Making lunch again

Here are some more damper creations we made for lunch. This is Mickey Mouse

This is a man and two rocks
This is a man being hanged. Cheerful I know.

Making lunch

Yesterday the kids were asking for playdough and it was nearly lunchtime so the obvious solution was damper. This was what we used to do for lunch when we were home educated and we had run out of bread (yes, my mum is a genius) Here is a picture of the creations we came up with.

As you can see firstly the writing has turned blue and is now underlined ??????

Secondly we used food die to make it more interesting. This resulted in patches of colour on some hands and entirely blue hands on one child.

Needless to say we had fun.

Toffee

One of the children and I decided toffee would be a fun thing to make, so we rang up my mother to get the recipe and began. Sugar, water, vinegar, green food colouring, stir till sugars dissolved over low heat, bring to boil without stirring, go outside to play and it turns a beautiful brownish colour instead of green and smells and tastes distinctly burnt. Also it turns out that super heated sugar and water snaps and cracks when dropped into a glass of cold water. Uncertain of how to dispose of the unusable and seriously hot mixture I ran cool water into it in small doses until it was cold and then poured it into a horse paddock. Today there will be some happy horses if they find it.

We tried again after dinner (this time leaving out the step where we leave it and do something else) and it worked beautifully. We have clear, green toffee that looks like glass and is rock hard and clean rather then slimy. I also cut up an apple into slices and we made little toffee apples which were delicious if eaten at once. The juice from the apple dissolved the toffee over night and it ended up at apple floating in syrup. But last night it was really good.

Cooking

This is another blog post thingy about cooking which makes two or three in a row I think.

I have spent a lot of time in my life cooking cakes and biscuits and things. When I was little it was one of the ways mum spent one on one time with me and my brother and sisters. She was smart and refused to cook with more then one child at a time, now I can see why. I think of all of us, I am the one who enjoys cooking the most, I taught three other kids to cook from scratch (not packets) before I turned 14 and now I cook something with the kids I look after about once a week.

I had stopped cooking for pleasure though, I cooked dinners out of necessity, morning teas and suppers because they were needed and since I moved here, cakes and biscuits because a child wants to make them. I had forgotten the pleasure of just cooking because you feel like it and not for any reason. The difference is time and choice, if it is someone else that suggests cooking, it is their choice of what to make. If it is for a function or event there is a time limit about when and also what you will make. Somehow these take some of the pleasure out.

Now that I am almost entirely in charge of the family dinners (my boss is NOT fighting me for it) I am finding a pleasing kind of responsible feeling, and planning ahead novelty, I had not expected. When I cook just for myself, there is a bit of that, but I can make it when I get hungry, rather then to a time table, and make what I feel like eating, without reference to others.

Cooking by myself while listening to music I like, planning meals for the week and what I will make for afternoon teas, cooking without time pressures, this is a useful and simple pleasure.

cooking dinner

On Tuesday I needed to make dinner since people would not get back till 6 at the earliest. There were what looked like beef strips thawing to go in the slow cooker and when it came to the time to put them in it turned out to be mince meat. I deliberated what to do and decided to make a lasagne because I could.

I fully intended to check that all the ingredients for the layers were there BEFORE I started but forgot until the mince was cooked. I looked and there were only 3 sheets of lasagne pasta stuff left so I decided to try my hand at pasta making (which I have done before) and spent a happy half hour making a mess and some pasta successfully (approx. 1/2 a cup of plain flour to 1 egg makes a hard ball which you roll out) This is easier with a pasta roller but I didn't have one of those so I used a glass as a rolling pin. It worked and lasagne succesfully completed in spite of a slight drama with the white sauce.