thegingerbreadmum

The most important meals of their lives

Posted on June 11, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

For children in Africa, breakfast isn’t just the most important meal of their day, but it could also be the most important meal of their lives. Starting the day with a full tummy gives them the energy to go to school and the energy to concentrate on learning. Education has the power to break the cycle of poverty; it can turn despair into hope.

The UK charity, Send A Cow, have published an e-book celebrating the importance of the first meal of the day as part of their Break…Fast appeal to help children in the poorest parts of Africa start each day with hope, potentially changing their lives. The Most Important Meal of their Lives features women and men who have made remarkable achievements. These women and men, who changed the lives of others dramatically, all had the choice to eat breakfast. If they hadn’t started every day with a full tummy, would they have changed the world? Maybe not.

Send a Cow researched what these great people liked to eat for breakfast, writing down the recipes for the food that helped them reach their potential. Now you can also start the day just like some of history’s greatest women and men, including Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Mother Theresa and the Apollo 11 astronauts.

If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen my versions of some of the Most Important Meals over the last few weeks. Here are some of them. I also breakfasted like Amelia Earhart and Jane Austin.

Mahatma Gandhi secured independence for India and inspired freedom movements all over the world. When he was in London, he liked to eat porridge and cocoa.

My peaceful breakfast:

Albert Einstein believed in the benefits of a vegetarian diet. When he lived in Germany he liked eating fried eggs for breakfast with something drizzled over them (download the book to find out what!).

My brainy breakfast (I was initially sceptical of what Einstein poured over the top, but it actually works very well):

Rosa Parks became an icon in the battle against racial segregation when she bravely yet quietly refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. Her featherlite pancakes have an extra (very American) ingredient which make them very yummy (download the book to find out what it is!).

My quietly strong breakfast:

While the book is free to download, any donation you make, big or small, before the end of June 2014 will be doubled by the UK Government. Your donation will help Send A Cow provide seeds, tools and livestock so African families can grow enough food to feed themselves.

Tomorrow morning when you eat your breakfast, don’t take it for granted. Take a moment to think about the importance of food and take a moment to think about the power of food. Food has the power to change lives. Food has the power to change the world.

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Posted in breakfast, recipe, review and tagged #BestStart, Amelia Earhart, Apollo 11 astronauts, breakfast, famous people's breakfasts, importance of food, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Send A Cow, The most important meals of their lives, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill. Bookmark the permalink.

Mini savoury bread puddings

Posted on June 4, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

When we were doing our Kingsmill Great White Challenge, I didn’t just want to eat bread in sandwiches or as toast. After a quick search online for ideas, I decided to try making savoury bread puddings.

Not only are these puddings a brilliant way to use up older bread, but they’re also great to use up any crusts or end pieces that your family doesn’t like eating. I have a few bags in my freezer of crusts leftover from school lunches which I would normally make into sugar-free French toast, but now I think they’ll be made into savoury bread puddings!

Please excuse my approximate amounts in the recipe. This is a very forgiving recipe, so even just 2 sausages would work. The only important thing is making sure there is enough liquid to moisten all of your bread chunks.

I made my savoury puddings in a large muffin pan, but you could easily pour all the mixture into a loaf tin and eat it in slices instead.

To get your munchkins involved in the cooking, forget about cutting up the bread and get them tearing it up instead. And I’m sure they’ll love mixing all the ingredients together too.

MINI SAVOURY BREAD PUDDINGS

Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 30-40 mins
Makes 6 mini puddings

1/2 onion, finely diced
3 or 4 uncooked sausages
1 cup milk
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 tbsp fresh herbs such as parsley, thyme or chives, chopped
salt and pepper
approx. 4 slices of bread, roughly chopped into cubes about 3cm square
oil of your choice (I used rapeseed oil)
extra cheddar cheese for sprinkling on top

Preheat oven to 180C.

Remove the casings from the sausages by cutting down the length of the sausages and peeling off the casings.

Heat a small amount of oil in a medium-sized frying pan over a medium heat. Add the onion and sausage, and cook for about 5 minutes until both are cooked, stirring to break up the sausage meat. Take off the heat and allow to cool a little.

In a medium-sized mixing bowl, mix the milk, egg, 1/4 cup of grated cheese, chopped herbs, and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Add the sausage mixture and then stir through the bread (if the mixture is quite wet and runny, add a little more bread; if there isn’t enough liquid to soak through the bread, add a little more milk).

Allow the bread to soak up the liquid while you lightly grease a large muffin pan.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared pan, sprinkle over a little extra cheddar cheese and cook for 30-40 minutes until golden brown on top and cooked through.

If you want to make your mini puddings into turtles, use half a cherry tomato for the head and pieces of soft cheese triangles for its legs and little tail. His mouth is a small piece of soft cheese and his eyes are cress leaves. I also garnished the plate with cress (grown by Nicholas!).

Variations:

Bake the mixture into a loaf tin and eat in slices
Add some grated apple while you’re cooking the onion and sausage
Use bacon or uncooked ham instead of the sausage
Add some chopped fresh spinach to the finished mixture

What do you do with your leftover bread?

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Posted in family, lunch, recipe, snack, toddler and tagged fun food, Kingsmill Great White, leftover bread, savoury bread pudding. Bookmark the permalink.

The Kingsmill Great White Challenge

Posted on June 2, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

I do love a challenge, especially one that involves food, so when Kingsmill invited us to take part in their Great White Challenge I jumped at the chance.

For three days we had to replace our normal loaf of bread with Kingsmill Great White and use it as creatively and healthily as we could. Our creations also had to have the ‘wow’ factor, kind of like The X Factor but with sandwiches instead of singers!

I don’t usually buy white bread, especially not for Nicholas, although I do secretly love a slice of white toasted and slathered in butter. Thankfully Kingsmill Great White contains as much fibre as wholemeal bread with 7.0g fibre per 100g (interestingly Kingsmill Tasty Wholemeal contains 6.2g fibre per 100g).

Nicholas, unlike his Italian papà, loves toast and sandwiches, and happily eats them every day. However, he’s recently gone from happily eating his crusts to refusing to eat them.

But back to the challenge. As soon as I heard the bread’s name there was only one possibility for me – we were going on an undersea adventure in search of great white sharks!

Mask and snorkel? Check!

Shark pjs? Check!

We actually had a false start to the challenge as it was postponed a week at the last moment, but I didn’t want our efforts to go to waste. We had turtle toast with peanut butter and a teeny bit of nutella for breakfast to celebrate World Turtle Day. Then Nicholas very excitedly told me when I picked him up from pre-school that he’d eaten TWO sharks at lunch (and there were only crumbs left as evidence). Two great whites already spotted!

On to the official challenge. On Friday we had ‘under the sea’ sugar-free French toast for breakfast, jellyfish and fish sandwiches for lunch and some shark fin carrot soup for dinner. I made the jellyfish tentacles from the leftover crusts and (shock, horror) they were the very first things Nicholas ate! Number of great whites spotted – 1

On Saturday morning a fishy in a hole gave us lots of energy, then later our Playmobil friend went a little crazy when she spotted not one but two great whites lurking in our salad sandwiches. Number of great whites spotted – 2

We started our final day of the challenge with crab toast (again with peanut butter and a little bit of nutella) inspired by one of Nicholas’ books (and the crab legs, made from crusts, were the first to be eaten!). I then used some of the bread chopped up to make healthy mini savoury bread puddings for lunch and I made Nicholas’ into another turtle (this is also a great way to use up any crusts or end pieces nobody eats). And finally, in the evening, we had summer pudding (another fab way to use up older bread). Unfortunately my octopus turned out more like a spider, but he still was very much appreciated! Number of great whites spotted – 0

Total number of great whites spotted – 5!

We had lots of fun making and eating our creations, and I loved see Nicholas enthusiastically eating his crusts 😉

You can see lots of other wonderfully original and healthy creations by other bloggers by searching #KingsmillGreatWhite on Twitter or Instagram. Kingsmill also have a fantastic free Lunch Book with recipes all created by kids (Hayley’s Funky Turtle is definitely my favourite).

Some of the other bloggers who did the challenge and their fabulous creations:
Boo Roo and Tigger Too
Mummy Mishaps
Mummy Mum Mum
Mummy’s Space

Disclosure: we were compensated by Kingsmill for participating in their challenge. My opinions are honest and my own.

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Posted in cute lunches, review and tagged #KingsmillGreatWhite, cute food, cute lunches, fun food, Great White bread, Kingsmill, Kingsmill challenge, Kingsmill Great White. Bookmark the permalink.

Review: a2 Milk

Posted on May 30, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

For my regular readers you know one of the things I like experimenting with in the kitchen is making dairy-free versions of recipes I love. It’s not only because I have a dear friend who’s lactose intolerant, but also because I’ve had periods in my life where dairy has seemed to have been a contributing factor to horrible eczema.

Cutting out dairy products during those periods was incredibly difficult for me. I love dairy! I love milk, I love cheese (the smellier the better!), I love yogurt, I love ice cream…

My Aussie grandparents had a house cow. ‘What’s a house cow?’ you might be asking. Well it’s when you don’t live on a farm, but have enough backyard for a ‘pet’ cow who keeps you supplied with milk! Because of my grandma and her love of dairy, I can’t eat cornflakes. This is because, as a very little girl, she got be used to eating cornflakes not with milk but with cream! I’d happily munch through a bowl of cornflakes and cream now, but it’s not the healthiest start to the day.

Anyway, I love dairy and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve married a man who loves dairy too. We get through 12 pints of milk a week (I think that’s almost 7 litres)!!! But hubby complains of bloating and I’ve also started noticing my tummy going from a reasonable size on waking up to being much bigger after even a small breakfast.

Enter the absolutely lovely Lindsay who hand-delivered some a2 Milk for us to try.

A2 milk was actually introduced in Australia many years ago (here in the UK we’re a bit behind when it comes to allergy-friendly products) and many people swear by it. People say it’s cleared up allergic rashes, stopped bloating and even improved behaviour in children. But what is A2 milk you ask?

To put it simply, cows’ milk contains protein. There are two differents types of protein (A1 and A2). Interestingly all cows used to only produce A2 protein until a naturally-occurring genetic mutation in European cows changed the genetics, making A1 cows the predominant ones in European and UK herds.

The A2 protein is supposedly easier to digest. So it’s possible that for people who have a physical reaction from drinking milk (not those who’ve been medically diagnosed as lactose intolerant), may simply be reacting to the A1 protein in regular milk rather than the lactose.

Let me make that clear again, a2 Milk is not suitable for people with a cows’ milk allergy, galactosaemia or a diagnosed lactose intolerance.

Hubby and I drank a2 Milk for 5 days (and I also bought some more to use in cooking). While hubby said he didn’t notice any difference in his usual bloating, I believe I did notice a little reduction. The thing I noticed more though was the taste. We normally drink semi-skimmed milk and the semi-skimmed a2 Milk tasted far less watery and closer to whole milk. Cooking with the a2 Milk was no different to cooking with normal milk (well it is milk after all!).

Price-wise at £1.99 for 2 litres, a2 Milk is more expensive than the supermarket brands, but is similar to Cravendale and some branded organic milk, and cheaper than Lactofree.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep buying a2 Milk, but at least now in the UK we’re getting more choice. I think that’s the best thing about a2 Milk, giving people a choice and allowing some who’ve been affected by milk in the past to get back to enjoying dairy once again.

a2 Milk (whole or semi-skimmed) is available to buy at Morrisons, Tesco, Waitrose and Ocado and is normally priced at £1.99 for 2 litres (the only size available at the moment).

Find out more information about a2 Milk on their website.

Disclosure: I was given a2 Milk to try for the purposes of this review. My opinions are honest and my own.

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Posted in review and tagged A2 cows, a2 Milk, A2 protein, bloating from milk, lactose intolerant, milk allergy. Bookmark the permalink.

Yogurt Week: Yogurt-filled strawberry apples

Posted on May 23, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

We’re heading towards the end of Yogurt Week, but you still have until June 9th to enter the Food Stylist competition.

These yogurt-filled strawberries are a yummy quick snack or dessert that really aren’t any more time-consuming than chopping up strawberries and serving them with yogurt. Really!

I thought it would be fun to turn them into something else, so we have strawberry apples. Not quite in the same league as Heston Blumenthal’s meat fruit, but they’re still fun!

If you don’t want to turn your strawberries into apples, you could grate a little chocolate over the top (or simply plop a chocolate chip on top) or you could crumble a bit of biscuit over the top for a different take on a healthy strawberry cheesecake (you’re with me on the last one, right?!).

However you have them, they’re a yummy little healthy snack to pop into your mouth.

Wash your strawberries and pat them dry. Slice the tops off, then using a small spoon (or the tip of a sharp knife), scoop out the inside of the strawberry. If you want them to stand up, also slice a small piece off the bottom.

Fill the hollowed out strawberries with yogurt and decorate as you prefer.

To make strawberry apples, cut out leaf shapes from a green apple or pear, and stems from licorice, and position them in the yogurt.

I’m linking my yogurt-filled strawberries up to Eat’s Amazing Fun Food Friday, a weekly round up of fun and creative food.

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Posted in dessert, fun food, recipe, snack, toddler and tagged finger food, Fun Food Friday, snack, strawberry, toddler, vegetarian, yogurt. Bookmark the permalink.

Yogurt Week: Beetroot and Yogurt Dip

Posted on May 21, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

This is a super easy, super quick and healthy dip, celebrating the versatility of yogurt.

My often fussy little eater kept wanting to taste this as we made it. The wonderfully vibrant colour appeals to little eyes, just be careful of beetroot stains! If serving this to a little eater, give them a variety of foods in different colours to dip in. You can also use it as a spread in sandwiches or wraps.

You still have plenty of time to celebrate Yogurt Week as well as enter the exciting Food Stylist competition (details in my last post). Did you know there is enough plain yogurt sold in the UK every year to make at least 616 million kormas?!

BEETROOT AND YOGURT DIP

Prep time: 5-10 mins
Cook time: 0 minutes!
Makes 4 servings

250g cooked beetroot, peeled and chopped into chunks
70g Greek yogurt
A pinch of cumin
Salt and pepper to taste

Put everything into a mini food processor and blitz until smooth. Taste and add more seasoning and cumin if needed.

Other uses:

use as a pasta sauce by stirring through hot cooked pasta
serve over rice
use as a crepe filling

Disclosure: I was compensated by The Yogurt Council to promote Yogurt Week.

Yogurt Week: Italian-inspired yogurt cake

Posted on May 19, 2014 by TheGingerbreadMum

Today is the first day of Yogurt Week, the UK’s first celebration of that wonderfully versatile dairy product and everything you can make with it.

What can’t you do with yogurt? Eat it on its own or add it to both sweet or savoury dishes, it’s a great way to add some creamy lusciousness without adding too many calories. It’s also a perfect first food for weaning babies.

With its power-boosting protein and bone-building calcium as well as a load of vitamins, it’s no wonder that in the UK we spent over £1.2 billion on yogurt in the last year (that’s £38 every second of every day!).

To celebrate yogurt, The Yogurt Council is running a Food Stylist Competition for those of you in the UK, with a £1,000 prize package up for grabs. All you need to do is create and style your own recipe using yogurt. The competition runs until Monday 9 June 2014 and more details can be found here.

Discover more about yogurt, and lots of yummy recipes using it, on the Yogurt Council’s website and follow @loveyogurtuk on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Yogurt Week has been the perfect excuse for me to experiment with making something I often ate while living in Italy and have been wanting to try to make for a while.

‘Plumcake allo yogurt’ is eaten for breakfast and also as a snack for little ones. I have no idea why it’s called ‘plumcake’, especially when it has no plums (or anything resembling plums) in it! Aside from the misuse of English, this Italian yogurt cake is lovely and light, and yummy both for breakfast or afternoon tea. If you make it with low or no fat yogurt, you can have absolutely no guilt eating it for breakfast (remind yourself of the protein and calcium you’re treating your body to).

It’s an amazingly quick and easy cake to make, it’s really just beating the ingredients together, and doesn’t leave you with many dirty things to wash. It also freezes very well.

In making my Italian-inspired cake, I’ve only used ingredients that are common here in the UK. I also added some lemon zest as I like the tangy freshness it gives to the cake. (When brutally honest Italian hubby tried it, he quickly pointed out that plumcake doesn’t have lemon!) It’s just as yummy with or without the lemon; why not try both versions and tell me your favourite.

ITALIAN-INSPIRED YOGURT CAKE

Prep time: 15 mins
Cook time: 40-45 mins
Makes 1 loaf
Freezable

250g Greek yogurt
100ml light-flavoured vegetable oil (I use rapeseed oil)
zest of 1 lemon (optional)
3 eggs
140g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 175C. Line a loaf tin with baking paper.

Put the yogurt, oil and lemon zest (if using) into a medium-sized mixing bowl.

Beat the eggs until they’re light and fluffy (a hand whisk is fine), then beat them into the yogurt mixture.

Add the sugar, flour, baking powder and salt, and lightly beat until combined.

Pour the mixture into your prepared loaf tin and bake for 40-45 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.

Tip: if the top of your cake is browning too much in the oven but it’s not cooked, cover the top with a piece of aluminium foil to protect it.

By the way, can you guess what the most popular yogurt flavour is in the UK?

Disclosure: I was compensated by The Yogurt Council to develop a recipe using yogurt and promote Yogurt Week.

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