Favourite Nut Roast Recipe

This recipe is a delicious alternative to meat and always makes me feel as though I could be a successful vegetarian.  Unfortunately I really enjoy meat too, so only eat free range sustainable meat, anyway, hopefully you'll love this nut roast too!

Ingredients
    1 tbsp olive oil
    1 small onion, chopped
    100g mixed white nuts, such as pine nuts, almonds, hazelnut, walnuts and brazil, ground in a processor
    2 garlic cloves, crushed
    Grated zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
    50g fresh white or brown breadcrumbs
    400g freshJerusalem Artichokes, peeled and roughly chopped
    1 tbsp chopped fresh sage, plus 4 extra leaves
    1 egg white

METHOD
Work out your timings first and take into account all your other roast veg.
How to make nut roast:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/ fan180°C/gas 6. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a pan and gently fry the onion for 5-6 minutes, stirring, until softened but not browned. Add the nuts, garlic, lemon zest and juice, breadcrumbs and artichokes. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and add the sage and egg white. Stir to mix well.

2. Tip the mixture into the centre of a large sheet of baking paper and shape into a fat sausage, packing tightly. Scatter over 4 sage leaves, then wrap it tightly in the paper and put into a roasting tin.

3. Roast for 20 minutes, then unwrap the paper on the nut roast, so it can brown in the oven. If it has stuck, don't worry about unwrapping it, it will not serve as neatly but will still be delicious. Roast for a further 15-ish minutes.

Serve with loads of yummy roast veg and enjoy with friends and family :-)

Roly Poly Bird Costume for Roald Dahl Day

It is Roald Dahl day at school! :-)

The letter came home two weeks ago informing us that it would be Roald Dahl character fancy dress. Immediately an exciting world of possibilities opened up for awesome costumes... Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, it was just a case of finding the one that my daughter would want to be.

We sat down and did some research.  I read and loved all the books when I was a child but that was a long time ago now and my children are too young to have discovered the wonderful world of Roald Dahl just yet.

Suddenly it came to me;  my daughter has often said she wants to be a bird; what was that super bird called? The big blue one with amazing tail feathers, in "The Twits"?
I remember, I have it somewhere..... AH HA!! The Roly Poly Bird! What a good idea!

I showed her the picture and its a winner, she totally wants to be the Roly Poly Bird.  Great!  So now we just need to make the costume.  We started to hunt through some old stuff and found...
An old dry cleaning suit bag,
Some broken fairy wings,
Some holey rainbow socks,
Some Craft feathers,
And some forgotten hair clips.

All these things were about to undergo some makeover recycling.   Here's how I did it:
First I reshaped the bent wings and placed them onto the dry cleaning bag.

I drew around the wings and added my own idea of bird wing shapes.  I cut two of these out and also two basic oval shapes for the back of the wings. Next I pinned these shapes together with the old fairy wings sandwiched between.

 I then hand sewed them together. The next part is where the old holey knee lengh rainbow socks came into use... I cut them up into long strips. I also cut some more long strips from the suit bag.

I stitched these pieces to the wings to become long tasselled Roly Poly Bird feathers.

Next is the most important bit... The "marvellous" coloured Roly Poly tail feathers.  I used some more rainbow strips from my socks with more tassells cut from the suit bag.  I arranged and stitched these all together and then sewed them onto a soft stripey belt.

 The Roly Poly bird has head feathers.  To do this, I used the craft feathers and sewed them to the forgotten hair clips.

 Lastly the stripey legs and  wrist cuffs are made from another pair of holey socks!  I cut the feet off to make stripey tights.  And to make the wrist cuffs I cut the toes and ankles off of the feet.

So there you have it, waste not, want not, I have turned a bunch of old stuff into an exciting costume for my little one for Roald Dahl day, she is stoked, here is the result :-)

 I did her some Roly Poly Bird face paint as a finishing touch and she has gone off to school excited to see all her friends and their exciting costumes too.   :)

Perfect Roast Pork Shoulder

I have to post the following recipe to share the wealth of this knowledge and also so that I don't forget the secret to perfect crackling!
The timings here are for a 1kg piece of meat.

-Remove the meat from the fridge in plenty of time to allow it to get to room temperature.

-Preheat oven to 230°C

-Using kitchen towel, pat the rind dry

-Rub with oil and sprinkle with salt

-Put it into the oven

-After 25 minutes turn it down to 160°C for a further 3 hours

*Get your roast potatoes in the oven 1 1/2 hours before the end! I like to sprinkle a bit of salt, vinegar, garlic n fresh herbs such as Marjaram

Serve with loads of yummy fresh veg, good gravy and homemade apple sauce :-)