Category: Other and blather

Easter eggs!

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Not the end of the story

What, we were supposed to do this earlier, and have a hunt for the eggs today?  No way, they’d be too easy to find.  I can smell them from here right now.

Hey, we’re fairly new at this parenting thing, and it’s a steep learning curve.  My mom asked me yesterday if we’d made hats.  Sigh.  Maybe next year we’ll have it together enough for that.

Colouring Easter eggs

Here’s the setup.  Bowls and paper plates with food colouring in water, and olive oil drizzled into each one.  It wouldn’t have had to be olive oil but the only other oil we have right now is sesame, which, with boiled eggs, would have made for an interesting combo of aromas.

The oil, where it wets the egg, keeps the water from touching it, so that part of the egg doesn’t get coloured.  For artists and geeks, it’s egg lithography with the oil as a resist.

Colouring Easter eggs

As you can see, G was more interested in crunching and squishing the eggs than in colouring them.  She was also interested in smooshing and splooshing the coloured water around.

Colouring Easter eggs

We vacuumed three times and mopped twice over the course of this exercise.

The product

I suppose I should point out that there were no white eggs at all at the grocery store.  Brown is the norm here.  I managed to get a neat patterned egg or two while G wasn’t looking.

Not the end of the story

Good thing I got a decent shot of the eggs before what happened next.  It wasn’t pretty…

Baked sweet potato with cheese and pepper

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sweetpotatotwo

I am back to share another recipe.  I have entitled it: “Baked Sweet Potatoes with Cheese on Top.  And Pepper.”

My version is probably unusual in that the sweet potatoes were peeled before baking.  I could make that into a long story.  Should I?  Shouldn’t I?  Should I? ….nnnnn…no, not this time.  Short version: I peeled all the sweet potatoes we had before thinking about what to do with the ones I didn’t steam for G’s supper.  Sweet potato skins being as ethereal as they are, I am intrigued by the concept of making crispy-skinned jacket sweet potatoes, and will probably try this another time.

I was tempted by the idea of sweet-potato rosti, but I just couldn’t conjure up the energy and time for grating the sweet potatoes. What I did instead was almost no work at all:

  1. Heat up the oven
  2. Rub some olive oil over the peeled sweet potatoes
  3. Stab the sweet potatoes with a fork or knife, to teach them a lesson in case they were thinking about exploding
  4. Wrap them in aluminum foil — this is mostly because I had already peeled them
  5. Put them in the oven and leave them there for one hour
  6. Unwrap and shred the now-soft tops a bit with a fork (the better to incorporate grated cheese)
  7. Grate some cheddar on top (I didn’t totally avoid the drudgery of grating)
  8. Spoon some cottage cheese on top
  9. Grind some pepper on top

The oven temperature I used was 175C, or at least that’s what it said on the dial.  It’s a fan-assisted oven, which usually means I use lower nominal temperatures than in normal ovens.

sweetpotatoone

The end result was tasty and sweet, caramel-like in places.  The cheeses and pepper went well.  We were too lazy to make anything else for supper.

Little grater

Here is the grater my mom gave me for Christmas.  There seemed to be some controversy at the cookware shop she bought it at, over whether this is a grater or a decoration.  It works fine for cheese.  I don’t plan on grating any sweet potatoes with it.