Thermomix heaven, anyone?

What's better than one thermomix?

Two, of course!

Oh yeah, looooove staying at the mansion!

It's a wrap

We're back home and settling in nicely, suddenly two kids and a husband feels soooo easy!

Although there are no nine and eleven year old girls to take my boys off my hands here, darn it.


Soooooooo, we

made hedgehog ( a joint effort of scrunching and munching)

decided it was too cold for swimming so we'd rather stand on our heads
(well, who wouldn't?)

not too cold for us though

tried to squirt the dogs

(the dogs have obviously had a lot of practice avoiding the squirt guns)

did a test run with the diving gear

went dog walking and kite-flying

learned the geee tar

and of course the drums too

gave the library some love

(though this one's going for the fire extinguisher, of course)

decorated cookies

climbed this set of stairs a bazillion times

had a picnic on the upstairs balcony

and took a photo of ourselves to prove we were there, haha

All in all, a fabulous time!

Oh yeah, and the thermomix kicked butt too.

(The thermie at this house has two jugs, so I didn't even need to wash between the really mucky stuff. Culinary heaven!)

Latest from my beloved Thermomix

Ok, I've decided to keep my blog mostly as is, there is just too much out there and I know most of it I'll get sick of shortly after I've changed it. I'm a bit of a Plain Jane when it comes to decorating. If you could see my house, ALL of the wall decorations are pics from the kids. So before that, it was just a tad bare. From a trained photographer, that is dismal I know...to be remedied one day in the distant future.....along with actually shooting more than happy snaps again....But for now, it's clouds and I need to shoot me a header pic.

I digress.

Now check out this drool worthy bowl of yum...

Oh my, was it good??

Well, the kids and I ate it straight from the thermomix bowl, despite the fact there is a dirty great sharp four pronged blade in the bottom of the bowl, if that tells you anything, feral mother that I am.

And yes, I made them use spoons so no one lost any digits.

I found this recipe on Quirky Cooking labeled Berry Foam, but the name does not do it justice. Foam reminds me of something scummy on the seashore and Mr 4 asked if he could paint with it in the shower.

He's thinking of, uh, shaving foam..

Which I cover the shower base in and tint blue to get a bit of relief from Mr 4's never ending energy and questioning on a rainy day. Thanks to my older sis, mother of three that she is for that idea.

I'll put the recipe here, as I changed it just a smidge from that which Jo on Quirky Cooking made, and she found it on a forum and changed it just a smidge from the original. (If you want a picture of how this recipe should be presented, please check out Quirky Cooking, Jo is much more civilised than I)

Berry Foam

• Whiz about 80 grams of rapadura on speed 9 for 20 seconds:

• Add 300-400 grams of frozen berries or other frozen fruit chopped up. Whiz for 30 secs, speed 9. (I found I had to insert the spatula and help it along as per making sorbet)

• Insert the butterfly, add 2 egg whites and 2 teaspoons of orange juice and whip for 3 mins on speed 4.

Done!

But none left now...

Chocolate sorbet in the thermomix

Here it is, and this is where I found the recipe, from Jo at Quirky cooking.

It was soooo good I cannot do it again any time soon as I just couldn't help eating way too much of it!

Self control, where are you?

Ah that's right, you do not reside in my kitchen...

Trying out the rapadura

A short while ago I mentioned rapadura, which is a sweetener made from evaporated sugar cane juice.

I managed to order some online, funnily enough it was cheaper for four 250 gram bags than for one 1 kilo bag so I went with the four.

This is what Jo at Quirky Cooking has to say about rapadura...

"Rapadura is evaporated cane juice - it's also known as Sucanat. It is just the juice extracted from the cane in a press, which has then been evaporated to dry it into granules. It has not been heated and spun to change it into crystals, so it has a grainy texture.

Because Rapadura is not heated, the vitamins and minerals have been retained. It also still has the natural balance of sucrose, glucose, and fructose, and contains components essential for its' digestion. It is metabolized more slowly than white sugar, and therefore will not affect your blood sugar levels very much at all. Refined, crystallised sugars will raise blood sugar levels, and the more refined the sugar, the more it raises your blood sugar."

See the rest of Jo's post about sweeteners here.

Now rapadura is a light brown colour, and in taste is vaguely reminiscent of brown sugar. It has some uneven sized grains so depending on what you want to use it for, you may want to grind it further. A thermomix is perfect for this but I'm sure any high powered blender will do.

So far I've used it to make lemonade syrup, a batch of snickerdoodle biscuits/cookies and just tonight I made a chocolate sorbet (in my Thermomix) with rapadura in it.

And oh my gosh, that sorbet was goooooood! I'm thinking the delightful writer of Gone Chocco might just appreciate this one and I will be sure to take a photo of it when I pull out the rest tomorrow and polish it off.

I digress.

Cooking with rapadura does not seem to be much different than cooking with regular sugar. The cookies turned out as expected, the sorbet as I said was sickeningly good and the lemonade syrup worked well too, the syrup gaining a beautiful deep brown hue and a bit of a brown sugar flavour. As I am a brown sugar fan, that's no problem for me.

Please excuse the manky tomato puree label left on my lemonade syrup bottle, I am generally too lazy to remove labels.




So in my quest to convert my family to a more whole food diet (um, a couple of the above foods notwithstanding...) the rapadura will stay. I just need to find somewhere to buy it in preferably larger and cheaper quantities.

If I find a decent supplier, I'll let ya all know.



Oh, and I'm taking delivery of some live kefir grains early next week, so that will be an interesting experiment too....watch this space.

Smarties, smarties, yum, yum yum!

I've gotta say, I looove smarties, or pebbles to you kiwis. M & Ms too, but now that I know smarties have no artificial colours, I prefer them over the other. Mind you, the colours are not perfect, not quite as vibrant as their rival but I will give up bright glaring colours in the interests of good health. Overlooking the fact that they still have the same amount of fat and sugar in them that they always did, ahem.

Well, I made some cupcakes in honour of my birthday and decorated them with guess what? Right. Only because my piping the buttercream technique still leaves a lot to be desired, read, was a total flop. I will, very soon, get some decent piping nozzles. I will. I WILL. But I haven't yet.

So I started off delicately placing one smartie into the center of what was supposed to be a rosette of buttercream but looked more like a buttercream cow pat, but after a few of those I thought bugger it, tipped the smarties out and upended the iced cupcakes into them. And the end result was it looked like I did exactly that.

See?





Something else I have discovered along the way for any Thermomixers out there, do not try and make icing sugar from raw sugar in your thermomix and then try and make buttercream icing with that icing sugar. I don't care what my thermomix handbook says, it is NOT as fine as icing sugar, so twice my buttercream has been grainy, before I cottoned onto that fact. Which reminds me, I forgot to buy any REAL icing sugar at the store when I shopped today. Dang.
And the raw sugar imparts it's own flavour and colour tint too.

Note to self: write ICING SUGAR on the shopping list.

The other thing I did with the enormous bag of smarties I bought was to make smartie cookies, which was the actual reason I bought the smarties in the first place. Honest. And I really did need such an enormous bag. Mmm hmm, I did.

Yum, but not good enough to share the recipe. I'll have to eat them, in the name of research....

Ok, I did share it as it was fairly moreish. It's here,
at Gone Chocco, check out all the chocolate goodness on this Aussie site!

Ooooh, Thermomix on Master Chef!

Yes, I am a kitchen nerd and am watching Master Chef every night.

And tonight (actually it was last night but this post got way laid at 11.30 pm by a teething 15 month old), low and behold, they had a Thermomix on the kitchen bench in master class. I was so excited, for no particular reason, hahaha!

And, it was also in use in the foodie segment on the nightly Tour De France coverage. So it looks like real chefs do use them, it's not just something the thermomix consultant made up. Although I never doubted.....

Mast Chef were making sabayon, which involved "add all ingredients, set the machine, finished!" Yum, but my thought was that's not going to help the contestants any, unless they have a thermomix themselves.

I am loving my thermomix more and more every day at the moment, as I'm trying to make more of our food from scratch, which is somewhat time consuming, so when I am getting behind, I kick the thermomix into action to help me out.

Today for example in short time I made pumpkin soup and bread rolls for lunch, both in the mixer, then a very fast but really delish spaghetti bolognaise in it for dinner.

Oh thermomix joy! Get one if at all possible, you won't regret it!

Oh, and have a look at this poster. Hehehe, this is me, dessert all the way!

In case you're at all curious, I'm getting some of my latest images off AllPosters.com. If you loooove a picture, click on it and it will take you to their site, where you can purchase a copy of the poster if you so desire.

I'm getting quite a collection....

Apple custard tea cakes

I made some of these yesterday...

Apple custard tea cakes

Don't they look great, all round and puffy, just promising to be moist and moreish underneath. And they were, mmmmmmm. Yes, were, because there are none left now, hehehe!

I found the recipe on sugarfishblog, posted by Ruth.

I did change a couple of things just to work with what I had around and what I know my family will eat. You'll notice no apple on top? I know kids (and hubby) would more than likely just peel it off. Yes, I am embarrassed to admit that....

I used wholemeal spelt flour, no custard powder (didn't have any) so just increased the flour by that amount, I only had one egg so added an amount of pureed apple approx equivalent to an egg, and used some leftover thick custard I'd made in the thermomix.
And mixed it all in the thermomix.
And I didn't do the butter and cinnamon sugar thing at the end either.

So really, they are probably only vaguely similar to Ruth's recipe
but gee they were droolingly good nonetheless.

Have a spare 10 minutes? 

Go and whip up a batch, then call me and I'll come over to help you devour them. 
See you soon!

Another thing my thermomix is GREAT at....

Ok people, hold a garage sale and sell your juicer, blender, food processor, rice cooker, electric mixer, your children and anything else not nailed down, because all you need in your life is a thermomix. And they are just a tad pricey. Well, maybe it's all you need in the kitchen, rather than all you need in life, that may have been a little generous.

The latest use for mine has been juicing. The sort of juicing where you put the whole fruit in the thermomix, add water and turn it on. I put in a carrot, an orange - peeled, some strawberries, frozen blueberries and water. Two minutes high speed......sounds like a concrete mixer with rocks in it is spinning on your kitchen bench......done. I could have run it through a sieve and not caught any lumps, it was super smooth. Did it taste good? I have no idea, I am so blocked up that all food is tasteless right now. Be a great way to lose weight, disconnect your sense of smell...

Look what I've been given!!

Someone in my life rang up a few days ago and told me they'd bought me an early birthday present.

Can you imagine what it is?

A Thermomix TM 31!

I'll try and describe it, but please, if you don't know what that is, either follow the link or look it up. It is a bit hard to describe; yes, it's another kitchen appliance but it seems to be so much more. For example, in making pumpkin soup from a recipe (which I don't usually do, I'm more of a throw-it-all-in kinda gal), the machine chops the onions, sautees them, weighs your chopped pumpkin, cooks it, then blends it all to perfection. So in making soup, all I used was a chopping board, a knife and the thermomix. Oh, and a spoon to slop in a bit of concentrated veggie stock.

Gee, I think I'm sold!

It comes with a recipe book that has all the basics and more, I can't wait to try some more out. I can see myself divesting the kitchen of a few of the appliances we already have in favour of this one. I think I am going to be forever indebted to this person, who is not even family, she obviously knows I'll get a lot out of it, as she has one herself.

I am in culinary heaven!