Three Cheese Pasta

Sorry, I didn't really have a recipe for this one. I cooked some pasta, threw some broccoli florets in for the last 5 minutes, and some halved and trimmed snow peas in for the last minute before draining. Fried some sliced mushrooms, and some bacon. Threw in 1/3 cup crumbled feta, and a tbsp of cream cheese. Topped it with grated mozzarella on serving.

Nothing to it really.

World Bread Day: Cream Cheese Fruit Bread

Today is World Bread Day, and nothing is better than dragging out the bread machine and letting it make you some piping hot yumminess. Pity this bread wasn't really our cup of tea. Well, the boys wolfed it down, and Miss Three would have eaten hers, but it was so heavy and dense the slice broke when she tried to lift it, resulting in tears, and dried fruit mixed with vanilla yogurt. Not to worry, I ate hers. But I found that it was only the hint of cinnamon and the dried fruit that made it nice at all. Perhaps if you had fussy children that needed their dairy hidden, this would be great, but I don't see the point of the cheese except to ruin the texture of the bread. Still, it got rave reviews, so it could be just me.

Cinnamon Cranberry Cream Cheese Bread adapted from Allrecipes
1/3 cup milk
1 cup cream cheese, diced
1/4 cup margarine
1 egg
3 TBSP sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups bread flour
2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
2 tsp Dutch cinnamon
2/3 cup dried cranberries
2/3 cup diced dried apricots

Place everything into your bread machine and select Sweet loaf, Light crust. Serve hot with butter. Then head on over to Kochtopf to check out all the other yummy entries.

Don't forget to think (and cook!) pink for the Virtual Night In, raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Research.

Cheesecake Truffles

When I heard that Stephanie over at Dispensing Happiness was having a birthday theme for this month's blog party, I knew I had the perfect thing lined up to cook for her. It was simple, and delicious, and if my kids were scared of the noise the food processor makes, they could have pretty much made these themselves. Stephanie loves cheesecake, and this is the perfect bitesized version.

Take one block of cream cheese (250g). Use it at room temperature, unless it is 24°C in your kitchen, then you might need it a little colder. Put it in your food processor (or someone else's, I'm not fussy) with 2-3 packs of Oreos. I used cheap imitation oreos. It still tasted great. Whizz up until you get a smooth mixture. Roll into little balls, and chill. Or it your kitchen is enjoying the start of beautiful warm spring weather, chill, then roll into balls, then chill again.

Melt some chocolate and coat the balls with it. I didn't have enough chocolate, so I mixed in some Freckles (chocolate discs with hundreds and thousands on the top) that I had leftover from making the teacups the other day. Then I ran out of that mix, so I bought another bag of Freckles. That's why some are bumpier than others. I brought these, with the teacups, to my niece's 13th birthday party, so they are doubly birthday-ified.

Go check out the round up!

Cheesy Spinach & Mushroom Spaghetti

Since today's lunch at the ILs got called off due to illness, I thought we might need something a little more substantial than jaffles. But since we still haven't done the fortnightly shop yet, I was a little limited as to what I could make.

I settled on pasta - two votes for spaghetti over the penne, and used up some leftover baby spinach, and neglected mushrooms from the bottom of the fridge. Add a few cloves of sliced garlic and some cream cheese, and regular cheese, and what more could you ask for?

All I did was set the water on the boil for the pasta, and when that boiled, added the spaghetti and boiled till soft. My family prefer their pasta on the soggy side, not al dente. While that was happening, I lightly fried 4 cloves of garlic I'd sliced, along with about 8 large mushrooms (just normal large, not the huge flat ones), also sliced. Then I added roughly 3 tbsp of cream cheese, and a bit of the pasta water. Mixed it until it was nice, added in, hmm, maybe 3 cups of baby spinach? I didn't measure, it was just everything left in the packet. Add it to taste, or whatever you have. Then add about half a cup or more of grated cheese right before you tip the (drained) spaghetti into the frypan. Mix together and quickly serve before your pan gets coated in melted cheese and all yuck to clean up.

The finished sauce before adding pasta

Kids Cooking Thursday: Pretzel Butterflies

This was a lovely simple thing to "cook" today, which was handy as we went out for lunch, and were tight for time this afternoon. I got the recipe and idea from the August 2008 issue of Australian Good Taste (the safeway food magazine).

Cut a stick of celery into 2 10cm lengths. Fill centre with cream cheese. Stick two pretzels (bumps pointing out) into the cheese as wings. Place 3 sultanas in a line down the body, and then either use two broken pieces of pretzel, or the "V" from the middle of the pretzel to make the antenna. Place that into the cheese above the wings.

Master Four looking pleased with his butterfly and himself


Miss Two thought they were a riot!

Then devour!

Those poor dismembered corpses!

Short and sweet this week, but the kids had fun, and afternoon tea, and I don't end up with an expanding waistline and/or a freezer full of cake/sweets I'm bound to end up eating by myself.