February 23, 2012

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Cooking with the kids

January 19, 2012 By

One of the great things that you can do to entertain the kids is to get busy in the kitchen. You can start off with something really fun like fairy cakes. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with these – no matter how many helping hands are stirring the mixture.

There’s a whole range of family favourites that they can cut their baking teeth on – like pizzas with faces, muffins, chocolate brownies. Once you’ve done a bit of novelty baking, though, there’s plenty of other stuff that you can get kids involved with in the kitchen.

For example, children can soon learn to prepare their own breakfasts.  You can start off with the easy stuff – like how much milk to pour on your cereal, how to put the toast in the toaster (and get it out safely). Pretty soon they’ll graduate onto knowing how to make porridge and pancakes. Of course, you’ll have to be there for anytime the hob or oven is required, but by getting them involved in meal preparation at a young age you’ll be doing them a favour – helping them to grow up into independent young adults. How many people did you go to university with who could barely boil an egg?

Other meals children can easily get involved with making are things like Spaghetti Bolognese and pasta carbonara. You can also teach them how to make pies and pastry.

One of the hardest things to accept when you first let children help you in the kitchen is the mess that it creates. The best way to deal with this is to let it happen, and include tidying up at the end of the cooking time as part of the deal. It makes the whole experience more fun for the family. To begin with, the children will be as rubbish at tidying up as they are good at making the mess, but with a little perseverance they’ll get the hang of it.

If you’re stuck for ideas, SuperSavvyMe.co.uk has all kinds of fun recipes for you and your kids to get your teeth into.

 

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Healthy sandwiches

December 1, 2011 By

When it comes to sandwiches, baking your own bread is the easy part; deciding what to put inside it is where it gets difficult!

First thing’s first: make sure the bread you make is the best choice for you. If you’re really not a huge fan of wholemeal or seeded bread, then it’s perfectly fine and healthy to stick with white bread as long as, overall, your diet is healthy and balanced.

There are countless different sorts of filling that you could put inside your sandwich. In fact, to be honest, you can put practically anything in a sandwich, as long as it tastes good to you!

Try putting curry inside your sandwich! It could also work in a wrap or a pitta bread pouch. To make this into a nice healthy sandwich filling try using as little oil as possible when cooking the curry. There are lots of ingredients apart from chicken and meat that you could use to make a curry. Try an okra curry, a curry with potatoes, or even a simple yet tasty aubergine curry. You could also try steaming the vegetables before cooking so they will cook properly without all the excess oil. This will also reduce the amount of sauce inside the curry so it can be put inside a sandwich slightly more easily.

Roast dinner ingredients, as odd as it may sound at first, is also a popular filling to put into a sandwich, but roasted vegetables, or chicken, or potatoes mixed with some low fat yogurt with a hint of lemon and some hommous topped with tomatoes, is a nice variation to your typical roast sandwich using last night’s ingredients. So give it a try! Using leftovers from dinner and turning them into a sandwich is the best way not to waste food when you don’t have to, while it also helps to save money, time and to keep a healthy diet at this time of year!

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What is a Bagel

April 6, 2011 By
Salmon Bagel

Salmon Bagel

A bagel is a bread product which is formed into a round ring and then boiled before baking. Some makers steam the bagel rather than boiling it, making traditionalists label the final product anything apart from a bagel. [Read more...]

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Artisan Bread

March 9, 2011 By
Artisan Bread

Artisan Bread

The term Artisan bread is precisely what its name suggests : bread that is made, instead of mass produced. Baked in tiny groups instead of on a massive line, artisan bread differs greatly from prepacked superstore loaves [Read more...]

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