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.

Comments

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks! I learnt a new word today! I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian . Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist. Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials. All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal. That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter. So why the need for a fancy new word? Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal. But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course. The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

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 number of peopl

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog