Thank goodness it's Pieday!

This week's pie is ultra-simple and so good for children just learning to cook, it's also a handy thing to have in the freezer if you need food for an impromptu picnic or a quick but reasonably healthy dinner for the kids (just add a tin of new potatoes and some frozen peas).

 I was going to use a proper rough-puff pastry this week, but while I was buying milk I noticed some ready-rolled herb pastry and wondered what it would be like.

 It turned out to be pretty good, but I'd recommend making your own if you feel up to it: either a rough puff or a more traditional shortcrust.

Mini Quiche

Ingredients

One recipe or packet of pastry

One egg

A generous handful of cheese (we used a mixture of Cheddar and Peccorino Romano,)

Some vegetables (we used tomatoes and green beans) either fresh or frozen

A splash of milk

Some fresh herbs 

Roll out the pastry and cut it into circles using a large pastry cutter, put the circles into a bun-tin or muffin tin, pressing each down lightly so that they conform to the depressions in the tin.

Grate the cheese and slice any large vegetables

Place the vegetables in the pastry circles, then sprinkle on the herbs.

We used tomatoes* with basil, and green beans** with mint.

I would have used peas as well as the beans, to make a summery green quiche, but what I thought was a bag of peas turned out to be yet more green beans.

Now crack the egg, add the milk and beat them together, seasoning if you want.

Share the egg-mixture between the proto-quiches.

Top with the cheese

Bake in the oven at about 180 for twenty minutes, checking to see the they aren't ready sooner and lowering or raising the temperature as appropriate (times and temperatures may vary depending on the pasty you use).

Remove from the oven and leave for ten minutes to cool a little and shrink away from the sides of the tin.

Either serve, or throw them into a bag and dump them in the freezer.***

You can make these with pretty much any vegetable and cheese combination that appeals: stilton and mushroom works particularly well, as, I suspect, would feta and pre-roasted butternut squash.

And of course you can add meat if you feel the need: snipped up ham or bacon is perfectly acceptable I'm told.

*Not actually a vegetable I know.

**Yes, yes, I take your point.

*** I should probably say something about defrosting them really thoroughly here, but, lets be honest, I just throw them in the microwave for three minutes and call them cooked.

Sometimes It All Comes Together

The paper ladybirds have redeemed themselves.
 The day after I remarked that Sometimes It Just Doesn't Happen I resolved to try again.
This time we started out by drawing around ourselves.
First Eleanor lay on the paper while I traced her outline, then Phoebe, with many a wriggle, did likewise.
Then I lay down and Eleanor, with much giggling, drew around me.
Lastly we added faces and hair to the pictures and there we were, as large as life.
 When we had our paper us-es we spread them out on the floor and started to compare them.
Some things were the same: we all had two arms and two legs for example.
Some were different: I was by far the tallest, Phoebe was the smallest.
After looking at all the similarities and differences we could think of we agreed that we were more the same than we were different.
 Next we got down the paper ladybirds and the paper butterflies.
Could we find any ways that we were the same?
We found a few: we all have legs for example, but there were a lot more differences than there were similarities, we decided that humans weren't all that much like insects.
When we compare the butterflies and ladybirds to one another it became much more interesting
 There were plenty of similarities: both had six legs for example, but although the two insects looked very different it was quite hard to think of real, rather than cosmetic differences.
Eventually we agreed that ladybirds don't eat nectar and butterflies don't eat aphids but that, as with humans, these insects were a lot more alike than they originally appeared.

Then, finally, I got around to the point I had been trying to make earlier in the week: we folded the paper humans.
 After some pondering Eleanor observed that the two sides were the same ("Except Phoebe because she moved").
 We talked a little about symmetry: were the paper ladybirds symmetrical?
They were!
And the paper butterflies?
My word!
What about a cat? A dog? A rabbit?
 Eleanor flew about collecting toy animals and we established that they were all, in fact symmetrical.*

 And then I asked her to think of an animal that wasn't symmetrical.
And she couldn't.
And I showed her a video of a fiddler crab on YouTube.

And everything was lovely.

And then we watched a video of a hedgehog having a bath.
Just because we wanted to.

*The tiger, of course, has a fearful symmetry.

Sometimes It Just Doesn't Happen

I love planning projects.
I love planning projects so much that this could easily be a whole blog entry about how much I love planning projects.
 I have a list of project themes on my phone (I keep it there so that if I think of another project while I'm out I can add it to the list), and happily while away my odd moments, on the bus, feeding Phoebe to sleep, waiting for Eleanor to finish her ballet lesson, by expanding on the various ideas, adding new activities, and thinking of ways to make everything as much fun as possible without actually abandoning any thought of education.
 Then I get thoroughly excited about all the activities I have planned.
Unfortunately what looks like a great idea on paper can be a bit of a damp squib in real life*.

Yesterday's activity was one of those.
It seemed a great idea when it was just an outline on my phone: we were going to make paper ladybirds.
We were going to each ladybird two more spots than the one before, and we were going to make them symmetrical, then we were going to talk about counting in twos, and multiplying or dividing by two, and symmetry.
 We were going to look at our paper butterflies and our paper ladybirds and talk about how they were all symmetrical, and then we were going to see what other symmetrical animals we could think of.
And then I was going to ask Eleanor if she could think of any animals that weren't symmetrical, and when she couldn't I was going to show her a YouTube film of a fiddler crab.
 It was going to be great.

It wasn't.
We made the ladybirds, but I took more time cutting out the pieces than Ellie did sticking them together.
 Perhaps it was the effect of having something new to do after yet another week in quarantine, but she seemed to assemble paper ladybirds like a paper ladybird assembly machine.
 And then, she said, she was finished.
Asked if she could see how the ladybirds counted in twos she informed me that no, they didn't because there were numbers missing.
No you can't count in just twos: " cos it would be just two, two, two, two and that's silly".
No she didn't want to listen, this was a silly game and did the ladybirds eat paper aphids?
She vaguely acknowledged that yes, both sides matched, just like the butterflies, but made it clear that this was a supremely uninteresting fact.
No, she didn't know what other animals were symmetrical.
No she didn't want to think of one.
 She did think that maybe the big ladybirds were the little ladybirds' Mummy and Daddy though.


*A bit like this really.
Honestly, in my head this was going to be a great blog.

Butterflies

Our butterflies have flown.
 Only three of them made it in the end, the other two never emerging from their cocoons.
Since the weather has been so damp and dismal we had to keep them in for a few days, and feed them on pieces of squashy fruit and flowers with drips of "nectar" on.
 As soon as we got some warm weather, though they were off.

 Hopefully they'll survive the cold nights and rainy days which seemed to start again as soon as the last one had flown.

 But our house isn't butterflyless yet.

We made "stained glass" pictures to brighten up the windows.

We made big and small butterflies by cutting out butterfly prints*

And we put a big butterfly with six pipe-cleaner legs on the wall to finish our life cycle chart

Technically the project might be over, but I suspect we'll find a little more to do yet.


*take paper, add paint, fold in half, squash flat, open: butterfly.

Happy Pieday!

I warned you.

Nobody can say I didn't warn you.
I warned you that my definition of pie was going to be flexible.
Today's pie has a filling contained within a crust*, therefore it is pie.
The fact that Nigella Lawson calls this a mexican lasagne should trouble nobody.
Eleanor couldn't do this all by herself as it involves a hot pan and a lot of chopping, but she had fun with the parts she could do.

Bean and Tortilla Pie

Ingredients:

One packet of tortillas
One large or two small tins of sweetcorn, drained
Two tins of black beans, drained
One tin of tomatoes
One or two green chillies
A mediumish block of decent cheese (smoked cheddar is good)
One onion
One red pepper
A few cloves of garlic
A bunch of fresh coriander
Some cooking oil.

Chop up the garlic, onion, pepper and chillies.
We kept the chilli pieces quite big so that I could find them to fish them out of Phoebe's portion, but you probably won't need to do that.

Heat the oil in a pan, add the garlic.
When the garlic starts to soften add the other chopped vegetables.

Once they've had about five minutes in the pan chop the coriander, add this to the pan along with the tomatoes and put it back onto the stove for ten to fifteen minutes.

While it's simmering grate the whole block of cheese and put most of this into a bowl.

Add the sweetcorn and the black beans, then stir it all together.

When the sauce is ready turn off the heat and prepare to assemble the pie

Put a little of the sauce in the bottom of a casserole or deep pie-dish.

Add one or two tortillas to cover the bottom and sides of the dish.

Now add about a third of the beans and cheese (more if you're using less tortillas) and cover that with more sauce.

Add another tortilla or two on top of this and continue layering beans, sauce and tortillas until you reach the top of the dish, finishing with a layer of tortillas.

Dab the last of the sauce (unless you have a lot left over, in which case just use a little) on top of this and cover it with the last of the cheese.

Put it all into the oven on 200 (or similar cook-everything) setting for half an hour or until the crust looks crisp and, well crusty.

Take it, singed but delicious, out of the oven and leave for ten minutes or so.

Cut into squigdgly sloppy slices** and serve.

This is definitely worth reheating and seems to stay good until you run out of leftovers.

*It goes crusty in the oven so it is a crust.
** Slices, see? Like a pie. It's a pie!

Red White and Blue Pieday

I haven't updated very often in the last week I'm afraid.
Unfortunately the chickenpox reared its ugly head once more and the time I might have spent writing in this blog was instead spent tending to a very spotty, very sad baby.
 Have no fear however: it would take more than the spotty pox to defeat Pieday.

We didn't intend to make a red, white and blue pie this week: it just sort of happened, perhaps the royal jubilee had infected my subconscious or maybe the shops had just stocked so much red and blue fruit for jubilee cookery that we didn't have any choice.
 This, like last week's pie, started out as a Nigella Lawson recipe.
Then I fiddled with it.
This recipe is much simpler than the original, and doesn't require food processors, it also requires a lot less precision: just adjust as you go along to suit your ingredients.

Cheesecake Pie


Ingredients

One small packet of digestive biscuits
One packet of ginger nuts
Soft cheese (about one-and-a-third tubs of Philadelphia seemed to work here)
One block of butter
One jar of lemon curd
Two punnets of soft fruit, more if you want.

First melt about a third of the butter.
The easiest way is to put it into a bowl, then place that bowl inside another bowl which is half-full of hot water.
You may or may not need more butter than this, so leave the rest out, just in case.

While the butter is melting, smash up the digestive biscuits.
We put them, a few at a time, into a jug, then hit them with a rolling pin.
However you do it you should end up with fine crumbs

Then take about a quarter of the packet of ginger nuts (more if it's a small packet) and crush them too.
Mix the crumbs together in a bowl.

Now pour in the melted butter and mix thoroughly.
 You should find that the crumbs are thoroughly coated and can be squished together, if some are still dry then melt a little more butter and stir it in.

Now take a deepish cake tin, pie tin, quiche tin, or whatever you have available*, and start pressing the crumb mixture into the base and up around the sides till you have a firm, if slightly crumbly, shell.
 This is your cheesecake pie-crust.
Put the whole thing into the fridge for an hour or two.

Meanwhile make yourself a cup of tea** and investigate the possibilities of the leftover ginger nuts.

Once the shell has set firm you are ready to make the filling.

Mix the cream cheese and the lemon curd, using more or less cheese or curd according to your taste, the size of the pie you have to fill, and the amount of curd available.

Now take the cold pie-shell and dollop in the lemony cheese, spreading it out to fill the bottom of the pie.

Put this to one side and wash the soft fruit gently, hulling any strawberries and cutting any particularly large specimens in half (or into slices if you're using peaches or other larger fruit).

Fill the pie with the fruit, taking care to cover the base evenly, and return it to the fridge for another few hours.

Since there are no ginger nuts left find something else to occupy you for a while.

Finally remove (carefully) from the tin, slice, rejoice, devour.


*We used a springform cake tin which is particularly handy when trying to remove crumbly pies*** like this without breaking them.

** Unless you are too young for tea.
Then don't.

*** Yes it's still a pie.

No Timetables

One of the great things about home ed, as most home edders will tell you, is that there are no timetables involved.
 Which means that if no-one's in the mood for maths you are free to read books, look for the hottest and coldest places on the map, paint pictures, watch a film in Italian, do a jigsaw puzzle, or do whatever else you are in the mood for instead.
It means that you never miss your big exciting educational trip because of flu (or indeed chickenpox).
It means you get to go on holiday when most kids are stuck in a classroom, and then visit all the museums and local attractions once everyone else has headed off on their considerably more expensive (but possibly warmer) holiday.
 It is also not entirely true.
It's certainly true that we have no written timetable (unless you count the big calendar I write reminder notes on) but nevertheless our weeks, and even days, do have a certain pattern and rhythm to them.
There are the home ed groups which, when someone's ill or on holiday, go ahead just the same without them, there are the ballet lessons, twice a week, which start promptly, end on time, and won't move for anyone.
There's the library, always visited on the same day, at around the same time: the point at which our convenience and the library's odd opening hours coincide.
There are buses to be missed at our peril, there are "See you next week"s and "Sorry we can't come"s.
Our time is not entirely our own.
 On a day to day level it's the same: On a day at home Eleanor tends to get her work books out in the morning, then she'll dance or watch a television program, perhaps I'll read to her or we'll play a game before lunch, on Mondays and Wednesdays we'll probably do some sort of art-based activity, on Tuesdays we'll look things up, Thursdays may involve making things, Friday has pie, and every Friday ends with us curled up on the settee watching films in Italian (for Eleanor) or Japanese (for me).
 None of this is obligatory, it just suits us, in the same way that that regular library visit (on a Thursday, last thing after a day of ballet, and craft projects) suits us.
I like it.
 I like the way our week rolls along from mostly-at-home more work-intensive Monday to a Friday spent almost entirely out of the house, not even glancing at a book*, until it all rolls up in that cozy ball on the settee.
 And if I stop liking it, or Ellie does, or Phoebe has something to do or somewhere to be one day, we can change it.
 Because we don't have a timetable.

*Ok, Eleanor does take a workbook out with her, just to pass the time during Phoebe's ballet class.
And we might read a story or two on the bus.
And sometimes hey have them at the Soft Play centre after lunch.
But apart from that there are no books.
 Not many anyway.