Cooking: Ice cream anyone?

Between my son's fussy eating and my parents and their ability to grow 500 kilos of strawberries every year, we've had to come up with recipes.

Mum makes jam - but there's only so much strawberry jam you can eat before you really want a Vegemite sandwich to cut through the sweetness.

So when I got talked into buying an ice cream machine by Smurfling I decided we had to figure out a way to use the strawberries to make ice cream.

Now I don't like pips in my ice cream so just dropping the strawberries whole into a vanilla ice cream mix wasn't going to work for me. So enter the combination of "Raspberry Sorbet" and "Classic Vanilla Ice cream".

If you or anyone in your family is allergic to eggs this would also work with one of the many egg free Vanilla ice cream recipes, but Mum also has chickens who lay more than she can use with only two people in the house.

Now we started with a 5L container full of strawberries which worked out to nearly fill my medium sized pot - which I'm told is about a 5L pot. Not all of that is going into one batch of ice cream. My machine isn't that big!

Step 1: Make up the vanilla custard so it's chilling while you make up your berry sauce.

Step 2: Hull and cut strawberries. For home grown strawberries this step is more important than for shop bought ones. You need to take out any bruising and bug bites.

Step 3: Wash the berries. Mine had grass in them, and being home grown, snails may have been on them at some point and that's just icky. Besides, I know what my Dad fertilizes with.... liquid cow manure - not in my ice cream!

Step 4: Add approximately 1/2 cup of water per kilogram of berries and 1/4 cup of sugar. This is not jam. It's sauce, so less sugar and more water than you'd put in for jam. Cook it down until the house smells of strawberries and the majority of the colour is out of the fruit.

Step 5: Blitz it. Vitamise, blend, puree. Stick it in the blender and turn it on. You want a puree. Pour this into a seive over a bowl and let it strain. I stuck mine in the fridge and let it go overnight. Because there was so much of it, it kind of needed that long to get all the sauce out of the pulp.

Step 6: Add strawberry sauce to vanilla custard - I used 300ml of strawberry sauce to 1L of vanilla custard - because my icecream machine is little. Chill it again because icecream machines like really cold stuff. Then whack it in the icecream machine as per directions.

Step 7: Eat. Try and stop the children eating all of it in one sitting which is harder.

There you go, preservative free, artificial colour and flavour free strawberry icecream. It's not as pink as shop bought stuff but it's better for you. (And if the kids won't eat it because it isn't pink, a couple of drops of red food colouring will change that.)

Kids: Dealing with end of year blues

December is always a difficult month in my house. Christmas planning, birthday planning and of course the dreaded "End of year blues"

Hair trigger meltdowns are less than fun.

But Smurfling learned an important lesson this past weekend, one that's caused him to miss the last full week of school even though he really didn't want to.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Mum's know what they're talking about. Like when they tell their fair skinned son to wear a shirt when going outside to play in the middle of Summer in the middle of the day.

Sadly Smurfling isn't the only one suffering because he didn't listen and got sunburnt in the half an hour he was outside. Hyper sensitivity to the itching and the heat in the skin means noone's getting any sleep- except the cats who have taken to sleeping in the shed away from the screaming.

We've tried every single sunburn remedy that exists I think. So far only 2 have actually done anything. So. A list for those who may find themselves in a similar situation!

Remedy 1: Oatmeal bath. The idea is that oatmeal is a moisturising agent, so 1 cup of the stuff in a bath of tepid water and soak for no more than 15 minutes - otherwise the water will dry your skin out more than the oatmeal can moisturise.

Remedy 2: Bi Carb bath. Not sure what it's supposed to do other than make it hurt less. We used about half a cup in a bath of tepid water.

Remedy 3: Aloe Vera gel. Normally this helps most people, not so my son, but that could be because there had to be touching to get it onto him.

Remedy 4: Moisturiser. Again, this normally helps, if you can touch and all.

Remedy 5: After Sun Spray. Not sure if this one is Australia specific. We used Banana Boat's aloe spray. Helped a little the first day, after that not so much.

Remedy 6: Tepid shower. This is the one that worked most often. But only while he was actually under the water.

Remedy 7: Solarcaine spray. This one is a chemist recommended use. Anaesthetic spray. When combined with paracetamol worked wonders.

And that's the other thing that you should do. Give the child paracetamol of ibuprofen at the recommended dosages. We personally had to up the pain killer to a chemist only paracetamol and codeine mix, but that's because Smurfling was so hyper sensitised. The itching of the skin healing was bad enough to be painful.

Kids: Getting organised

There's so many things that I've found I have to do every week that I never thought that I'd have to do. I've been doing them for nearly 7 years now but I never thought that I would have to have life organised to this degree.

Menu plans, things to do before school, things to do immediately after school, things to do to get ready for bed, what chores need to be done on what day - and whether it's a before school job or an after school one...

I'm sure my childhood wasn't this organised. I know my meals weren't listed up where I could see them every day.

For those of you who don't have kids who need every little thing planned out in advance, some of the lists that I have had to make or my son will seem kind of strange. So a learning opportunity for you - not all children remember everything that they did the day before - even if they have to do the very same things every single day, some of them don't remember from day to day. We have lists so I don't have to repeat myself every single day with the things he has to do. I ask if he's checked his list. Then when that task is done it gets marked off of the list so he knows that he's already done it.

Personally we use a bunch of chore charts that I found online - but forgot to save the links for so I can't share them. We have Before School chores, After School chores and Before Bed chores for both of us, and because he wanted to know what I did all day, there's also a During School chart for me.

We also have meals planned out for 6 weeks in a plastic pocket stapled to the wall so he knows what's for dinner that night.

While we're still getting into the habit of things there's still the "I don't wanna do it Mum" whining - but I can deal with that. It makes him seem like a "normal" (and gods do I hate that word) kid to people outside of our house.

I won't give out our lists, because not every child needs to have a thing on the wall to check off that they're wearing all the correct clothes for school, or that they've brushed their teeth before bed. But the blank charts...

I will hunt down the links for the printables that we use and post them up here for all to share, because they've really helped us, and if they can help just one parent out there to not lose their voice repeating the same thing for 20 minutes a day then they've done their job.

Let's begin then shall we?

I've been reading other people's blogs for months and making the things that I've found off them for just as long. My beautiful son asked me why I don't write one of my own to showcase what I've been doing instead of just selling the things that I make because I can't ever just make one thing.

So I figured "Why not?" and here we are. I decided that at first we'll be a bit sporadic in posting, there will be at minimum one post a week, usually done on a Wednesday but as I get more organised and used to writing and posting things again that will increase. Especially since there's so much that I do that I want to share with people. Recipes, knitting patterns, knitted things, sewing things - and eventually my pathetic attempts at learning a new skill - that of crocheting.

This first post is just me setting everything up I think. Making sure everything works the way that it should work and all that. Especially because in order to show everything else, I need to remember to stop and take photos of the things that I'm knitting. Terribly bad at doing that while I'm working I am.