Cooking With Little Ones

For some reason Poppy has been really homely recently and wants to stay home rather than go out and about. To keep her busy we have been doing lots of cooking and she is really getting into it. Even Rosie has great fun joining in.

For Christmas the girls were given a New Annabel Karmel Book:

Its a great book and we have been trying some tasty but easy recipes. Today we made Aranciini. These are lovely little balls, made with risotto rice and with a delicious melted cheese centre:

These were quite tricky for little ones to make but we got there in the end. Poppy picked the recipe. We do not tend to eat fried food in this house so I wasn't sure what we would make of them but they were  really good and went down well with all of us.

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For pudding we enjoyed a lovely fruit brulee. To be honest I think they could have done with a little longer under the grill but they were pretty good. Somewhere we have one of those blow torches but could I find it? Shame!

Both girls helped with this and it was pretty easy to make and quite delicious:

I really enjoy cooking with the girls and feel as though I am teaching them important life skills.  Poppy also eats more when she has cooked it herself. There is none of the usual fuss resulting in her picking bits out, instead she happily sits there munching away.

Karen x

This is in no way a sponsored post we were given the book as a present and are just having fun with it!

Ive Been Cooking - Using World Foods Fusion of Flavours Chilli Coconut Marinade

Having recently been tweeting about meals I have been cooking for the family, I got tweeting with @fusiontasteteam who offered to send us something new to try. All excited I jumped at the chance. After all, although I do cook for my family, its pretty basic and far from exotic, so I could do with a bit of inspiration.


I was really excited to be sent a chilli coconut marinade to try. We love a bit of chilli in this house and I love anything with a hint of coconut so was keen to try it. However, with Husband away I decided to wait until he came back.

Well I have used it twice now and it is delicious, we would definitely buy again.


This sauce is both suitable for vegetarians and vegans too and being vegetarian myself I used it the first time round to make a delicious vegetarian stir fry.  I marinated Quorn chunks for 3o minutes and then stir fried it adding mushroom, onions, red & yellow peppers, carrots, peas and noodles. I also added a little more of the marinade to make a bit of a sauce. 


The result was delicious and went down well with the whole family:

 

I am vegetarian but the family are not so I used the rest of it to marinate some chicken and make some delicious chicken wraps with. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos but they enjoyed it and didn't leave a scrap.

If you are looking for some inspiration yourself check out World Foods Fusion of Flavours yourself.

Karen x

Please note, although we were sent a jar of this marinade to try for free,  I was not asked to write this post. We just loved it so much we wanted to share!

We Won A Big Top Cookie Maker

Last week I was very excited to receive a prize I had won over at The Crazy Kitchen.  It was a Big Top Cookie maker.  

We decided to make one straight away to celebrate Daddy coming home for the weekend (after 5 long weeks away). Poppy and I poured over the recipes and decided on a very large but exciting carrot cake one and I wrote all the ingredients down to take to Sainbury's.

Unfortunately I forgot my shopping list and couldn't remember what we needed. I improvised and picked up a chocolate cookie mix.  Although it may not be as impressive as the one we planned, the girls had great fun using it for the first time.

You can see for yourselves how much fun they had in this short slideshow:

Create a free slideshow

We are going to make the carrot cake one this weekend.

I am linking this in with the linky over at The Crazy Kitchen. I feel a bit of a fraud as we cheated using a packet but for some great recipes or to join in yourself you should check it out:

Karen x

For the record this is not a sponsored post. We just happened to win the big top cookie maker and had great fun using it!

Miniscoff For Mini People

For those of you who read my blog regularly you will know that I am vegetarian but the rest of my family are not and that I cook for us all from scratch. Rarely jars (unless Husband has done the shopping) and absolutely no ready meals in this house.  I am not a brilliant cook or a fancy one, tending to cook traditional meals like Shepard's pie, casseroles, chilli and spaghetti bolognaise. However, I was quite intrigued when approached by miniscoff to see what they have come up with.

I had never heard of miniscoff before so I looked them up on the Internet straight away. They offer "grown up organic meals for children of all ages". Recognising that most Mums want to cook for their families but in today's busy world this isn't always possible, they developed miniscoff! What I really like is that they do not use machines, they use real chefs and cook everything by hand in small batches. Each meal is then  frozen really quickly to lock in all the goodness, until you need it. Sounds like the next best thing to my cooking!! (haha).

A few days later I was delighted to see this package arrive at my door. It was a cool box full of meals with exciting names like Ali Babas Sheppard's Pie, Creamy Salmon Pasta and Chilli Yum Yum:

Quite a large cool box

Food was well wrapped and still frozen

These meals might be prepackaged but they claim they are delicious and healthy with: NO preservatives, artificial additives, colouring, fillers, GMOs, sweeteners and no unnecessary salt or sugar (just enough and not too much).

Instead what they do offer is "100% organic ingredients (approved by the Soil Association), premium cut meats from only the best British producers, locally sourced vegetables where possible and all the love and attention you'd put in if you made it yourself"). Got to be good right?

Okay time for my mini testers Poppy (aged 3) and Rosie (aged 14 months) to put them to the test (oh and they let Daddy have a taste too....for research purposes of course). They tested the organic curly wurly chicken and the organic planet spaghetti.

What I noticed first about these products was the size portion, they are very generous, in fact they look like adult portions.  I decided to split one meal between the two of them and then add vegetables on the side. This worked out perfectly for their little tummies.

You can cook these meals either in the oven or the microwave depending on time.  I did one each way and to be honest Husband told me they tasted just as good both ways. In fact he was really impressed and thought they were "pretty tasty".

I will let the photos do the talking next:

As you can see they both look happy. Not a scrap of food was left between them with either meal (much to Daddy's disappointment) and they gave them the thumbs up. Poppy even told me they were "delicious"! Great praise indeed. I was impressed to see there were good sized peices of meat and the sauces looked chunky and tasty.

Now as I said at the start, I do like to cook for my family so I am not going to stop just because I have discovered miniscoff. However, it would be very handy to have a few of these in the freezer for those extra busy days and I would not feel bad or guilty for feeding my children these. Also if I saw the name miniscoff in a restaurant I would definitley pick that meal for my girls. Quite lucky really as I have a freezer full of them right now:

My top freezer draw full of miniscoff meals

Miniscoff are currently available at Ocado and Abel and Cole.

Karen x

For the record I was provided with 6 of these meals to trial and review but all words and opinions are my own.