Do you ever find yourself looking for new dinner ideas
which contain the essence of other favourites? Our kids, in particular the younger two, love baked beans. Beans on toast is a standard Monday night dinner after swimming as after trying to watch two boys swim and then help them get changed again afterwards while ensuring a two year old doesn’t disappear is a really stressful feat. Thank heavens she goes to play with her dear friends the crèche ladies for most of the lesson! (Big thank you crèche ladies.) On the occasions that she has been poolside with me, I have had to drag her away from the edge of the water to prevent her from joining her brothers’ lessons fully clothed!
Another popular dinner choice is sausages. I think they would feature a lot more frequently if I let the kids choose the weekly menu! If you asked most children what their favourite meal is, I do think that sausages (meat or veggie) would probably prove one of the more popular choices. My children are happy eating either meat or vegetarian sausages and this dish could in fact be made veggie friendly.
This was one of the dishes that I made with all three children at once. I would be lying if I said it all went swimmingly without a
single hitch. The truth is that each child spilt the melted butter bowl once and I ended up with the contents all over the counter and the floor. I can say I was definitely getting frustrated with the three of them by the end of the process. I didn’t always remain as patient and as calm as I should have, but we soldiered on. Then when it came out of the oven, I saw their impressed faces and it was all worth it. Cliché yes, but 100% true. From experience, I would recommend using a wide-bottomed sturdy bowl for the melted butter rather than a plastic one to prevent accidental spillage.
This dish contains many process that kids enjoy such us chopping cooked sausages, painting filo pastry and the dish with melted butter, mixing, spooning/transporting and scrunching. It is perfect for little chefs. Mine did need a little help moving the fragile pastry, but the rest they did managed completely by themselves.
Seb has decided that this dish should in be called Sausage and Bean Bowl Pie. This is because we shaped the filo pastry in the bottom of the pie dish so it sort of became a ‘bowl’ to the sausages and beans once the sides were gently scrunched. I totally see his logic and I love the fact that he is using his reasoning, and as it is such a fab name how could I not use it?!
Ingredients
- 8 cooked sausages
- 1 tin of beans
- 120g cheese
- 10 leaves of filo pastry (most of a whole packet)
- 60g melted butter or margarine
Method
- Preheat the oven to 200°c and paint the bottom of a 20cm pie dish with melted butter.
- Chop the sausages into ‘coins’ with a table knife.
- Put the beans into a mixing bowl and add the chopped sausages.
Add 90g of the cheese to the bean bowl and mix well.- Unroll the filo pastry and paint the top sheet with butter.
- Pick up the top sheet and the one below it and place butter side up in the pie dish. The kids did need help transporting the filo sheets as they are fragile.
- Repeat step 6 until all 10 leaves of filo pastry have been used. Make sure you place the filo pastry sheets at different angles in the pie dish.
- Spoon the bean, sausage and cheese mixture into the pie dish and gently flatten with the back of the spoon.
- Gently scrunch the sides of the filo pastry to make a
‘bowl’ (you should have a small circle of exposed bean mixture in the centre of the pie) and brush the scrunched pastry with the remaining butter. - Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the exposed beans.
- Put in the oven to cook for 20 minutes or until the pastry is crispy and golden brown.
The first 
slice was a bit of a challenge to get out intact, but subsequent slices came out more easily. According to Seb this is; ‘loads better than beans on toast!’ He managed to eat two slices as well as the rest of the food on his plate! I think there may well be more requests for it in the near furture. Do let me know if you try this out.
time around I decided it was time to make a savoury flapjack recipe. I was toying with the idea of a hidden vegetable flapjack, then I remembered that with the kids helping me make them they would see the so called hidden vegetables (well courgette which they all seem to despise) and therefore knowing my luck, refuse to try them. My back up was to make a recipe where cheese has a starring role. The kids will gobble up pretty much any snack item which contains cheese. They really must have very strong bones as they all drink quite a lot of milk too. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to jump to cheese in pretty much every savoury recipe, but that is another story altogether!
ridiculously addictive. I dare you to only manage one. I cut ours into little fingers so that I wouldn’t eat quarter of the batch in one sitting. Incidentally this also makes them finger food-sized for the smallest of foodies.
Preheat the oven to 170°c fan and grease and line at 20cm square tin.
In case you hadn’t already noticed, I enjoy messing around in the kitchen creating recipes. Furthermore, I love it when the children can get involved in making their after school snacks or meals and contribute to the activity. This makes me feel less like a general dogsbody and more like a proactive parent on a mission to teach the kiddos how to fend for themselves.
Bread and Butter Pudding, my sprinkle fix hadn’t been abated. To try and satisfy it, we decided to make giant white Jazzies biscuits. Just in case you are imagining an epic giant biscuit coated in sprinkles, I fear I may well disappoint you when I say these can only be classified as giant when compared to the actual size of a Jazzie! I should also mention, I have been calling these sweets Jazzies for years and I only just realised that the packet says Jazzles! I am going to continue to call them Jazzies as in my head it is more fun and I am struggling to get my head around a new name for this childhood favourite of mine.
opinion that sprinkles make everything more exciting as these are essentially chocolate buttons coated in sprinkles and they never fail to brighten up my day or bring me out of a grump. I remember taking these to a friend who was ill when I was in secondary school to cheer her up. They certainly didn’t make her immediately better, but they definitely seemed to serve their purpose.
She also had lots of fun with the
biscuit dough. I am pretty sure she thinks we make a lot of playdough which when she is done with it goes into the oven so she can then eat it when it has cooled! I am not going to correct her just yet, as I find the mentions of playdough rather amusing; we are most definitely learning through play.
for pancakes during the school week and I feel terrible having to say no. The stove time with normal pancakes makes them impractical if not impossible when faced with the stark reality of getting three children out the house for the school run and morning activities. They are generally reserved for the weekends, unless I am being super organised like I was yesterday. Atticus and I made the pancake batter last night before our bedtime routine and stored it in the fridge overnight. All we had to do this morning, was put the batter into our silicone muffin and mini muffin trays, add the toppings and bake.
popular in our house are coconut chocolate chip or orange and cranberry. There are generally discussions about not eating the toppings while preparing the pancake muffins and they usually fall on deaf ears, but this does not distract the enjoyment that all the participants get (me included!) from the process!
Preheat the oven to 170°c and grease the muffin trays.
It is better to add the chocolate chips or dried cranberries after putting them in the muffin holes in the trays.)
Confession time; our kids have fairy bread when we really need to go shopping, but haven’t quite made it. Normally when I need to wait for Simon to return from work as I can’t stand the idea of braving the supermarket with three children in tow. Have I mentioned how much I really hate taking children to the supermarket?! I recently discovered that taking Ophelia was far from the mother-daughter bonding time I was anticipating. I made the mistake of attempting to use the self service scanner and she managed to reset not one, but two machines in the space of 20 minutes. I really don’t know what she was doing to them. She’s two, and she managed it twice! We had to go through the tills instead. I had to take a couple of really deep breaths to prevent me from having a tantrum on the floor of the supermarket. She remained oblivious to my frustration and continued to chat to everyone with whom she could make eye contact.
it would be fun for them to make the pudding. I had been wanting to try Fairy Bread and Butter Pudding for a couple of weeks, but wanted to leave it for a special occasion and this seemed to be it. I was somewhat concerned that the sprinkles would just dissolve or leak their colour out. They did do the latter a bit, but it looked really fun and everyone had a lot of fun so I am going to declare it a success. You could use darker coloured sprinkles and they would then be more visible.
Preheat the oven to 170°c fan.
pastry brush.
triangles.
Crack the egg into the milk and mix together thoroughly.
it is organised chaos, I found them and started to wonder what I could make with them. My initial thought was to combine them with lemon in something. But, while looking at my list of ideas of things I would like to make with the kids oatcakes jumped out at me. Then I realised that we also had some parmesan left in the fridge from making pesto and decided to combine the two. I also like the alliteration of parmesan and poppy seed! The latter was, of course, a big factor!
butter and mix with a wooden spoon.
Flour your surface and the rolling pin and roll out the oatcake mixture as thin as you can (some bits of ours were thinner than other bits) and cut out biscuits with the cutter.
It seems that Ophelia thought that the oatcake was playdough as she insisted on poking and prodding it while cutting out the rounds. I can understand why she thought that, and I didn’t begrudge her a bit of time doing that and she didn’t have the patience or concentration to cut out all the rounds on her own.
Soda bread is made without yeast. The bicarbonate of soda was traditionally activated with soured milk. Instead of soured milk, it is more common now to use either buttermilk or a mixture of milk and natural yoghurt. The iconic cross dividing the bread into quarters helps the bread cook through, but when reading many soda bread recipes, I learnt that traditionally it was said the let the fairies out. This makes me smile and that is how I will put it next time I am asked why we are scoring bread!
in and squishing and squashing the dough with my help to bring it all together. She was desperate to put her beloved apricots in it, but they didn’t make the cut this time. She wasn’t bothered for long when she saw the raisins and dried cranberries though. That is one good thing about the short attention span of a toddler!
fingers.
– it is usually used for apples in our house for crumbles and pies etc)
Once you have made all the potatoes all curly, cut each long curl in half so they are smaller and put 
them in the large bowl.
them in the oven to cook. Ours took 35 minutes and were turned half way through baking.
Everything is better with Nutella right?! It did make them a lot messier too so they never ended up being eaten on the way home from school, only at the table to try and contain the inevitable mess! We did get 16 evenish looking pieces all decorated the same – we added an peanut on each of the slices to try and make them look elegant.
Preheat the oven to 160°c fan and grease and line a brownie tin.
onto a cooling rack.