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.

The Show and Birthday Cake

My sister turned 10 this week, and decided that she would like to go to the Royal Melbourne Show on her birthday.  My mother, Tabitha and I took Q and her friend to the show, first thing in the morning, to beat the crowds.  We arrived at 9am, and managed to leave just after noon, fitting in the baby animal nursery, the dogs, cats and poultry, the craft/cooking competition areas, the big food pavilion, and a quick scoot through the showbags and rides area.  It wasn't as hideous as I'd feared - not too crowded so early in the day - and Tabitha seemed to really enjoy seeing all the activity and the animals.

My sister and her friend had pony rides:

I didn't give Tabitha a pony ride - she's too small to reliably hang on by herself - but she enjoyed waving to the ponies as they walked past:

My mother and Tabby cuddled a bantam chook.  Tabby thought it was a rooster, I think, and said "cockalocolocoloco" when she saw them, which is her very cute way of saying cockadoodaldoo.  She buried her hands into the feathers, and the chooks were all beautifully patient and calm:

Pointing out its red comb:

My mother helped Tabitha pat the lambs 'very gently':

Tabby was mildly alarmed by the sweet cow, who tried to lick her toes.  She did say moooo back to the cow, though, which was polite of her:

Patting the fluffy baby duckling very gently:

This little feller was only hours old.  So wobbly on his little legs!

Don't you want to just curl up amongst the baby lambs?!

I have a real weak spot for a orange-and-black pig.  Here is a whole pile of piglets:

I know they say that dogs look like their owners - how about cats?

This rabbit is a rex.  This means, essentially, that his fur coat is literally the softest thing in the world.  Softer than any chinchilla or mink I've touched.  It's what I imagine beds are made of in heaven.  I took a card from the breeder - I am trying to convince The Daddy that it would be a fantastic idea to have a couple of rex rabbit pets.  Once Tabitha is older, I can teach her to ask, "please can I have a rex rabbit, daddy?"  Surely he can't say no to her...

Tabithe enjoyed the big food hall immensely.  She ate samples of Jalna yoghurt, some spinach and beef golzeme, some seafood laksa, a little of Jock's award-winning chocolate ice cream, some chewey pretzel and she tried some honey fresh from the comb:

I love checking out the entrants in the cooking competitions.  This 'Amy Winehouse tribute cake' took out a prize in the decorated cakes section.  The attention to detail was incredible:

Check out the dizzying height of this blue ribbon winning sponge cake:

I always say that the best scones are never the prettiest - the things which make a scone 'pretty' tend to prevent it from being a good scone (over-mixing, over-kneeding, less liquid, too thoroughly rubbed in butter).  These first-place scones look satisfyingly ugly.  This is how you can tell they must have tasted fabulous:

An entrant in the children's decorated cupcakes section - third price to a Miss Tabitha!  I hope one day my Tabitha also enjoys decorating cupcakes.

For many years, I mocked the Dagwood Dog a.k.a. Corn Dog.  "How disgusting!" I would sneer.  The Daddy made me try one a few years ago, and I now concede that when they are fresh (e.g. the batter is hot and crispy), they can be pretty tasty:

Tabby loves pinwheels, so I bought her this fancy foil one.  She doesn't have the lung capacity to blow them properly, but she has learnt how to hold them out in the pram as we walk, so the wind gets all the wheels turning.  Here she is examining her newest pinwheel:

I also bought her a 'dolly on a stick', with layers of pink glitter tulle skirts and a glitter-and-feather headpiece.  Ostensibly, the dolly is for Tabitha - and she does love it - but I do love them myself, too:

We managed to escape without being too laden down with colourful cr@p:

When we got home, Tabitha chased Possum the cat around with her dolly.  He then chased the dolly around, trying to chew off her feather headpiece.

Of course, Q and her friend bought a couple of show bags each, and had a wonderful time unpacking them once we got home:

I bought a small 'Wizz Fizz' showbag for my best friend Amy, and a Bertie Beetle showbag for The Daddy.  He tells me that it contains 15 Bertie Beetles, and a nifty beetle toy that creeps and flips down a wall.

Naturally, the cats hid inside the showbags as soon as the girls emptied them.  Strange creatures!

After a morning of show food - including a treat of some chocolate ice cream! - Tabitha had a nice healthy lunch of steamed veggies and baked meatballs:

While Tabitha napped, I quickly whipped up a chocolate cake for after dinner, for my sister's birthday.  I used the same recipe I used for Tabby's first birthday cake, only with two tiers instead of four...

Such an easy recipe - just throw everything into the food processor...

The chocolate cake batter, with brilliant Valhrona cocoa and sour cream, is the most delicious batter I've ever tasted.

Q was most thrilled with her cake, however did manage to bite down hard on one of the dragees with her 'wobbly tooth', which apparently hurt quite a bit.  So warning, if you are serving to other 10-year-olds!