Category: Accompaniments

Sebastian, our eldest, has inherited my curly hair. As his is a darn sight shorter than mine, it curls beautifully. He hair is the envy of pretty much every woman we meet who has paid or spent many hours with a curling iron at some point or other to put curls into their hair. Seb’s hair does add an inch or two to his height depending on how recently we have had it cut, so when measuring his height it does have to be flattened! One of his school friends said Seb’s hair was cool as it looked like he had brains outside his head! Don’t you just love the hearing about the world from a kid’s perspective?!

Anyway back to food. Simon’s favourite frozen chips are curly fries. Maybe now the introduction paragraph makes more sense?! The children do tend to want to try pretty much everything that daddy eats. So I decided that we would try to recreate curly fries for dinner. Now we have made this recipe a couple of times. Seb and Ophelia always gobble them up no questions. One time, Atticus, our resident potato-hater, was happily munching on them until he remembered that they were made out of potato and then he decided he couldn’t abide them!

Despite making them several times, I have epically failed to get any nice pictures of them. They just don’t seem to be particularly photogenic. The kids loved making them and happily experimented with spice combinations, but they just don’t look wonderful. This meant I was somewhat reluctant to blog about them, but then I thought did the kids make them (yes they did), did they have fun (yes they did) and did they eat them (yes they did) so I might as well share the recipe.

Equipment

• Apple Peeler and Corer machine (we have a kitchen craft one – it is usually used for apples in our house for crumbles and pies etc)
• Baking sheet lined with baking parchment or a silicone mat.
• Smallish bowl filled with water
• Large bowl (we used Pyrex)

Ingredients

• 1 jacket potato per child (I know this sounds like a lot, but when peeling it and coring it you don’t end up using it all.)
• 2-3tbsp vegetable oil
• 1-2tsp of spices of your choice depending on how many potatoes you have and how much your children are used to spices (we have used any combination of cumin, paprika, garlic salt, cinnamon and ground coriander)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170°c fan and line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or greaseproof paper.
2. Fix the apple peeler and corer to the surface and attach your first potato. Turn the handle to start peeling it. All of my kids find this process completely fascinating. It is harder to do with a potato than an apple, but it does work. You will be left with the potato skin which can be composted or binned. A long curly bit of potato which needs to go in the bowl with water and a middle ‘core’. I tend to eat the cores cooked for my dinner so they don’t go to waste so I put these in the water with the curly fries. Peel all the potatoes this way.
3. 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.
4. Put the oil (we used 3tbsp for 3 potatoes) to the large bowl. Add the spices you want. My kids really like any combination of the above spices. Last time we used 1/2 tsp garlic salt, 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 1tsp cumin.
5. Shake the bowl side to side (not up and down!) to coat all the potatoes in the spice and oil mixture. You could cover the bowl with a plate to prevent any spillages, but we didn’t. In the above video Seb shows us how it is done.

6. Spread them out on the lined baking sheet and place them in the oven to cook. Ours took 35 minutes and were turned half way through baking.

As I have mentioned previously, these don’t look great, but the kids seem to find the whole process using the peeling and coring machine mesmerising. Seb is always very excited when he can use this piece of equipment. I also love it when the kids ask to smell the spices and try to guess what we are going to use. They always get cinnamon and garlic right. In time I am hoping that they will recognise more scents as we use them more frequently.

 

 

The kids went to stay with their grandparents earlier in the summer. It seems they were, much to our relief, delightful. We were informed upon our return that Atticus had taken a liking to his grandmother’s lunch one day and had eaten quite a lot of bulgur wheat. This was surprising on a couple of counts; firstly in the past he has shown no interest in any of the grains I have offered him and secondly he seemed to eat all the vegetables that it came with including leeks. It was one of those moments when I had the feeling that another child was being described!

We should have taken advantage of this interest in a new food stuff sooner as by the time we had got round to purchasing more bulgur wheat a couple of days later, Atticus had become less enthusiastic. Maybe we didn’t cook or present it the same way his grandparents did. Or maybe he secretly wants to keep us on our toes and eating certain foods for grandparents and not for us is his way of doing so. Speculation aside, his reaction to the bulgur wheat that he previously professed to love now seemed to be tepid at best.

A couple of years ago I made a strawberry and cucumber salsa and I remembered how odd I thought the combination was and then after eating it how happy I was with how it turned out. With this in mind, I decided that strawberries and cucumber would make a nice addition to a bulgur wheat salad along with basil, orange zest and orange juice. It may well sound like another crazy combination, but it does work and makes a lovely summery salad. Other additions could include dried apricots or raisins and if you want a bit of crunch some sunflower or pumpkin seeds. But having eaten too much cake recently, I decided that I should really try and make a slimming world-friendly recipe that the whole family could enjoy.

Ingredients

• 250g bulgar wheat cooked according to packet instructions and cooled
• 100g cucumber
• 100g strawberries
• 10 basil leaves
• Zest of 1/2 an orange
• Juice of 1 orange
• 1tbsp white wine vinegar
• Seasoning

Method

1. Cut the cucumber and strawberries into small pieces.
2. Count out the basil leaves and chop or tear into smaller pieces.
3. Add the cucumber, strawberries and basil to the bulgar wheat.
4. Zest half the orange (I generally need to help the kids with this) and add to the bulgar wheat.
5. Juice the orange. The kids enjoyed using the juicer with a bit of help. Mix 1tbsp of white wine vinegar with the orange juice and add to the bulgar wheat and combine well.
6. Mix well and season with salt and pepper. Refrigerate until you want to use it.

This salad was enjoyed with both fish and chicken. It has to be said, Atticus picked all the strawberries and cucumber out and only ate some of the bulgar wheat. Ophelia happily gobbled the whole lot up and so did I! It definitely did make a change from a potato salad or coleslaw with our lunch.

We currently have two weeks left of the summer holidays 2018. Don’t get me wrong, we have had a wonderful time as a family together creating memories, but I am ready to get back to more of a routine. My really long list of ideas at the beginning of the holiday has only been partially completed. However, my list was stupidly long and contained things that we were really never going to attempt to do. For example, bullying Simon into constructing a Wendy House out of all the wood scraps we have accumulated in the garden. Funnily enough this hasn’t been done yet!

I was looking for a wallet-friendly way to spend my Wednesday with the kids. An activity that I could fit around a trip to the park with Seb’s school friends and Ophelia’s swimming lesson. Then I remembered the slow cooker. We haven’t used it in a while and it would be perfect to fit around all the other little bits we had planned for the day.  As I was racking my brain for a recipe idea, I realised our supply of tomato ketchup was perilously low. This made me realise that we could in fact make tomato sauce in the slow cooker. Yes it is a rather labour intensive way to get a jar of tomato sauce, but the kids would have fun chopping vegetables and then mixing it all up.

This recipe was excellent for improving knife skills for all the kids. The boys did a really good job with various knives for chopping different vegetables. Their confidence has really improved with frequent practice over the past 6 months. Ophelia, age 2, stuck with a table knife for chopping tomatoes and she is even holding the knife the right way around now!

Ingredients

• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
• 500g tomatoes
• 3 sticks of celery
• 1 red onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• Fresh ginger (about an inch long), peeled and grated
• 1 bunch fresh basil
• 2tsp ground coriander
• 200ml red wine vinegar
• 70g soft brown sugar
• Seasoning

Method

1. Chop the vegetables and place into the slow cooker.
2. Grate the ginger and add to the vegetables.
3. Gently bash the garlic cloves with a wooden spoon to loosen the skin and remove it, then slice and add to the slow cooker.
4. Add the tinned tomatoes.
5. Pull the basil leaves off the stalks and add them to the pot.
6. Measure out the red wine vinegar, brown sugar, and ground coriander and add to the mixtures.
7. Season to taste and mix well.
8. Turn the slow cooker on low and leave uncovered.
9. After around 5 hours turn the cooker to high to help it fully reduce.
10. Turn it off when the sauce looks very thick with little liquid remaining. This took ours around 3 hours.
11. Allow to cool fully and then blend. (We blended it the following morning.) We found that a stick blender didn’t make it as smooth as we wanted it so ended up using the food processor to achieve a smoother ketchup.

This tomato sauce will keep for 2 weeks in the fridge or 2 months in the freezer. My recommendation would be store it in batches in the freezer if you don’t think that you will finish it all in 2 weeks as it really is too yummy to waste.

Ophelia is the tomato lover of our children. She loves them nearly as much as I do. The surprise was how much Atticus enjoyed the tomato sauce. As our resident ‘fussy eater’, he will often refuse tomatoes and will try and sneak them to his sister when I am not watching. But he devoured the ketchup on his homemade burger and chips and even asked for more!