aka R’acquel

It’s moments like these where i think that kids on the spectrum seriously do know what’s good for them. Jatz’n'Cheese & BBQ Shapes aside, i think that the classic chicken nugget diet has some potential merit that’s worth investigating further.

My family experienced a strange phenomena recently where we ended up on a diet of chicken schitnzel (almost non-stop) ever since our trip to Werriberri Lodge. I ended up purchasing about 2kg of chicken breast, so …there was a lot left over from this adventure that got stored in our freezer when we came back home. I was up to my neck in trying to juggle work along with homeschooling preparations, so Chicken Schnitzel became the primary staple in our diet for quite some time. My brain didn’t have the space to forward plan with much creative ‘variation’ 10 days in advance as it usually does, so while we didn’t eat chicken every single night - we did eat a more-than-usual amount of it for the period of about 4-6 weeks.

We noticed Aidan going through some significant cognitive leaps during this period. It could’ve very well been a natural growth spurt or just from the removal of school-stress being out of the picture as well …but significant enough for my husband & i to really see a marked shift. I also noticed that i experienced a whole menstrual cycle (and a half) without my skin breaking out as well, where yeah, it really did feel like i had tapped onto a potential “something”. There was something in our family’s dynamics during this time, that was causing a shift of some kind, and the only thing that i can think of ~ was that we were eating more chicken than usual. The ‘results’ or noticeable change i felt, seemed a lot more in-my-face compared to this stuff:

…so I’ve put my hand up to indulge another round of this chicken schnitzel diet in the name of science, to rule out whether or not this was just simply, a pure co-incidence. I can mark my son’s improvement in behaviour as a wild card, but not the condition my skin. Worth giving it another shot, nothing to loose.

Now the processed stuff you get at the supermarket ~ ewe, there’s something not quite-right about them for me - so this is how we make them over here at home from scratch.

Ingredients for a Basic Batter
2 cups flour
1 T salt
1.75 cups of water (more or less)

FRESH Chicken Breast - the batter is enought to cover about 2kg’s worth
375-500g of bread crumbs in a separate bowl
[more if you’re not too dexterous &or have sensory issues ..and more if you’re getting the kids to help out]

Easy ~ flour + salt into a mixing bowl, add water and mix it until it turns into a gooey paste. I’ve tried this with beer in the past with good results too. While it’s sitting there in the bowl and the batter is starting to coagulate together, move on with preparing the chicken.

The kind of knife you shouldn’t use for this task, but my $75 psycho knife from The Essential Ingredient wanted to make an appearance tonight. Normally ~ i use the $45 filleting knife from the Nelson Bay Fish’n'Tackle shop. The reason i fillet them thin is because if the slab of breast is too fat, you risk the meat not cooking in the middle if you fry it. I experienced sensory meltdown during this process because the chicken was so cold and it’s the middle of winter here in the mountains. Calmed down ok after placing traumatised chilblain-prone hands under warm water ~ because i’ve learnt how to get used to that pain - with practise. Yeck! Should’ve prepared the bastards during the morning when it wasn’t so freakin cold. =P

So ~ about 3-4 fillets per portion of a chicken-breast (half) …and yeah, you can make nuggets too, but it’s such a pain in the ass for me to turn them all over in the frying pan which is why i do fillets. If your kid has major sensory issues with food, yeah ~ go get that cookie cutter that’s in the shape of a faux-chicken nugget and work your butt off to make sure it looks EXACTLY like the processed ones (and still risk having your hard efforts in the kitchen getting screamed at). Hooo yeah ~ I’ll share some tips i’ve acquired over the years with regards to dealing with my own uber-picky eater in another post.

Start plopping the fillets (or nuggets) into the bowl of batter, mix thouroughly with hands or a wooden spoon to make sure each piece gets evenly coated. Another moment where temperature can cause sensory irks as well - it helps when i opt for using a bit of warm water with that batter instead of chilling Blue Mountains tap water that’s cold enough to keep butter hard.

I do understand why my son finds getting his fingers all gunked up with glue to be so frustrating. It’s a seriously unpleasant experience for me as well and it can get awfully messy with battered chicken if you’re not accustomed to the art of how to do it without messing your fingers up so much. I have to pull each piece of chicken breast with the very tips of my fingers of the left hand like this all the time to avoid getting it all over me. They are usually the only parts of my body that ever get into contact with it.

Then with the tips of the fingers, I kind of toss it into that bowl filled with bread crumbs and sometimes, i need to wash the goo off my finger tips because i can’t stand it. Hmm… it’s looking superbly delicious for me already even though it’s raw-ass in this shot. If i allow my brain to get too stir crazy, it could freak me out if i visualise the crumbs as sand from Bondi beach. Sand-crumbed chicken… ewe. I can almost taste the grit of sand in my teeth that’s found it’s way into my mouth during a trip to the beach.

The fun bit that’s bound to inspire a narcotic high for some kids on the spectrum who do that classic sprinkle thing with with dirt & sand all the time. I swear man, it’s so cool to just watch those little tiny bits of sand go sprinkle, sprinkle. I could do this forever man. Yeah… if only i had 3 hands, so i could use the other two to just take photographs of this all day long. Wanted to get Aidan involved tonight, but he said he was too busy with his Mario Brothers research on You Tube.

If only i could get this shot with one of those Matrix 360 degree “Bullet Time” shots …man, it’s making me feel high just seeing all those tiny little gains suspended in mid-air - how cool would it be to do a 360? This is how i avoid getting the “goo” on me. I have to make sure that the battered chicken is coated with heaps of bread crumbs on the top…

…so that when i press down on it like this with my left hand that’s been allocated as the “get gunky” part of my body, it reduces the chances of excess gloop permeating through the bread crums and ending up on my skin. Each time i feel that gloop manage to get through and it touches my skin, it makes my body go ick ~ especially if it’s cold gloop. That contrast of wet vs dry ~ it’s not pleasant, but i’m used to it. It upsets me, because if i get gloop on my hands, it will make other bread crumbs stick to it, and make my hand turn into a crusty fingered gloop monster.

First piece of crumbed chicken complete and it looks so much like a slab of Bondi beach. Potentially annoying or delicious, depending on which way you look at it, but i found it somewhat amusing tonight.

Every time i prepare this dish and finish crumbing everything, it always reminds me of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind mashed-potato mountain and i sometimes get that theme song running through my head when i attempt to cover it all in glad wrap and hurl it into the fridge to cure for an hour or two before i start portioning pieces that are going to get hurled into the freezer. No ~ i won’t apologise for the absence of commas in that paragraph.

Now ~ the temperature setting on the stove if you intend to shallow-fry in 1cm of oil in the pan ~ it’s such a tempramental thing. At this house, i know the oil is just-right if i’ve set the dial to 8 and time it for 15 minutes. To test if the oil is hot enough, I use a small piece of crumbed gloop. If it bubbles with anger, the oil is hot-enough. If the best it has to offer is a constipated & fairly flacid kind of a fizzle, the oil is not ready.

The first batch of anything fried, always seems to be either too-hot or not hot-enough. With schnitzel, the first run is almost always going to be too-hot because the oil is just learning how to get acquainted with chicken consistently cooling it down. If it’s getting too dark, too quick ~ it’s time to turn the dial down a tad until you find it’s sweet-point. I almost always end up turning it down to 6 over here ~ but that’s just the bitch of owning one of these bloody electric stoves. Heat-induction - cooking with gas ~ it’s a whole new learning process for me each time we move to another house and i have to learn the temperament of the next new heating element. We have the exact same stupid Chef oven as the former one, but this current one is a different kind of stupid beast. Chef & Blanco ~ brands i don’t trust and will never own in a kitchen of my own.

Oh yeah ~ it was tasty - but if you can’t stand the taste of chicken, you will find this picture absolutely revolting. Have to take care when you’re dealing with the excess frozen chicken that gets locked up in storage tho. Very important to make sure that the meat is properly thawed all the way through or you’ll end up with chicken that’s too-dry - and for some people, that can be a matter of life or death at times.

Anywayz… looking forward to seeing what happens with this experiment of consuming more chicken-than-usual for a whole month or so again, and i’ll follow up with another post if i do see anything interesting at this end.

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The famous Wendy salad which is a common staple at all Smith gatherings that has been in use ever since i first met my SIL a good 12 years ago. Cool & tangy, with creamy avocado functioning as the key signature of this dish. Don’t go stingy on the avocado, as whenever people are trying to heap this salad onto their plates, they’re always fishing for all the avocado with the serving spoon. This dish is vulnerable to a ‘first in ~ best dressed’ kind of a scenario, where the last person usually doesn’t have as much avocado compared to the folks who get to the salad first!

Best prepared on the day and served immediately, so the art of making this dish is to make sure you don’t ‘over-produce’ - so make sure you are liberal with the amount of leafy greens you add to this one because it’s easy to get carried away.

Ingredients
Leafy greens - preferably ones similar to iceberg lettuce which aren’t too ‘bitter’.
Spanish/purple onion
Tomatoes ~ halved cherry or grape ones seem to work better
Cucumber - diced
Avocado - cubed
Red capsicum - cubed
Shredded cheddar cheese
Italian dressing - full fat version is usually better than ‘light’ variants. Praise brand is pretty good.

Method
Hmm…easy, just chop & toss together in a bowl and eat straight away as it doesn’t survive too well in the fridge overnight.

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Cooking is one of the focus areas in my homeschooling ‘program’ for Aidan becuse it’s one of those important skills you need to acquire for learning how to live independantly as an adult. We’re working together on a recipe book by taking photos & documenting the process of making food.

I picked up the skill of making pasta many moons ago before-child, during the days i had the luxury of time to indulge my serious hobby for cooking. So anywayz ~ PASTA. We don’t each much pasta these days, it’s pretty much out of our day to day diet but i figured that pasta-making would be a fantastic recipe to indulge because it’s so dead easy to make. I also find that home-made pasta tastes much better compared to the commercial stuff as well - it feels much better on the digestive system.

The ingredients, are dead simple. All you need is some eggs & flour - that’s it. As it’s been quite some time since i last made pasta, it panned out i needed an extra egg.

Ingredients
2 cups flour
3 eggs

Crack the eggs into a bowl ~ it’s great for fine-motor skill practise for the kids - so is peeling boiled eggs as well.

Next ~ dump the flour into the bowl, not too hard!

Then basically ~ you have to mash it all up with your hands and form it into a dough. Aidan found this challenging because it recquires strength in the fingers but he also has sensory issues with sticky-things ending up on his fingers too. It wasn’t overtly distressing for him, but he was getting frustrated because he couldn’t form a dough. Not a problem for mum to take over while he washed the gunk off his hands because there’s no way he was going to say “no” to the “pasta mill” - as he was *really* looking forward to using that one!

So finally, the flour has been moulded into a dough and it’s ready to get passed through the pasta mill on a clean table. If you don’t have a mill, you can simply use a rolling pin to flatten it out and cut into strips with a knife.

You need to pass the dough through the mill a number of times before the pasta sheets become nice & even, slowly progressing to a smaller dial on the machine to create sheets which are thinner. It helps to lightly coat each side with a bit of flour to prevent it from sticking. We made about 4 long sheets in total. It’s amazing how looooong the sheets can become.

Picture of the final product hanging on the clothes horse to dry. If you have nothing to hang it on, you can use a broom or a dowel suspended in the kitchen somehow.

You can create alternatives to this recipe by incorporating things like mashed spinach to make ‘green pasta’ ~ but you need to be really careful because the excess “water” will make the dough too “loose” without enough “glue” - important to squeeze as much water out of such ingredients as you can.

The beauty of fresh pasta ~ it doesn’t take long to cook ..and we enjoyed eating “Makaka with Paprika Sprinkles” for dinner that night …which is Aidan’s name for this Turkish dish.

I was so surprised by just how good the pasta tasted, that i look forward to attempting some stuffed raviolli with Aidan for the next round.

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Fish - is a hard ingredient to access in these parts. Not much variety here in the supermarket but even when i was living in Sydney, the Fish Markets was still a source of lost confusion beyond my numerous attempt to master the Thai Tom Yum Goong (a hot prawn soup) during those days i had the spare time before our son arrived.

The most commonly ingested format over here would be fish’n'chips (almost always if it’s a visit to the beach) and it’s never travelled beyond a tin of tuna paired with a small dab of mayo and spring onions in a sandwich in this home. Perhaps the odd instance of enjoying sardines. As for cooked fish in general - it’s virtually non-existent on both sides of this family.

Currently on a journey to learn how to stomach more salmon, bring more of this oily fish into the family diet. I learnt from my previous experience, that it’s much better to buy it fresh compared to out of a tin. It’s much less offensive in the smell department for me.

I don’t stomach the pairing of dairy or pasta with fish too well, so am on the search for recipes that can extend the “lemon & herb” route. Attempted a Jamie Oliver based recipe for this round.

Herbs included basil, dill, parsley and majoram, but i could only taste the basil. Husband claims he could taste the dill, but i was completely aloof to it.

Key stuffing ingredient was black olives. They did a fantastic job of replacing lemon. It really didn’t need lemon zest.

Seasaoned both sides of the fish with salt & ground white pepper. You’re supposed to stuff & wrap the salmon packages with string, but i couldn’t do this so it panned out to be more of a salmon sandwich.

In future, I’m just going to concentrate on flavours that compliment the olive base. Feel glad i’ve found a good alternative to lemon and look forward to experimenting further with this ingredient.

Hubby enjoyed the 5 star dinner. I kind of enjoyed getting back in touch with the old gourmet cook-within that got blitzkrieged after childbirth.

There is still sporadic sadness with this loss which was quite harsh and distinctive for me, like a death. Long gone are the days it could take a whole week to prepare an exotic dish, days where hubby and i could debrief after work at exotic restaurants up to 2-4 times a week at times, and those days of travelling to specialist shops to source unique ingredients that were often far too expensive.

These days, i can make my peace that the old-cook hasn’t quite died. The function has somewhat shifted towards cooking “for a family” and for now - i can still make my peace that it’s still always home-cooked, almost always from-scratch and very low on the processed-food components. I’m still very efficient and skilled in the kitchen. Can take pleasure in knowing how to organise things so well that i always know what’s on for dinner now.

Enjoying how the salmon journey has helped me to reconnect to an old way of life again.

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Mrs.Lifecruiser’s Cinnamon Buns baked in my home again tonight. This time the filling was what my dad would called the Turkish equivalent of Nutella.

This is Pekmez - a concentrated grape molasses and all you have to do is mix this sweet stuff with tahini.

I tossed some extra sultanas into the mix this round and they panned out delicious again.

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Tried The Queer Chef’s Harlot Salmon with Bacon Thongs last night. My husband was really thrilled to receive a gourmet meal and devoured his entire portion of it. Nice to try something different, and also go out of my own comfort bubble as I’ve never used salmon before and was turned off from it the first day i smelt one “fresh” out of a tin. I was really suprised by how much better it tasted fresh from the deli. Some parting shots of my feats in the kitchen last night.

Say Cheese (philadelphia, not thrush)! Spices were mashed into philly, then stuffed into a classic Hollywood smile.

Wrapped in bacon and turned back into a fish. Like, grrrrrrr!

Served with home made coleslaw, though my husband calls it “slorr”.

Forgot to wear gloves, but my kitchen soap did a fantastic job of dealing with the afterbreath of handling salmon. I’m going to try this with chicken next time!

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It’s slowly verging towards Newtown Mum’s 4th birthday in May. I found these old photos of the checkerboard cake I made for it’s second birthday which was celebrated at the Newtown Cemetery.

When my brother in law saw this photo this morning, it gave him a sudden craving for chocolate! =D The checkerboard cake has always been an incredible success with the guests, especially upon cutting the cake up because people are expecting a standard old boring cake underneath, but with this sort of cake, - they get a very interesting surprise instead!

The concept came to me via my bargain basement find of the Le Cordon Bleu Dessert Techniques book, which has been an incredible source of inspiration for amazing ways to create incredible looking eye-candy. This one used a combination of vanilla & chocolate cake strips, glued together with raspberry mousse - but the kind of combos that you can do with this idea are endless! You can do a circular version if you have concentric circle cutters in different sizes, but as i don’t have any, it’s far too complex and the standard square or rectangle version is effective enough to make people scream very loudly at the parties anyway!

The recipe for the “glue” is very easy, and can also act as a very simple fruit mousse as well.

Ingredients
450ml sweetened fruit puree - it can be anything!
1tbsp (15g) gelatin
300 ml double cream

Method
1. Dissolve the gelatin into the puree and leave it until it begins to ’set’.

I tend to dissolve it in a small amount of hot water before i add it to the puree and use 2tbsp gelatin to make the glue stronger (the brand i get here just seems to be too weak for the task). You can spice & fire things up with the puree by soaking fruit in flavoured liquour, so do consider the use of more gelatin if you add more liquid into the equation. You can put it in the fridge to speed up the setting process.

2. Beat & bash the cream up (erm…whip it!) until you can make it stand into mountain peaks, then fold the fruit puree into it. It’s consistency should be like butter cream, easy to spread on the cake with a knife so don’t pour all the puree into it if it’s begining to get too runny. You can still glue the cake if it’s a little runny, it just makes the application onto the cake more difficult and messy.

To serve as mousse - put it into nice glass jars or bowls & leave it to set in the fridge.

If you’re using it as glue to put the cake together, construct your cake on a sheet of “Glad Wrap” (what we call the plastic wrapping stuff you use to cover food with over here). Apply the glue to all sides that need to be stuck together. When you finish building it, wrap the plastic around the cake very snuggly and then put it into the fridge to set overnight. You’ll find yourself with a fairly solid lump of checkerboard cake in the morning, ready to dress in any kind of icing or ganache of your choice. If you’ve done a good job with the glue, you’ll get a nice solid slice of cake as you cut it! ;D

I’m a big fan of the chocolate, vanilla & raspberry combo, but would love to see pictures of other combos if anyone dares to try something like this at home. ;D

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