Our Week In Dinners, 24th-31st January

For the past year I have been reading lots of blogs from the Irish Parenting Bloggers and every so often I come across a mention of Sinead's (from Bumbles of Rice) week in dinners. I think this little linky is a great idea and had been keeping an eye out for it. 

Well, on Monday morning, just as I came in the door with the grocery shopping, my phone pinged with an e-mail - Sinead has started her linky again. If you are interested in joining, here is the link.

Dinners in our house are a bit confusing. You see, for the last 17 months Number Two hasn't got his full-day place in kindergarten anymore. So he comes home for lunch. Number One gets a hot meal at school in the middle of the day Monday to Wednesday and The Bavarian eats his dinner in the canteen at work in the middle of the day. 

Often Number Three, Number Two and I have our dinner in the middle of the day, with Number One joining us on Thursdays and Fridays. The problem is, I am a dinner-in-the-evening, lunch-at-lunchtime kind of person. Try as I might, I just can't get used to dinner in the day. I try to get round this by making a hearty soup like Minestrone  for the middle of the day. But there are some days when I make dinner twice. 

There are others when I don't eat a warm meal at all because no-one wants one. On those kind of days we have "kalt" for dinner. Kalt is the German word for cold and my children use it to mean having what we called a tea-dinner in my house when I was a child - bread, cheese, cold meats, maybe a salad and a fruit platter and some yogurts.

The past week  of dinners (whether eaten at lunchtime or dinnertime) looked like this.

Sunday

On Sunday we grazed. I had had a dinner party the previous night and had served mezze / tapas type dishes. There was enough left over to feed us all whenever we got hungry throughout the day. This is what the original meal looked like.

Front the bottom of the picture to the top, there was garlicky flatbread, Parma ham, Puy lentils, marinated olives, red pepper hummus, feta and spinach filo rolls, baba ganoush, cherry tomato salad, Irish salmon with dill and caper dressing, grilled courgettes with mozzerella and my version of The Busy Mama's bread. All homemade and well worth the hours spent in the kitchen on Saturday.

Monday

Originally I had planned a roast chicken for Sunday but what with all the leftovers, it made no sense to cook it. I roasted it for Monday evening. I happen to have goose fat in the fridge, so it rubbed it all over the chicken along with some herbed salt and roasted it for 2 hours at 150°C. For the last 20 minutes I gave it a blast at 200°C to crisp up the skin. I hadn't time for stuffing but i did shove some garlic and a bunch of flat-leaf parsley into the chicken before roasting it. Number One wanted roast potatoes, as did I, and Number Two wanted mash, so I made both as well as carrots and gravy.  

The picture shows the previous weekend's chicken. I made it exactly the same way and just prepared mre veg and no mash. 

Tuesday

Wednesday

Since I had lentils and chickpeas in the house for the dinner party, I decided to use them up and make a tasty stew. Unfortunately I a the only chickpea eater in the house. I got three meals out of it and can't remember what the others ate. Probably "kalt".

Thursday

The boys' new favourite soup is chicken noodle. We are in the lucky position of still being able to get two days out of a meduim-sized chicken. 

I took most of the remaining meat off the chicken and made stock with an onion, a carrot, a few black peppercorns and some parsley. After simmering it for about 90 minutes or so, I strained it, brought it to the boil, seasoned it with salt and pepper and added broken up spaghetti to it. When the pasta was almost done, I added the chicken meat. 

Poor Number Three couldn't understand when it was all gone. He kept walking over to the hob with a bowl looking for "moh" (more).

Friday

I had made bolognese on Thursday night for Friday's lunch and there was enough left over for the kids to have their dinner from it. It was eaten with spaghetti at lunchtime and with cheese-filled tortellini in the evening. 

The Bavarian and I had a Thai green curry with peppers, brocolli and carrot. The picture shows the one I made the previous week with prawns in stead of brocolli. The Bavarian wasn't too thrilled with the lack of prawns this time, but he got over it. 

Saturday

While I was out at the shops for an hour on Saturday morning, THe Bavarian made Frikadellen, a German meat patty somewhere between a meatball and a hamburger. We ate them at lunchtime with bread rolls and intended cooking in the evening. By the time evening came round, the headache I had woken up with was still there and I had been sneezing all afternoon, so we scrapped our cooking plans and ate "kalt". That looked something like this.

My Kitchen a. k. a. Atelier, Centre of Education, Surgery, Refuge

I can spend whole days in my kitchen and not even notice I have been confined to one room for hours on end. It is by no means of vast proportions, measuring roughly 3.5m x 4.5m, but to me it is the perfect room. It is where I am now, actually. 

By perfect I don't mean the decor, as such, or the layout, moreso the feel and functions. It multi-tasks, in somuch as a room can. It is quite obviously a kitchen, having all the usual fittings - cupboards, sink,  kettle, dishwasher, hob, oven, fridge, microwave - as well as an extendable table and six chairs. At the same time it is so much more than a kitchen. 

For a start it serves as commnication central in our house. Of the two windows, one looks out the side of the house allowing me a view over the comings and goings of the neighbours, should I chose to look, and it overlooks the garden gate too. The second window looks out on the garden. Anyone approaching the front door has to walk past it. Needless to say our doorbell doesn't get much use since we have usually seen our visitors coming and have opened the door already. I generally do my blogging and anything else computer-related from the kitchen too because the light is better here than at my small and incredibly untidy desk in the no man's land between the livingroom and playroom.

Cheesemaking with my four year old

Cooking with figs from the garden

My cookery book collection is housed in one corner on a five-shelf-high bookshelf. On the short stretch of wall between the shelf and the window to the garden we have our set up our learing area. It features a map of Europe, a multilingual alphabet poster and our garden birds identification cards. As the boys have got to pre-school and school age so many questions have come up about nature, spelling, geography or food that this corner with the means for them (and us as parents) to answer their questions grew organically over the past couple of years, beginning with the bird cards. Jars of pens, pencils and safety scissors adorn the window sill along with an atlas, craft books and pre-school activity books. 

Part of our learning corner

 Any regular readers may have noticed the grey flooring that appears in the background of many of my photos. No, we don't have this throughout the house. It is only in the kitchen. When we bought the house I was delighted that we had a decent-sized shed, a garage and a guest room. I imagined I would have plenty of space to complete all my upcycling projects. And I do. Space is not the issue. Trying to fit these projects into life with three small boys is the issue. The kitchen is the only place where they can get done, unless I employ a nanny (not an option). So the kitchen has developed a parallel life as an atelier.  

The cradle renovation was carried out entirely in the kitchen

I am not the only one who gets creative in the kitchen. My children have a great love of experimenting, especially if it involves water, paint, food colouring or homemade volcanos. Again, the kitchen sacrifices its original function and becomes a science lab for an afternoon now and again.   

Experiementing with dyeing eggs

 Not least among the many and varied roles of this most wonderful of rooms is it that it serves as my refuge. Here I have my coffee maker, my pantry and my well-stocked wine rack. I have my books and my radio. I can write, bake or watch the children play in the garden. I can sit with a cuppa, my feet resting on a Tripp-Trapp, and feed Number Three. I can browse my craft books and cookbooks and favourite blogs. I can rest, cook or dream. 

Food photos from my cookery blog, My Kitchen Notebook