food

Baking Across America – Lowbush Blueberry Buckle

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I must admit, even having been to Maine and enjoyed their blueberries (and yes, even contemplated ways in which I could move to Maine), I only understood two of the three title words in this dish. Yet having left my February Baking Across America baking to the very last day of February (two family birthdays with a birthday party over the course of eight days had a bit of an impact), this dish kept coming to mind. It looked good. It looked achievable. It looked summery, which was appropriate for our last day of summer. I had to find the suggested alternative for graham crackers (digestives), and order them alongside sour cream and frozen blueberries, and then I was good to go.

This was one of those dishes that got started one day and finished another. Thank goodness for dry ingredients. After trying to break up digestives for a bit on Friday and then Saturday morning, I then remembered our new and lovely and powerful blender. Bliss. Blitzing bliss. Sugar and digestives and cinnamon looked like sand in no time. I discovered I cannot hold a knife in my left hand (come on, who does?!), so my Scottish crumble skills came to the fore. Sorry if that makes this less legit, but honestly, it was pure luck that the blueberries were tiny, as specified in the recipe, and not the giant ones of the previous packet. Aussies are not so particular about our blueberries as this dish specifies. 

I actually managed to get to the last step of the process before putting it in the tin before S came in hauling the ladder to help me. Then by the time she had washed her hands then told her sisters she was helping me then blown her nose and washed her hands again, it was actually time to put it in the oven.

This was one of those dishes that as I was putting it into the tin I thought, “This is too stiff”, and as I was bringing it out of the oven I thought, “Did I burn it?” Yet, having let it cool for several hours, slicing into it was a dream. A crispy promise of baked sugar with moist cake beneath. Goodness.

And because it was our last day of summer, we took a few pieces to a friend’s place for a swim in their pool. 

Which. Was. Glorious. 

We had it to ourselves. It was clear and summery and warm and just utterly perfect, and having a treat by the side of the pool made it the best swim of the season. Our host enjoyed a piece with me while the girls got straight down to the business of swimming. But after a bit, S was out and having half a piece before wiping crumbs from her face with her sleeve and getting back into the pool. I think she had three pieces in total. S and C relaxed on the deckchairs with a piece each when I finally had everyone out of the pool and I have been assured that it will be a welcome addition to lunchboxes. What a win.

Lamingtons

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Australia Day. It’s a bit of a fraught occasion, and understandably so. But until the powers that be come up with an alternative day that doesn’t have the issues the current date does, January 26 is going to be the day we celebrate the good things about being Aussie. Healthcare. Education. Low gun crime. Breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Venomous creatures galore. Creatures found here but nowhere else in the world. And our food! Vegemite, Milo and Tim Tams abound in lists of typically Aussie foods and are packed carefully for overseas trips to share with expats and the curious. 

Today, though, I wanted to make a staple sweet that is on offer at every decent gathering. One that is doused in coconut and so eaten by me in a combination of duress and national pride: the lamington. As it was invented just up the road from where I lived in high school, I feel a duty to like it and bring up my girls knowing this delight of sponge and chocolate and coconut that gets stuck in your throat and demands you take a swig of your beverage of choice. Even though I am decidedly not a fan of coconut, lamingtons are impossible without it, and also if anyone comes in and says “I thought I’d change it up a bit and use crushed almonds/chopped pistachios/extra cocoa powder/chopped cranberries” or anything else then my eyebrows will go down and my eyes will narrow and I will lament the way of the world. Lamingtons are very simple. Don’t stuff it up. Here goes.

Oh. This is the easy way. The achievable way. The “I’ll just make lamingtons” way. Not the way of making your own sponge and making your own jam and milking your own cows to make the cream. Not here. 

You will need:

Bought sponge cake, preferably the double rectangular variety. 

Chocolate topping or syrup that is not too thick. If it looks like it’s set to be a science experiment in viscosity, skip it. Or buy it and water it down a bit.

Optional: cream for whipping, and strawberry or raspberry jam. The sort of jam you would have found in the 70s, none of this 100% fruit business.

Desiccated coconut. Sigh. On the upside, it uses a lot so I currently have not much left.

What you do:

Whip out your baking paper or reusable baking paper. Cover a couple of trays with the paper.

Cut your sponges into bits. How big is up to you. I don’t think there’s a standard lamington size. I went with rows about 2cm wide then cut them into three, so about 4-5cm long.

If you are doing optional filling, whip some cream. It does’t have to be stiff peaks or anything, just a bit stiffer than dolloping out of the tub. I didn’t want to do all the lamingtons filled so I started with about 1/3 cup which was too much.

Prepare yourself. I move left to right, so I recommend sponge, jam, cream, tray. The bottom of each pair of sponges gets a bit of jam on its top. The top of each pair gets some cream on its bottom. If you have a helper, you may end up with jam on both bits. This is fine. We’re not entering these in a country fair or anything. Only a scraping of jam and cream is needed. Once spread, pop them together so jam and cream are touching and corners align, and put them on a tray. 

When you have all the filled bits that you want on a tray, put that tray in the freezer for about 15 minutes.

If not filling the lamingtons, just cut as above and proceed. The next left-right work station is sponge, a bowl for the topping, a bowl for the coconut, lined trays.

Squirt a generous amount of topping into the topping bowl. Pour a generous amount of desiccated coconut into the coconut bowl. Both of these will need top-ups as you go. 

Put a piece of sponge into the topping and flop it around using a fork or something. You just need a thin layer of topping on each side. Once coated, use the fork, Luke, to lift it into the coconut. Heap coconut onto each side and flop it around. The right amount of coconut will stay on the topping. Lift your lamington onto a tray. Done! Repeat the process with the remaining sponge bits and the filled bits from the freezer.

Because this is summer in Brisbane and the humidity is real, I put the trays in the fridge. This helps the topping stay put and not melt down the sides in a fit of ennui. If there are any left in an hour, probably transfer them to a container and probably keep them in the fridge. 

Best eaten with a cup of milk or a milky tea to save you from choking on the coconut.

Baking Across America – Bing Bars

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One of the things that will always make me feel like a kitchen goddess or just a half decent mum is if I bake something in the morning, before people are up for breakfast. We had a plan for Saturday and I imagined baking these Bing bars, breakfasting, then being able to take photos on our picnic blanket in the botanic gardens with dappled summer sun and warm blue skies and butterflies and green grass and happy children and … and life happened, instead. I prepped the night before (the virtue! the smug!), and was very glad I did because, if you haven’t tried this, pitting and chopping cherries to get 450g of them takes a long, long time. And then it was a Bad Night, where I was ditched from bed by E before midnight and she was awake and coughing and S was awake and awake and awake and Glenn wasn’t feeling great and I slept on the sofa and while it’s not such a problem it was also not very comfortable. 

Having been a Bad Night, though, meant that E and S both had significant sleep-ins, so I could get on with baking this without endless “Mummyyyyyyy” interruptions. Extra kitchen goddess points for simultaneously making scrambled eggs for breakfasts as well as Biscoff toast and juices and cups of tea and sourdough toast and oh look at that more scrambled eggs. As the cherries took a while to cook down into jammy goodness, I also tackled some of Washing Mountain and felt extra smug. 

This recipe was definitely not next on my list of what to bake from this book (Baking Across America by B. Dylan Hollis). I was planning on trying one of the northeast cookies, I think, but my mind just kept coming back to these. I mean, what even are Bing cherries? As it turns out, they’re cherries. Normal cherries. And Australian cherries are just sold as Australian Cherries, but Bing is one of the varieties grown and sold – Google has been my friend – so instead of resisting the urge and baking something else, I caved. We have abundant cherries at present so I didn’t even buy frozen, but risked buying two punnets and pitting and chopping them myself. Next time – and there will definitely be a next time as this was definitely a winner and has been definitely requested for lunch boxes – I will use frozen. 

I am not one for selfies, but if I were, you would have seen my face in various stages of delight to worried to concerned to wide-eyed to panicked to blissed out to shocked to satisfied. What a ride. I think I possibly cooked the cherries down a little further than the recipe intended, because when it came time to transfer the mix onto the base, it turned out to be toffee. Pro tip: make somebody else wait to do what they want in the kitchen so that they clean out that tough sticky mess for you. Ahem.

Maybe it’s my Scottish heritage, but rubbing cold butter into oats and flour and sugar just makes things right. It settles me. Makes me feel connected to generations of Scots bakers before me, even if the butter isn’t really cold because this is Brisbane in summer and nothing is staying cold for more than two minutes out of the fridge. I had a slight moment when it came to the egg wash, as I drizzled it on as instructed and in the moment it took me to pick up my pastry brush, all the egg was soaked into the topping. A valiant effort was made to no avail, so one portion of the slice is impressively tan while the remainder looks ordinary but bland.

One thing I appreciate about this book is the absence of serving numbers. Who’s to say if a cake will serve 24, 12, 3 or 1? Exactly. I cut this slice into 16 squares which is a perfect amount for sating the sweet tooth but not going sugar crazy. Girls, as mentioned, loved it. Glenn is not much of a sweet tooth so had a half piece – see, it could serve 32 if it was just Glenn eating it – and seemed to enjoy it.

I was determined to take some photos outdoors, so when I took the girls outside in the afternoon we also took out the picnic blanket. What a thrill! We were just in time for late afternoon sunshine. Girls were mighty disappointed to be not eating the rest of the slice, but did their best to sneak bites anyway. We clearly left some crumbs around because every dog out for an afternoon walk was very excited, and one owner even brought her dog right into our garden. Wild.

Baking Across America – Peach Cobbler

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“Mummy, whatever you’re baking in here, it smells *awfully* good”. With that ringing endorsement from C, here beginneth the journey of Baking Across America and a peach cobbler from Georgia. That is, as close as one can get when one lives in Brisbane and has zero access to Georgia peaches. However it is that they differ from Alabama peaches or Queensland peaches.

One of my Christmas presents from Glenn was B. Dylan Hollis’ book, Baking Across America. I have been devouring it whenever I can ever since. With books like this, I love to then make the recipes – I mean, duh. But in a methodical fashion, rather like Julie and Julia but without the stress. Being me, I would normally start at the beginning and be orderly about it. However, each area contains recipes with summer fruits and recipes without, and I know if I went through systematically I would give up fairly quickly from dejectedness over lack of ingredients. As it is, I have already sent my husband out searching for fresh cranberries without success and I will be taking girls with me for a full-on excursion in quest of them at some point. Peach cobbler was chosen because peaches and Brisbane summer seemed quite doable.

I ordered a box of imperfect peaches and let them ripen a tad, which meant that some of them did that weird thing of having foul spots while still being hard. Still, I washed eight instead of the instructed five and was glad I did. One was wonky on the inside, and two of them were tiny, so I figured this amounted to about the amount of five Georgia peaches. With girls watching Nightmare Before Christmas and Glenn relaxing on his sofa, I set to work and was instantly in a happy place. It has been a long time since I baked a dessert, or baked anything from a recipe book that was not for the purpose of lunchbox snacks or freezer snacks. Methodically slicing peaches and removing the flesh from the stone and transferring to a saucepan and repeating the process, knowing that this would turn into a tasty dessert, was an instant endorphin rush. I must do so more often.

This turned out to be a “trust the process”, er, process. I should probably point out here that I think I have both made and eaten cobbler once in my life before, and not any time recently. So my knowledge of cobbler process is limited and vague and reaching back a long, long way into my memory. Still, I expected peaches then batter, instead of melted butter then batter then peaches and juices then sugar, in a process that looked shockingly wrong and rather unphotogenic. Trust the process. Because, as I was fairly confident would happen, what looked entirely ugly and as if I had most definitely read the instructions entirely incorrectly, turned out to be exactly what it ought to be. A peach cobbler. Lovely soft cinnamon sugar peaches amid blobs of sweet batter. 

A surprise, though, was the ultimate in jammy goodness hiding in sporadic pockets beneath the dough. We’re talking not just scooping out as much as possible for the next serving, but letting out an actual gasp of delighted surprise followed by furtive side eyes so as to sneak more of it. It was almost black, and it was camouflaged with the spots of stickiness that had to be worked to the extent that I felt my arms had earned another serve, and it was amazing. 

Furthermore, this was one of those desserts that seemed to be a new creation the following day. I let the girls have a serve (with ice cream!) for morning tea. When cleaning up, I had a morsel of peach and ohmygoodnessme it had caramelised and gooeyfied and … I just can’t. It was glorious. 

Meal Prep Monday (21/07/2025)

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Not much happened this week by way of meal prep or snack prep or however you want to classify this. I have been sick. The girls have been a little bit on the edge but not too drastic, really. I have felt like I did when I had Covid nearly exactly three years ago, just not as bad, which is not surprising as I’m not currently 35 weeks pregnant. So. Not much happened.

I did manage to make chocolate chip cookies as a preventative measure. For girls, not me. I also made some Everything Balls as a preventative measure. For me, and apparently everyone. I love that this happens. I was halfway through rolling them into balls when S came into the kitchen for something like a third mandarin and just snaffled a ball. Glenn ate one of the mini cups last night and before I had finished covering the tops in chocolate tonight, he ate another. These are guaranteed to be eaten if I pack them in C’s lunchbox, so long as the she has eaten her sandwich (I have passed down certain traits for sure). 

Sandwiches and hard boiled eggs were also made today, but the eggs will have to find another way to be cooked as the best hotplate for them is suddenly cactus and only knows about off and full. Eye roll. 

I am having a good think, but I really think that is it for this weekend. In my defence, apart from the stupid sickness thing, one of my plans had been to use up our unexpected mandarin glut. I was still tossing up between mandarin marmalade and mandarin bread when E decided she was going to eat mandarins for afternoon tea one day and went through four of them and S is a great mimic so she had a few as well and suddenly we have not enough for anything much. Good.

Meal Prep Monday (14/07/2025)

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A few things happened this weekend. Friday was the Friday for a fortnightly funky food farm box of fruit and veg. I add a dozen eggs to this order because we love eggs. By the time we came home from the park at lunchtime, it was waiting for us at our front door. S very enthusiastically carried the eggs to the kitchen while I watched helplessly until she had speedily and carefully put them on the bench. 

Then through some glitch in the system, the other dozen eggs I had ordered to be delivered from Woollies – first extra large, then I had to change it to large, then that wasn’t in stock so it would be jumbo – well, it made me feel like a magician. Or more accurately, a magician’s assistant, most likely a volunteered audience member, as I found not one, not two, but three dozen jumbo eggs in our delivery. 

Having 48 eggs did affect my weekend food plans, I must admit. That, and the other thing that happened which was the hot water system beeping every 10 seconds on Saturday. Every. Ten. Seconds. No. Matter. What. It turned out to be needing a battery change. Yes, this was the day I found out they have batteries and yes, I had asked the internet and ChatGPT for help, and no, nobody told me this until our real estate phoned me and told me. Thank goodness we had some of the right size battery in stock. But this did mean that irritability was high, and that Saturday washing was put on hold. Baking took over.

So. Friday dinner was salmon bake from my childhood (5 eggs). Saturday morning breakfast was scrambled eggs (7 eggs). I made “sheet pan eggs”, as this person calls it, which is usually in our household baked by Glenn in a round pan and called eggy pizza. Same deal, though – lots of eggs (10), lots of vegetables, a bit of cheese, baked until set. Great for breakfast or lunch or a snack. Great to have on hand for when you ask a 4yo what they want for breakfast after the time you actually normally like everyone to be eating breakfast and the 4yo says enthusiastically, “eggy pizza”, and the first reaction is, “but it’s too late for that”, but the second reaction is, “but that’s okay because I made some on Saturday!” This one had broccoli, cherry tomatoes and capsicum in it. Also to be mentioned in the delivery oddity was an extra bag of frozen strawberries, which I hadn’t really wanted in the first place, either (I was aiming for raspberries). S helped me make strawberry and chia jam with some of our bonus strawberries. I made chocolate chip zucchini strawberry muffins (2 eggs) – these are a new favourite, I think – and zucchini and blueberry baked oatmeal (2 eggs). 

Sunday was prepping some sandwiches for school lunches. Today, with E home with me and both of us not well, I boiled some eggs (4 eggs) and made some chocolates. I think of them as “loaded chocolates”, as they are dark chocolate mixed with a hefty dollop of nut butter, and combined with, in this week’s batch, dried blueberries. There are, um, not as many now as were made this afternoon…

With other fried eggs for breakfasts, our 48 eggs are down to 12, which seems like quite a normal number, and I feel well-stocked for lunches and snacks and breakfasts. For now.

Meal Prep Monday (30/06/2025)

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Last weekend, I felt like a kitchen superstar. I baked SO much. In fact, the whole weekend was so exhausting I didn’t manage to post about it so I have photos just sitting in my phone, reminding me of the achievements if I scroll through looking for something. Sleeping girls, girls outside, random short videos of the tablecloth, work info, girls in pinafores for daycare photo day, row after row of a child’s forehead – pretty sure it’s E – closeup pics of the corner of the sofa, food, food, girls outside, food.

This weekend, I was not a superstar. At all. In any sense. For anything. If you set the bar low – really low – then yay! I did some things. I had all 3 girls dressed and respectable to go to a birthday party on Saturday morning at a not-very-close park. They were well-behaved. There was a present, wrapped in paper coloured in by my girls. We got there and back safely. Pause here while I think. Um. Nope. That was pretty much my achievement. 

But wait. I made pizza on Friday night, with dough made by me. (C asked for this a few weeks ago and it is how I used to always do it and now it is her new favourite way of pizza). This pizza – one (1) pizza – has fed us Friday night, and was added to Saturday dinner, and was lunch today for C because we had no bread and neither of us wanted to go to the shops on the holidays, and there’s still a bit more.

But wait. I made a lemony chicken and vegetable tray bake for dinner for Saturday night, which all the girls ate, and leftovers were my lunch today as well as incorporated into dinner tonight and I think there’s still a bit left for a half-lunch tomorrow. 

But wait. I made pancakes for Sunday breakfast, and because when they were mostly cooked, E came in and scrunched her face and told me she did NOT want pancakes, she wants an eggy – no, TWO eggies – she scored eggs for breakfast and not all the pancakes were eaten so C and I had morning tea pancakes today. They were my favourite recipe (using the Greek yoghurt waffle recipe here), and cooked in the love heart fry pan. A bit of a whim purchase, that pan, but my goodness me it saves mealtimes. S helped me make these, and C had a go at turning them which is rather tricky, I must say, but she did wonderfully. And because there are four hearts and four of us (Glenn had an early, early start), I could cater to all requests prior to the pancake-refusal-in-favour-of-eggs. Plain. Chocolate chip. Blueberry. Blueberry AND chocolate chip. And E ate some after she had demolished her eggs, too, actually. 

To be fair, this week and next are school holidays. We have Anzac biscuits in the jar from last weekend. Still some Everything Balls (I still don’t know what to call them), which are also stopping me delving into chocolate stores in the evening. I mean, not an actual store full of chocolate, like a chocolate shop, or a cellar of chocolate, but … mmm. Wait. Chocolate supply. That’s a better word. We still have carrot oatmeal slice. We still have carrot sultana muffins in the freezer. We still have cottage cheese brownies in the freezer. Our freezer could do with being slightly less full. Ooh, and pizza muffins in there too. So you see, for all my not at all a kitchen superstar thoughts, it was enough. I have to remember that. Enough. 

Meal Prep Monday (16/06/2025)

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Friday and Saturday were fairly light on in the food preparation department. Cornflake cookies were made, which are apparently for me now. C, it turns out, doesn’t like the flavour of cornflakes, and E bit into a crunchy bit and hurt her mouth so apparently is never eating cornflakes or cookies ever again. Sigh. S has eaten some for me, but unless she spies the cookie jar, it will be Milo cereal for her. (Seriously. How do toddlers and preschoolers do this? She seems to eat nothing but Milo cereal and occasionally yoghurt. E had about 2 months when she was nearly 2 when I swear she just ate peanut butter and blackberries. That was an expensive time). To make up for the apparent cookie fail, on Sunday I made nut butter cookies and added chocolate chips to the tops and, guess what, nobody wants to eat them either. Make them without the chocolate chips and half the batch is scoffed as soon as fingers have braved the hot-from-the-oven cookie trays. It looks like I will be living on cookies this week.

Friday I also made a very healthy chocolate mousse then made it less healthy to make it more dessert-y and edible for girls. Thankfully, they had filled up on pizza dinner so I have chocolate hits ready to go in the fridge. Score.

Saturday was yet another flop which I will chalk up as future snacks. E was really wanting doughnuts so I finally made the (ultra healthy) jammy blueberry doughnuts from Jamie’s superfoods book for breakfast. It was a frustrating experience because I had neglected to soak our ordinary, not-expensive-Medjool, dates overnight, and also because we have a mere chopper and not a glorious food processor. I am debating whether I cave and buy one now in the sales or if I wait until the chopper dies then replace it. Hm. Decisions. It is definitely becoming more necessary. Anyway, there were leftovers. I have snacks.

Sunday was spent making the fail nut butter cookies, as well as doing hard boiled eggs, sandwiches, carrot oat slice, and what I think of as “Everything Balls”, or “Use it up slice”. This started off as the Eat This My Friend muesli bars and then I went crazy a few weeks ago and added a bunch of things that were needing to be used. You know. The 1/4 cup of almond meal. Tablespoon of walnuts. Slightly less than 1/3 cup chia seeds. The dregs of 4 different nut butter jars. Some sneaky powders of super greens or berry immunity. I mean, I started with the basic recipe and just embellished a bit. Squashed some into the mini muffin holes. Rolled some into balls. I thought for sure this would be a mummy-only treat, but before I knew it, S had demolished 4 balls. I kept meaning to cover them in chocolate but after not very long there didn’t seem to be much point. This weekend, though, I made sure to get the chocolate hit happening, so the minis are covered in a blob of chocolate and the balls are mostly half-covered, with a few glorious pieces entirely covered.

Delay in posting due to the futility of taking photos after 10pm. I’m glad I did this post, though, as I had totally forgotten about the doughnut snack option. I see there is a slight delay in work starting soooo first snack for the day is going to be a purple doughnut. 

Meal Prep Monday (09/06/2025)

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Three days. Three kids. Husband working. How much can I do.

The whole having kids and having a husband who works retail (so, weekends) has really hampered me getting into a lot of meal prep. All these people who post about their one hour on a Sunday when the dad takes to the kids to the park and the mum gets to meal prep and do the whole look at how much I made in an hour with no kids around and no distractions. Yeah. Good for you. Another factor is that Glenn loves to cook, so me not meal prepping much is fine because then what is he going to cook? Cooking is part of his destress and who am I to interfere with that.

This weekend I felt like I achieved a great deal. But I also felt that I was on my feet the entire time, and the one tiny bit of something for me that I wanted to do when the girls were playing – to sew two tiny bits on my skirt to secure the elastic at the waist – was ruined. I mean, I had to remove the needle and the foot and then do a deep extraction on the material, all because of girls fighting. The fighting that needs a grownup to intervene so we don’t have the kind of chaos and hospital trip that has the authorities involved and asking, where was the responsible adult in this. Ahem.

That said, much of what I did on Sunday – where we didn’t go to church because S was getting to the level of Snot Monster again and clearly needed a rest day – was accompanied by S sitting quietly on the kitchen floor next to me, pulling out the Christmas cupcake cups, lining them up, returning them to the tube, repeating. Or playing with the magnets on the fridge. It was very calming, if a little tripping hazard.

In my chocolate chip cookie post, I said to start it as early as possible. I started my mix last weekend and couldn’t progress with them until Friday. That is, I think, the longest between start and finish for me so far. We also had a three spotty bananas in the fruit bowl, and Glenn and I both held out on buying more bananas while there were spotty bananas. Three bananas is perfect for my new favourite snack, “4 ingredient” peanut butter banana cups. Which, despite the presence of a topping of chocolate chips, are apparently unappealing to my girls so they are all mine. Score. Also on Friday I made a batch of veggie pizza muffins, mostly for me for lunches. Italian herb seasoning has resulted in a very faint suggestion of spiciness so that’s a guaranteed return with grumpy face if I try to pack it in C’s lunchbox. 

Saturday morning I had a dinner panic. I wasn’t taking girls to the shops. We were meeting Glenn at his work in the afternoon and planning a little trip to South Bank.  The South Bank bit didn’t eventuate because everyone was exhausted but still, I knew we would be out and then home needing dinner and I had no idea what to feed girls. I found a recipe for chickpea nuggets. Perfect. Of course, when they were done and cooled and I was looking for a spot for them in the fridge, I found what would be a much better dinner option – chicken drumsticks and rice leftover from a recent dinner hit. Nuggets are destined for the freezer and an emergency meal. 

A new loaf of bread meant a new batch of sandwiches for the freezer, cut into love heart shapes because I love her and she maybe needs to have more reminders of that. And at 2am I remembered that I hadn’t prepped overnight oats so yes, I did that at 2am while everybody else slept, thank goodness. There was so much I didn’t get to do, but seeing all of this really does boost my sense of achievement. 

Top left: chocolate chip cookies. Top right: veggie pizza muffins (large and small). Bottom left: chickpea nuggets. Bottom right: love heart peanut butter sandwiches.

Meal Prep Monday (02/06/2025)

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I am inspired. One of my Facebook friends shares, it seems, everything that she makes for lunches and treats and dinners, and every single photo is terrible and unappetising. A page I follow, on the other hand, shares what she eats and what she makes for healthy everything, and everything looks fantastic and healthy and an Anna Thing To Eat. In my “I can do that, too” mentality, and with the amount of food prep that actually happens Friday-Sunday (usually), I now plan to do a roundup of that on Mondays for you. You’re welcome. Actually it’s also part of me reminding myself of achievements. If I feel like I’ve just been opening yoghurt pouches and doing the washing and chopping up oranges and doing the washing and separating squabbling children and doing the washing and sorting the washing and doing more washing, noting the other things really helps. Yes, I did all those other things too, but now I also have a record of the snacks and other things prepared. Lots of them include chocolate chips.

Friday normally gets me baking something but we had stuff to do so, no. Saturday morning, though, I baked sweet potato and apple oatmeal, sweet potato and banana chocolate chip bread, and “4 ingredient peanut butter banana bars”. That’s in quotes because, as is so often the case with recipes with a small number of ingredients, whoever did the recipe didn’t actually count. Out of bananas, peanut butter, vanilla, oats, salt, baking powder and chocolate chips, some of those are clearly more special than others. I am not, however, game to omit any. And also, I couldn’t find the silicone loaf pan I wanted so as the recipe makes 6-8 bars, I used a 6-hole silicone muffin pan and I will be making these again. New favourite, despite the lack of accountability (ha pun).

You may have noticed a theme with both bananas and sweet potato. We suddenly had a glut of 12 very ripe (black) bananas. Although I love Our Go-To Banana Bread, I had made it recently as bread and muffins and mini muffins and there was only so much I could take. With recent baking and Saturday’s baking, I cleared the build-up just in time for a fresh bunch to start going spotty. Good times. The sweet potato was from our farm box. Not the most recent one. The one a fortnight before that. I didn’t weigh it, but it was about the size of a toddler’s torso. Glenn used some in a couple of meals. I reserved some for baked oatmeal and then had enough to try this bread as well. The bread is fantastic and will be made again.

Less exciting meal prep but very necessary meal prep happens on Sunday evening. If we have eggs, I hard boil four of them. C and I both enjoy them during the day. Everyone else does, too, but E and S are not so adept at peeling or biting without the egg bouncing away. I also do a batch of overnight oats which will do me for three breakfasts. I did not do either of those things for a few weekends in a row and I was really feeling it. Mornings were a bit more rushed. Snacks were a little less varied and less protein-rich. I’m back on track now, though, and much relieved.

Top left: Sweet potato and apple baked oatmeal https://thenaturalnurturer.com/baked-apple-sweet-potato-oatmeal/

Top right: Sweet potato and banana bread https://thenaturalnurturer.com/sweet-potato-banana-bread/

Bottom left: “4 ingredient peanut butter banana bars” https://sammibrondo.com/peanut-butter-banana-bars/

Bottom right: hard boiled eggs. I draw on them so we know they’re boiled and not not-boiled. I am not good at drawing flowers.