A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Recipes

Recipe: Banana Blueberry High Fibre Muffins

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Banana Blueberry High Fibre MuffinsI’ve been trying different things to increase the fibre in my diet.

Mix together and let it sit

1 1/2 cups all bran
1 mashed banana
2/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

 
in a separate bowl mix together

1 cup whole wheat flour
2 baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt

in a third bowl mix together

1 tbsp. oil…. can be melted butter, coconut oil or vegetable oil.
1 egg
1/2 cup molasses
2 tbsp. maple syrup
1 1/2 cups of blueberries.

Mix together second bowl and third bowl.
Add in the first bowl.

Mix until just moistened.

Cook in a 350 oven for 20-24 minutes depending on your oven.
Let cool in muffin tray 5 minutes, before removing to wire rack to cool completely.

Thoughts:

The lad ate them so quickly I was astonished.  They aren’t a large muffins…but still!   I got three, hubby got one and the lad just kinda had fun eating them.  I think next time I make them FOR ME I will need to remind him he can’t eat them all… hungry growing boy or not.  🙂  I really liked them.  Hubby thought them good “but too small”.

 

Turkey Mixed Veggie Casserole

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One of the things that I love about my recipe link up is that I have access to lots of lovely recipes!   It’s like OH MY!   I sometimes need to adapt them, but today I was inspired to try Chicken Cordon Blue and Broccoli Casserole.. and yes, I needed to do some adaptations and those are what I’ll be putting up here.   I found this recipe on my Australia Country Study linky. 

Recipe for Turkey mixed veggie casserole

Turkey Mixed Veggie Casserole

Ingredients and Instructions for the casserole:

Layer these four in order in a 11 x 13 casserole.

  • 2 cups cooked turkey, cut into bite sized pieces
    Deli meat… whatever you have.  I had eight pieces  total of smoked beef and some ham/bacon loaf and some plain ham.  Dice it up.
    1 cup mixed veggies
    1 1/2 cup shredded cheese – I used Havarti, smoked cheddar and regular cheddar

In a fry pan (or sauce pan whatever your preference)
Melt 2 Tablespoons butter and
Whisk in 2 Tablespoons flour
Slowly add 2 cups milk until you get a nice sauce.
Add spices/herbs that you like: I did garlic salt, thyme, pepper

Pour the sauce over the layered meat/veggies/cheese

For the topping:
I used about a cup of mixed crushed saltines and panko with 1/4 cup melted butter mixed in. Season however you prefer. Parsley works well.  Spread this evenly over top of your casserole. 

Put in 350 oven for 30 minutes. 

Eat as is or serve with quinoa, rice, potatoes or pasta.  Whatever your preference is.

Reactions:

My son didn’t try it… he looked and said “can I have my turkey leg instead?”  Since it had to be eaten I said “sure”. 🙂

Hubby said “tastes good hun” (had seconds with ketchup)

My thoughts: it’s pretty good, I preferred it as seconds (when I reheated it).

Country Study: Australia

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After doing South Korea it was my son’s turn to decide what country to do next.  He chose to do Australia.   Did you know that Australia is the only country that is also a continent?  I learned on facebook today that not all people know this which TOTALLY shocked me.  🙂

Learning about Australia, her people, culture, places and food.

Anyways, Australia has often fascinated us so it was rather neat to spend some time learning about this country.   My son did a report on it.  We learned that Australia had a gold rush and started as a penal colony.   He learned a few other things as well but his report has gone the way of the dodo bird when we wiped my old laptop clean for him to use.   He also did up a map of Australia, figuring out the important cities and landmarks (like the Great Barrier Reef and Ayers Rock).

We Watched:

As always we watched a fair number of videos because videos show us things that we can’t always appreciate reading a book (and frankly my boy is a video oriented lad).

This video gave us a good introduction to Australia and gave us information to consider and look further into.

 

Did you know that the official name of Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia. This was news to us as well, but then again, Canada is called the Dominion of Canada (but we don’t say that eh?)

We went on to learn more about Ayer’s Rock, also known as Uluru. 

 

We watched a couple longer videos on the Great Barrier Reef, but thought a shorter one linked on the blog would be more suitable. 🙂

We checked out tourist destinations as well, because in many ways we are tourists…just doing it via videos rather than a long plane trip.  🙂

Saw some of their wildlife, and learned about their climate. We tend not to like background music for our videos, but we couldn’t escape it on this video. We found this site on animal conservancy interesting.

I could go on and on about all we learned… but I need to leave room for you to explore this interesting land on your own too eh? 🙂

Oh! I mustn’t forget. We did some art! Just some simple dot art. It was kinda fun though.  We learned all about it here.  As well as through Geography Through Art.

We Cooked:

Oh.. and we cooked (don’t we always?)  🙂  And oh my goodness we made good food.  The only thing we don’t mind not making again was the ribs as they were good but nothing better than what we’ve made before.  The spinach damper was excellent and worked well dipped in spaghetti sauce!  The rosemary butter was excellent and I’ll be making that again when I have biscuits on the table. The lamb rolls were easy enough to make and I hope to make them when I have guests sometime.  They were excellent fodder! 

We made aussie ribs, spinach damper, lamb rolls, and…. 

My son made cherry pavlova on his own.   Very sweet, tasted great, especially when frozen.  We all initially had a slice and then decided it would be better a bit colder.  🙂  I admittedly did help my lad with the meringue as it needed to be done ahead of time and he was busy writing a report. 

We had planned to make this pasta dish but decided we actually had enough with what we had made already.

If you would like to study Australia, you might find these free unit studies helpful as well.

Momma of many blessings.
Trillium Montessori.
AngelicScalliwags.
Creekside Learning.
Pinay Homeschooler.

Recipe: Baked Tuna Mac and Cheese

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For the last couple of days I’ve been in the mood for a tuna casserole. I wanted to make a Baked Mac & cheese casserole with tuna in it. Ergo I went and found me a recipe that I needed to modify a fair bit due to lack of ingredients or a desire to use up what we had in the house so basically I made my own recipe. 🙂  I hope you enjoy it.  It was quick to make, and I love the addition of the half & half cream.. made making the sauce a complete breeze.

my recipe for baked tuna mac and cheese.

Ingredients:

1 lb of pasta.. I used macaroni this time.

12 oz tuna
Spices of choice: I used lemon pepper seasoning, garlic powder, salt, pepper, fresh parsley  
1/2 cup finely diced onions (white, green, Spanish.. your choice)
2 tbsp. Dijon Mustard
2 ribs celery, finely diced
2 tbsp. lemon juice

1/4 cup butter
2.5 cup half and half  (for lighter version use milk, whole milk would be best)
2 cups grated cheese (used light cheddar old)
1/4 cup flour

1.5 cup breadcrumbs or panko (I used seasoned crumbs)  (Next time I'll use less crumbs)
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/4 cup butter, melted

Directions

Preheat oven to 400.

Cook pasta to al dente

You have a choice.. glazed onions with the butter for the sauce OR put the onions in with the tuna mixture.  I chose to glaze, but mixing in the tuna works too.  :)

Tuna Mixture: Tuna (flaked) plus celery, mustard, seasonings, lemon juice.   
Mix the pasta and tuna together.  Place in your casserole dish.

Melt your butter, mix in the flour, slowly add your cream (lower fat option would be milk).
Make a nice sauce.   Add your grated cheese stir till all melted in. 
Add sauce to pasta/tuna mix, stirring well.

Mix together the breadcrumbs and butter, add in the parm cheese and mix well.
Top the pasta with this mixture.

Cook until golden brown and bubbling (in my oven took 25 minutes).

The reactions of the family:
Me: I could make this again…but will use less bread crumbs. using half and half adds depth to the flavours.
Hubby: I like this. Make it again hun.
Son: two thumbs up (he was too busy eating) and the cat got a bit more pasta to enjoy that flung off a fork. (yes, she’s odd)

Six servings, 877 calories per serving.

If served with a salad could do 8 servings which would obviously be less calories. 🙂

Country Study: South Korea

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It was my husband’s turn to pick what country we studied about two months back and he chose to do South Korea.   It was fun picking out recipes together and spending a week learning about South Korea. 

A study we did on the country of South Korea with a link up for recipes.

We watched a lot of videos, did some reading of websites, and made food.  LOTS of food, we’ll get to that later though. 🙂  One of the interesting tidbits we learned about was the demilitarized zone. This is an area between North and South Korea where people aren’t allowed.  It is host to a wide variety of animals.  We spent some time learning more about the DMZ and the animals there.  This video is a brief glimpse.

 

We watched quite a few videos on Korea, including these ones on 10 things you might not know, and introduction to Korea.  We listened to some language lessons. 

My lad’s interest in archery and Karate led us down those paths in studying the sports of Korea.  We started with the Korea historical bow that Gakgung. 

 
We looked into their form of martial arts, learning about Korean taekwondo and Judo. We were surprised to learn that in Korea they have schools with a sports theme.  This is one of the reasons Korea produces some of the top competitors in Judo. 

Son found out what their flag looked like and some general details and filled out his sheet which… I haven’t the foggiest where he stored it.   But it was done.  In case you are curious, South Korea’s flag looks like this and is filled with symbolism.  The background is white, one of their traditional colours, it represent peace and purity.  The circle in the middle comes from the um-yang (like the yin-yang in China) and represents balance.  The red half positive, the blue half negative.  The Trigrams in the corners represent movement and harmony.  There are four to represent four separate elements: heaven, sun, moon and earth. 

We made some amazing food which we ate while chatting and listening to Korean music. 🙂 I will freely admit we didn’t play it long and we did shut it off after a while as .. well.. it’s not our style and we found it a tad distracting.

What food did we make?   YUMMY FOOD!!!  oh my goodness.. just so yummy.

Hotteok:

These were pancakes with a brown sugar filling.  Very yummy.   Took some fiddling to get them to work well and we had some leftover filling when we shouldn’t have.  But I didn’t know how to stuff them as full as what we should have.  A lad kinda gave up too.  🙂

Bulgogi:

Hubby LOVES this dish so just had to make some.  He and the lad thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kimchi:

Admittedly we didn’t make it, but hubby bought some and enjoyed it.  The lad thought it was fairly good too.  I didn’t have any since cabbage and I don’t get along.

Red bean something or other.  This was harder to make than I thought it would be and my first try burned.  But once we got it made and cooked it was really good.  But I can’t find my recipe anymore.  🙁  sorry.  It involved making a red bean paste.

Honey Butter Fried Chicken. 

Honestly, if this chicken took less time to make, I would make it all the time.  It was very very good.

We attempted to make a rice drink that they do.  Um.. we failed or it just wasn’t our thing, I really don’t know.  It needed to ferment and something else, and the drink tasted okay but I couldn’t do the rice in it and hubby sniffed it and said “nope”.   The lad tried a bit of it and seconded dad’s opinion.  🙂   I gave it good go… but sometimes things just don’t work as they should.

Stay Tuned.  Recipe Linky is Below!

Anyways, that’s our walk through South Korea, I hope you enjoyed your journey.   Just reminding you if you want a more traditional approach to studying countries, to check out SchoolhouseTeachers.com.  They have some wonderfully indepth country studies for you to embark upon. Valetines Sale is: February 12-16, 2018
Here are the Coupon Codes: LOVE18 – $99 for Annual Membership subscription + 6.8 Oz. Dark Chocolate Bar (U.S. customers only) + Winter Print Issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine and LOVEMONTHLY18 – $10.95 per month. 

OH!   I also wanted to mention how much we’ve been enjoying the Olympic Games today… watching curling and moguls.   Did you know my friend Lori put together a wonderful Olympics study?   I KNOW how awesome is that!  So grab up your middle schoolers and have some fun with the Olympics.   Find it right here!

What else…oh.. some unit studies you might find helpful in learning about South Korea.

Knowledge quest.   Confessions of a homeschooler.  CIA.  Half-a-hundred acre.  



Recipes: Baked Chicken Wings

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My son is fairly sure he’s found his favourite recipe now… one that he thinks he can make for meals when he cooks on Tuesday nights.    Baked Chicken Wings.  When I first made this recipe I made enough for me and a couple for the lad.  Hubby snagged a couple off my plate and before I knew what was happening I was making up another batch…   They are considerably less fatty than any fried ones I’ve come across which is an added bonus.

Best ever chicken wings I've ever had

This is a very simple recipe to make and would be easy to change up for the spices that you like best, to add a dipping sauce if you are inclined to have one, and add garnishes etc..

This is how we made it.

For every two pounds of chicken wings/drumsticks you’ll need

                   2 tbsp olive oil, 2 tsp sea salt (we used himalayan), and 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper.

You’ll need a baking sheet topped with parchment paper for ease of clean up.

Turn the oven on to 425.

Put your chicken into a bowl, drizzle them with the olive oil and mix well.

Then grind up your sea salt and sprinkle over the chicken and mix it up well, then add your pepper and repeat.

Lay out on your baking sheet, pop into the oven for 45-50 minutes (depending on your oven). 

Turn at the halfway mark.

Then listen to the oohs and aahs of your family as they gooble up every ounce of meat … even a hubby who always leaves what I think is loads of meat behind.. they’ll clean the bones off so well you’ll be shocked!

 

Recipe: StoveTop White Mac and Cheese

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Who doesn’t love a good bowl of homemade mac and cheese?  While I love the baked mac and cheese I don’t always have time to make it.  This time I made a stovetop version loosely based off this recipe.    

Recipe to make stovetop white mac & cheese

I have a large bag of pasta noodles (macaroni in this case) that I dumped a bunch into a boiling pan of water and cooked until al dente.  Probably about 10 oz?

As it drained I made the sauce using a bit more than a 1/4 cup butter, 1/3 cup flour with seasonings, I used garlic salt and pepper,  Mix that together well in the bottom of the pot you used to cook the pasta.  It’ll be thick.

THEN as you are stirring SLOWLY add the milk (abit more than 2 cups).

As you are stirring get your son to grab some cheese, in this case some Havarti.  He grated up 1/2 the brick (so about 200 grams) and slowly added it to my milk mixture before tearing off after our new cat. 

Add your pasta back to the pot and stir well. 

On the side have some ketchup, bacon bits and parmesan cheese.

Let everyone help themselves and garnish as they please.  

Enjoy.  Made enough servings for hubby to have two bowls, the lad one, and me four (over two meals).