mutteringhousewife

July 3, 2013

Crochet Black and White Beanie and Rainbow Scrunchie

Having looked through many knitting and crochet patterns lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that most of them you wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch in. What is it about yarn craft and really horrible clothing? Do you know of anyone who’d actually want a woollen daisy brooch? Seriously! No wonder so much of it is intended for babies, they can’t get away.

Beanies are the exception. I’ve seen many beanie patterns that look both possible and good, and I’ve finished two and am contemplating a third. You’ve seen the first one, and here’s the second.

I’m not, you know, ecstatic about it. I think I’ve put the crown in upside down, but crochet looks OK either side. The brim is done in Tunisian stitch, which produces a very pleasing almost material like result, but isn’t very stretchy, so not the greatest choice for a brim. It was fun to do though, you do it on a long crochet hook. You collect all the loops onto the hook in one row, then the next row is almost exactly like casting off knitting. You don’t turn the hook around between rows, so you feel a bit like you’re operating a typewriter. I did a lot of it during Monsters University, which was very cute but not as entertaining as the first movie, which I saw approximately four hundred times before the DVD disintegrated.

But I needed a black and white beanie to watch the boys playing soccer. It actually looks better on.

All the baggy bits stretch out. It’s quite close fitting, so will mess up the wild and free hair thing I have going, which is why the next one I’ll make will be a slouchy beanie. Just have to choose the colour.

I’m also in the process of doing some fingerless gloves, which I’m finding fairly boring. So instead I did a scrunchie.

That was very easy, I did it during Star Wars Three, which the Horror was watching in between jumping on the trampoline and decrapulating his school bag. You just take a hair elastic, the kind you buy in packs of twenty because the dogs tend to eat them if you leave them around. None of the instructions actually tell you how to get the wool on the elastic, they just say sc around the elastic. What you do is stick your needle into a slip stitch. Then you poke your needle into the middle of the elastic and draw the wool up with the hook and through the slip stitch. Then you alternate drawing the wool through the middle of the elastic and from the outside of the elastic as you form each stitch. You just pack as many stitches on there as you can fit. The you can knock yourself out with what you do next. I just sc’d twice into each of the first row, then every second one in the second row and every third in the third row. Makes a ruffly scrunchie that your daughter will immediately wrap around her ponytail when she comes home from pony camp. Could make good birthday presents. The dogs definitely won’t be interested in eating them either.

So next is a slouchy beanie, and then a round one with a brim that I’m going to make in red for a friend. Not sure what pattern I’m going to use yet, but don’t worry. She did ask for it, I’m not inflicting it on her. I should be fairly good at it by the time I get up to that one.

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July 2, 2013

Rather Good Banana Smoothie

The advantage of having fussy children is that they’ll keep gently encouraging you to keep trying until you get that banana smoothie just right. It’s just the thing for a growing lad who’s spent the day at tennis camp and has come home all pink and starving.

You do need to do a bit of of advance planning. Apart from buying bananas. Once the bananas are fairly ripe, but not at the banana bread stage, peel them, break them in pieces and freeze them.

Nobody eats fresh bananas in our house, they like them processed. I usually just fling this smoothie together, but for the purposes of the blog I measured everything for this afternoon’s batch. It was a pretty good one, if I do say so myself.

Place in a blender (though the kids request the Thermomix, it gives a noticeably smoother result) about two frozen bananas in chunks. Add half a cup of (homemade) plain yoghurt and a cup of milk. Add also half a teaspoon of cinnamon and some sweetener, and this depends on your kid and the initial sweetness of the bananas. Today I put in two tablespoons of maple syrup and two tablespoons of rice malt syrup. You could use honey, and you could use less. Zap it for about twenty seconds, or on the smoothie setting on your blender.

It made three big glasses full, one each for me, Moose and the Muffet. The Horror won’t eat bananas except in cake form. I shouldn’t have had mine, being a little intolerant to both bananas and milk, but goodness it was delicious, thick and creamy. I wonder if the kids would mind making their own dinner tonight? I feel like a lie down.

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July 1, 2013

Lemon Meringue Fail

One problem with conducting a blog in which you occasionally mention food preparation is that people form certain expectations about your abilities. So when you’re invited for dinner and you offer to bring dessert, it might be a wise idea to bring something you’ve actually made before.

Well, I have actually made lemon meringue pie before, but I wasn’t happy with it. This time, I was definitely pretty happy with the crust, though it was a little over cooked. I had a lot on on Saturday, I stopped concentrating. Anyway, it was three tablespoons of brown sugar, two tablespoons of crystallised ginger, zapped in the Thermomix. You don’t have to use ginger, but I really like it with lemon. Add 150 grams of cold butter, two cups of plain flour and three tablespoons of cold water. Zap that in the Thermomix. It will turn to a crumb like substance first, but should start becoming more dough like after ten seconds or so. If it doesn’t, add another tablespoon of water. Don’t go nuts with the water, a wet dough will make somewhat tougher pastry. You just want it to hold together. Squash it into a ball, wrap in Gladwrap, then put it in the fridge for half an hour or so while you melt the chocolate for the topping of the choc mint slice you’re making as a backup.

Roll out the pastry, then gently lift it into a pie dish. I dust the pie dish with a bit of flour, but as I use a glass pie dish I’ve not had a shortcrust stick to it. I had a few off cuts left, so I also made some mini tart cases. Cover it with baking paper, load it up with some barley you found in the back of the pantry that’s past its use by date and is looking a bit dubious and bake it at 180 degrees for about ten minutes. Wade out into the back swamp and dump the barley in the compost, remove the baking paper (once you’ve made it back to the kitchen), then bake for another ten minutes. You just want it golden. I really must get myself some pie weights.

I don’t think I’ll trouble you with the filling recipe. There seem to be a few schools of thought on the filling, and I foolishly went with the corn flour and water version. You whisk together cornflour, water, lemon juice, lemon zest and sugar over heat (or in a Thermomix) until it boils, then whisk in three egg yolks. You pour that into a bowl and refrigerate it. It thickens up quite satisfactorily, at which point you spoon it into the pie case. Then you do the meringue, which is whisk three egg whites and a pinch of cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Pour into the KitchenAid while it’s still going a third of a cup of caster sugar and you’ll see the meringue go all glossy. Spoon it over the cold pie, then back into the oven until the top of the meringue just starts to brown.

Shall I cut a long story short? After an excellent meal and much nagging by the Horror I cut into the pie to discover it was more of a meringue pie with lemon sauce. The lemon filling had completely liquefied. I probably should have put it in the fridge. Oh, it got eaten.

It was delicious.

But, embarrassing! Especially as my hostess had been calling me Nigella all evening.

So I’ve been thinking about trialling different filling recipes to put into the leftover tart cases. But the kids have sneaked them all and eaten them unfilled. They’re just going to have to put up with eating different lemon meringue pies for dessert this week. How I make them suffer.

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June 28, 2013

A New Green

When you see the nonnas shoving each other out of the way down at the IGA, you know something’s going on. They could be offering free slices of sorpresa, there could be only one cash register open. Today it was that Mr Lamonica had just got back from the markets with something they really really wanted.

Rapé. It’s an Italian green, possibly related to broccoli, but looks like something that you’d find growing by the railway tracks. The nonnas weren’t even waiting for it to be unpacked, they were grabbing armfuls of it out of the boxes as they came in. Buying it by the trolley full.

I don’t generally buy my vegetables from Mr Lamonica, he goes for cheap over quality. I go to Frank. I bumped into a few friends at Frank’s who emboldened me to ask what’s the big deal with rapé? “Oh, it’s delicious!” said Frank’s daughter at the cash register. “We cook it with a little oil and chilli, and lots of garlic”. Well, anything tastes good cooked that way, but my friends convinced me to buy a bunch, cook it and blog about it, so here we are.

I think you can cook it in a very similar way to whole bok choy, but I want mine in smaller pieces. So I stripped off the smaller stalks, leaves and flowers, only leaving the large stalks at the bottom, into the Thermomix jug.

A very quick zap got them into more manageable sized pieces.

I tipped them out of the jug and into a bowl. I put in the jug a couple of cloves of garlic, three chillies, a slug of olive oil and a couple of local tomatoes I’d also picked up. Zapped those into a purée and cooked them at 100 degrees for four minutes on reverse speed two. I put in the rapé and a sprinkle of salt and cooked it for four minutes on a hundred degrees, also reverse speed two. I could have even got away with three minutes I think. It’s not much to look at.

It cooks down quite a lot. I think I like it. The stalks are very reminiscent of asparagus. I think the description for the leaves is bitter. It has that aftertaste you get from an expensive beer. Lucky I do like it, it comes in enormous bunches. I might cook it all up and put it in a selection from my new jar collection. I wonder if you could lightly pickle it? I’m a bit scared to Google it. I can tell you this, it’s a whole lot better than kale, that stuff tasted like horse blankets.

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June 26, 2013

Bathroom Almost Finished

What’s worse than tradesmen in your house? No tradesmen in your house, that’s what.

It’s been a full two weeks since the vanity was attached to the bathroom walls and since then, nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. Except a rising level of complaint from a family who isn’t getting used to having to nip out to the frigid back verandah for ablutions. It’s even less amusing in the middle of the night. And why? Well, that’s an excellent question, I’m glad you used your mind powers to ask it. I thought it was because the tapware hadn’t arrived. The bathroom company thought it was because the tapware hadn’t arrived. The plumber thought it was because the tapware hadn’t arrived. After a series of increasingly irate calls to the bathroom supply company from me, Crystal the site supervisor, and her boss, it turns out we were all mistaken. That series of texts I’d had from them referring to missing tapware was actually referring to missing towel rails, the tapware had been on my back verandah under a pile of tiles this WHOLE TIME. I had to check that the top of my head was still attached after that message. So, that whole thing about not delivering the vanity top until the tapware had arrived? Oh, silly customer, did you want the vanity top at your place? Well why didn’t you say so?

Of course in the mean time the plumber had turned his attention to other things, so he wasn’t able to come until today to instal the tapware and toilet.

The kids thought this message was a terrible tease, but he told them they could use the toilet for night time emergencies so long as they didn’t sit on it. The Muffet is visiting Nanna and Poppa for a few nights and I don’t have night time emergencies, so we should be right.

The electrician also came today to put in the first power points this bathroom has ever had. “How do you live like this?” he asked upon his first visit. Tradesmen are very judgemental. And the Scotts finally came back to remove all of the demolition rubbish that has been sitting on our verge for over four weeks now. I’ve been waiting for the council to fine us for it.

It was almost worth the wait to watch them try to remove it. They were supposed to bring a skip bin, but brought this thing which is basically a double sized green bin, and it’s been filled to the brim with concrete and broken tiles. Can you see the problem? To remove it they brought along what looked like a hire van with a tiny little lift on the back which was in no way capable of lifting that thing. There was much rocking the bin backward and forward, then they got out metres of strapping.

Then more rocking. Then they tried lifting the top layer of rubble by hand into the truck, with a bit more strapping and rocking. Then the bin fell over completely, which meant I had to retreat into the kitchen so they wouldn’t hear me laughing. Much cursing as they got out a couple of shovels and transferred the lot into the truck that way. I’ll bet they don’t get their deposit back.

We now have a bathroom we can bath in, clean our teeth in and shower in if we don’t mind getting water all over the toilet. We’re waiting on the shower screen, the towel rails, some little glass shelves, the toilet roll holder and a soap dish. I have to call the bathroom supply place for the shower screen, but I need to spend another few hours breathing deeply first.

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June 25, 2013

Dammit, is there a Knitting Bandwagon now?

Well, then I’m on it. Because today I discovered that you can knit at the movies. Especially if its a kids movie that you’ve already seen and are only going to shut your daughter’s high maintenance friend up from complaining about her sister.

I should first mention that I finished the crocheted beanie and the Muffet only takes it off to go to bed. I’m rather pleased with it.

The Horror originally wanted an identical beanie, but then picked up a Tardis one at Supanova. So, as we’re going skiing the week after next he requested what is essentially a cowl. He wanted to be able to pull it up over his face, to be able to breathe through it and for it to stay in place once he’d put it there.

The easiest way to do this is to just knit a rectangle and sew the short ends up. But there’s a whole lot of bulk at the back of your neck when you’re skiing, the collar of your jacket, a helmet in the Horror’s case, a ponytail in mine. So I decided to make it narrower at the back. What I did was to start off with twelve stitches on size ten needles. Then a row of purl. Then alternate knit and purl rows and increase every knit row by a stitch either end. When I got to a width the stretched from the bridge of my nose to the bottom of the V neck of my jumper I stopped increasing and just knitted and purled on for a while. By the time the movie had finished I was decreasing and finished the thing before it was time to pick up the Horror from his little friend’s place.

He said it was far too big for him, so I’ll keep it for myself, thank you very much. Knitting his smaller one only took me about an hour. Here’s what it looked like before sewing the ends together.

And with the ends sewed together. Yes, his name does start with a K.

He tested it fairly thoroughly, tried it in different positions, breathed heavily through it and pulled it up over his whole face to discover he could see through it, it’s quite a loose knit. He finally declared himself satisfied, he’s a tough audience. Now we won’t have to put up with any complaints about facial discomfort in the snow.

Also now I can start on a new crochet pattern I have. It’s a round beanie with a wide turned up brim that I’m going to do in black and white for watching the boys play soccer. I may have to go yarn shopping again soon, there’s a place in town that looks rather exciting. After the kids go back to school, after skiing. That is if I can still walk by then, but of course I’ll be able to, what kind of talk is that? Just because last year’s trip resulted in what is now a full year of ankle treatments, that has no bearing on this year’s trip. None at all.

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June 24, 2013

Supanova 2013

Well, I’m nearly recovered from Supanova, the geek spectacular attended by around forty thousand people at Olympic Park over the weekend. Supanova consists of three elements, famous people, cosplay and geek shopping. Oh, and some lectures and displays. Four elements.

We didn’t bother with the famous people. I’m sure they were there, but to access them you had to line up to purchase an autograph or photo ticket, then line up again to meet the presumably haggard looking famous person who you’d never recognise as their movie character because they’re either not covered in prosthetics or they’re forty years older than when they were famous. I’m looking at you, Margot Kidder, who didn’t turn up the second day after looking out the window and deciding to stay in her dumpster. Ooh, that was a little harsh, wasn’t it. I wonder if they should at least put them on a platform or suspend them from the ceiling or something so at least the kiddies can see them.

Many people are clearly there for the cosplay. Cosplay is when you dress up, usually as a movie or game character, although I think you could dress up as anything you like, really, who’s going to know? The Moose dressed in all black with a black hat and sunglasses with a long black velvet coat I picked up in a Table Eight sale some years ago. He was asked if he was Vengeance, to which he just smiled mysteriously. The more impressively costumed get queues of people wanting photos with them. There were many Batmen, the kids spotted a Fatman and a fat Flash, but I didn’t get photos of them. Geek girls are a lot fitter than I remember, I was a little disturbed by the often gorgeous Lycra clad girls being asked to pose by older men with giant cameras and doing so very happily. The Catwomen all seemed to be in great shape, not so the Poison Ivys. Odd. Many people cheated by simply buying a onesie of any description and wearing that, I even sawa woman in a cow onesie. Would have been a lot warmer than the Supergirls. Capes and elven robes were big. Harry Potter was almost non existent except for a couple of Hermione Grangers. Not everyone tried very hard.

There were also a lot of prosthetic wounds and a very impressive cyborg who kept getting the giggles when he was asked to pose with the plastic arsenal at his stall.

In fact there were a lot of heavily armed cosplayers, which made me wonder what the security guards at the entrance were actually going to look for. There was a stall, called Fight Club, which were selling real swords and armour. The Horror seriously considered buying himself a very reasonably priced helmet, until he discovered he could hardly lift it.

He also considered a unit that looked like a shiny tough flick knife, but when you flicked it open it was actually a comb and a handy bottle opener. I think they had that the wrong way around, that’d be confiscated at the airport for sure.

The geek shopping was pretty impressive, especially if you liked T shirts. Apparently no one wears long sleeved shirts, hoodies, singlets or baby doll style shirts. Just T shirts. There was a lot of plastic weaponry. I was excited to see Weta Workshop there, we got two Keys to Erebor from them. They had a very realistic Gollum with them.

They also had some of the weapons from the Hobbit movie, which you could actually handle.

Steam punk is still a thing. All of my kids bought fob watches, independent of each other. The Horror also bought a little dooverlackie that looked like a tiny brass flask, but unfolded into a working telescope. Many of the crowd bought and immediately wore Tardis beanies, we now have one in our collection, so that’s one less rainbow one for me to crochet. The clothing for women was a bit limited, unless you like whatever that cutesie Japanese style is called.

Or corsets. There were plenty of them, but not many under a size twenty.

I did vaguely think about getting one when I finally found a small size, but the kids said “ew, gross, Mum, why would you want one of those?”, and there wasn’t anywhere even slightly discreet to try one on. You could have got a hat with ears or gloves in whatever animal or character you could think of.

Of course there were figurines from all movies and games you’ve never heard of. I heard a man say wearily at one of the stalls “I guess you could put it on the shelf with all your other ones”. The Moose got himself a sonic screwdriver that you can use as a remote, you can load a couple of functions from whatever infrared remote you have onto it. He’s had a lovely time today sneaking up behind his brother and turning off the Wii with it. Here are his favourite purchases:

It is a very impressive sonic screwdriver. His fob watch is a beautiful copy of the Master’s watch, it works and lights up too.

My only gripes were that it was very crowded, and too many T shirts.

I overheard a woman saying to her friend “and this is where you get the flu”, which made me breathe in a shallow manner for a few minutes. You’d think with the type of crowd this event attracts they’d have chill out areas. I found it a bit overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be saving up for next year.

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June 21, 2013

Crochet – Adding to the Nanna Arts

I blame the craft shows. Such beautiful yarn! That’s what we knitters and crocheters call all the various combinations of plastic and fibre that can be spun into thread. Once you buy the yarn, then what? I’ve got my knitting skills up to such a point that I can knit a whole scarf with only a few wonky bits in it. But what then? Knitting actual garments is quite a giant step up and requires commitment and determination and a ton of yarn. I had a look at patterns for knitted beanies, but most of them involve circular needles and it turns out that if you want to make a beanie, you should crochet it.

Why didn’t I get my Nanna to teach me to crochet when she was compos mentis and also alive? I wasn’t even crafting at all then, I was busy getting married and travelling and having kids. It’s a lot easier to have someone teach you to crochet than teaching yourself over the Internet, but it will take your mind off your homicidal thoughts of the bathroom supply shop owner. I guess I could have travelled up to my Grandma’s retirement village to get one of her buddies to teach me (she didn’t knit, crochet, sew or cook, she spent all her time coping with an extremely difficult, but delightful, husband), but I thought I could manage.

Ha. I don’t know if you’ve tried, but to save you the effort here’s how it goes. There’s reams of instructions on starting to crochet. Descriptions of hooks, yarn weights. The most painstaking instructions and diagrams of how to form a crocheted chain. Then, with no warning,
Ch3 (counts as dc), 2dc in same st, skip 2 dc, *FPtr in next dc, ch1, BPtr in next dc, ch1, FPtr in next dc, skip 2 dc **, 3dc in next 2dc, skip 2dc; repeat from * around, ending last repeat at **.
Well, I ask you. The hell?!?

What you do next is to teach yourself some simple stitches. Look up double crochet on a site called Crocheting for Dummies, and make a circle of that.

I don’t do video, I hate waiting for it to download, and I don’t know, it just irks me. I want a diagram. I had a breakthrough realisation that you can crochet a stitch into the stitch underneath more than once, and sometimes you skip stitches. Then I found a pattern for a beanie I wanted to make with some terrific rainbow coloured wool I found at Spotlight, which was unusual, they tend to specialise in cheap plastic imitations of wool, and looked up each individual stitch on the Crocheting for Dummies site. This hat was mainly FPdc and BPdc, so I eventually worked out those. Note, they’re hard to start off, but once you have a round of them it gets much easier.

Getting that far was tricky, it involved a great deal of mental strength to ignore helpful comments from my offspring such as “that doesn’t look like a hat”, “is that the same as Chinese crochet? I saw a Chinese lady once with a ball of wool and a stick, is this the same?”, “why do some Chinese ladies have bobbed hair?”, “why isn’t six times eight the same as seven times seven?”. Actually that last one’s quite a good question, I’ll have to sit down with some xs and ys some time and work it out. Not now though, I have some schnitzelling to do, and I can’t stop crocheting.

Because now I have this!

It does look like a hat, you just keep going 3BPdc, 3FPdc until you have it big enough. Now the littler two both want one, and I loved the wool so much I went back to Spotlight and bought the remaining couple of balls of it, so don’t think you can go up to Birkenhead Point and get some of your own, it’s all gone. The fabulous thing is you can do it without too much concentration, so you can do it while listening to tales of woe and joy from school and work, while watching Harry Potter AGAIN, while watching the Muffet climb what looks like a curtain and hang upside down from it,

And while watching chess, which is what I’ll be doing this afternoon. Being a mum involves quite a lot of hanging around, which will now result in bonus beanies.

When I’ve done two of these, I’m going to do a black and white one to a different pattern for the husband, and who knows what after that. It’s very relaxing, and hard to stop, just one more round! Oh, I’ll still be beading and baking, baking rather more so, don’t worry. But while doing so, I shall have a warm head.

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June 20, 2013

The Source – Balmain

I can take a hint. When every second person who’s read my blog or lives in Balmain tells me I should definitely visit The Source, all that is required is for me to gather a posse and form a foodie excursion.

I’m extremely reluctant to drive in Balmain, almost every time I go there I get lost or can’t find a parking spot anywhere in the suburb and have to retreat back to more car friendly climes. So I’m pleased to have a volunteer from the posse drive while I crochet in the back. Don’t worry, you’ll be hearing about the crochet shortly. It’s down the further end of Darling Street, you go through that bit that looks like it has a lot of shops, the they die off and you worry that you’ve missed it, then they start building up again and it’s just past Zumbo’s. We found a park next to a temperamental parking meter and we were there.

Not to keep you in suspense, I’m going to be coming here a lot. Oh, I have my quibbles. The good stuff is available in three rows of bins, one flat and two on an angle. The angled ones have the rather annoying feature that their lids don’t open very far. You secure your scoop, grab a paper bag and carefully write the product code on it for ease of processing at the checkout, then have to prop the lid open with a spare elbow as you attempt to transfer the stuff from the bin into the bag without spilling it all over your vegan shoes. There doesn’t appear to be a scoop for the spices. There’s a whole row of bins devoted to sweets, and you’d think us buy stuff in paper bags types would be making those ourselves.

But goodness, it has everything my homespun heart could desire. Nuts, dried fruit, grains, seeds, pulses, spices, oils and syrups. It’s quite a small shop, so it must be a bit hard to take on weekends. I’m getting the feeling that this movement is gaining momentum, does it even have a name? Pure food, clean food (that sounds very gimmicky, like eating paleo which strikes me as a ridiculous description given our limited knowledge of what the paleo diet really was), made from scratch? Real food? I’m going with real food.

I just got a few things. I’ve just run out of Honest to Goodness muesli, so I bought some stuff to make my own. Five grain mix, dried pear, currants, dried pawpaw (it has a gingery flavour), raw almonds. Organic couscous! I also got seven vanilla beans so I can start off another giant bottle of vanilla essence.

It takes about a year to be usable, I should get cracking on the next one.
I got some glass jars to store my ever expanding collection of raw ingredients. I also got a jar of maple syrup, dark and fragrant, and one of rice malt syrup. I was a little disappointed with the flavour, not very malty at all. I’ve put it in a banana smoothie, and it makes me think it’s intended to be used as a sweetener rather than a source of malt flavour. It’s nice enough. I’ll be able to use it instead of honey in baked goods for the Horror, he can pick even a trace of honey. I like that they put the country of origin on the bins, was a bit surprised that the raw sugar was from Brazil. So when I got home I looked at my raw sugar packet and sure enough, Made in Australia from local and imported ingredients! Surely we can make raw sugar here.

I was fascinated by some of the stuff in bins. What on earth would you do with bee pollen? A $90 a kilo, that bin would have been worth thousands of dollars. And the hemp seeds with the instructions “not to be eaten”. I’m surprised they didn’t add a >. emoticon. I’m very keen for some Himalayan bath salts IF I EVER GET A BATH!!!! Ahem.

So it looks like I’m going to have to learn to drive to and in Balmain. Because it’s unlikely I’m going to be able to form a weekly posse, and anyway it gets expensive because you have to have lunch and coffee after. I wish they’d open a branch in my suburb, all the local Chamber of Commerce allows in our main street is hairdressers and pizza shops. Some of which are very good, mind you. But if I could walk up to get my supplies in biodegradable paper bags I’d be so dark green as to be almost pure chlorophyll. Ah well.

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June 18, 2013

The Thermomix – Three Months On

It has a permanent place on my kitchen bench and the two questions people always ask me are “what do you make with it?” and “should I buy one?”. So I’ll start off with what it doesn’t do, so if you’re trying to talk yourself out of it you can push off and make dinner without having to grind through more than the next paragraph.

What doesn’t it do? I wouldn’t make stock in it, the jug is too small. If you want to grind small quantities of spices, I’d get out the trusty old coffee grinder. It does a terrible job of creaming butter. You can’t cook more than two litres of anything in the jug, though you can add things in the steamer to cook above them, so I don’t know if I’d regularly prepare the whole family dinner in it.

Did that put you off? You know, I’d probably use it between once and four times a day. Every week I make yoghurt (I’ve sorted that out now, I’m putting a capsule of Inner Health Plus in with the yoghurt, sets like a jelly, thanks Amalia for that tip!), several times a week I make bread because it does such a fine job of kneading and I’d make butter in it whenever Harris Farm is carrying its Jersey Cream, but not today, must be Devonshire Tea week in the Inner West. I also make Nepalese Porridge in it a couple of times a week. It’s my rice cooker, it’ll do two cups of rice in the steamer basket no problems. Last week I also made an orange cake, made breadcrumbs, ground almonds, ground a block of Parmesan cheese, made pizza dough, made apple sauce, made pine lime coconut iceblocks, made banana smoothies (with homemade yoghurt), caramelised onions, made buckwheat flour which went into pancakes, and steamed vegetables. I usually make myself a vegetable soup a couple of times a week, but didn’t manage it last week. See, you don’t need to make a six litre vat of soup to freeze because you can whip yourself up something delicious in fifteen minutes, do it as you go. I love the mashed potato it makes, but my husband says I can save that for when he’s lost all his teeth. Philistine.

I don’t know what you’d make in it. It’s perfect for curries, but my family haven’t quite advanced that far in adventurous eating. People always carry on about the risotto you can make in it, once again, not in this house. Dips, it’s good for dips. It does a very fine salad. Why don’t you hang out with a friend who has one? Or follow the blog of someone who uses one regularly?

Yes, it’s a lot of money. But if you want to make your family’s food fresh, from scratch, it’s very hard to go past it. It makes everything so easy. I never would have attempted curry pastes without it, there’s no way I’d stand over a saucepan for an hour to properly caramelise onions. I wouldn’t make bread every second day. And I’m not buying yoghurt or butter (except for Pepe Saya) any more. You could also buy one if you’re awash with cash and need something high tech on the kitchen bench. It isn’t for everyone, if you only cook occasionally, or really love the slicing and grating and drawn out food prep, then walk on by. But I couldn’t do without it.

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