When the weather is so cold outside, what else to do but bake and make some homecooked meals?
For lunch, I decided to try and make something quick. When I cook I don't follow recipes. I just go by what I have in the fridge to use up and most often than not, my family likes the food I make. Cooking for kids especially, they will tell me whether they like something or not!!
I grabbed the over-riped tomatoes, which has been sitting on our counter for over a week, and put them in my Vitamix. Any time I can add more vegetables in sauces, I do it!
I put in carrots, an onion, celery and cilantro and a dash of sea salt and blended it all up into a liquid then boiled it down in a pot with some leftover tomato paste my husband used for making pizza the day before. Later, I remembered I had some ground turkey so decided to mix some spices in and rolled them into balls and put them in the sauce. I tried to involve my girls with the ball rolling but they didn't want to touch raw meat. Perhaps I was like that as a kid? I popped some garlic bread from the freezer into the oven and let the girls dip it into their tomato veggie soup. Ta da! The tomato soup turned out thicker from the low boiling and looked more like a sauce but tasted really good.
When I have my oven on, I like to use it to its full potential and try to make multiple items and multi-task. So while my soup was simmering down and letting the flavours cook through, my girls and I tried out a recipe for making matcha swiss roll: https://www.justonecookbook.com/matcha-swiss-roll/. It didn't turn out looking exactly like the one in the recipe but tasted pretty good. I always tell my kids that they have to try something even if it may not look good, because you never know how it tastes. I used pandan flavour extract in the whip cream instead of using matcha. I didn't want the kids to stay up all night from the matcha!! I didn't know until a few days ago that matcha is very high in caffiene. We had company over and they wanted to try the matcha green tea I bought from Costco. I didn't have time to read the instructions and put 2 heaping tablespoons of the matcha powder in my little teapot. Weeeelllll, let me tell you, I didn't sleep a wink that night and affected me the whole week! Not kidding you. Anyways, the pandan flavour profile was a nice compliment with the matcha. My kids gobbled it up with every bite with a 'yummy' and licked the plate clean.
Then after dinner we tried our hand at making macroons following this recipe: https://www.thespruce.com/easy-classic-chocolate-macaron-recipe-434873. Since we didn't have almond flour, I decided to grind some almonds with my vitamix. Nope...it didn't work out as nicely as I wanted but we were half way through and I didn't want to just give up. Seeing my kids faces after telling them the almond 'flour' didn't turn out, I decided to make our own version. The clumps of almond actually added a good texture and tasted like a macroon...just a flatter version. Instead of filling the 'macroon' with our hazelnut chocolate cream, I dipped the flat 'macroons' to coat halfway and put them in the freezer. They actually looked like florentine cookies, something that I always wanted to try making, so it really turned out in the end cuz the girls loved them and was well satisfied.
With warm bellies and feeling grateful for having family and good friends around, here's to new beginnings and a happy new year!