This year is the year of the Dragon, a very auspicious year in the Chinese calendar. New Year starts on 23 January and the celebrations continue for the next 15 days. We’re celebrating tomorrow evening with a Chinese Banquet and if you’d like some ideas then check out some of my recipes here or listen again to my Feeding the Family show
Feeding the Family aired today at 1pm so at 9am I was busily prepping rum truffle mixture with David Greenwood-Haigh’s wonderful Haitian Rum. It’s not actually David’s rum but David, who is the chocolatier at Divine Chocolate, does a lot to raise money for Haiti and he kindly brought me back this fabulous rum. As David was coming on my show today I thought it only polite that I’d make up his Rum Truffles so we could try them on air.
To make sure I had the right quantity of rum I had to try the mixture (well, it would be rude not to) and it took me back to skiing, days before children, when we’d stop mid morning for a hot chocolate and rum. Actually rum ganache goes really well with porridge, with porridge in one hand and the spoon to lick out the bowl of ganache in the other it went down a treat. A little dubious about rum at 9am but the sun is past the yard arm somewhere in the world and as long as I pretend I’m there it’s OK.
David was a fabulous guest as always, and give us insight in the invention of truffles and ganache by the world’s first celebrity chef, Augustus Escoffier, if you’d like the hear the show and the wonderful story of truffle invention and where the word ‘ganache’ came from you can listen again to the show on BBC Oxford
My edible Christmas recipes are up on the site too to download, I’ll be making some more of the savoury spicy nuts for a do tomorrow night, they’re yummy.
The term Stir-up Sunday comes from the opening words for the day in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549. The collect is the prayer of the day that ‘collects’ up the themes of the readings during a church service. The original prayer used to start:
‘Stir up, we beseech thee’, - hence the term Stir Up Sunday.
‘Stir-up Sunday’ is the Sunday before Advent – the end of November – and everyone in the family takes a turn to stir the pudding with a wooden spoon from East to West (clockwise) in honor of the three Kings making their journey, with their eyes closed whilst making a secret wish. The sprig of holly is a reminder of Jesus’ ‘Crown of Thorns’. Holly also was supposed to bring good luck and is said to have special healing powers.
Another custom is to put silver or gold items into the pudding; each has a special significance:
- Silver coins are supposed to bring luck to whoever finds them in their slice of pudding on Christmas Day.
- A gold ring signifies that the finder will be married before the year is out.
- A silver thimble or button signifies that the finder will never marry and remain a spinster or bachelor forever, or if people didn’t want to upset whoever pulled out the thimble the meaning was changed to ‘having a lucky life’.
There should be 13 ingredients in the pudding to signify Jesus and his 13 disciples; my recipe has more ingredients because I think it tastes better.
Legends surround holly go back much further into human history. It’s one of the few evergreen trees abundant in England in the winter and as such was considered magical as remained green and bore fruit throughout the darkest, coldest season. The Druids believed that it kept it’s leaves and shiny red berries to help keep the beautiful throughout winter when the sacred oak lost it’s leaves.
It’s Stir Up Sunday today so gather the family together and make your Christmas Puddings and Mincemeat, I have some lovely recipes on my recipes pages, so check out
Chocolate and Ginger Christmas Pudding
Cranberry and Orange Mincemeat
I’ve been testing out the Philips Airfryer, this fabulous kitchen applicance produces my healthy, amazing muffins in super quick time. My Small Boy was off on a school trip and as usual I hadn’t got my act together to sort him out a packed lunch. He hates sandwiches so it’s always a challenge, anyway, cheese and sun-dried tomato muffins it was. It was 7.10am, he was leaving at 7.30am – stress city.
It took 3 minutes to heat up during which time I made the muffins, I admit that most people would probably take longer to mix up the muffins but I know the recipe off by heart as I wrote it and it’s in my new book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods. By the time the Airfryer was ready the muffins were in their cases and took only 8 minutes to cook, you can only cook 4 at a time but that meant total cooking time of 24 minutes plus 3 minutes to warm up so much quicker than heating up your oven. Small boy left the house munching on one savoury muffin as second breakfast (it’s 7.30am) with two in his lunchbox for his school trip – day saved, massive points scored on the Perfect Mum scale.
I was quoted in the Daily Mail on Saturday talking about this great piece of kit, check it out.
I had a great day last Saturday ‘being’ Tom Kerridge. Tom couldn’t make it so I was asked to take his slot and be the ‘big name’ for Saturday afternoon – no pressure. This went some way to make up for the fact that I was due to do book signings there but my lovely book wouldn’t arrive in time – another missed opportunity.
So with less than 24 hours to shop and plan I chose two recipes from my book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods - Beef Stroganoff with fresh noodles and Drop Scones with Blueberries, suitable from 9 and 12 months respectively. Went down a storm, tasted fabulous too and I had my glamourous assistant up on stage, Olivia, who comes to Saturday morning cooking club was dragged out of the audience to help, she was wonderful and we got her a huge round of applause at the end.
500 Baby and Toddler Foods has it’s own facebook page so please check it out, comment on it and ‘like’ it.
Does that sound like baby food to you? That’s how it should be, the whole idea is that the recipes are for the whole family to eat, yes you would need to puree it for little ones but they can still eat the same food so you’re not cooking different meals for the whole family. Life is too short, as a new Mum you need sleep, not stress.
This lemony garlic chicken is one of the easiest and cheapest dishes for supper. Work on the basis of 1 chicken thigh per child and 1-2 per adult depending how hungry you are. If you have an AGA then blast the dish in the roasting oven for 20 minutes before transferring to the simmering oven for at least an hour or it’s fine to stay in there for 2-3 hours, you may need to add a little more wine or stock if it starts to dry out.
This is a great family staple, it’s cheap – £2.50 for 6-7 chicken thighs, 30p for a lemon and similar for the garlic, use the bottle of wine you have to drink from. I am making an assumption that you do drink white wine, if not, use stock as it would be shame to buy a whole bottle of wine that would get wasted. You could always send it over to our house, it certainly wouldn’t get wasted here. Actually, just realised that’s what’s missing, it’s gone 8pm and I don’t have a glass of wine in my hand, this is so wrong.
This dish you can pop into the oven at around 2pm and it will be ready when the children get in from school, serve it with some rice or mashed potato and veg, you could always adapt it for a supper party version and serve it with a big green salad and lots of fresh crusty veg. Serve it in the roasting dish as the juices caramelise at the bottom of the pan and cry out to be mopped up with lovely bread.
The skin becomes lovely and crispy and the garlic softens as it roasts meaning that you share out the cloves, squeeze them out of their papery skins over the mash or crusty bread, smear the roasted lemon on top, dunk into the lovely juices collected into the pan and stink of garlic for at least 24 hours. Do you know what, it tastes fantastic so just make sure that anyone you want to kiss also eats the roast garlic.
I had to blog this email, sent last night from Diana Viola who reviews cookery books in the US for the website www.inmamaskitchen.com. I read her review of my new baby and toddler cookbook ‘500 Baby and Toddler Food
Hi Beverly,
This is nerve wracking, now I know how actors feel after the first night of a show when they await the morning papers for the reviews, so far it’s pretty fantastic.
This is another website/blog review of the US version of my book, by Real Mums, Real Views, love it.
It’s fabulous, I read it nervously, I think my book is great, I would, I wrote it and it was wonderful to read this from a font of baby and foodie knowledge that make up the wonderful team at In Mamas Kitchen in the US. Some of the recipes are up on their website too if you’d like to have a sneaky peak.
So thank you guys, I really really appreciate it. Fingers crossed the UK reviews are going to be as good.
The schools are back – how are the packed lunches going? Would you like some inspiration? We covered packed lunches on Feeding the Family on BBC Oxford on Friday’s show and Jo and I have some great suggestions as well as some recipes especially for children who dislike sandwiches.
Making packed lunches for children every day of the week, 36 weeks a year, that’s 180 packed lunches per child per school year. Now that’s daunting, how do you know if your child has actually eaten their lunch or just thrown it away? You don’t, unless you have access to CCT in their class, actually there’s an idea.
180 cheese sandwiches per day per year, or even splitting it into different sandwich filling each day can still be boring for you and for your child so try something different and encourage your children to help you.
Savoury muffins, make them at the weekend and freeze them taking one out each evening to defrost so they’re fresh and moist ready to go into your child’s lunch box the next day. Use my basic recipe and vary them by adding pesto, sundried tomato, parmesan or mozzarella cheese, ham, olives, whatever your child prefers, a few pine nuts maybe. They’re great for children to help with as you just stir everything together.
Flapjack, quick and easy to make and packed with slow release carbs to keep your child going throughout the day, add dried fruit, seeds or nuts (if they’re allowed at school) for extra vitamins.
Scones – my son dislikes sandwiches but loves cheese scones, change the cheese around, add fresh herbs or pesto to them or make cheese scones and fill them with ham and tomato or salad like you would a sandwich.
Flatbreads – OK I admit they take time but they are lovely and cheaper than buying them from the supermarket. Or make breadsticks instead and roll them in seeds, parmesan, oats, whatever you fancy.
We had Annabel Karmel on the show giving her advice on packed lunches too, so if you’d like to listen again or you missed it check out the link to Feeding the Family