May 2012 archive
May 26
Making Beef Casserole and Beef Puff Pastry Pie for Busy Eaters the Easy Way
What do you do when you are too busy to cook but not too busy to eat a good meal? You find ways to make your life easier without compromising your balance diet…this is one of my very easy yet yummy recipies, even my 3 (nearly 4) year-old can make it…some say Iam cheating as I am using prepack spice and ready puff sheets. Cheat or not, it is easy to make, yummy and a balance meal.
Ingredients
500-700 g Diced beef
200 g Diced carrots
200 g Diced potatoes
150 g Sliced mushrooms
1 Sliced medium onion
2 tbsp oil
150 ml water
0.5 to 1 Colman’s beef casserole sachet (or you can marinate your beef with herbs, soya sauce, salt, sugar, wine, sherry depending on your taste, but for this post, lets concentrate on making your life easy and use ready packed spice…with no MSG or artificial colours or preservatives of course!)
2 x 320 g Jus Rol puff sheet
Method
1. Place all ingredients in the oven roasting bag provided (note, these are special oven bags, do not use ordinary plastic bag if you don’t want to eat melted plastic!)
You can do this the night before storing it in the fridge until you are ready to cook, perhaps when you come home from work!
2. To cook, preheat oven to 170 degrees C (150 degrees C for fan assisted).
3. Place the filled oven bag in the middle shelf and bake for 2 hour 15 minutes.
Note if you bake it at a higher temperature shorter time, your beef will not be as tender.
When this is ready….you can dig in or to make puff pastry pie, read on…
4. Preheat oven to 220 degrees C (200 degrees C for fan assisted) .
5. Unfoll your pastry sheet on a lined baking tray and spread with your yummy casserole to make a big pie. Cut the sheet to smaller portions if you want to make smaller pies. Leave some sheets so that you can wrap your beef casserole into a big neat parcel or many mini parcels.
6. Seal the sides and cut the top to allow the steam to escape whilst baking.
Optional….add cheese on top!
7. Bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.
Soooooo Gooooood! Yummy meal made easy!
Dinner today will complete with yummy moist choc cake known as the Ultimate Devil’s Food cake!
May 16
Joys of a Nursing Mum: Weaning
For most mothers chose to nurse their young, I bet you can not agree more when I say most mothers have worries about establishing nursing in the early days, then find it difficult to wean the baby off without baby screaming bloody murder! I am one of the mummies!
Whilst searching the web on ‘How To’ I looked at the usual websites which helped and guided me in the early days….(La Leche League International , Breast Feeding Basics, Baby Centre)
…mostly suggest that the baby is weaned off gradually dropping a feed at a time, increasing solid…bla…bla…bla…then i found this website BabyZone which has a link to The Old Farmer’s Almanac . This is where it gets interesting!
In the old days, it is common for farmers to use astrology…mainly the moon to embark on certain tasks from sowing to harvesting crops without the need to watering plants ever…apparently the farmers went further to determine best dates to cut hair to promote growth or dates for cutting hair to prevent growth, …this gets better when the ‘best dates’ included dates to begin diet to gain weight and dates to begin diet to lose weight! How cool is that!
Naturally, the website provided what I was looking for ….weaning dates! Have a look at The Old Farmer’s Almanac’s Best to Calendar weather you want a date to go on a diet, quit smoking, start on a project etc… Try it and tell me if it worked…I will be trying the next recommended date for weaning for sure…no harm there…
definitely beats Ewan screaming for me to nurse him every 2 hours day and night!….What sleep, I know that I can function with 2 hourly cat naps…sleep is so overated! 
May 12
Making Beetroot Chinese Steamed Buns
It has been awhile since I posted anything. We have been busy…Ewan has started cruising and teething…so all hands on deck (or rather all hands on Ewan in my case).
This recipe is similar to Making Spinach Chinese Steamed Buns….just swap the spinach for beetroot and adjust the liquid content as you mY not have to add any milk (I didn’t need to add milk in a few occassions) I used 1 whole pre cooked/steamed beetroots chopped in my Kenwood Food Processor.
Beetroot is apparently good for the heart! So eat up! 
For the filling, as I don’t have much time to make elaborate things these days, I placed a dollop of jam (any flavor, be it Nutella, lemon curd etc) to entice my boys (not that they need much encouragement to whollop the buns in minutes)!
May 10
Review on My Food Processor (Kenwood Multi Pro)
Under construction
One of my most used kitchen gadget! Though I must say some of the attachments are a waste of space. Stay tuned as I will try to describe all the attachments which apparently have 34 functions.
