might not seem like the most summery recipe but with a drizzle of olive oil, this really hit the spot, especially when the weather is less than you'd hope for.

Stuffed Mushrooms

Stuffed mushrooms are one of those foods people think are difficult to make.  "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom" a phrase apparently coined by Shirley Conran.  Stuffing a mushroom does sound difficult, or fiddly but I promise it's not.

 

This super simple stuffing also makes it easy (and delicious).  I just had this as an adult meal for one but my son, a fan of both mushrooms and cheese would love these.  Do include the herbs, after all, without them they'd be a two ingredient recipe and that feels a little bit lame!

Rhubarb Cake

Rhubarb is such an odd fruit.  It's almost a twisted fact of nature that rhubarb is great at this time of year, just as we should be donning our suncream and sunglasses.  Then you have a spring like this one.  Days of dismal rain and almost tempted to switch on the central heating.

So rhubarb suddenly has a strange purpose.  The joy, if you like, in the drizzled disappointment of British weather!

After initial reluctance, my son loved this cake and so did I.  It lasted for 2 further days in a tin and I also froze some wedges which defrosted in the microwave beautifully.

Great served warm as a pudding with silky double cream or custard or cold as a cake.  Ok, I'm not winning any prizes on health here but I figure it's still healthier than a chocolate bar, and, cream aside, it's pretty low in fat.

Quesadillas for the Whole Family

Quesadillas was something I used to make for my son when he was very little.  This is a slightly updated version with plenty of sneaky hidden vegetables!

Spinach and Carrot Cannelloni

Cannelloni is a surprisingly easy dish to cook for one.  I had made some tomato and pesto soup the other day and the leftovers were in the fridge.  It occurred to me that it would also make a really good pasta sauce. 

But I had no cream cheese, no goats cheese, no mince, nothing traditional for a cannelloni filling in the house.  So why not vegetables.  Why not?  You know what, it didn't just work, it was delicious!

A great idea for fussy kids not keen on vegetables (or even adults!)

Honey Ginger Glazed Tuna

Glazed tuna, a pretty tasty invention, I have a feeling this would work with any kind of robust oily fish.  The idea is you add the flavour after the cooking so you don't get issues with the sweet sauce burning in the pan.  I enjoyed this and have made it twice already, what's more, fresh or frozen tuna is a great source of Omega 3 (tinned isn't).  It's also great to make something like tuna the star of the show when so often it's just bunged in a sandwich as a cheap protein source, although I have to admit my favourite way to have tuna is sushi but with the sweet gingery notes, this still hits the mark.

This isn't mad spicy so should be fine for kids but no babies please as it contains honey.

Gluten Free Pancakes

Chickpea pancakes might sound like an odd proposition for breakfast but bear with me.  Chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour or 'Besan' has a distinctive, savoury taste but there is something delicious about that served with syrup, just like that salty sweet combo of bacon and syrup is something fantastic, so was this.

The amazing thing about chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour is it has over double the amount of protein compared with wheat flour which makes them amazingly filling so a great start for the day, and, handily for coeliacs (or people choosing to avoid gluten), it's naturally gluten and wheat free.

The verdict was "nice but not quite as good as the normal ones" from the household, I disagreed.  I really liked them and I felt seriously full until lunch.

Pasta Salad for the Whole Family

Pasta salad is one of those things you can use any old stuff in.  Leftover cooked chicken?  Marvellous.  Tuna?  Equally at home.  Well I'd picked up an avocado which was actually ripe (unheard of so of course it was down to 20p and 'reduced for quick sale'!)  I would have loved some guacamole and maybe I'll use the other half for that but I had nothing to serve it with so a pasta salad it was.  It's a great way to squeeze in fruit and vegetables which your child might not ordinarily try.

I should have made this during my week of eating 7 fruits and vegetables a day!  A surprising hit with my youngster who's normally a bit of a salad dodger.  Substitute the dressing for mayonnaise or a mayo / yogurt mix if you prefer.

Baked Onion Rings

Onion rings, love them but don't love the oiliness.  I'm not some health freak but I can feel my arteries hardening as I eat!  These are cunningly baked so much less fatty!

Weetabix Cake

Weetabix cake?  Am I serious?  Well I'd been trying different ways of using cereals quite a bit recently what with rice krispies with mackerel but I'd never found a way of using them in cakes like I had with bran loaf.  Shreddies seemed promising but were a bit of a failure when I gave them a go.  Who knew Weetabix would work?

This tastes similar to my bran loaf, loads of fibre, sweet whilst being low in added sugar, dairy free fat free and lovely with a pot of tea!

Chocolate Custard (low sugar)

Custard.  I never make it from scratch but I do make it from custard powder.  It occurred to me when making some custard from custard powder the other day that custard powder is simply cornflour (cornstarch) natural flavouring (vanilla) and colour (normally a natural colour like annatto).  I don't have much annatto floating around the house and there feels like something wrong about making white custard even though that's the colour it would be if not made with eggs, so my idea was to make chocolate custard.

This would be great hot with chocolate cake, poured over banana (if you want to keep on my 7 a day routine), on it's own or allowed to cool in small pots and eaten cold like blancmange.  It's pretty low sugar too with only 1 tsp added sugar per portion.  There's more sugar in a fromage frais!

7 a Day Challenge; Day 3 - Vegetable Pakoras

7 fruits and vegetables a day is a bit harder than I thought.

A few days ago, I set myself a challenge to eat 7 fruits and vegetables minimum in 7 days to see how it affected me, my wellbeing and how hard or easy it might be.

I'm on day 3 now and I need to find ways to liven things up!

Breakfast

I was at work early today so took breakfast of rice crispies and a banana.  This is actually far more than I'd normally eat for breakfast so I ended up saving the banana for mid morning.  I will definitely be stretching myself more from a culinary point of view at the weekend when I have more time!

Lunch

Lunch was Gazpacho again (2 portions of vegetables) due to making a double batch yesterday with watermelon and a satsuma afterwards.  I was up to 5 of my 7 after lunch but felt the need to 'retox' with some chocolate cake.  A girl needs something unvirtuous!

Tea

Ok... this week has been harder (even by day 3) than I expected.  I needed fried.  So wrong.  I know, I had chocolate there was even some sugar on the rice crispies.

But the problem is I'm just so full!  Maybe I don't eat big portions but 7 lots of vegetables, in the portion sizes recommended really limits what else you can eat.

So I needed fried.  I needed something which felt wrong even if it was full of vegetables.  Pakora it is!

Vegetable Pakoras - Makes enough for two

7 a day challenge: Carrot cake Bircher Muesli

The things I learned the most in my first day of trying to have 7 fruits and vegetables in my diet were:

• It takes organisation
• I need to buy more fruit and veg urgently (so much so after only buying some on Monday I went out for more today)
• A 'portion' is bigger than I thought so it's not just about variety but about quantity
• It's a bit confusing what a portion size is for a child so for my 3 year old I aimed for variety and didn't get too hung up on how much he ate
• I'm going to get very bored weighing ingredients very, very quickly...

Today was a day at home with my son.

Breakfast

My first day of 7 fruit and vegetables in 7 days started with a Bircher Muesli.  It might look like a bowl of mush (ok it is kind of a bowl of mush) but it's also a great way to get raw fruit and vegetables into your breakfast.

As I said yesterday, I think the key to getting to 7 in a day is to include fruit and vegetables into every meal.

I didn't add any sugar or honey and you could if you like but both my son and I liked it as it was  ("it delicious!")

Carrot Cake Bircher Muesli - Makes 1 adult portion

Nasi Goreng for kids

Nasi Goreng is a spicy Indonesian Fried rice dish based on peanuts.  You can do as much of the 'faffing' in this recipe as you like but the basic idea is a paste, rice, some protein and some vegetables.  I've made this to be reasonably mildly spiced so kid friendly but up the chilli if just cooking for adults (if you like, it's still blooming tasty as it is!)

As spring is in the air, I even got outside for my lunch!

Fruit Crumble Bars

I'd looked online for a fruit crumble bar recipe which I thought wasn't a load of faff.  I failed to find one so this is what I came up with.  It's simple and you could switch in whatever fruit you have in the fruit bowl looking past it's best.

Although plums aren't seasonal in the UK at least, they are in South Africa and the UK are a major export market.  Irrespective of what you think of imported fruit and vegetables, these plums were lovely.  Juicy, delicious and sweet but unfortunately my son on a whim has decided he doesn't like plums or maybe he's aware it's not UK plum season.  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened than my son deciding to put his foot down on carbon footprints.  Well he is 3.

If you are sticking to more locally sourced fruit, why not try using frozen fruit instead?  Raspberries might work well but will probably need boiling down more so they're not too wet.

Fruit Cobbler

Cobbler.  It's such a long time since I've eaten one and I'd forgotten how lovely they can be.  Essentially it's stewed fruit topped with a scone like topping.  On a whim I decided to make this while making my Spanish style sausage and beans.  This fantastically tasty pudding then happily cooked away using heat in the oven and then was left cooling slightly while we ate our first course.

This was also devised as a way to use up some past their best apples and some frozen raspberries which had been kicking around the freezer for a while.  Not massively high in sugar either.  Probably around 60g, 2 ounces of added sugar in the whole dish and a fantastically warm cuddle of a pudding when spring has more than a hint of wintery bite about it.  This is great Sunday lunch fodder.

Healthy Fish and Chips for the Whole Family

Healthy fish and chips.  The mark of a good recipe is when you make it twice before posting it!

We should all eat more omega 3.  One of the best sources of it is oily fish but that can be a tough sell to adults let alone kids.  Mackerel can be fantastic and delicious, especially grilled on a barbecue but can be strong tasting and a lot of people aren't all that keen on the bones.

I introduced a way of cooking mackerel recently for reluctant adults, now I thought I'd look at kids.  Mackerel is such a well flavoured fish, it can stand up to some really strong flavours and it goes fantastically well with mustard.

The best ideas come to me at 5:30am when I'm lying in bed wondering why I'm not still asleep!  One morning, I had a bit of a brainwave; why not use mayonnaise as a way to adhere a coating?  If I used mackerel I could also mix in some mustard... and so an idea was born!

As I was starting to prepare this I had a sudden thought, why not make this a healthy fish, chips and peas dish?  Why not indeed!

Chorizo and Chickpea soup

This is a great 'cupboards are bare' recipe as you can get packs of chorizo which last in the fridge for ages or even freeze it (this is often what I do if I have a part opened pack).  Take a look at the 'make it thrifty' section for other ideas to keep costs down.

This is a bit cunning.  Only 90g of meat for 2-3 portions yet a soup which tastes meaty and flavoursome and 5 different vegetables sneakily inside; onion, carrot, pepper, tomatoes and chickpeas.  Trust me, you or any vegetable hating family members would struggle to notice all of them.  Hidden in plain sight...

Smoked paprika is a pricey spice but a fantastic one and a great way to 'extend' the chorizo flavour without using masses of it.  Look out for the 'sweet' versions as some can be very spicy but some are milder and full of smokey barbecue aromas.  I prefer the milder versions, especially when I'm cooking for the little one.

It feels like there's not long left for soup season, especially when the birds are starting to sing in the trees and the blossom is already here but I feel this recipe spans the seasons.  Still great when it's chilly but a reminder of warm summers just around the corner spent nibbling chorizo and chickpea based tapas.