How wonderful to spend a spring day in the garden and just ‘be in the moment’ among scented plants, warm breezes and bubbles blown by a happy little girl.
In the moment
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Summer dinners for happy kids
A failsafe dinner I was very happy with recently was a quiche made on the principles of the ’4 Ingredients’ recipe book – with a frozen sheet of Pampas butter puff pastry, sour cream, leeks & bacon (yes! he passed the bacon/ham challenge), accompanied by iceberg lettuce and potato salad made with homemade failsafe mayonnaise, and tinned sweetcorn. This could be served to anyone and they wouldn’t know they were eating FS food! What is even better though is that Bradley, at 9 and a half years old, made the whole quiche himself from start to finish and enjoyed every minute! It is the first step of his education in learning to feed himself as an adult, as given his food intolerances, if he is going to survive out there in the big wide world, he will need to know how to cook.
In my day …..
What a lovely thing – father and son making Airfix models together – you can’t buy that sort of quality time.
Work in progress
Treat & Treat?
Halloween, my favourite night of the year, and one I am going to embrace with even greater enthusiasm next year. I’m already making plans to introduce the tradition to our street, and to educate the masses that it is NOT American and is in fact an ancient pagan harvest festival which travelled across the Atlantic with the Irish immigrants, and came back to British shores after many years, Americanised. Jess did however get a lot of lollies from the neighbours, but she was only one of a handful of kids and their parents out there taking part. We are going to have to think more about some fun ‘tricks’ as that part of Trick & Treat seems to have disappeared – these days it is all about the treats!
All ready for getting treats, but no tricks
Hungaree at Cuboree?
It would be nice to think that packing your child off to Cub camp would mean less work for a while – not so in my world. The preparation, extra shopping and pre-cooking of all food for one child for a whole week’s worth of food has been a huge burden on me for about 3 weeks. However, now that the Esky is packed up with all the failsafe alternatives to the main camp menu, I can now rest assured that Bradley will not only have a great time doing the camp activities, but will eat well too. I had to pack Baker’s Delight bread, Mountain Bread, grated Colby cheese, margarine, home made mayonnaise, pear in syrup pots (Coles), homemade piklets, pure maple syrup, home made cakes and rice puff slices (Fed Up Cookbook) & Philadelphia block cheese. For dinner alternatives I made a bolognaise sauce (mince, leeks, grated carrot, chopped celery, water, salt, cornflour to thicken), chicken slices (sprinkled with garlic salt before cooking in Crisco sunflower oil), and home made sausages (which is a long story, but we got there in the end!). So NOW I can relax as it is all now in the camp kitchen, ready for next week’s camp. He is also going with a few low chemical lollies from www.littlelollyshop.com Bon appetite, son!
Many a slip …
Us suburbanites packed a lunch, emergency blankets, flares and sat nav, and headed off into Melbourne for a visit to the Icehouse to meet friends for an afternoon of skating. We all did very well considering most of us had never skated on ice before. Afterwards we had a well earned hot chocolate (or hot milk with white sugar for the failsafer among us)!
Walk like an Egyptian
We had a great day 2 weeks ago at an Egyptian themed party with friends. We found a fantastic Queen of the Nile costume for Jess and played ‘mummies’ by wrapping Bradley & Jess up in toilet roll. We played The Bangles and had a ‘walking like an Egyptian’ competition, and did camel and scarab beetle crafts. And also had middle eastern fare to keep up our energy for all the fun.
