Famous biscuits

"Mum! These biscuits should be famous!"

"Shall I put them on my blog then?"

"Yes! And don't forget the rules."

Much as I think the Beautiful Girl has radically over-estimated the impact of this little blog, these scrummy biscuits are most definitely worthy of note. Crisp, buttery and with a faint tang of lemon, they came about because the BG received some new biscuit cutters for her eighth birthday from one of her friends and wanted to use them STRAIGHT AWAY. A quick Google turned this up on the BBC Good Food website - easy peasy, though short on 'rules' (which, as Monica Geller and I both know "help control the fun").

For your budding chocolatiers...

Wait…. a…. minute. I might be just about to write something mildly topical. Hold on to your Easter bonnets, because, just in time for the school holidays, when you might be in the market for a fun activity for children, and Easter, when you might have a large amount of chocolate lurking around, here’s this!

Yes!

What is it?

Umm… Rocky road? A sort of chocolate collage? The result of an accident in a sweetie factory?

Read on, reader...

Actual cooking by real children

We're supposed to interest our children in food by allowing them to get involved with the selection and preparation of food and I'm all for it. Perhaps today after the children have cheerfully completed all their homework we'll slip into our matching Cath Kidston aprons, and work together carefully and co-operatively (perhaps while doing some close-harmony singing) to produce a healthy, satisfying meal that we will all enthusiastically yet tidily consume, while conversing politely about the day's events. After we've shared in the washing and cleaning up perhaps we'll probably retreat, laughing, to the sofa where we'll enjoy some improving literature before bed. Yes, yes I'm sure that's how it will go.

Fish pie

I didn’t much like fish pie when I was a child, I seem to remember. Possibly it was the colourlessness of it – white fish, in a white sauce, topped with white mashed potatoes. Maybe I thought it was a tad bland, taste-wise, too. Or maybe it was just because it was my brother’s favourite.

Now I love it. There’s just something so natural about the combination of fish and potatoes (like in those fishcakes). It’s a comforting, comfortable, rainy-day kind of food.

We all love chips

I don't have a problem with frozen food - why would I? Freezing is a great way of keeping food 'fresh' without adding nasty ingredients. If it weren't for frozen peas, GB wouldn't eat any vegetables at all (let's draw a veil over the fact that his preferred way of eating them is in their still-frozen state, with a spoon...) and I really love those bags of mixed berries you can buy (I think Sainsbury's Basics version costs all of £1 a bag) which make the most fantastic smoothies.

But I think I take some persuading when it comes to oven chips. Because it just takes so little time and energy to slice up a few potatoes, sprinkle them with olive oil and maybe a few herbs and/or spices, and shove them in the oven. And while a bag of pre-prepared 'lightly spiced oven wedges' will cost you £2.47 a kilo and cook in 18 minutes, according to the packet instructions, Maris Piper potatoes cost 78p a kilo and, when cut into wedges, cook in about... 18 minutes.

In which we make a gingerbread house

It's hard work, making all these magical memories, isn't it? It's Christmas Eve and the children broke up from school a week ago. I tried to get as much of the shopping, wrapping and general preparation done ahead of time in order to be able to gaze in hushed wonder at the twinkling Christmas lights, take long walks through frosty fields and generally drink in the awe and majesty of this special time of year.

Let's have two minutes' silence to mourn the death of another lofty ideal.

The reality is that the children are simultaneously exhausted from a busy school term, hopped up on all the sugar they've come to expect as an inalienable right, excited at the prospect of a visit from you-know-who and bored/frustrated with all the endless WAITING. It's the perfect storm, and it has resulted in plenty of shouting, crying and sulking. The kids have also been pretty badly behaved.

One accomplishment I am proud of, though, is our lovely gingerbread house. Do you like it? OK, OK, I know, I know, a nano-second spent Googling 'gingerbread house' will yield some amazing specimens (like this one) to which ours does not begin to compare. BUT as my Dad always says, "if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly" and I can honestly say that the children and I got a lot of pleasure out of completing this project together. I'd like to think it will become an annual ritual.

First blogging challenge...

Here's a picture of some bread to give you a clue as to what I came up with...

It gets kinda lonely around here (not that I want to guilt-trip you into leaving comments. Much). So I decided I would dip a toe in the blogging community pool, so to speak, in order to try and make some connections. How? I hear you ask. Why, by participating in a food blogging challenge, of course.

There are tons of these out there in Blog Land. They seem to consist of various bloggers getting together and coming up with a theme for a monthly (or one-off) recipe-related challenge in which they invite fellow bloggers to participate. Other bloggers create a recipe to fulfil the brief and submit their entries to the challenger (or 'host', as I believe they're called) for them to collate so we can all compare notes as to who has the worst photography skillz (erm... that would be me).  Not really. I mean, so we can see what recipes everybody came up with and hopefully get some new ideas for our own cooking along the way.

I came across this one via Dom at the Belleau Kitchen (thank you! You're an inspiration!):

and decided to try and come up with an idea. This is a monthly blogging challenge on the subject of ... you guessed it... breakfast. Check it out here. It's being hosted this month by Susan at A Little Bit of Heaven on a Plate. (Hello, Susan! I hope you like my entry!)