First up, don’t miss the kiddo quotes that should have gone out last Friday.

Second, the very, very, VERY good news is that my blog host was able to retrieve my old database from 2 January 2012. This means that the archives of Blissful E are complete except for the comments from 2 January to 19 January. I’m sad about losing those comments. Overall, though, it’s a huge relief to have so much of my site back. Whew!

Third, things are still going to be a little messy around here while I tweak the site and give it a bit of a facelift (I love this sort of stuff and can’t resist an excuse to mess about with code). If you have any questions, suggestions, concerns or comments regarding how the blog looks or how you prefer to use the site, this is a good time to let me know.

Finally, THANK YOU to each of you who has stuck with me through this upheaval. Your support and comments throughout have kept me from giving up several times. You guys are the best. :)

On the precise day he turned six months old, David was sitting on Baba’s lap at dinner when he lunged for the banana Ben was holding. I took a few snapshots and some video of David’s introduction to solid food.

 

 

 

As my family grows, many meals that were convenient are not scaling up very well. Grilled cheese for two: easy. For a family of six: not so practical.

Healthy, tasty, easy and frugal food is an ongoing, near-daily challenge. Thankfully, technology is a big help. Here is the process I am currently using to find, try, and keep good recipes available.

1. Collect tasty-looking recipes on Pinterest.

When I see a delicious looking recipe on any website – especially if it is described as “slow cooker” or “crock pot” – I pin it to my “yum” board so I can find it later.

2. Write a menu plan into a spiral notebook.

Yes, this is low-tech, but it works very well for us. We write the name of each recipe we want to cook that week, with a little symbol (and page number, if applicable) of where to find it if it’s not something we make a lot. We also annotate that week’s menu plan with a list of staples as we run out of them (for instance, baking soda, peppercorns, or my favourite snack, dried apricots).

3. Clip or copy/paste new recipes I want to try into Evernote.

If I’m feeling adventurous and want to try a new recipe, I copy the recipe from the internet into Evernote, with a tag “recipe”. I have a search set up in Evernote for notes tagged “recipe” but NOT tagged with “eBook”, so that only recipes I haven’t tried will appear in this search.

4. Order groceries online.

 

I cannot tell you how much time, energy, and even money (due to less impulse shopping) this saves us. With menu book in hand, we look up recipes wherever they are – Evernote, eReader, cookbooks – and click to order the required ingredients.

5. Cook dinner, tweak and evaluate.

If a new recipe is good, I reformat the recipe in Evernote to match my other recipes, noting any changes or substitutions I made. I then copy and paste the new recipe in the appropriate section of the 700-page Open Office Writer document that has become our family’s personalised cookbook. After the recipe is in Writer, I add the tag “eBook” to the recipe in Evernote so that it won’t show up in my “new recipe” search anymore.

If the new recipe isn’t to our taste, I tag it appropriately in Evernote and remove it from my “yum” board on Pinterest.

6. Export my updated cookbook as a PDF, then upload the PDF into my eReader using Calibre.

Having the cookbook on my eReader makes it searchable and easily accessible in my kitchen using this cover with integrated kickstand.

7. When someone asks for a recipe, I easily email them my annotated version via Evernote, or simply send them the original URL.

Evernote automatically saves the source URL when I copy and paste from any website, so I can always give credit to the original recipe creator.

With a smart phone or tablet you could eliminate the extra steps of copying approved recipes to a word-processing program and exporting as a PDF. Accessing everything in Evernote directly from a portable device would make the process even simpler.

How do you find and manage the recipes your family enjoys?

Nikki chose wood fired pizzas for her birthday meal. When we build a fire in our backyard pizza oven, we like to cook a lot of pizzas, so I made 48 crusts in the three days before we celebrated Nikki’s fifth year. We ate a lot and still had plenty to freeze for later.

Adapting this recipe I found via Jen, I used my Thermomix to grind wheat and make the dough, and then all I had to do was roll it out.

After the dough rose and rested, I divided each batch into eight equal-sized balls.

Lightly oiling a piece of baking paper, I placed a ball of dough on top, drizzled the dough with a bit more olive oil, topped it with another piece of baking paper, then pressed it with my cast iron skillet.

I rolled the dough thinly to prepare it for 90-second cooking in the wood fired pizza oven. Each flattened crust was then stacked between sheets of baking paper (and later aluminum foil when I ran out of baking paper). Not only does the baking paper or aluminum foil separate the bases for freezing, it also serves as an excellent medium for sliding in and out of the pizza oven without getting wood ash directly on the crust.

Two batches of dough or 16 individual-sized crusts fit into one 13×9 inch dish, which I covered and froze until Nikki’s celebration day. I made and rolled out two batches of dough per day for three days leading up to Nikki’s celebration in order to produce 48 crusts.

The dough did not rise much but it was tasty and held toppings well.

The kids’ favourite pizza combination this time was olive oil, Italian sausage, and mozzarella.

Our children enjoy choosing the colour of their birthday dessert. Nikki selected purple for her fifth birthday. Ben and I put our heads together and came up with a mixed berry cobbler topped with butter cookie crust and homemade whipped cream.

Delicious!

We had so much fun celebrating my dad’s 65th birthday with him… and slipping in a belated birthday gift for my mum.

DaD’s birthday meal was his request of spinach alfredo lasagna and homemade oat bread served with carrot raisin salad and topped off with angel food cake and poached strawberries.

I was excited when I realised that the entire meal, right down to the butter for spreading and the mayonnaise in the carrot raisin salad, was homemade with love by me.

My mum helped us break in my new ravioli maker this morning.

Grandma rolled the dough so nice and thin.

We made three dozen whole wheat ravioli filled with roasted butternut squash and goat’s cheese.

Dried for a few hours, boiled in veggie stock, and topped with Parmesan, they made a tasty and fun meal for my noodle-loving crew.

One marvelous thing about getting rid of the stuff we don’t need is that it allows us to make room for better things.

For instance, Ben and I moved away from the US and 120v electricity 9 years ago. Since we were never sure if/when we would be moving back to the States, we used a power transformer with our food processor, blender, hand-held electric mixer, crock pot and other much-loved gadgets until we were sure we would settle in a 230v country.

When we made the decision to stay in Australia, it felt so good to Freecycle the big brick of a transformer that had been taking up counter space in our kitchen. But it was inconvenient to go back to mixing everything by hand.

We bought a 220v crock pot, and I began to search for an appliance that would allow me to mix and grind and chop, without having to replicate my kitchen-full of US appliances. I was thrilled to find a European solution made for small kitchens which did all of the things my old appliances did, and more, in one compact unit.

making lemon sorbet

Introducing… Thermomix.

Unlike my old food processor, I use my Thermomix daily, and it is much easier to clean. As a family with small children, here are items we make regularly:

• apple sauce
• butter, both plain and flavoured
• chopping garlic and onions
• hard boiled eggs – place eggs in basket, add water, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• hot chocolate – made from cooking chocolate and milk
• ice cream, both instant and traditional
• icing sugar – making this on demand saves me having to have an additional container in the pantry
• mayonnaise, both plain and flavoured
• oatmeal/porridge – weigh in oats and milk, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• pizza dough – takes 2 min 11 sec prior to letting it rise for half an hour
• play dough – ready in 7 minutes
• rice cereal – grind the rice and lentils, add water, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• smoothies
• sorbet
• steamed rice – weigh and wash rice in basket, add water, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• yogurt – for our family, in one year the savings from making out own yogurt pays for the Thermomix

The list above is almost embarrassing because it only scratches the surface of what we could be doing with the Thermomix. For me it is enough that this machine has made cooking from scratch easy, saved us time and money, broadened our food choices, and doesn’t take up much space on my kitchen counter.

If you would like to see more specifics about how the Thermomix works, this Canadian demonstration video shows the blade, bowl, time and heat functions, and the steaming tray.

Please note: this is not a compensated review, just a product I like.