Soccer and Salmon

After a week of wet weather, the rain stopped long enough to let soccer pitches dry sufficiently to allow all games to be played.

9:10am, Huapai Domain, The Groovy Girls vs the Crocs

Score 2-0, both goals scored by the prolific striker "Lovely" Lauren Palmer (actually not very lovely on the soccer field, more like a tenacious terrier).  Nana & Poppa and Grandma & Grandad were there to witness the goals and would agree that she is indeed tenacious. 

Lauren was particularly thrilled to be awarded the player of the day for her efforts today.  Luckily Poppa had his camera with him to capture the moment.

10:00am Bay City Park, Norwest Mavericks vs East Coast Bays Bees

Score 6-0 Braden didn't score today, largely because he typically plays defense!

None of the boys on Braden's team like to be subbed off, so after about 30 seconds of being on the sideline, the query starts "when can I go back on?"

A well played game with team effort put in to get the goals.

11:00am Huapai Domain, Norwest Eagles vs Oratia Cheetas

Score 0-4 This was a disappointing result for Kyla's team as the previous game showed a lot more skill and team effort.  Today everyone looked a bit sluggish, as one Mum said, "like they had been up late partying last night" ...... actually Kyla had, but she was one of the few actually running hard.  Kyla is most often playing in a mid field position, which ends up meaning she runs from one end of the field to the other, joining in with defending and attacking.  This Wednesday she will be playing in the year 7&8 girls soccer team representing Waimauku School at the North West area Soccer Tournament.  She is looking forward to it, and will practice with the school team on Monday and Tuesday, as well as her club team practice on Tuesday after school.  After the tournament on Wednesday, she has swimming at 6pm for an hour.  Just as well she is fit!

2:30pm Riversdale Reserve, Western United vs. MNL Spirit

Score 6-0 Daryl scored his first goal of the season, a nicely placed header into an open goal.  He came home with the largest blister that I have ever seen, on the back of his heel, and a marginally smaller one on the other heel.  They are now steri-stripped flat, and covered with large plasters.  Apparently his winter boots give him blisters and he forgot to use plasters during the game.  Well, he won't do that again in a hurry, will he?

So, all in all, not a bad day of soccer for the Palmer family.

After all that soccer, we had a very hungry family.  Braden sat down and ate cereal for afternnon tea, and was still hungry at dinner.  Tonight we had one of the family's favourite fish dinners.

Maple, Balsamic and Orange Glazed Salmon on Green Pea Risotto

The first time I served this to the kids, they were very suspicious of the green rice, but it has since become a favourite of theirs, much to the amusement of Grandma who had Lauren suggest that she could cook Salmon and Green Pea Risotto when Lauren stayed over one time.

The glaze is from a recipe book of Paul's and is really nice with Salmon, pork or chicken.  The risotto is a variation on a recipe by Nigella Lawson from her book "How to eat".  The snow peas were freshly picked from our very own vege garden!

European Peasant Bread 2 ways

The recipe I most often use for our bread is the European Peasant loaf.  It is largely white flour, with the addition of some rye and wholemeal flours.  This makes a nicely textured and coloured loaf with a bit of added goodness.  

The classic round shaped loaf is called a Boule, a free formed loaf sprinkled with flour and slashed before baking.  I have been trying for quite some time to get the crust a lovely golden colour and slightly shiny where it has been slashed.  

From reading on the Artisan Bread in Five website, (www.artisanbreadinfive.com) I found out that what I needed in my oven was to use a pizza stone, and have steam for the first part of the baking.  

The first method suggested was putting hot water in a roasting tray in the oven, which works, but is a bit fiddly and unpredictable.  

Another method shown, which I have discovered is the easiest way, is to place the bread on a pizza stone, with a stainless steel bowl over it for the first 15 minutes, and then remove the bowl for the remaining baking time.  And voila, it works.  A gorgeous crusty loaf.  

The third method I have read about is one I believe Paul has used, which involves using a preheated cast iron (or clay) baker with a lid on for the first 15 minutes, and then removing the lid so the loaf can crisp up.  I am waiting to see his results, as a cast iron dish here is an expensive beast to buy.  I may try it with a standard lidded casserole dish and see how it goes.

For school lunches, I have baked various

things including ready made hot dogs using a kransky sausage with cheese wrapped in bread dough and baked.  Mini sandwich loaves are one of our new staples, and the kids find it to be a lot of fun to slice the loaves and make miniature sandwiches.

We have also had sticky cinnamon rolls, pizza and calzone, all made from this basic dough recipe that we store in the fridge.

Growing food and a new acquisition.

As we have a reasonable amount of space here, it made sense to plant a vege garden.  So far, we have only completed a small section of the garden, but already have been enjoying fresh produce from it.  We have been eating lots of lettuce from it, spring onions, snow peas and parsley.  Still to come are carrots and broccoli. We have planted Marigolds in the vege garden too, as they apparently repel various small bugs that would otherwise be a nuisance.  Not sure if they work but they add a nice touch of colour. When we get the rest of the garden finished and filled with dirt, it will be time to add more plants, to hopefully end up with most of our fresh veges being home grown. 

The next bit of news is that I was particularly spoilt this Mother's Day with my family (read Daryl organising it) giving me a shiny new Kitchen Aid mixer.  This will replace the electric beaters that wore out and died recently.  Since then I have discovered it is remarkably tedious having to beat egg whites with a hand whisk, or beating egg yolks and sugar till  pale and thick by the same method.  Not good for an arm that has OOS tendencies.... and besides, it looks so good on the bench!

So far it has been used to knead dough for pizza bases, caramel mud cake for Kyla's birthday cake, the filling for a cheesecake type dessert and the egg whites for the sponge part of the same dessert. 

Another Soccer weekend...

Yay! Lauren's soccer team (the groovy girls) won their game- a first! The score was a very respectable 3-1 with Lauren scoring one of the goals and assisting in another.

The parents were all thrilled at the win as we feared it could be a season of losses with the girls all new to soccer.  

Braden's team won their game 4-1, so they were also very pleased.

Kyla's game was cancelled this weekend as we have had a lot of rain over the last week and lots of the grounds were closed on Saturday.

Soccer (last weekend)

This is out of order in that soccer was before the bread baking, but I thought I would catch everyone up on how it went.

Soccer starts with Lauren's game at 9:10.  Her team is an all girls team (wasn't intended to be, just ended up that way) and none of them have played club soccer before.  That makes for a few disasters to start with, and a very steep learning curve.  This week was wet and cold, and 2 of the girls were not keen to join in after watching a younger sibling play, and getting cold and wet doing so.  That meant that we only had 4 players when we needed 5.  The other team loaned us a player, and even with that bit of help, we were soundly beaten.  Score 9(?)-1 (lost count)

Braden's game was at Greenhithe at 10am, meaning with Daryl away, I had to call on Nana and Poppa to take him to his game.  So, they had the privilege of standing in the cold rain, watching him play.  I believe he played well.  Score 2-2.

Kyla's game was at 11am at Huapai.  So far this season, her team has lost both their games, but this week was quite different.  They played well, and were only 1 point down at half time.  Nana and Poppa arrived in time for the 2nd half, and were there to see Kyla score a goal to make it 3-3.  Later in the game she scored another goal to make the final score 5-3!  A fantastic result, and a very happy team.

Pain d'Epi (wheat stalk bread)

Since my recent obsession is baking bread, I thought it only fitting that the first blog be about baking bread.  

Last night Kyla wanted to make Curried Kumara Soup for dinner, so here was a perfect opportunity to use some of the dough sitting in the fridge to make nice bread to go with it.  It was also raining and very cold, so there wasn't really much to do.I had previously tried this particular form of bread, with limited success.  The first attempt was using stored dough again, but it must have been slightly too wet for this, as although they tasted great, the wheatstalks looked more like caterpillars. (Craig and Sandra can vouch for this.)  So, time to try again.

This time I put a lot more flour around the dough when shaping it ("cloaking" according to the book I have), and let it rise for a couple of hours while doing other stuff.  I then dusted with a bit more flour, and cut to shape the dough.

Here it is just before going into the oven.

And after 25 minutes baking, 

it looked like this:

The kids were very impressed, and between the four of us (Daryl being in London at present) we managed to get through almost all of 2 of these.  They were very tasty and nothing at all like small segmented larvae.

I believe Paul was going to try the brioche recipe from the same book/website (Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day) so I am sure we will hear/see about that.  It looks very yummy but the quantity of eggs and butter used to make it so rich is just a little off-putting.  I guess for the sake of learning we will have to put ourselves through the ordeal of testing it anyway.  

I am thinking Blueberry and cinnamon brioche? mmmmmm.

The Beginning and Purpose of this blog

So, I have finally joined the ranks of bloggers.

I have lofty ambitions of keeping this up to date and interesting, we shall see how that goes.  I am sure there are people laughing already.

A brief glimpse of our life at the moment would look like;

food, school, work, soccer practice, food, swimming lessons, food, soccer games, food, and so it goes on.

I love to cook, and am particularly interested in baking, particularly bread of late. So, I will occasionally tell you about my adventures in baking the perfect loaf, or share some of what we cook for meals, or the other tasty morsels we create here.

You will no doubt see and hear what the kids are up to, and as we spend a ridiculous amount of time involved in Soccer this season, there are bound to be blogs about their efforts.

So please, grab a coffee (another love of ours) and enjoy.