I have moved my blog to my own website - www.how2beasecretchef.com

I have been designing my own website for the last couple of weeks - hopefully you will enjoy it.  I am hoping to keep adding to it and am open to suggestions as to how to improve it!

I look forward to seeing everyone over there!

Sometimes food should just be fun!

These are so easy to make and really very yummy - raspberries with a white chocolate or milk chocolate chip stuffed in the end.

My 13 year old daughter just made these.  She doesn't like raspberries normally but she wolfed the lot of these down.......it's called working with what you've got!

I prefer the white chocolate version!

Nut allergy? Chuck out the peanuts and try chickpeas instead!

Chickpeas are a great source of all sorts of nutrients.  They're high in fibre and contain 10 different vitamins.

In particular they're a great source of thiamin and B6, which helps the body convert food into energy, so they'd be a great snack on test/exam days when they've been revising into the night before!

Chickpeas provide multiple essential minerals, including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus -- essential to healthy bones and they're higher in potassium than bananas. 

A lot of kids love humus, which is fabulously easy to make - just blitz the chickpeas in a blender with some garlic, olive oil, lemon juice and tahini - obviously it's better for them if they'll eat it with raw vegetables but if you can only get them to eat it with toasted pitta, it's still good for them in its own right.  

Chickpea curry is a good vegetarian dish - I have a great recipe - if anybody would like it, let me know!

This may not sound appetising, but I promise you it is quite addictive - try warming through naan bread, breaking it open smearing humus inside, tucking in some crispy bacon and some pickled beetroot for breakfast - my mouth is watering just thinking about it!

But my recipe for today is for roasted chickpeas - eat them like nuts or popcorn......oh whoops, this is supposed to be about feeding the kids......you could let them have a taste if you are feeling that way inclined!  In the recipe below, I've used tinned chickpeas, they aren't as good for you as the dried variety but they are much more convenient.  When I prepare them from dried, I generally do about three times as much as I need and freeze what I don't use.  I haven't tried my frozen chickpeas for roasting yet and I'm not sure how the freezing would effect the texture for this recipe - frozen ones are fine in curries and humus though. 

• 1 tin chickpeas, drained
• 2 teaspoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon (harissa or ras al hanout also work really well)
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• 
  
• 1.    Pre-heat the oven to 220C.
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• 2.    Pat the chickpeas dry with a paper towel and place on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper.
• 
  

3.    Bake for 30 minutes.

4.    Mix together the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and add the baked chickpeas, stirring them to ensure they are all well coated.

5.    Transfer to mouth and chew!

Toffee Tasting Pumpkin Cupcakes - with parsnip!

Two veg in one cake - a great mid-morning snack or even with a glass of milk for breakfast, and they'll never know!

Ingredients:

For the buns:

175g soft butter (this needs to be at room temperature)

200g plain flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

Small pinch ground cloves

250g tinned pumpkin puree (Waitrose/Ocado do this year round now)

2 medium sized parsnips, chopped, steamed and pureed

2 tablespoons maple syrup

325g light brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

Icing:

175g soft butter

225g icing sugar

1/2 tin caramel/dulce de lecce

1.     Preheat oven to 190C.

2.     In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium-low heat, stirring, until the butter turns a light golden brown. Pour into a bowl to stop it cooking or plunge the saucepan bottom into a bowl of iced water.

3.     In a mixing bowl combine the dry ingredients.

4.     In another bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients including the brown butter.

5.     Add the wet mixture to the dry and whisk until combined.

6.     Line a muffin tin with 12 deep paper cases and divide the batter evenly using an ice cream scoop.

7.     Bake, rotating the tin halfway through, until a cocktail stick inserted in the centre comes out clean, which should take about 20 minutes.

8.     Transfer to a wire cooling rack and cool completely.

9.     To make the icing whisk the butter with an electric whisk or in a mixer until pale and fluffy.

10.  Add the icing sugar and caramel and continue to whisk until you have a stiff but fluffy frosting.

11.  Swirl the frosting onto the cooled cakes and then drizzle the rest of the tin of caramel over the top.


3rd June 2013

P.S. I've just tried to buy another batch of ingredients and it seems Waitrose don't do tinned pumpkin year round anymore - it can be bought from Amazon though!  It seemed cheaper to buy in a batch of 5 cans so now I need to make up some more recipes!

Meal times should be fun times

Sometimes, after a hard day's work and coming home to a bomb site in the living room and a teenager's bedroom with rotting unidentified old food stuffed under the bed, I do wonder why it was that I wanted a family and in that moment, I do take comfort from the thought that there are probably a million other mums experiencing exactly that same thought all over the world that night.

But, I do know why I had a child really - it was because, I like children and I liked the idea of having someone I could love and nurture and watch and help grow into a beautiful grown up who will give me grandchildren!

And the latter is what I want to think about when we sit down to our supper at night.  I want to emulate in a small way those wonderful Italian outdoor family meals we see in films, where everyone is laughing and chattering and passing each other fabulous looking food - even if it's only the two of us.  I want meal times to be a time where we unpick our day, moan about the ignorant guy in the car park who nicked my space, hear about how her little buddy at school has fallen out with her imaginary friends again, talk about what to wear on mufty day to wind up that stick-in-the-mud teacher and just know about each other's days and lives whilst sharing food and talking about it too.

At the end of a day, I do not want to have to pick a fight.  I do not want to fall out with my child and send her off to bed on a bad note whilst I sit in front of the TV with a feeling of disappointment and unease.  And, I don't want to put the same plate of food that she won't eat in front of her night after night until she caves in from hunger and eats something that isn't currently in her pallet.

Say your child takes the view that vegetables are poisonous - I have a nephew just like that - if you don't want to fight with him (or her!) about it, why not disguise them in a meal he will eat?  No need to tell him - just enjoy the food together and feel smugly happy that your child just got something he needed and liked it and don't stress about the fact he also ate a bunch of stuff he didn't need - he was going to do that anyway, whether you liked it or not.

I know this goes against what the current child psychology gurus preach - but gurus have got it wrong before............

So........grate carrot into your bolognese sauce, mash cauliflower into your mashed spuds (with plenty of butter), puree parsnip into banana dishes and start on the road to stealth health!

Avocado Ice Cream

 Avocado is technically a fruit and fruit goes into ice-cream doesn't it?

3 medium sized ripe avocados

1 tablespoon lemon juice

375 ml full fat milk

125 g caster sugar

250 ml double cream

250 ml dulce de lecce

1.              Peel and pit the avocados.

2.              Puree the avocado flesh together with the lemon juice, milk and sugar.

3.              In a mixing bowl, combine the avocado mixture with the double cream and whisk with an electric whisk until you have a soft peak consistency.

4.              If you have an ice-cream maker, process the mixture in the machine for about 8 – 10 minutes until the mixture starts to set and then spoon in the dulce de lecce caramel to form ripples through the ice cream and continue to process for another couple of minutes.

5.              If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, spoon the mix into a clingfilm lined plastic container and freeze for 40 minutes.  After that time, remove and pop the mixture back into a mixing bowl and whisk again with an electric whisk.  Re-line the container with fresh clingfilm and repeat the freezing then whisking process.  As you spoon the mixture back into the container this final time, gradually add the dulce de lecce caramel so that it is rippled through the icecream.  Pop it back into the freezer for a further 40 minutes and it should be ready.

Our 5-a-day and the humble pea!

Do we really need to achieve variety with 5-a-day?  We’ve all heard the “eat a rainbow” mantra but that’s not always possible and there is a lot to be said for picking your battles.  Ideally, your child’s 5-a-day should be made up of 3 portions of veg and 2 of fruit.  A portion is about a handful – and that’s a handful of the person eating, so a child’s portion will be smaller than your own.

Whilst that variety is the ideal, some of us know that with the best will in the world, the only thing we’re going to get some children to eat on the veg side is the humble pea!

The humble pea - we don’t usually think about it as an exotic food in terms of nutrient composition—but we should, they’re rich in phytonutrients, low in bad fat and generally nutritious and high in anti-oxidants. Cooked peas contain significant quantities of vitamin K, manganese, vitamin B-1 and vitamin C. Additionally, peas are a great source of dietary fiber.

Even though green peas are an extremely low-fat food, the type of fat and fat-soluble nutrients they contain is impressive. Recent research has shown that green peas are a reliable source of omega-3 fats in the form of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) and also omega-6 fatty acid, linoleic acid.  They also contain beta-carotene and small but valuable amounts of vitamin E.

Give yourself a break – if all they’ll eat is peas, then give them lots of peas!  And you can add them to so much – so if you’re having a meat dish with rice – boil the peas in with the rice.  If using frozen, let them defrost first and add them to the rice about half way through cooking – this way any “leaching” of nutrients will be “caught” by the rice!  If you’re having cottage pie, put the peas in with the mince and make it a one pot meal!

I gave my daughter, as a toddler, a small bowl of frozen peas as a snack when it was hot outside rather than sugary ice pops and to this day, when frozen peas come out, her hand is straight in the saucepan to scoop them up before they cook!  I don’t really have many memories of food as a child but I certainly remember the joy of picking peas in my grandfather’s garden and eating them fresh from the pod – I preferred them to raspberries as picking them didn’t scratch my hands up!