In the kitchen with little time, little money and little people
It sounds a bit odd – making cheese on the campfire. You probably want to manage your expectations on this one – you’re not making a fine camembert, but it’s still a brilliant activity and a tasty spreading cheese to have on crackers or toast.
Campfire cheese uses a basic chemistry concept: irreversable changes. You can read more about making it into a lesson/life lesson/ conversation here. Continue reading “Campfire Cheese with Foraged Herbs”
These cheesy straws are a lovely snack for lunch boxes and last minute visitors. They can be prepared whenever you have time, and the pastry frozen – then just pop out a handful and bake when you need them. I was setting an Autumn scene for some photos I had to do, so we broke up the straws to make a ‘woodpile’. I was glad when the kids walked in and said ‘Oh, look at the brooms!’ Always useful when people can tell what you’re going for!
These cheesy straws can be made as straws, though simply baking them in rounds is okay too – I tend to freeze them as round biscuits, making them easier to use with dips. If you’re going to make brooms, I recommend that you use the stringy type of kids cheese, rather than regular blocks of cheese which crack rather than pull apart. And have more chives than you think you need as they break really easily too.
I also like to add paprika or rosemary to cheese strings – it just depends on what flavour you like, or whether you like something different from time to time! Also, you don’t have to add parmesan, it just heightens the cheese flavour. If you decide not to, just make another 50g cheddar cheese.
An odd side effect of growing your own food is that sometimes you have very small amounts of produce. For example, we harvested a handful of carrots this week, thinning out space for the other carrots to grow bigger. This gave us about 8 small carrots which is barely a snack of one person, never mind a side for three, so I had to think of something we could make that use the carrots to best effect.
I decided a good snack for a picnic we were attending would be Carrot and Cheese Shortbread. I know shortbread is normally a sweet treat, but why should it be!?
This recipe was a bit trial and error, but it worked out so well, I’m really pleased with it. And if we have another small batch of carrots I intend to do the same again, but freeze the dough so that we have ready shortbread whenever we want – I think it’s a great way of saving summer produce too! I’ll let you know how I get on with that.
In the meantime, here’s the carrot and cheddar shortbread recipe.
This week my home schooled kids are learning about France, because we’re heading off to Disneyland Paris in a few weeks. They don’t know this though – they think we’re going to Paris to learn about ‘old stuff’. We will spend a day in Paris too though, just to make sure their learning wasn’t for nothing.
One of the things you learn when learning about France, beyond capital city and population size, is food, and since we have very little by way of groceries at the moment (someone left the car door open, leaving the light on over night and us with a flat battery today. RAC finally reached us well after bed time tonight, so grocery shopping tomorrow!) I was quite literally faced with four onions, two day old bread and some cheese to come up with a dinner idea… you can see where I’m going with this, I’m sure.
One of the books we’re using for our studies at the moment is called France: Food and Celebrations* by Sylvia Goulding, with a bunch of recipes for kids to make, so while I could do this with so much more ease in the Thermomix® in 15 minutes, I still feel it’s really important for my kids to learn to cook traditionally first, so that they can understand the basics of cooking – and from there the sky is the limit.
For this French Onion Soup, I didn’t add the traditional Gruyere, so the kids’ just had a strong cheddar on theirs. I added some Chaource to mine. Chaource is a French cheese, originally manufactured in the village of Chaource in the Champagne-Ardenne region. Chaource is a cow’s milk cheese, cylindrical in shape at around 10 cm in diameter and 6 cm in height. It has a soft inside, like an already baked Camembert, and has a beautiful very mild blue cheesy tang to it. It’s really lush, a very unknown cheese in the UK and easily available from Tesco and just works in this soup. (Sorry French traditionalists!)
I had my 5 year old slice the onions (we use this ‘safe’ Pampered Chef slicer) and then stir them on the stove till they were translucent. Meanwhile my 3 year old layered bread and grated cheese in soup dishes. I poured the water in to make the soup, transferred everything to the grill and removed it from there again.
I should add here that this is probably a meal for two, but for one adult and two children it’s ample. Considering you’re eating a slice of bread and an onion with some cheese, it’s incredibly filling, and very rich.
It’s that time of year where I start thinking about snack box fillers for days out, picnics and camping weekends, and one snack type that we all like is a puff pastry cheese stick. Now, you can buy these pretty cheaply, but they’ve been in a box for weeks and have an almost human-lifespan shelf life, in some cases! They are so quick to make, and they are delicious. Kept in an airtight container they also last well – if you hide them away so no one can eat them, that is.
Now, I’d like to be all pious and tell you I made the pastry myself, and for budget reasons, I’d make large batches, but actually when I’m doing quick snacks, bought pastry is perfect. If you buy a roll of pastry, go for the most expensive one you can find. An all-butter pastry is delicious, whereas the cheaper ones with oil can have a bitter after taste.
You can vary and adapt the filling to your heart’s desire. Remember a lot of it will fall out when you’re twisting, so make sure to have a bowl or something you can ‘mess’ into so you can reuse it again.
Tip: It’s also useful to fill and slice the pastry on the tray you’ll put in the oven. It just cuts down on the spillage.
For this recipe I’ve used parmesan and smoked paprika. You can also use a combination of herbs, and a melting cheese. Great flavour combinations are:
