clumsily raising my boys and baking cakes
These Three Easy Halloween Party Food Hacks have been made using Barratt Sweets and can easily be recreated at home for your own Halloween party to feed your little monsters with.
Halloween is such a fun time of year. Fancy dress, trick or treating and of course fun food to eat! No wonder children love celebrating it every year.
These mini Meatloaf Muffins are perfect for a family meal served alongside some creamy mash and vegetables. Any leftovers could even be eaten cold in lunch-boxes the next day, or frozen for another time.
My mini Meatloaf Muffins are a fun way to serve a classic recipe to your family. Meatloaf Muffins may well appeal to children more than a slice, or even a chunk, of the regular shaped meatloaf would too. By making them in a muffin tray, you automatically get individual portions ready to serve to your family.
These delicious cherry bakewell flavoured Hot Cross Bun-nies are my fun take on the traditional hot cross buns. Quite easy to make, these are a fun bake to make with your children and serve up over Easter for all the family.
I love eating hot cross buns but I have to confess that I have never tried to make any myself. I think I was a little scared in case they went wrong because, to be honest, they are quite time consuming to make due to them requiring several proves. So of course attempting to make Hot Cross Bun-nies was not going to be a problem……..well it was a challenge I set myself and here is how I got on.
This easy Sausage & Butternut Squash Pasta Traybake is perfect for a mid week meal for the family, packed full of flavour and veggies, pasta and dough balls, this dish can all be cooked in the oven.
I love easy cooking and when you are busy during the week, you want meals for your family which are quick and easy to make. that taste great, and with as little preparation and washing up as possible. I cook sausages at least once a week for the boys because they love them, and since HECK introduced their Chicken Italia sausages, with are gluten free and , if like me you are following a low fat eating plan, perfect for those of us watching our weight. Plus packed full of flavour.
Luckily for me I was sent a hamper of delicious HECK products to try, which pleased me greatly as they are one my favourite brands for sausages and burgers. The trouble is, the supermarkets in my area do not stock many of their range, so it was a treat being sent some new items to taste.
The boys LOVE the burgers and I love that they are made with a high beef content (97%) and I trust the Heck name for quality, so am more than happy to feed their meat, and non meat, products to my family.
I wanted to share a recipe which incorporated the HECK Chicken Italia sausages into a mid week meal perfect for all the family after a busy day. It is a traybake meal so that means minimal washing up and cooking involved – yay!
We enjoy garlic bread or dough balls with our pasta, so to be different I added these to the baking dish.
We ate it with a green salad, well when I say ‘we’ I actually mean ‘me’ as the boys don’t like salad, so they had peas with theirs.
It was so quick and easy to make, that I actually made a video showing how I made this dish which you can see here
Here is the full recipe for my Sausage & Butternut Squash Pasta Traybake:
This easy and tasty Chicken Vegetable Noodle Soup is a take on the classic chicken noodle soup, except I have added carrot and courgette noodles instead of wheat ones.
As a parent to two boys who struggle to eat vegetables that are not hidden inside their food, I am always on the look out for new ways to get them to try vegetables at meal times. Since the recent trend for making spiralized vegetables has taken off, I have to admit that it has not occurred to me to make some and see if Burton and Jenson would actually try some. That was until I was sent a Kenwood (electric) Spiralizer to review.
I was quite excited about trying this out, because I have seen lots of interesting looking recipes using courgetti and other vegetable ‘noodles’, and they always look colourful and tasty. I have to admit that the spiralizer did take a few goes to get to grips with, in order to make perfectly shaped spirals of veg, but this did not take long, after all, practice makes perfect!
I wanted to showcase a recipe using some serialised veggies but it was hard finding one that had not been tried already, afterall I am a little late to the serialised vegetable recipe party! However, I had a light bulb moment eventually, when I had some leftover roast chicken in my fridge and I was feeling a little like I was coming down with a cold. Something that always perks me up is some homemade soup, and I thought I would make some chicken noodle soup, as it does not take long to make. Then, I thought that instead of using actual noodles as per the traditional way of making it, I would replace them with some spiralled carrots and courgette instead.
This soup is my version of a chicken noodle, so I have taken some short cuts, probably as this is how I prefer to cook, and I didn’t have any spring onions so I used a brown onion instead. BUT what I loved about this version, is that it took about 10 minutes to make from start to finish, and by using vegetable noodles it made it a soup that was more nutritious and healthy.
Here is the recipe if you fancy giving it a go
I made a video showing how to make this recipe plus a quick demonstration of how the spiralizer works which you can see here
This soup was delicious and I loved how the veg still had a light bite to them, meaning they still contained their goodness and nutrition. Although the boys will not eat soup (yeah, I know, crazy pair!), they have been eating carrot spaghetti which they have been enjoying. Next I will get them to try some courgetti and some butternut squash noodles – but one step at a time with those two.
For more information about then Kenwood Spiralizer please visit their page
I was sent the Kenwood Spiralizer for the purpose of a review, and all comments made are honest and my own. The recipe is my own idea.
