We eat several different meals that we consider to be mexican, although in reality they are probably a very loose interpretation of what Mexican food really is. The challenge for this week was to cook a mexican dish we had never made before.
While wandering around on the internet looking for ideas, I thought of Mexican Pork and Beans - something I have never had, but must have heard of somewhere. As it happens, there are literally thousands of recipes for Mexican Pork and Beans. I was wanting to make as authentic a dish as I could, which is made more difficult when you have never seen or tasted the dish before.
I came across this recipe for
Mexican Pork and Beans. The ingredients and spices looked to be a good balance from what I had read in numerous other recipes.
It also helped that there were no strange ingredients to source.
I made this on Friday night, for Craig and Sandra (and kids), and Paul and T. I cooked it in the afternoon, and we finally got to eat after Summer Soccer.
We had it with Rice, Tortillas and Salad.
This gets a 4.5/5 from me. Really tasty, with just the right amount of chilli in it to make it warm but not hot. Having beans in the dish meant that the 1kg of meat stretched to feed 6 adults and 6 children. I used a pork shoulder roast, deboned and diced. There could have been a bit more meat in the dish, but realistically we probably didn't need more - it was just tasty enough that we would have eaten it if it was there.
Yet another recipe to add to the repertoire.
With our regular meals, I try to keep to an average of $10 meat per meal to feel our family of 2 adults and 3 kids. With the challenge for this week being "a budget meal" I decided to try and make the whole main course for as close to $10 as I could, including meat.
I found a Destitute Gourmet recipe for 
Peanut Pork and Rice. This recipe also happened to be a one pot meal, where everything is cooked together, which is always a bonus when it comes to cleaning up afterwards.
I think the total of ingredients added up to $11.47, which fed us all plenty, and there was enough left over for Kyla to take in her lunch the next day. Having garlic, courgette and beans from our garden certainly helped to keep the total cost down.
We would give this a 4/5 and I will certainly make it again.
This week, the challenge was to use a grain that you had never used before.
I bought a bag of pearl barley last week, having read about making a pearl barley risotto. The challenge gave me a push to actually make it this week.
I was a little dubious about how this would work, and after a quick look on the ever useful internet, found a recipe that looked good.
I didn't have any mushrooms, so they just got left out of the dish, and I added some slow roasted tomatoes that I had done. The texture is quite different to a regular risotto, with a bit more bite to the barley grains. The risotto tasted really good, and the kids all happily ate it. Incidentally, Pearl Barley has a very low GI rating (25) which means that it does not impact your blood sugar level very much. This will make it a very good recipe for me to cook for Jill sometime.
I would score this at 4.5/5 and will 
definitely be making it again - probably trying it with different flavours as well, just as I would with a regular risotto. And at $1.90 for 500g, it is significantly cheaper than risotto rice. I used just under a whole 500g pack, which provided a large serving each for 5 of us, and a large lunch for Daryl the next day. Pretty cheap really.
Kyla has officially started High School now, and is only a few months off becoming a teenager! She is also now eligible to go to Youth Group, which starts this weekend.
Clearly we are all getting very old.
I thought you might all like to see Kyla in her school uniform, ready for her first day.
It has been/is a big adjustment for her, but she is doing very well. She caught the bus to school yesterday for the first time, and this afternoon will catch it home. This is a big thing, as up till now she had never had to do this. Fortunately she has a friend from Waimauku School who catches the same bus, so they have been organizing to do this together.
She is in the GAT (Gifted and Talented) Class, and so there are very high expectations from the school about how hard they will work this year. Kyla has a very good work ethic, so I do not think this will cause her any problems.
No doubt she will grump at me for this blog entry, but I figured you may like an update anyway.
After a break over Christmas and New Year, the challenge has re-started, and this week was my turn to choose the ingredient.
As it is summer, I thought we should go with a seasonal ingredient, and at the moment we are enjoying plenty of lovely fresh stonefruit.
Earlier this week Mum made us a summer fruit tart for dessert when we visited them for dinner. I got a copy of the recipe, and so for dessert last night I made this with the addition of a few ground almonds to the cake batter. For fruit I used blueberries, peaches and black doris plums.
I also made vanilla and black doris plum frozen yoghurt from a recipe I found online. I used the juice from half a lemon instead of adding the cinnamon, as I was after a fairly sharp clean flavour.
The cake and the frozen yoghurt were both great, and went down very well with our visitors. The yoghurt tasted very sweet before being frozen but once frozen had plenty of tang and freshness to it. I would definitely do both again, and will probably use the same frozen yoghurt recipe again soon with different fruit. I want to make peach frozen yoghurt when the black boy peaches are in season as I think the idea of a purple yoghurt that tastes like peach is quite intriguing.
I just had to put a couple of photos of Missie here for you.
She has decided that she really likes the vege garden, and on a hot sunny day I saw her sheltering under the leaves of the Rhubarb plant.
She looked so cute that I couldn't resist getting the camera out. She didn't like the flash and the noise of the camera though, and almost seemed to frown before going back to sleep.
