First Week of Summer

My kitchen currently looks like this...

Icing sugar gets everywhere!!

...so obviously the sensible thing to do is write a blog post, haha, sorry Liam!! ;-)

I can't believe we are already coming to the end of the first week of the summer holidays, and what a gloriously sunny week it has been. We've settled into a nice routine of doing something in the mornings (park, picnic, beach etc) and then coming home in the afternoon. Toby then has a nap, Izzy either has a nap or does some colouring inside, and I sunbathe in the garden. It is way too hot for the little ones to be outside 12-3, but the same rules clearly don't apply to me...I love the sun so am making the most of it while it's still here!

Today as slightly different as we met up with friends at 11.30am and went to the local woodland/river area for a picnic. I took too much food, as usual...

The box contains the best thing - egg mayo sandwiches, my favourite! I was only planning to eat the sandwiches, strawberries and water, but Izzy, Toby and Izzy's friend polished off most of the strawberries between them - I think I got 2! - so I ended up eating a few coconut biscuits instead! I never used to take things like crisps, biscuits etc to picnics but I found that everyone who we met would have these things so then Izzy would spend the whole time looking longingly at them. Today however my friend had just brought sandwiches and crisps with her, but we were happy to share the rest of our stuff! Those My-5 fruit shoot things are a new-to-me find and seem to just be fruit juice and water (?) which I'm ok with as an occasional treat. Toby used to have a fruit shoot whenever we went to Costa (whoops, not great ingredients!) but then they changed the recipe and he seems to be allergic to something - got the full on shakes and head jitters :( - so these were a good alternative that made him think he was having his old favourites!

Anyway, parental self-guilt over, we had a fantastic time today. We met up with my friend, her 13 year old daughter and her 5 year old son (who goes to school with Izzy). It was great having a teenager with us as she took the two 5 year olds (making the most of being able to call Izzy that until her birthday next Wednesday!!!) into the river...something Liam and I would never have done! At first they just dipped their feet in, but then they ended up stripping off to their pants (the 13 year old had a bikini on anyway) and getting soaking wet, such fun!! Toby does not like swimming/the sea/rivers so he just stood a bit away from the edge watching them, which suited me to be honest as whilst I trusted the 13 year old to watch Izzy, if Toby had been in the river too I would also have had to get in, and I much preferred chatting with my friend!

Yesterday, we went to the sea front for ice cream with Mum...

And then I took the children onto the beach. Izzy absolutely loved the sea and spent the whole time up to her knees in it (I wouldn't let her go in any deeper without me!), whereas this was the one and only time that Toby voluntarily got his feet wet - the rest of the time he & I sat close to the water's edge "chucking" stones in!

We have also been to the play park several times, as well as quite a bit of time spent in the garden. This weather makes it so much easier to avoid hearing the children (well, Izzy) saying "I'm bored...!" as there are so many places we can walk to when it's not raining!

I have also been eating more salads...

and bowls of yoghurt...

I made the most of Julian Grave's closing down 50% sale to stock up on a few goodies...

but when I opened the pack of chocolate covered pretzels yesterday, I then ended up eating the whole bag in one go rather than the few sprinkled on yoghurt that I'd planned, whoops! Liam and I are going to the cinema tomorrow night so I'm going to take a bag of chocolate popcorn with me to save some money - cinema snacks are such rip-offs!

Tonight I am off to the Body Pump class I first went to last week - looking forward to it! And then we have a busy day planned tomorrow (*hint* that first picture was a result of early birthday cake making!) so I'll be back after the weekend to tell you all about it.

Have a great weekend everyone! I've now got 20 minutes to clean up the kitchen before my Mum arrives to look after the kids, eek!! ;-)

Choc Chip Pancakes with Homemade Chocolate Almond Butter for Dinner... Yes Please!

On Tuesday, I finally got round to getting out the reduced bag of peanuts I'd bought. Luckily I checked the packet before I put them in the blender...these were dry roasted in paprika!

Not ideal for the nut butter I had planned!! Luckily a quick switch to almonds saved the day...

Inspired by Angela at Oh She Glows, I decided to make dark chocolate almond butter. I put 200g almonds in my blender...

and was ready to go! It took my little blender 20 minutes to turn the almonds into almond butter, with much side scraping...

and breaking up of a big almond dough ball after about 15 minutes...

the wait was finally over...and so worth it...

this was delicious as it was, but I added 60g dark chocolate, melted in the microwave with a tiny bit of coconut oil...

to make dark chocolate almond butter...

Ah-mazing! It should've made about 250g, but only 180g made it into the jar!

I plan to make many more nut butters in future :) maybe next time I need to make one Liam will eat though - I only made this yesterday morning, and the entire jar has been eaten, only by me, by this evening...oops! It tastes even nicer once it has been in the fridge for a bit...similar to Nutella, yum yum yum!

I enjoyed some on top of banana porridge (with a scoop of vanilla protein powder in which made it all bubbly!) this morning...

delicious, but the best way to enjoy it (apart from by the spoonful!) was tonight's dinner...

Pancake recipe from here, I followed it except I used 3 tbsp liquid egg whites instead of 1 whole egg as I have a couple of cartons that need using, and I dropped some chocolate chips on top once the batter was in the pan. The first pancake was a bit mis-shapen...

but I soon got the hang of it! As well as the chocolate almond butter, I enjoyed these with maple syrup...

Gorgeous! Perhaps not the healthiest of meals, or indeed the quinoa stuffed peppers I had planned, but it was needed!!

I have had a horrible couple of days! (I realise my problems are nothing in comparison to the suffering of people in Japan etc, I feel guilty stressing about my problems when such horrible things are going on in the world) However...daughter is still off school ill, it's been a week now! I phoned the doctor yesterday but he said it's probably just a virus and we have to wait it out...poor little girl is so not herself, barely eating (which is not at all like her!), high temperature, sleepy, majorly swollen glands etc...not good. She seems to perk up a bit in the fresh air, so yesterday we took her for medicinal ice cream (!) I had a scoop of raspberry ice cream and a scoop of mango yoghurt...

how can I complain when I get to enjoy this by the seafront?!

Yum. Frozen mango yoghurt is my absolute fave, and the raspberry went really well, very summery. Liam was home as well - nice to have his company but that's hassle number two - on his way to uni yesterday morning the car broke down - turns out the whole engine would need replacing and basically the cost of repairs just weren't worth it - a write off. My poor car! If someone had told me a week ago that we'd have been happy to get £100 scrap money for our reliable family-friendly Ford Focus I would not have believed them, sob! So now Liam is hunting for a new car so he can get back to uni...and any hopes of buying an SLR camera anytime soon are now firmly out the window! :( Not the end of the world in the grand-scheme of things, but pretty unexpected and unwelcome for us!!

Anyway, moan over. Having Liam and our daughter home the last few days has sent my eating all over the place! Today especially - I managed my porridge breakfast but, as already mentioned, dinner ended up being pancakes, and lunch was vegetable crisps dipped in houmous and guacamole...

supplemented by many handfuls of Brazil nuts & almonds whenever I went into the kitchen! Tasty, but not what I'd planned!

Fingers crossed for a better day tomorrow! Or at least daughter feeling better, I hate seeing her so poorly and not being able to do much to help her! :(

Leftover Turkey = Yummy Curry!

After yesterday's 2nd "Christmas" Dinner, Liam and I spent most of the evening stripping the rest of the turkey for leftovers! We got lots...

I bagged this up into portions for the fridge/freezer (was clearly feeling organised for once!) and it made enough for 6 family size meals, plus there were already some slices in the fridge for sandwiches...yum...I love leftovers more than the actual roast! :)

On to this morning though and back to routine :( Liam starts work at 7am on Sundays and baby got woken by the alarm so it was an early start for all of us! After sorting out the kids' breakfasts I needed some fuel of my own to keep me going! I decided to do a repeat of yesterday's "pink porridge" with oats, Kara coconut milk and frozen black forest fruits...

topped with some dried papaya and a much needed blob of peanut butter!

to be honest the papaya was a bit unnecessary but the peanut butter was definitely a good addition...delicious! :)

Unfortunately an early breakfast meant I failed at the first hurdle with regards to no snacking. I need to buy some more fresh fruit to try to stave off the hunger/munchies! As it was I tried to prevent too much damage by having a Nak'd Cocoa Mint bar...

and then finished off the Nutella (luckily hardly any left!) and ate a whole 60g bag of dolly mix sweets...

bleurgh, I felt so sick after all of this junk! I've been really good at resisting the Nutella recently - admittedly because it's been so cold in our kitchen that the Nutella was solid until today so required chipping off and microwaving if you wanted it on toast!!

I bought this biscuit tin for Liam for Christmas, think it's more appropriate for me though!!

I filled it with Boost chocolate bars (his favourite) when I gave it to him and it's still more than half full...he has way more willpower/self-control than me!!

Anyway, back to today's food. I had no idea what we would be having for lunch as we were going over to my Grandparents to see my cousin who is visiting from Australia. They'd put on a buffet...

my main plate...

the mushroom quiche/tart was from Waitrose and really good, egg mayonnaise sandwich (I had another of these later), sausage roll (another couple of these found my way into my mouth later too!!), smoked salmon blinis and carrot sticks with dip. I also had one mince pie for pud and picked at some more of the carrot sticks and grapes. Lovely to see my cousin and nice food, only problem is that quantity of food wasn't huge but full of calories in form of pastry etc!

I had been looking forward to dinner all day...leftover turkey curry! :) I have to admit to cheating and letting curry paste do the bulk of the work for me. These were the ingredients...

2 small red onions, tikka masala curry paste, about 320g leftover turkey, tin chopped tomatoes and 2x 150g packs of mangetout, plus brown rice to serve with it. I have 5 more bags with the same amount of leftover turkey in for future use, so was pleasantly surprised to see how much turkey it contained once chopped up...

yum, can't wait til all the turkey inspired meals!! Anyway, back to today's curry! I first fried the finely diced onions in a little oil, added a couple of tablespoons of curry paste and the turkey, stirred all together then added the chopped tomatoes and another can's worth of water to get to this stage...

to finish the curry off I added the mangetout and once I'd taken the curry off the heat I stirred in a big-ish splash of double cream. This made a lot! I ended up having a bigger portion than I'd planned as I was worried about re-heating it again when it had already used re-heated meat, so had to eat it all up instead!

this was gorgeous, I do love turkey curry! :) does anyone have any suggestions for me to cook with some of my other turkey leftovers?? I have 5 more bags...I will definitely be making one batch of coronation turkey, and probably another turkey curry...so that leaves 3 more meals to come up with. Rest of the leftovers are in the freezer though so I have time for inspiration to strike!!

Once the kids were in bed, Liam and I couldn't resist some chocolate. We received a ridiculous amount of chocolate for Christmas, although worryingly a lot of it has now been eaten! Our baby "gave" our daughter a huge box of chocolates from Thorntons...

she had already opened them and eaten quite a few but tonight I had 4...or 5...must save the rest for her, although really I'm doing her a favour - her 4 year-old stomach would be sick on all that chocolate!!!

Liam and I then treated ourselves to a pud, he had his in a bowl but I had mine straight from the tub...

chocolate sponge pudding on top of half a tub of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream...

this was so good! :) the chocolate pud stayed warm the whole way through which was great, made the ice cream all lovely and soft :)

I started off today trying to be healthy...it rapidly went downhill though and by this evening I was kind of thinking "may as well eat up the treats now so I can have a fresh start on Thursday"...we have so much rubbish still left in the house from Christmas! We gave quite a few boxes of chocolates away to people we've visited since Christmas but it doesn't seem to have made much difference...I will just have to learn to ignore it all I guess!

On the plus side I managed more than half an hour's reading this afternoon while the kids were playing happily together, so that's one resolution completed for the day! I was given a Kindle for Christmas which is great, has got me back in to reading and makes it so much easier to get back into a book whenever I get a spare 5 minutes. I used to love reading before baby #2 came along but don't usually manage to find the time these days!!