slow cooker lamb, pumpkin soup, crumble and sweet confessions…

It’s been a busy week, but there’s always time for cooking. We still need to eat midst the chaos of  the day.

Slow cooker lamb curry/broth ; bone in lamb steaks, cinnamon, star anise, cumin, coriander, chilli, grated fresh ginger, garlic, carrot, chick peas, carrot, pumpkin, chopped dried apricots, cider vinegar, water.

Pumpkin, sweet potato and red lentil soup

Apple, black currant and gooseberry crumble with gluten free almond, hazelnut and sunflower seed topping

Finally, here’s a copy of a post I wrote for the big swell yesterday.

the white stuff; sweet confessions from the parenting from line

If you’ve read my blog you’ll know I spend a fair bit of time thinking, making, photographing (dreaming) of food. I figure with all that going on it’s best to try and keep the worrying about food to a minimum (with 4 young kids I’m eager to keep the worrying to a minimum full stop). I do my best to give my kids a nutrient dense diet of real food and if some days my best doesn’t quite look like the stuff food-dreams are made of then I try not to sweat it. The small people appear to be thriving even if I’m not soaking their grains, or giving them too many second helpings of leafy greens. However, there is one food that I do stress about a little, and that’s sugar.

As a reader of Nourishing Traditions’ (Sally Fallon) and a real food activist I feel like I am confessing a sin saying this, but here goes…‘I feed my kids sugar (in moderation)…but probably every day’. There, I’ve said it.

I’m aware sugar is at best an empty food (nutrient wise), so should it have any place in a family diet? Why not cut it out completely?  Maybe in an ideal world then yes, but in (my) real world, whilst I’ve found it easy to keep sugar to a minimum, I haven’t cut it out completely.  I’m not even sure if I want to.

It’s been easy to;

Stick to water and milk for drinks.

Ditch processed yogurts and have live natural yogurt topped with fruit.

Ditch highly sugared cereals.

Stick to real food, cook stuff from scratch, stay away from most processed stuff.

 But the sugar creeps in here…

–      Baking. Baking is at the heart of our home. It’s the answer to ‘what can we have next?’ as well as, in my opinion, to many other questions. I do make some sugar free stuff but generally a few spoons of sugar will make a cake. You can read more of my love of cake here along with some great nutrient dense cake recipes like prune, chia, chocolate and beetroot cake.

–      Baked beans. We love beans on toast. Especially awesome after a morning playing sport. Or for a rainy lunch. With cheese.

–      Jam. The kids love jam. If allowed there would only be one sandwich filling and it would start with J.

–      Chocolate. We just have it around. We don’t gorge on it but we’re no strangers to it.

–      Cafe treats. I like to go out for a mid morning coffee sometimes (often). It helps with sanity. The kids get fluffies with marshmallows… and then there are the cute little kiddo cupcakes, barely the size of a postage stamp, lolly on top….and the not so postage stamp sized brownies… I think I’d rather just skip the coffee and stay at home than go in there and not let the kids indulge a little. That’s just me. This post is not about what’s right and wrong (which isn’t my style anyway) it’s about being honest about my reality.

–      Parties.

–      Ice creams on sunny days.

–      Ice creams on days when we all need an ice-cream

–      Ketchup

So that’s my family life in terms sugar. I’m still figuring out if I’m happy with it or if I need to cut it back further. But for every time I read an article that makes me feel that feeding my kids the sweet stuff is akin to letting them pop outside for a smoke, then I think of the simple joy of seeing a little face covered in ice-cream on a sunny day. It might be empty nutritionally but it sure can be good for the soul. I think someone once said something very profound about moderation.. perhaps we just need to get back to that?

leftover lamb and butter-bean broth

Made with left over slow cooked lamb casserole (bone in lamb steaks, garlic, carrot, red lentils, butter beans, rosemary, lemon, fresh chilli, bay leaf, turmeric, cider vinegar, water and red wine; all in the slow cooker, all day) . Left overs left to mellow in the fridge for a day or two, then simmered with extra water and parsley. A very fine lunch.

leek, lamb, lentil, carrot and apricot curry.

This is another hybrid of curry and bone broth which seems to becoming a bit of a mid-week special around here. It works on the basic principle of slow cooking some ‘bone in’ lamb, together with vegetables and spices with plenty of water. Today the leek gets top billing, because it was a giant of a thing – almost filling the pan before I’d had chance to put anything else in. Cooked with a big dollop of coconut oil, turmeric, cumin, chili powder, garlic, ginger, cinnamon stick, a few cardamon pods, star anise, a couple of small and feisty fresh chillies and a whole lemon (cut in half and squeezed) …it’s really going to be hard to go wrong with that list, isn’t it? Added some chopped dried apricot, a few carrots and celery sticks. Then in with some bone in lamb leg steaks and covered with water and a good splash of apple cider vinegar Put in a cup of red lentils (I really just can’t help myself – they were sitting there staring at me)

Cooked for about 5 hours on a low heat. We had it with fresh tomato chutney and cucumber mint yogurt (amongst other things …but to list them could appear greedy).

slow cooked lamb and chick pea curry

I used a pile of lamb leg steaks, bone in, and cooked this slowly over the course of an afternoon (about 5 hours) so that the end result was a cross between a mild curry and a ‘bone broth’ sauce.  The lamb becomes braised and falls apart so there is no need to cut the steaks up. If you leave a bit of fat on the steaks when you cook them it, makes a very rich sauce indeed.

Start with a little coconut oil and some onion and garlic – then add spices – I think curry is an area you can be very slapdash with the spices provided you don’t go too wild with the chilli. Being a bit random means you keep getting slightly different results, which keeps life interesting. For this one I used a fresh chilli, a good lump of grated fresh ginger, turmeric, cumin, garam masala, star anise, a cinnamon stick, cardamon pods, salt and pepper. Get the lamb steaks straight into the hot pan and brown them with the spices. Then a tin of chick peas, a couple of carrots, some chopped dried organic apricots and a handful of sultanas. Cover completely with water and a splash of apple cider vinegar (if you have it) and bring to the boil on the stovetop and then put in a low oven and cook slowly – it would be done in 2 hours at about 160 but I kept adding more water and cooked around 140 for about 5 hours.

You do need to eat around the bones (the meat will have completely fallen off) and keep an eye out for a rouge cinnamon stick but that kind of stuff is hardly a major hardship. We had it with fresh mint leaves and slivered almonds and a side of cucumber mint yogurt, some mango chutney as well as rice and poppadoms.. be as regular readers of this blog will have figured then we can be a bit greedy around here.

lamb and aubergine curry with potato curry

Made a paste out of a couple of spoons of coconut oil, tumeric, cumin, 2 chopped fresh chilis, grated fresh ginger (couple of tablespoons) and garlic. Heated this in the le creuset and seared some lamb leg steaks (bone in). Meanwhile chopped an aubergine into chunks and salted the chunks, added them to the lamb with a couple of handfuls of sultanas, covered the lot in vegetable stock and slow cooked for a couple of hours with the lid on in the oven. About 1/2 and hour before serving added a tin of coconut cream. Sprinkled with fresh coriander when ready.

We had this with a fantastic potato curry and homemade roti – cooked by J & L – will get the recipes for these up later.

lamb and kumara curry

Despite getting Gordon’s ‘Great Escapes’ out of the library today with a view to getting some Indian inspiration  (after reading J’s facebook update yesterday about a fantastic meal they had just eaten in Jaipur) .. then tonight’s dinner was a random marriage of stuff that happened to be in the kitchen rather than something more thought through.

Onion, garlic, celery, chopped sweet peppers, carrots, grated ginger, tumeric, chili, cumin, all cooked in a coconut oil, then added some lamb leg steaks and chops, kumara chunks, salt, pepper, a little grated nutmeg, a handful of sultanas. Covered in water and slow cooked in the le creuset for 2 hours on low. Ate with rice and roti and mango chutney with slivered almonds over the top.

lentil and lemon lamb legs, slow cooked with honey and sage roast pumpkin and green beans

The lamb was a bit of a mish-mash of flavours as had no clear plan when I started throwing it together but it all came together really well. Onion, garlic, a little fresh ginger, fresh mint, lemon verbena leaves, tumeric, seared the lamb, added a tin of brown lentils, sultanas, veg stock and carrots and a slow cooked in the le creuset (lid on) for about 2 hours.

Chopped the pumpkin into chunks, thew in some whole garlic cloves, plenty of salt, olive oil a spoon of honey and some sage leaves, munched the whole lot around so everything coated in the oil and honey and roasted for 30 mins. This was a winning way to cook pumpkin as think probably the first time D has liked it outside of soup.

Steamed green beans on the side which T likes to open and eat the tiny baby beans from the inside.

lamb steaks, slow cooked with lemon, spices, chick-peas and sultanas with a salad of carrot, orange, mint and zucchini

Onion and garlic in coconut oil with chili powder, tumeric, paprika, cumin , coriander, squeeze of lemon, seared the lamb steaks (bone in) added a tin of chick peas and a couple of handfuls of sultanas, sliced lemon and covered in water – slow cooked for a couple of hours.

Salad – shaved garden zucchini, carrot, garden mint, fresh orange – dressed with orange juice a little sesame oil and red wine vinegar.

lamb and apricot curry

somewhere along the way curry became another casualty of our busy family life and rather than a thoughtful and fragrant creation it had become more of a chuck the contents of the veg drawer in with some meat and a couple of spoons of curry paste. Now the whole point of writing this blog is to inspire me to make food I want to write about and that last sentence just isn’t very poetic. Tonight I had some lamb shoulder steaks (bone in) and some apricots. Started with coconut oil, garlic, onion, chili, tumeric, cumin, garam masala, dried coriander (I guess fresh would have been better but I’ve never managed to grow it in our garden) and some fresh grated ginger (probably stuck in about a teaspoon of each – 2 of ginger) coated and seared the lamb steaks then added 3 chopped apricots, 4 chopped carrots, a handful of raisins and covered the lot in water then slow cooked for a couple of hours. Had it with rice and cucumber / mint yogurt.