Chickpea and tomato macaroni

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Bert breakfasted as a fireman, shopped as an astronaut and dined as a builder.

If I’d ever wondered what it was like to be famous, walking down a shopping street with a tiny astronaut would have given me a clue. Nearly everyone stared, smiled or stopped to talk. Bert was muttering to himself under his helmet ‘look me! I spaceman!’ 

Not every man can carry off a silver jump suit.

Serves 2-3

1 small onion, chopped

A little olive oil

3 cloves garlic, peeled but left whole

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

2 sticks celery, chopped

400ml passata

1 x 380g can chickpeas

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons single cream

Macaroni to appetite

This is based on a Nigel Slater recipe but I rarely make a tomato sauce without adding extra veg. I had mine with green salad (Bert mimed being sick) and we both had grated cheese on top.

Gently sauté the onion in a little olive oil. Add the garlic, carrots and celery and cook till the onion’s transparent, then tip in the passata (or tinned tomatoes, if you prefer). Bring to a fast simmer then turn right down and cook on a gentle heat for an hour to an hour and a half.

At the end of the cooking time put the pasta on to boil. Puree the sauce and add the drained chickpeas and cream, seasoning to your taste. Heat through for five minutes then stir through the drained pasta.

If you don’t have a blender, you could finely chop the onion, crush the garlic and grate the veg.

Serve with grated cheese and green leaves (bleurgh).

  

 

Sticky toffee banana muffins with cheesecake frosting

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I see Bert’s inherited my thighs.

These are so delicious, I might have two.

As with sticky toffee pudding, the dates and dark sugar combine to create a dark toffee gooeyness. The icing is only just sweet, so it’s not sickly at all – New York cheesecake in icing form.

Makes 12 muffins

3 ripe bananas, mashed

175 muscavado (dark brown) sugar

175ml sunflower oil

100g chopped dates

175g brown self-raising flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

3 eggs, lightly beaten

For the frosting (to top half the cakes – double the quantities to top them all):

150g soft cheese

100g sieved golden icing sugar

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4/ 180 degrees. Gently stir all of the cake ingredients together until only just combined (this and the sunflower oil make them really light) then spoon the mixture into 12 muffin cases. Bake them for about 25 minutes. Allow to cool slightly in the tin then lift them onto a cooling rack to completely cool. I froze half the cakes at this point.

Beat the sugar and cheese together till combined then top the cooled cakes with it.

You can switch the banana for grated carrot and the chopped dates for raisins to make little carrot cakes.

Tandoori chicken

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Every day I’ve dropped Bert at nursery since a week or so before Christmas, he’s clung to me sobbing. Nursery’s solution: peel him off me, weeping, and ask him what he wants for breakfast. My solution: wait outside till I hear him stop crying then go home and worry. 

This morning he said he didn’t want to go to ‘school’ and started to sink miserably into the sofa and hide his face. We talked about why and found out it was saying goodbye he hated (don’t we all), so we came up with the solution of taking a different dinousaur in to show his mates every day. He skipped, smiling, into nursery with his robot dinosaur and didn’t look back.

What’s a blog for, if not to share the rare moments of smug parenting?

But now he’s eating this with his hands in front of the TV. Bert: do dinosaurs eat rice? Me: yes. Bert: do dinosaurs eat chicken? Me: yes, they do.

Serves 2-3

4 skinless chicken thigh fillets

150ml plain yoghurt (with low-fat yoghurt, this works for 5:2ers – 2 thighs and a small portion of rice is about 350 cals)

1 teaspoon each of: smoked paprika, cayenne, ground cumin, ground coriander, turmeric, ground ginger (or a tablespoon of tandoori spice mix) – this has a kick but isn’t hot; adjust the paprika and cayenne for less heat

Juice of half a lemon

Salt and pepper

Mix the marinade ingredients together, slash the chicken thighs, cover with marinade and leave to marinate for at least an hour, ideally overnight. Then preheat the oven to 200 or gas mark six and bake for around twenty minutes.

We had ours with brown rice and peas, and crunchy carrot and cucumber salad. If I’d been cooking for adults with less veg-suspicion, I’d have probably gone for sag aloo, coconut naan and cucumber raita.

Five-veg bolognaise

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Today after nursery me and Bert made elaborate train tracks, played ‘Mum is going to sleep’, a game of Bert’s devising where I was tucked up with a blanket, had a story read to me (‘oh! Poor fox. Lost socks. Found hat!’) and was left to read to myself with the light off. (Oh, if I must!) We then snuggled up to watch Tom Hardy cuddle his dog and read the CBeebies bedtime story.

There is such a thing as a perfect day.

He filled his new Fireman Sam boots with wee though.

Serves 4-6

400g minced beef

200g chestnut mushrooms, finely diced to match the size of the mince

1 onion

1 red pepper

1 courgette 

1 stick celery

1 tin tomatoes 

2 dessert spoons tomato paste

1 teaspoon marmite

1 beef stock cube

1 teaspoon chopped rosemary 

Salt

Pepper

Pinch cinnamon 

Good grating nutmeg

This is 5:2 diet recipe, but it’s got loads of veg in, and with Peppa Pig pasta shapes (the creators of Peppa Pig must be richer than J.K. Rowling) and grated cheese it’s ideal for small firemen who’ve lived off chocolate coins and sausages for the last month.

The original recipe (in Mimi Spencer’s book) dices the veg, but I couldn’t face Bert querying each individual piece and asking ‘what’s that mum?’ a hundred times, so I puréed it and the whole thing just looked like a regular Bol. On a non-fasting day you could fry the meat in a knob of butter or add crisply fried chunks of pancetta. Minus the meat it’d make a good veggie bolognaise for veg-averse toddlers too.

Fry the meat and mushrooms in a spray of oil (or knob of butter) till the meat’s well-browned and starting to crisp and caramelise in places. Meanwhile, blitz the veg in a blender (or finely dice them). Add to the browned meat with the tinned tomatoes, tomato purée, marmite, stock cube, seasoning and herbs and spices. Bring to a good boil, turn down to a simmer and cook for at least half an hour, ideally an hour and a half. 

Serve with pasta and cheese, or, if you’re 5:2ing, a small portion of pasta and some corgetti. If you are a fellow 5:2-er, a quarter of this, 50g (uncooked weight) brown pasta and half a bag of courgetti is about 350 cals.

Tomato, ricotta and green veg pasta

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Table manners are coming along nicely.

Serves 2

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoons ricotta

200ml passata

1 head broccoli, florets separated, stem peeled and sliced

2 tablespoons frozen peas

Grated zest of half a lemon

1 tablespoon pine nuts

Wholewheat pasta to appetite

Grated cheese to serve (we had Cheddar)

Gently fry the ricotta in the olive oil for a couple of minutes. Add the passata, lemon and pine nuts. Simmer.

Meanwhile put the pasta on to boil, adding the broccoli for the last five minutes and the peas for the last two. Drain, stir the sauce through, season and sprinkle with grated cheese.

Shove fistfuls into your mouth.

Overnight apple, maple syrup, raisin and cinnamon porridge

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I didn’t get a picture of Bert refusing to eat this, so here’s a gratuitous one of him having a cuddle with his big brother. The dark shadow sitting at his feet isn’t the ghost that foreshadows some far-off, horrible doom, it’s Ray.

Serves 2

1/2 cup porridge oats

2 cups milk

1 apple, grated

1/2 a cup of raisins

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Dessert spoon of maple syrup

Sprinkling of brown sugar

The night before, put the oats and milk in a pan and pop it in the fridge. It will seem like far too much milk. The next morning warm it gently with the apple, raisins, cinnamon and maple syrup till it’s smooth and creamy (you get a much creamier, softer consistency by leaving it overnight and it cooks more quickly too). Sprinkle on a little brown sugar and offer to a toddler who writhes away from it like it’s poison.

Delicious.

 

Storecupboard bakewell muffins

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Today, as on many days when I’m alone with Bert, we’re busy in the morning then have to fit in a dog walk after Bert’s luxuriously long lunchtime nap and before it gets dark. As a result, I bribe him into it by taking the pram and iPad, along with dummy, blanket and John.

So today at 4pm a maudlin Bert was dressed in his oversized fake fur deerstalker hat and only-just-big-enough green parka, dummy in, looking like a Russian gangster who was no less sinister for being tiny. Meet Sweet Cheeks – happy to sell you a sawn off shot gun for the right price.

Me: Look at the beautiful sunset!

Bert: [taps away at Dinosaur Trucks with very cold hands]

Me: It’s like Christmas lights in the sky!

Bert: [taps away at Dinosaur Trucks]

[Ten minutes’ silent trudging]

Me: Look, a digger.

Bert: [glances up, agrees] Yellow digger. [Back to tapping at Dinosaur Trucks]

In my pre-child fantasies there was more Boden knitwear, stamping through crisp leaves and collecting of acorns involved.

Makes 6 muffins

150g golden caster sugar

3 eggs

150g sunflower oil

150g self raising flour

100g ground almonds

100g frozen cherries, dusted in flour

Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/ 180. Beat together all of the ingredients, except the cherries, till smooth, then stir the fruit gently into the batter. The flour dusting helps stop them from sinking to the bottom of the muffins. Divide the mixture between six muffin holes, making sure there are cherries in each. Bake for about 30 minutes, till golden and risen.

Easy and cheap leftover lamb and lentil ragu

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Today Bert had a play and a picnic lunch with Fearne, one of his nursery gang and his general partner in crime/ muse. When she picked up a green frisbee that he wanted to wear like a hat he threw a wooden toy at her head. He sobbed, refusing to say sorry, even though she was kissing his hand and offering him the frisbee back. Half an hour later he was wrestling her to the floor and trying to opportunistically convert the situation into a kiss.

In the car he cheerfully claimed that it was ‘nice seeing Fearne.’

That’s the hidden dynamic of most romantic relationships for you, right there.

Serves 4-6 generously

200g leftover roast lamb

75g dried red lentils

200g roast veg – either frozen and ready to cook, or leftover

1 can of tomatoes

1/2 can of water

Salt and pepper to taste

Finely grated zest of half a small lemon (so a G&T later!)

A spring of rosemary, leaves removed and finely chopped (for me this is a balance between how small I can be arsed to chop it and the knowledge that if it’s visible, the whole meal will be rejected).

Chop the lamb fairly small and add it to a casserole dish with the lentils, roast veg, tomatoes and water. Don’t season it yet. Bring it to a boil then put the dish in a slow oven (gas mark 1-2) for around four hours.

When you’re nearly ready to serve it, bring it to the hob while you cook some pasta, mushing the veg into the sauce, adding the lemon zest and rosemary and checking the seasoning and liquid. (It may not need any salt if the lamb and veg were already seasoned, it may need a little more water or to reduce further.)  I did it with the grated zest of a whole lemon and it was too citrussy, so I’d not go too large on the zest.

Serve with pasta and grated parmesan cheese.

Halloween pasta

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The night before last I woke up in the middle of the night to hear Bert calling for me. I went into his room and he pointed sadly at some sick on his bed and said, ‘poor old Bert.’ As I gathered up his bedding, blanket, Rex the dinosaur and John the rabbit to be washed he shouted, ‘no, not John! Not the dryer for John!’ It was like Sophie’s Choice on a tiny scale.

(Spoiler: John was fine.)

There are good parenting days. And there are days when I’m constantly infuriated at dinosaurs being smashed onto tables, wee accidents less than a minute after he’s refused to try for a wee, denials of the need to nap and sulks at the end of Dinosaur Train – alongside teetering washing baskets, sinks and dishwashers both full of washing up and clients that promise work then disappear. And then I see a serious little face with round cheeks and I apologise, again, for being grumpy.

Today I mostly feel like this picture. Poor old Bert.

Serves 2-3

200g pureed pumpkin (the scrapings from our T-Rex pumpkin – what, you can’t see it? – blitzed in the blender till smooth)

4 rashers streaky bacon, chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 teaspoons chopped or dried rosemary

1/2 bag of spiral pasta

50g grated mozzerella

100g mixed grated Cheddar and Parmesan

Fry the bacon with the garlic and rosemary till it’s starting to crisp. At the same time, boil the pasta till it’s just done. Drain the pasta, put it back in the pan and combine it with the bacon mix and pumpkin, stirring till the pasta’s well coated with pumpkin and the bacon’s evenly distributed. Stir the mozzeralla through more roughly so there are pockets of it melting into the pasta and tip the lot into an overproof dish. Top with the Cheddar and Parmesan and cook at gas mark 4/ 180 for half an hour, till the top’s golden and bubbling.

The other 364 days of the year you could subsitute any other squash for the pumpkin.

We’re having ours with broccoli.

 

Marmite and pancetta pasta

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How can something so wrong feel so right?

Serves 2

200 diced pancetta

Splash of oil for frying

Pasta

Knob of butter

50g grated cheddar cheese

2 teaspoons marmite

Grated parmesan

Me and Bert have just got back from a lovely couple of days in Brighton. All very relaxing except driving on a busy M25 with a back seat passenger shouting ‘CRASH!!!!’ at random intervals.

I think this is a BBC Good Food recipe. If you use the quick cook pasta, the whole thing takes five minutes. Ideal for after a 3 hour drive that’s commentated on as if it’s a Lego Juniors iPad game.

Cook the pasta, scooping out about half a cup of the cooking water towards the end of the cooking time.

Meanwhile fry the pancetta in oil till it’s starting to crisp.

Return the cooked, drained pasta to the pan and quickly add the cheese, butter and marmite, stirring through till melted, and a splash or two of the pasta water – enough to make a silky sauce to coat the pasta. Add the pancetta and serve with grated parmesan.