A new month is here again and it`s time to fly away from Ireland to arrive in France. Before we landed I printed out a  passport with a passport cover  and some colouring placemats. Lil Mermaid had coloured in the placemat already and together with a book we got from the library we have been exploring France.  We will be filling in the passport pages as we cook the dishes through April and then turn them into a little booklet :)

When I thought of France, Ratatouille immediately came into my mind. I have made it many times and as it is a nice healthy dish I thought I would make it once more. Lil Mermaid helped me to chop the veggies and put them into the saucepan.

There is a big variety of Ratatouille recipes but we used a very simple one. We used one aubergine, two medium size  courgettes, one very big onion, can of chopped tomatoes, four garlic cloves, red and yellow pepper. So first of all we heated the oil and cooked some garlic and onion about three minutes. We then stirred in the courgettes, peppers and aubergine, and cooked for a further five  minutes until lightly coloured. After that we added the tomatoes and herbs, covered and cooked over a low heat for 30-35 minutes until the vegetables were tender, before seasoning and sprinkling with chopped basil.

This time we decided to make a dessert as well and I was really shocked (pleasantly so) to discover that my childhood favourite is very popular in France. We called the dessert ” Snowball Soup” but in France it is called Ile Flottante.

So for Ile Flottante you need 1.5 cups of milk, split vanilla pod, 3 eggs  (separated), 115g caster sugar

This is how you can make the “islands” or “snowballs”. 

Beat the egg whites in a  bowl, with a little pinch of salt, until the eggs have firm peaks.Continue beating the eggs, while slowly adding about 40gr of sugar.The eggs can now be put into boiling water to cook. An alternative is to poach spoonfuls of the egg white mix in the hot milk for 2 minutes, before adding the egg yolks to make the custard. We cooked in boiling water but I think next time we will be using the milk version.

And this is how you can make the custard:

Heat the milk over a low-medium heat, with the vanilla pod, until slightly bubbling, then remove from the heat. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks and 75gr of  sugar, then pour on the hot milk and mix well. Pour the mixture into a  saucepan, and heat over a low heat for 5 minutes, stirring continuously. It should not boil during this time. After a few minutes the custard will have thickened, remove the vanilla pod. Put the custard into bowls, and place  the islands  on top.

And Lil Mermaid decided to decorate her plate :)

Check the other blogs of “Around the World in 12 Dishes” for their French creations:

Adventures In Mommydom, Creative Family Fun, Domestic Goddesque, Enchanted Homeschooling Mom, Glittering Muffins, Here Come The Girls, Juggling with Kids, Kid World Citizen, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Little Artists, Mermaids’ Makings, Montessori Tidbits, Mummymummymum and The Educators’ Spin On It.

Please link up your French dish and/or craft in our linky below, we would love to see it!

Click here for the linky :)

Have you  found yourself thinking .. whats for dinner. Not those special occasions but just an everyday meal after work, or school and you just want something easy to prepare. So here are a bunch of bloggers who got together to share their favourite family meals. Our simple family meal is-

Potatoes with Minced Meat Sauce. 

In Estonia this dish is as popular as baked beans on toast in the UK :)

So this is how I made minced meat sauce.  I fried about 500 g of minced meat together with one chopped onion in the frying pan. Seasoned with salt and pepper. When the meat was ready I added 1- 2 tblsp of flour and fried some more. Now it was time to add about 500 ml milk and some water. Cook until the sauce thickens and voilaaaa… here it is!

Serve with boiled potatoes…

 Or cooked buckwheat.

And just in case there is any buckwheat left, you can make yourself a quick salad by adding chopped sping onions, pepper and cucumber together with corn, and cottage cheese… or whatever else you fancy.

As we enjoyed our journey Around the World in 12 Dishes very much, we thought we would take part once more!

So this time we start with our neighbours- Ireland. We printed out a couple of  passports and placemats and had lots of fun exploring Ireland together.

As for the food we decided to make something very simple, easy and tasty. A suitable recipe wasn`t hard to find because this is what Irish food is- simple, yet very tasty :)

Colcannon is a side dish but we decided to have it as a main course. Colcannon is very similar to the British Bubble and Squeak, although the recipe varies a bit. So this is what we did: We took about 3 cups of finely chopped (or shredded) cabbage, 6-7 seven cooked and mashed potatoes, 1 onion finely chopped, ¼ cup milk, ¼ cup water, ¼ cup butter, salt and pepper to taste.

Lil Mermaid helped me chop the cabbage. I then put the cabbage and onion in a saucepan with water and brought it to the boil. Then reduced  the heat, covered the saucepan and let it simmer for 8 minutes until the cabbage was tender. Now it was time to add the mashed potatoes, milk, butter, salt and pepper. We mixed them together and there it was. Our simple yet very hearty dish was ready!

Whilst chopping the cabbage Lil Mermaid decided to try some too. She is not normally much of a cabbage fan, but now she decided she liked it after all.

As my little one doesn`t like mixed veggies I created a special plateful for her.. one that looks like the Irish flag :)

Check the other blogs of “Around the World in 12 Dishes” for their Irish creations:

Adventures In Mommydom, Creative Family Fun, Domestic Goddesque, Enchanted Homeschooling Mom, Glittering Muffins, Here Come The Girls, Juggling with Kids, Kid World Citizen, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Little Artists, Mermaids’ Makings, Montessori Tidbits, Mummymummymum and The Educators’ Spin On It.

 Please link up your Irish dish and/or craft in our linky below, we would love to see it!

Click here for the linky.

We celebrated  St. David`s Day with some traditional Welsh food. So I made Cawl, Bara Brith and Welsh Cakes. The cawl was so good and disappeared from the table so quickly I did not even manage to take a picture.. but here is the recipe anyway.

Bara Brith

Bara brith means “speckled bread” and can be either a yeast bread enriched with dried fruit or something more like a fruitcake made with self-raising flour (no yeast). It is traditionally made with raisins, currants and candied peel.

For Bara Brith I used:

450 g self raising flour

1 tsp mixed spice

175 g Muscavado sugar

1 egg

1 tbsp orange zest

2 tbsp orange juice

1 tbsp honey

300 ml cold tea

450 g mixed dry fruit

extra honey for glazing

And this is what I did:

Put the mixed dried fruit into a bowl, pour over the tea, cover and leave to soak overnight. The next day mix together the sugar, egg, orange juice, zest and honey, add to the fruit. Sift in the flour and spice, and mix well. Pour the mixture into a buttered loaf tin. Bake in a preheated oven at gas3/160c/325f for about 1¾ hours. The loaf should be golden in colour and firm to the touch in the middle. Baste with honey whilst still warm. Allow to cool thoroughly before storing in a cake tin.

The flavour of the Bara Brith can be altered slightly by adding a few flavours. When soaking the fruit, substitute ¼ of the fluid with a whisky liqueur. Replace the honey and fruit juice with 2 tablespoons of marmalade. Alternatively, replace two tablespoons of fruit with chopped stem ginger, and replace the juice and honey with lemon marmalade, and the orange zest with lemon.

Welsh cakes

Welsh Cakes ( picau ar y maen, pice bach, cacen gri or teisen radell in Welsh) are traditional Welsh snacks. As the cakes  are traditionally cooked on a bakestone (maen in Welsh), they are also known as bakestones. Welsh cakes are served hot or cold dusted with caster sugar. Unlike scones, they are not usually eaten with an accompaniment, though they are sometimes sold ready split and spread with jam, and they are sometimes buttered.

As the Estonian and Welsh national days are so near eachother we decided to keep both lots of decorations up. For St. David`s day we made some daffodils (using yellow card and an egg carton) and some welsh love spoons (using card egg carton and coloured paper).

The lovespoon is a tradition going back to the 17th century. Over the centuries, the spoons began to be decorated, and lost the original practical use and became more of a decoration to hang on the wall. The earliest known Welsh lovespoon is in the St Fagans National History Museum near Cardiff and  is from 1667, although the tradition is believed to date back long before that.

The lovespoon was given to a young woman by her potential husband. It was important for the girl’s father to see that the young man was capable of providing for the family and woodworking.

Sailors would often carve lovespoons, which is why carvings of anchors are often found on the spoons.

Many carvings had their own meaning – a horseshoe for luck, a cross for faith, bells for marriage, hearts for love, a wheel supporting a loved one and a lock for security, among others. Caged balls on the spoon showed the number of children the couple wanted. Other, more difficult carvings, such as chains, allowed the carver to show off and did not have any special meaning.

So for our Lovespoons we decided to use some card, coloured paper and an egg carton. We cut out the spoon handle, some cups from an egg carton and some shapes from coloured paper, and glued everything down.

This year we thought to make something  simple and here they are.. Estonian flags printed with the handle  end of the paintbrush. 

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Sel aastal tulid siis sellised lihtsad kaardid. Trükkisime pintsli tagumise otsaga helesinisele paberile Eesti lipu ja kui trükk oli kuivanud, liimisime valgele kahepoolsele kaardile. Lihtne ja ilus :)

Here are some photos for you. Enjoy :)

So we are in Austria this month and flicking through some Austrian recipes it became pretty clear quite quickly that we would be making a SACHER-TORTE.

Because Lil Mermaid LOVES chocolate!

And of course she was very eager to help me with the blending and measuring out the ingredients,  cracking the eggs and mixing the dough…. and she was even more eager to eat some this time. Usually she just wants to taste it….

The story of this Torte is quite interesting.. In 1832, Prince Metternich ordered his chef to make a special dessert for some important guests. The head chef was ill, so the task ended up with his sixteen-year-old apprentice, Franz Sacher,then in his second year of training in Metternich’s kitchen. The Prince apparently declared, “Let there be no shame on me tonight!”  Although Metternichs guests loved the Torte, nothing more happened until after Sacher completed his training as a chef, finally settling down in his hometown of Vienna where he opened a specialty delicatessen and wine shop, and the Sachertorte was now for sale!

AND- did you know that December 5th is National Sachertorte Day!!

There are a number of slightly different variations of the recipe but we chose the one from here.

So what you need for the cake is:

135g dark chocolate or cooking chocolate

140g butter, room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

125g icing sugar

6 eggs, separated

pinch of salt

100g caster sugar

140g flour

And for the glaze:

220g caster sugar

125ml water

160g chocolate, finely chopped

Additionally:

Apricot jam, passed through a sieve and heated

Cream

And this is what you do:

Preheat oven to 190 C / Gas 5. Grease and flour a 23cm cake tin. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, stir well, remove from heat and set aside. In a large bowl, beat butter, vanilla and icing sugar with a  blender until fluffy. Gradually add the egg yolks to the mix. Stir in each yolk well before adding the next. Now stir in the melted chocolate.

The Sachertorte tastes great with a portion of whipped cream.

 

***

Welcome to “Around The World in 12 Dishes”. We will be taking you on a journey around the world, (loosely) following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps, exploring 12 different countries with our children, by cooking 12 dishes with them. One for each country visited.

The world is such a wonderfully diverse and colorful place. Our children see maps, flags and books. They see postcards and maybe they see films about the world.. but let’s really bring it to life through food! Taste and smell don’t often get explored, we think this would be wonderfully fun and interesting for you and your children.

Not only is it an exciting and different way to learn about cultures, but cooking with children brings a host of benefits – from numeracy to science. How can you beat that?

Adventures In Mommydom, Creative Family Fun, Domestic Goddesque, Glittering Muffins, Here Come The Girls, Juggling with Kids, Kid World Citizen, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Mermaids’ Makings, Montessori Tidbits, Mummymummymum and The Educators’ Spin On It have come together to help you on your food journey and will each cook a dish with our children and post about it – to help inspire you to have a go! Then go out there, cook, blog, and join in the linky fun! Check out the other great posts as well!

Around the World in 12 Dishes

We had started our journey the same way Phileas Fogg did in London, UK, and now are arriving in Athens, capital of Greece!

• March 4 – First country was the UK
• April 1 – The second country was Sweden
• May 6 – The third country was Russia
• June 3 – The fourth country was India
• July 7 – The fifth country was Japan
• August 5 – The sixth country was Australia
• September 2 -The seventh country was French Polynesia
• October 7 – The eighth country was Mexico
• November 4 – The ninth country was Brazil
• December 2 – The tenth country was Morocco
• January 13 – The eleventh country was Greece
• February 3 – The twelfth country is Austria

How to join the fun!

• The only mandatory part is the dish, the rest is all up to you, we just thought it would be fun and more concrete to the kids as to why we are making a unusual dish.
• Cook a dish from Austria: The goal is to explore this country through FOOD and activities if you wish. Make a typical dish (sweet or savoury) from the country with the kids, take photos and have fun!
• Typical dishes: Apfelstrudel, Wiener Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, Kaiserschmarrn, Sachertorte
• Print your passport: Click here to download, comes with space for a photo of the child with the dish. Here is a little cover for it if you wish :)
• Color a placemat: Once colored/painted or whatever other way you want to do this, you can laminate it or put it between clear contact paper to use it over and over. Great conversation piece for you and your kids. Click here to download it.
• Make a craft: you can make a country related craft with the kids [optional!]

• Fun fact: The sewing machine was invented in 1818 by the Austrian Josef Madersperger.
• Share with us: Our Austrian challenge starts on February 3rd and will remain open for a year, so attach a link to your blog to enter the linky party or go to the comment section and post a photo together with what you did together with your child(ren).
• Pinterest: We will add your photos to a “Around the World in 12 Dishes” Pinterest Boards (one for the dishes, one for the crafts) you will be a great source of inspiration for everyone :)
• Are you a blogger? Let your fans know about the challenge and grab our cute lil’ button to share it on your blog.

<a href=”http://www.glitteringmuffins.com&#8221; target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i1145.photobucket.com/albums/o502/theeducatorsspinonit/world.jpg&#8221; alt=”Around the world in 12 Dishes” width=”125″ height=”125″ /></a>

Please check out our partner blogs and their Austria ideas: Adventures In Mommydom, Creative Family Fun, Domestic Goddesque, Glittering Muffins, Here Come The Girls, Juggling with Kids, Kid World Citizen, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Mermaids’ Makings, Montessori Tidbits, Mummymummymum and The Educators’ Spin On It

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations :)

Please link up your Austrian dish and/or craft HERE, we would love to see it!

And to make a snowman we had to use white card, scrapbook paper and pen.

So we cut out three different size circles and glued them on top of each other using craft foam in between to make a 3 d effect.

After adding a scarf and hands we drew some dots for the buttons and eyes.

 A lovely orange nose as well and three snowmen were done!

Inspiration from here!

We have owls in every bedroom, in the bathroom, in the living room and even in the kitchen.

These cute paintings have been framed and are sitting on the wall  in Lil Mermaid`s bedroom. For the background of the two first paintings we used romaine lettuce prints and for the owls Lil Mermaid did some handprints. After all the paintings were dry she used black pen to redo the outline.