A Little Look at Breakfasts

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day and "they" are probably right. But I sometimes wonder how much time "they" have in the mornings. I mean, there are very few people I know who, with the best will in the world, are not in a massive rush in the morning. What with getting dressed for work, getting children up and dressed, getting packed lunches made, finding shoes, school books and other mislaid items, it is hard to find the time for anything other than bread or cereal.

Nicola from Simply Homemade recently gave us a great run down on her family's breakfast favourites and started a little linky. So I'm joining in. Breakfast in our house is a real German-Irish mix. Like most people, during the week it is all a bit of a rush and at the weekend we tend to take our time, sit down together and have a bit more of a feast.

Toast

In our house sliced pan is known as "toast bread" (I still call it sliced pan but I am the only one) because Germans don't believe in eating "raw toast". It is only for toasting. We are not big toast eaters but we do go through phases. The toaster lives in the press and comes out for a few days at a time, either to make proper toast, to toast the cut side of bagels or to brown the inside of burger buns in the summer.

Porridge

My husband and children love to eat what I call raw porridge - rolled oats with milk and a little sugar. That is their standard weekday breakfast. I am not a fan, much preferring the cooked variety with cream and brown sugar. Not exactly healthy, but better than scoffing a danish in the office at 10am, right?

Fruit / Yogurt with Fruit

All three of my boys are fruit lovers. About half my grocery shop each week is fruit. Some mornings it is all they want. I know it is not all that filling, but as long as they eat, I'm happy. Often they will have natural yogurt or vanilla yogurt with it. Greek yogurt with honey and banana is one of Number Two's favourite combinations.

Overnight Oats
A combination of the above two breaksfasts, this is a recent addition to our breakfast table. So far it has only found favour with me and Number Three. We share a jar in the mornings. I find he eats more when he is eating the same as someone else. Number Three may be only 9 months old, but he does not want to be treated like a baby! 

I make my overnight oats as follows:
Take a jam jar and 1/2 fill it with oats. Add a few spoonfuls of natural yogurt and mix. Pour a few spoonfuls of pureed berries over it and then slice in some banana and top with a spponful of yogurt or puree to stop the banana going brown. Put the lid on and refridgerate overnight. (If you have time) take it out of the fridge about ten minutes before eating so that it is not icy cold. 

Sweet Yeast Plait
Another favourite in our house is plaited yeast bread. I make it for special occasions and sometimes for Sundays. The trick to having this ready for breakfast is to make the dough the night before and leave it in the fridge to prove overnight. You just mix everything together really well, pop it into an oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and place it in the fridge. The next morning you just need to divide the dough into three pieces, plait it and bake it. The recipe is the same as this one for Easter Nests. Eaten with homemade jam this is a delicious breakfast. Given that it is all homemade and the sugar content of the bread is much lower than cake, it is not as unhealthy as many a processed breakfast. 

Pancakes
When I was growing up, my mother often made us dropscones for breakfast (they are small, fat pancakes and are not at all scone-like, to clarify for the non-Irish readers). Even though she left for a full day's work as soon as we went off to school, she made the time to throw a batch of these together. I love them and have often mase them for my own children, more at the weekend though. Unfortunately my children prefer proper pancakes - thin and flat, for rolling up. I like pancakes too, but they aresuch a chore to fry ad the fryer (me) either has to eat while she fries or wait till the batter is all used up and sit to eat as everyone else is finishing up.

Waffles
We invested in a waffle maker about 4 years ago and we just love it. Waffles are reasonably quick to cook, the mixture being along the lines of pancake or muffin batter. Our machine cooks two at a time. You can find my recipe here. While I prefer to make them seldom so they remain a treat, you can make wholewheat, low fat variations of waffles. We top them with whatever is going - blueberries, greek yogurt, honey, homemade jam, cinnamon sugar,... They are always a hit in our house. 

Fresh Rolls, Brezel and Croissants

Here in Germany there are bakeries on every corner. Within three minutes walk of our house there are three bakeries in three different directions. They sell delicious fresh bread rolls, croissants, danishes and traybakes of breakfast cakes (light sponge with almonds or crumble on top). At the weekend we very often pop round the corner and buy ourselves a selection. After 12 years here, the novelty has still not worn off. Even on a school morning I will sometimes pop round the corner to the bakery for brezels for us all. I'm there and back in 6 or 7 minutes. The kids don't even notice I'm gone. 

As you can see, we are not the healthiest breakfast eaters but you won't find a pack of fruit loops, a Rice Crispies Bar or a jar of Nutella on our table. Homemade and fruity sums up our taste in breakfasts, and when we go home to Ireland we binge on fry ups.

http://www.madewithpink.com/2015/07/fairy-bread-its-not-just-for-parties/

This Week I've Loved - Filming with Number Two

There are times in life when you ask yourself "Why did I do that? It was obviously a bad idea" and then it turns out it wasn't such a bad idea after all. Like me moving to Germany with no money and no job. But twelve years later I am still here, happily married and with three sons and a lovely house.

I had one of those bad idea moments this week, albeit on a much smaller scale. I had a notion to make a yeast bread video tutorial. When I couldn't get my phone to the right angle to film from, I asked Number Two (my almost 5 year old) to hold the phone steady for a few minutes. It started off well but then he decided to get creative and take a few photos of me. As he did so, he chatted and waved the phone about, leaving me a video in need of severe editing. But what I also got were some candid shots of me in the kitchen, just doing what I normally do while baking. Number Two enjoyed filming and photographing as he pleased while I had floury hands.

I loved this shared moment with Number Two, interrupting our usual routine of breakfast, chatting and getting ready for the day by adding a phone set to video mode into the mix.

I never got to re-film the start of the tutorial, but here is what i was able to salvage. If you are interested in the recipe, leave me a comment and I'll post it soon.

How to Be Lazy and Still Be Organised

One thing people always say about me is that I am very organised. (Hopefully that won't be what they write on my headstone). "Where do you find the time?" is a question I am often asked by colleagues and friends. My standard answer to date has been "Eh, I dunno". Lately I started to take a closer look at my life to identify why I have time where others don't seem to and I came to a couple of conclusions. The main ones are that 
a. I am lazy about things I don't enjoy
b. I work efficiently on the things that have to be done in order to allow myself time for the things I really enjoy.

Anyone who knows me a bit will have read a. above and will now be thinking to themselves "Liar. She is anything but lazy". Anyone who knows me really well (The Bavarian, for example) will be thinking "Spot on". I'll give you a few examples to highlight what I mean. Our bathroom get cleaned when it is borderline filthy or when visitors are coming to stay overnight. Our floors get washed so little, that it almost has novelty value. My middle son has a toy sweeping brush. The only explanation I can find for him wanting to have one is that he thinks it is something you only take out on special occasions and hence must be very precious. 

Here are my top tips for efficient running of the household:

Use separate laundry baskets for the different washes
I don't mind putting a load into the washing machine but I detest rooting through dirty washing to separate colours, darks and whites. Since having children and discovering the joy of wee'd in jammies, pooed on undies and milk encrusted muslins I hate this task even more. So I put a stop to it. Our bathroom now boasts no fewer than three pop-up net laundry baskets - one white, one black and one blue. It is a quick, cheap and fool-proof way to organise your laundry and cut out unnecessary sorting. When the kids undress for bed, they know that vests go in the white basket, dark trousers in the black one and anything colourful in the blue one. At one glance I can see which basket is the fullest and know then which wash needs to be done next.  

Use the night
I try to let the night work for me. From using the timer on washing machine to letting yeast dough prove overnight in the fridge, I arrange for all manner of things to be ready when I get up. Often I will set the table at night. Within the last five minutes before going to bed, I grab the plates, bowls, spoons, knives, glasses and cups and plonk them into the middle of the table. Then the breadboard, bread (covered), jam and cereal jar are placed beside them. Out with the light and off to bed I go.
The coffee machine wakes at 6.45 am, providing me with a nice hot brew when I drag myself downstairs at five to seven. The table is pretty much set. I just have to grab butter, milk and yogurt from the fridge before yelling up the stairs "Breakfast is ready".
Once breakfast is done, I can unload the washing machine, having filled it the evening before and set the timer for the wash to be finished at 7.30 am.

At weekends I quite often make a sweet yeast dough after dinner. This takes ten minutes all in all. The dough rises overnight in the fridge. In the morning it can be turned into a plaited bread, raisin rolls or cinnamon twists within an hour of getting up.

Keep sports / hobby bags packed
We go swimming quite a bit, so we have one big swimming bag for the whole family. It contains a couple of €2 coins for the lockers, a hairbrush, a couple of nappies and swimming nappies for Number 3, water wings for Number 2, suncream (for the outdoor pool in summer), swimming togs for me, The Bavarian, Number 1 and Number 2 as well as five towels. After a visit to the pool, all the togs and towels go straight to the washing machine. After drying, they get put straight back in the bag. 
We came up with this plan after spending several Sunday mornings searching for everything we need and ending up in foul humour when we were finally ready to leave the house. Now we use the same ready-packed bag principle for Number 1's football gear and Number 2's music class bag. 

Forget about keeping the place clean
I am not naturally a person who keeps order and I feel that quite keenly since I live in Germany. I used to try to keep the house tidy and clean, but eventually I realised that I was just putting undue pressure on myself and irritating the family.  There would be cries of "You tidied away the Lego I was building with" and "Where is the Star Wars battle I set up yesterday?" from the boys. The Bavarian could never find his sunglasses or work bag because I would move them from the highly unsuitable place he'd put them. 
For the past couple of years I have been operating on the principle of cleaning up messes and only messes. Untidiness gets ignored. The level of satisfaction I get from taking a room from the looks-like-a-bomb-hit-it state to the did-we-hire-a cleaner? state is incredible. So mostly our house looks like this:

And very occasionally like this:

Saturday Night Supper & Sunday's Breakfast

Obviously, I knew life would change with children and, like many people, I underestimated it a bit. I realised that going out on a Saturday night would not be the regular occurreance it once was. But six and a half years in I find myself perched on the top step of the stairs with my laptop and a hot whiskey for company. Now THIS is definitely not how I imagined things.

The evening began normally enough and I had planned, as the title suggests, on blogging a little about tonight's supper and tomorrow's breakfast. The Bavarian put the boys to bed while I fed Number Three then put him to bed. The Bavarian wanted a bath and I wanted to write, so that's what we agreed to do. He hopped into the water, I made a hot whiskey and promptly Number Three woke screaming. It seems he wasn't too pleased with not being included in the evening's activities. So here I am attempting not too successfully to get the soother back into his little mouth before he really wakes, whisper soothing words into his ear and then return to the laptop at top of the stairs. 
Cue crying (his).
So now it is a cold whiskey and one-handed typing with a relatively content baby on my arm. But let's get back on topic...Saturday Night Supper. We spent most of this week galavanting with our visitors from home and ended up with loads of food that needed using up. In an effort to use up as much as possible, I cobbled together French bread pizzas and salad. To make the pizzas, I sliced two par-baked baguettes lengthways and spread them with creme fraiche. This I topped with freshly ground black pepper, chopped sun-dried tomatoes, grilled red peppers (recipe here)and slices of a goats cheese log. I baked them for 12 minutes at 220°C and served them with a salad I threw together while they were in the oven.
The salad consisted of lamb's lettuce tossed with the grated zest of 1/3 of a lemon, walnuts,finely sliced pear and very finely sliced fennel. Dressed with salt, pepper, sherry vinegar and my good olive oil no one else is allowed to touch, it was the highlight of the meal for me.

Considering the turn the evening took, I am very glad that I took ten minutes to get a headstart on tomorrow's breakfast. Germans love a type of sweet yeast bread plait (Hefezopf) for breakfast on Sundays  and I love making it. It is so simple but looks and tastes fantastic. Basically you throw the ingredients into the mixer with the dough hook on and give it a good old knead, then leave it to prove overnight in the fridge.

As I waited for the kettle to boil for the boys' hot water bottles, I weighed the ingredients into the mixing bowl and while I brought the hot water bottles upstairs, the dough got 6 or 7 minutes kneading. Then all I had to do was lift out the dough, oil the bowl, pop the dough back in, cover it with clingfilm and place it in the fridge. 

When I get up in the morning I just have to divide the dough in three, plait it, brush it with egg and 45 minutes later I will be sitting down to breakfast. 

P.S. The recipe will follow soon on My Kitchen Notebook 

My last yeast plait