Haha..here’s our kitchen. Basically, a disaster zone. Thought about posting a nice picture of our Friday night homemade burgers but decided on a slice of real life! The kids are on school holidays, there’s a continual demand for food, activity, outings and lots of mess everywhere. By the end of the day, the kitchen bench is littered with dirty dishes, packets that hadn’t been put away, half eaten food and drinks. Miss 14 had made chocolate fudge biscuits earlier and lunch was probably somewhere in the midst of all that mess too. Lately we have had easy tmx meals that have been posted previously. Everyone is well fed but had no time to try any new recipes and have quite a few lined up to try. Can’t wait till next week.
Slow cooked lamb shoulder with gremolata on cauliflower purée
http://www.recipecommunity.com.au/main-dishes-meat-recipes/slow-cooked-lamb-shoulder-gremolata-and-turnip-and-vanilla-purée/256467 Holy moly, we’ve just tried this recipe from one of NZs top chefs, Ben Bayley, and it is really amazing. We are so impressed, you could imagine it being served in a restaurant and we can’t quite believe it’s been made in our kitchen. On top of the look it tastes incredible. As NZ’s Thermomix ambassador Ben Bayley has created this recipe specially for the Thermomix. Slow cooked Lamb shoulder with gremolata and cauliflower purée ( link above) served on a bed of spinach. The lamb is so tender and succulent, still slightly pink. It’s just been steamed in the Varoma for 75 minutes and roasted for 15 minutes to brown and caramelise. The combination of flavours is fabulous. The parsley gremolata was a breeze to prepare, the silky creamy cauliflower purée is divine and was cooked in the thermomix while the lamb was browning in the oven. Really great how he’s timed all the elements so that it can all come together easily. Restaurant quality food at home! Everyone loved the purée, we used the vanilla been seeds and you could taste them so it is worth adding this optional ingredient if you have it. And best of all no extra dishes are needed, the vegetable content is covered by the spinach and cauliflower. He has uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating the recipe which was really useful to watch first.
Gremolata, lamb and cauliflower purée ready to plate up
Mmmm yum banana cake. This recipe from the recipe community was so close to our family recipe except for the use of self raising flour instead of flour and baking powder, we had to give it a go. 85 positive comments, and it turns out lovely and moist just as everyone says. I might substitute flour and baking powder and leave bananas in when mixing, as suggested by a few members, next time but very happy with this cake as is. Sometimes our cake would fall in the middle but this one stays nice and high. Maybe because it’s cooked at 160C instead of 180C for an hour.
Another trending recipe from the community that we had to try. It’s school holidays so a good time to get the kids into the kitchen and wrapping these spring rolls was a perfect activity for them. You will need a couple of spring rolls packets. I only had one packet so have some extra filling to be used tomorrow.
Leftover spring roll filling
We used chicken mince instead of pork and uncooked prawns which I just threw in with the chicken mince and pulsed once to combine. Cooked a few minutes extra and tasted before adding extra seasoning. Our spring rolls were fried in an airfryer but could easily be baked in the oven too.
Very keen to get back into the kitchen today. We’ve had a few days away on family vacation and after a six hour drive home, we wanted quick simple food. Even though we had some lovely restaurant meals, we were all looking forward to home food. I was super touched when Miss 8 said “Are you cooking tonight? I said yes, she said “yah, just what I feel like “. Meatballs in tomato sauce has been posted before but I can’t resist reposting it tonight. What we love about this guided meatball in tomato sauce recipe is the steamed meatballs are so light and the sauce has a very clear clean taste and because nothing is fried, there’s hardly any oil used at all. You’d never believe steamed meatballs could taste so delicious. The meatballs are just made from bread ( just used one old bun from the cupboard) soaked in milk, two eggs, mince, onion and garlic and the tomato sauce is just 2 tins of crushed tomatoes sautéed in onion and garlic. So simple but absolutely so good and exactly what we all felt like on a cold, wet , windy night. Boiled pasta in the thermomix and dinner is ready in the time it takes to unpack our bags, which is literally what we did while the thermomix cooked our dinner.
Yummy schnitzel, working through Chelsea Winter’s blog recipes and next on the list to try was crumbed Beef Schnitzel.
It’s a lot more effort to make crumbed beef schnitzel. The thermomix doesn’t help much with this one. But wanted to make two nights meals and lunches in one night and it helps when you have a teenager on hand who’s keen to bash, crumb and fry the schnitzels while mum cleans up. The thermomix was used to blitz the herbs and old bread to make panko. Blended bread speed 9/10 until sound changes.
Panko made from bread ends.
We sprinkled salt onto each schnitzel as it cooked and these were great wrapped in lettuce. Didn’t need the Parmesan sauce. Another goodie to be saved to favourites.
Another lovely Chelsea Winter recipe. Light and tasty, a nice change from meaty bolognese. This pumpkin and chicken lasagne is made a bit more special today using fresh homemade pasta that Miss 14 helped to make.
Guided fresh pasta dough
Being pasta making novices, we were inspired to try making our own, knowing there was a thermomix guided fresh pasta recipe that would probably be easy and also seeing pasta machines were 50% off at Stevens. I bought the masterchef one for NZ $60 which seemed like a bargain and was super excited to try this out. After a couple of very average attempts in the past few days, dough was too sticky and not knowing how to operate the machine properly, the pasta was clumping and difficult to work with. Today I’m hoping for success. Having a teenager with confidence, who’s watched junior masterchef for years, we got it this time. Miss 14 successfully made three pasta sheets. Rested pasta dough for 30mins instead of the 15mins recommended in the guided recipe because many of the experts seemed to quote this being standard and floured the sheets in between rolling.
Homemade pasta sheet
Yippee! Making the sheets turned out to be very simple, and the only change we would make is to 1.5 x the guided recipe for a large sized lasagne dish and not roll out as thinly, number 3 thickness instead of number 2. The homemade pasta was beautiful, paper thin, light and fresh.. To adapt Chelsea’s recipe for thermomix , we cooked bolognese base sauce in TM bowl at the time as steaming chicken and pumpkin in the Varoma above. Added cooked chicken back into sauce then added spinach to wilt. Then made bechemal sauce in TM bowl. Saves time, no pan frying or oven roasting pumpkin and chicken and steaming makes the dish quite light with no extra oil added. Layered up the lasagne and baked for 35 minutes.
Pumpkin and Chicken Lasagne adapted for thermomix
Place 4 cloves garlic and one whole onion in TM bowl, Chop 4 sec, speed 7.
Add 30g olive oil sauté 4 min, 120c, speed 2
Add 1 TB of oregano, 3 tsp of rosemary, 1 TB balsamic vinegar, 2 cans of crushed tomatoes, 3 TB tomato paste, 1.5c chicken stock ( NB I left out red wine because there seemed to be too much sauce but you can judge consistency in the TM bowl after cooking and add water/wine if too thick. Or another better option would be to use TM chicken stock paste with wine leaving out water. Possibly because there’s less evaporation using the Thermomix instead of stove )
Add 600g peeled and diced 2cm pumpkin pieces to Varoma tray and add 600g chicken thighs halved to varoma dish. Place Varoma dish and tray on top of sauce in TM bowl.
Varoma dish and tray with steamed chicken and pumpkin
Cook bolognese, chicken and pumpkin at same time using TM bowl and Varoma together 25mins, Varoma temp, speed 1.
Remove Varoma after checking pumpkin is soft, mash pumpkin roughly and set aside. Add chicken to TM bowl and shred chicken in the sauce 5 seconds, reverse speed 4.
Add 2 cups of spinach leaves to chicken sauce in TM bowl, wilt 5 mins, 100c, reverse speed stir. Set aside.
Rinse TM bowl. Make guided bechemal sauce using either the bechemal guided part of the guided lasagne recipe cook all bechemal sauce ingredients 12 mins /100c/ speed 3. (1000g milk , 80g butter, 100g flour, 1 tsp salt, 2 pinches nutmeg )or the separate guided bechemal (500g milk). Depends if you want less or more white sauce. We used 1000g milk this time. Set aside.
Layer lasagne:- pasta sheet, chicken sauce, bechemal alternately placing the smashed pumpkin in between one of the layers finishing with bechemal on top.
Grate a cup of cheese in thermomix and sprinkle over top.
Bake 180c for 35 minutes, grill a few minutes to brown top. Rest for 10 minutes to allow it to set before cutting.
Homemade burgers and bread loaf. Used the recipe above from thermomumma’s blog but used half for burger buns and half for loaf tin. Friday night takeaway food at home. What makes them special tonight is Chelsea Winter’s secret sauce made from gherkins, mayonnaise, mustard.
Burgers
Sliced the bread loaf for the freezer. Turned out great.
Used Annabel Langbein’s sticky bun recipe from her website. ( link below) for these nutella scrolls. Definately a treat, nutella and sugar and cinnamon. Ran out of milk and used 1/2 coconut milk, still worked great.
Tried this easy satay chicken dinner from the recipe community. Super easy and perfect if you’re in a hurry, not too many ingredients, sauté garlic and onion in Thermomix, throw in everything else and cook 15 minutes. Buy prediced chicken and you don’t even have to chop that up. In the time it takes to cook, make a salad or coleslaw. Next time I’ll throw in some spinach or steam some mixed vegetables in Varoma at the same time. Tasty simple family dish with a peanut flavour.
Here’s another very similar recipe that has fewer ingredients and no mustard and has even more favourable comments.
NZ thermomix mum's blog 