Skip to main content

Monthly Munch: October 2015

A mixed month.  We enjoyed visits from Graham's sister, Graham's parents, and my parents (not quite all at once!).  We suffered with lots of night-time waking, and sick boys during half-term.  We celebrated Toby's birthday.  I finished work, which made me happy and sad at the same time.  And we put the clocks back, which means it really does feel like winter.


Toby

Look at those cheeky grins!

- learned to ride his bike without stabilisers!

On the Tissington Trail


- is learning phonics with sign language at school.  He regularly gives us demonstrations.

- got a remote control car for his birthday, and got the hang of driving it straight away.


- loves to chat, but sometimes gets a bit stuck while he remembers what to say next: "Well... I mean... well... the thing is..."

Theo



- can sing "E-I-E-I-O" at the right time in "Old MacDonald had a farm".

- dances along to "Gangnam Style" (Oh yes!).

- loves aeroplanes.

Favourite book: 1001 Images of Aircraft
- is gradually starting to produce recognisable words, although "haaa" can mean hot, hand, hair or hole, depending on context.

Thankful for:


- a nice walk along the Tissington Trail


- a good place to work for the summer

- "Thanksgiving dinner" in October with all of our parents

Recipe of the Month - Blueberry Cheesecake Pots


I made these for dessert on Toby's birthday.  The recipe is slightly adapted from a raspberry version in Feelgood Family Food by Dean Edwards.  They're beautifully quick and easy, and because they're so small, you've probably got all the ingredients on hand without having to go and bulk-buy cream cheese.

Base
6 Nice or plain biscuits (1.5 oz)
1/2 oz butter
1/2 oz desiccated coconut

 Topping
5 oz cream cheese
3 oz Greek yoghurt
1 1/2 oz honey
blueberries (I used frozen) or other berries

 For the base, put the biscuits in a bag and bash them into crumbs.  Melt the butter and stir in the coconut and biscuit crumbs.  Press into the base of four small containers (mine were tealight holders in another life) and put into the fridge to set.

 For the topping, whisk together the cream cheese, yoghurt and honey.  Taste to see if it's sweet enough, and add a bit more honey if you want.  Put 8 or 9 blueberries on top of each biscuit base - no need to defrost if they're frozen - then spoon the cream cheese mixture on top.  Finish off with a few more blueberries, and leave in the fridge until you want to eat them.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...
2 comments
Read more

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess.  This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story.  Everything went right and it was a lovely day.  For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong.  I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing.  Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off.  Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok.  But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know?  Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil.  Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the...
2 comments
Read more

On having an accent

Back in the olden days, when it was a major undertaking to get from, say, Bristol to London, or even Bristol to Weston-super-Mare, and so most people didn't bother, it is said that you could place people within 10 miles or so by their accent. Now that we've built motorways and everyone spends their days whizzing up and down them, you have to go a bit further to get your accent noticed, but moving 3700 miles from Bristol to Texas certainly does the trick. Of course, I don't really have an accent - I speak quite normally, thank you very much, but everyone else talks funny around here, so naturally I stand out as different. It's been a strange experience to be marked out the minute I open my mouth. About the second thing everyone says to me is, "You're not from around here" or, "Where are you from?" Even though we talk the same language (well, almost), the way I speak says I'm a newbie, a stranger, something exotic. Fortunately the thir...
1 comment
Read more