This Week's Cooking

I made a giant tray of brownies - it was my Godson's 15th birthday, and I told him that I'd bake him a chocolate cake, but decided that brownies would be infinitely better.

If you are feeling tired or just lazy (or, of course, greedy!) brownies are a winning choice.  Melt and mix, then pour into a tray lined with foil (easier than lining a tray with baking paper!).  The only fiddly bit is chopping the walnuts, but you can use a food processor for that.

You know how good brownies have that cracked, papery, thin layer of shine on the top?  That's because they contain so much sugar...

Some to take to my Godson:

Some to take to the hungry breastfeeding mummas at my local ABA meeting:

And some to eat for lunch, tee hee:

Aaaaand some more for dessert, hot, with ice cream:

I made an enormous batch of paprika chicken, for freezing.  The recipe is HERE, despite being quite messy (browning lots of thighs in oil, red splattery sauce, drippy, gluey spaetzle batter...) it is a simple dish to cook, and both the chicken and the spaetzle / nokedli freeze brilliantly.

A few notes to add to the recipe I posted months ago - yes, it is a lot of onions.  A few people have asked me if I accidentally wrote down too large a quantity.  Nope, three good cups - even a little more is fine!  You'd be surprised, they really cook down and, being white onions, during the long cooking process they almost seem to melt away to nothing.  Make life easy for yourself, and use the slicing disk on your food processor if you have one.

When you add the flour and the paprika, you do need to cook it for a bit, until the flour starts to thicken it up, vaguely like a roux.  Don't worry if it looks like it's darkened quite a bit - you want a decent browning, to make sure the paprika flavours really come out:

Yum.

For the nokedli / spaetzle, I really recommend leaving the batter for a good hour or so - even overnight is fine.  You can beat it in a KitchenAid or similar, as long as you leave it to sit, to relax the gluten.  This week, I actually doubled my spaetzle recipe,  making nearly 2kg of spaetzle, because they freeze so beautifully.  Allow about a cup of cooked spaetzle per person, possibly a little more.  I freeze 2.5 cup bags of the cooked dumplings.  

To reheat, I recommend allowing them to defrost in the fridge, then cooking them in a frying pan of hot butter or bacon drippings, until they are starting to brown a little.  In fact, lately, I do this every time - even after they have just been cooked, I pan-fry the serving we are about to eat.  Trust me.

As you need to cook them in small batches - you don't want more than a single layer of floating spaetzle, really - you just dump them into a great big bowl.  But add a drizzle of olive oil, and toss them with the oil periodically as you cook, to stop them sticking.

After dinner, we had some coconut cupcakes.  Just ordinary cupcakes with a good handful of moist shredded coconut mixed in at the end.  They are deliciously chewy and moist.

Have been making salmon kedgeree a bit lately.  I always thought that it was a total Australian (via Britain via India) classic, but when I first met The Daddy, he had never heard of it!  Now it's one of his favourites - Fry some onions in butter and oil, add a teaspoon or two of curry powder, cook for a minute until smelling gorgeous, add cooked rice (best to cook the night before), peas, a can of drained salmon (or some poached and flaked salmon fillets), some parsley, a good squeeze of lemon, and some chopped hard boiled eggs.  Serve with some extra eggs.  It ain't pretty, but it sure is yummy!

Another fishy meal that I cook a lot is scrambled eggs with spinach and smoked salmon, for Tabitha.  I love this too, and so I am always happy to make double and eat some for my own lunch or a light dinner.  She adores anything with fish - sardines, baked or steamed white fish, teriyaki salmon, tinned tuna, salmon patties, smoked salmon - so this meal is a hit.

You may recall that - like me - Tabitha's first word was shoes.  Or, rather, 'sooz'.  Her passion for shoes continues, and she owns more pairs than me.  Like any toddler, however, she prefers to clop around the house in grown-up shoes - The Daddy's dirty Blunstones and my little MJ mouse flats are her favourites.  Here is Tabby having fun in mumma's mouse shoes:

Remember the Ikea play food we bought last month?  It is still a big hit.  Recently I had a couple of ten-year-olds over, and they played with the food too, so I think it will be popular in our house for a while to come.  Every day when Tabitha naps, and again after she goes to bed at night, I do a quick house tidy, including putting away all of her toys.  Though she is very good at packing up her blocks, it is much easier if I do a speed-clean after she is in bed, or else she UNpacks as quickly as I can pack. 

The Daddy thinks it's funny that I always put away her play food back so neatly in its baskets - but I notice that Tabitha seems much more inclined to play with her toys if they are presented attractively and clearly, rather than all piled up in a heap.  We also rotate her toys as - that is, only keeping a small number of toys out at a time, and swapping them around every week or so - which seems to keep her interested.  Plus, because our home is so small, keeping just a few toys out, and keeping them tidy, ensures relative sanity for myself.