Bread sticks and scones with "hidden veggies". A smash hit with my kids.

I struggle to get my kids to eat veggies at all, yet alone the recommended daily intake of veggies. Recently my kids and I invented a recipe called potato snakes, which my kids love, especially when they get to roll the potato dough into snakes.
So last night I decided to try something similar in order to get a few other veggies into them. It was successful! So here's my recipe for bread sticks (grissini) and scones with some hidden vegetables in. And the great thing is, you can say things like, "You can only have another bread stick if you eat the veggies on your plate first!"

Basic dough (scone dough).
2 cups self raising flour (you can use gluten free but may need to adjust the quantity)
30g butter (approximately, or 1 heaped tablespoon. I used salt free butter).
Milk (cows milk, almond, coconut or any other type of milk you like)
Cheese, salt, pepper and any other flavourings are optional
extra flour for rolling the dough.

Now for the veggies...
I had some baby spinach, sweet potato and a zucchini. I steamed the spinach and sweet potato, but just grated the zucchini. Make sure you squeeze the excess moisture out of the zucchini. You could really use any vegetable you like. I didn't use any broccoli due to the strong taste (I thought I might be pushing my luck getting my kids to eat it).

Blend the vegetables until you have a puree. I blended each separately so I could make different batches.

Preheat the oven to 225C or about 450F. If making bread sticks, line a baking tray (like one you use for biscuits). If making scones, line a deep oven dish (such as a lasagna or lamington tray) so that they rise up beautifully.

Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the pureed zucchini and mix in. Add in whatever other vegetable(s) you want and just enough milk to make a stiff dough. Do not knead too much, otherwise your breadsticks and scones won't rise nicely. I did one lot with just the zucchini added in, another lot with sweet potato and a third lot with the spinach.
For making scones: Roll dough out to about 2cm thick. Use a scone cutter to cut out shapes and place in lamington tray so scones are touching (a great tip for getting scones to rise up rather than out). Brush with milk and place on top tray in oven (hottest part of oven so they rise quickly before starting to actually cook).
For making bread sticks: Roll dough between hands to make a snake shape. Place on biscuit tray, brush with milk and you can top with things like sesame seeds or poppy seeds if you so desire.

For both, bake for about 10-15 minutes until they have browned on the top and make a hollow sound when you tap them. Place on a cake rack to cool.

My kids ate the bread sticks with dinner last night and had the scones for morning tea today, and then asked for more!

Two in one recipe: Peach and rockmelon juice and peach, rockmelon and passionfruit sorbet - egg free, dairy free

I have a juicer which is great but I find that, during the process of extracting juice, there is a lot of pulp left behind. I don't want to waste the perfectly good fruit pulp, so the other day when I made this Peach and Rockmelon juice, I used the pulp left over to make a very yummy sorbet.

For the juice:

1/2 rockmelon (cantaloupe)
4 peaches
2 oranges
1 tablespoon lime juice

Juice the fruit according to the instructions for your juicer. For example, I have a different attachment for doing 'fleshy' fruits like the peaches and rockmelons and another attachment for juicing citrus fruits. Months ago I juiced a heap of limes and put them in the ice cube trays in the freezer. I picked out enough cubes of frozen lime juice to make about 1 tablespoon and added them to the rest of the juice.

For the sorbet:

Collect the pulp of the peaches and rockmelons from the juicer.

In a saucepan, place 1 cup of sugar to 1 cup of water and slowly bring to a boil until sugar has dissolved. Put aside to cool completely.
Once cool, stir into the pulp along with some passionfruit pulp and seeds (or omit if you don't like passionfruit).
Place into a shallow freezer proof plastic container and freeze. After a few hours (when it is almost frozen solid), pull out and beat, then place back into the container and freeze again. If you leave it longer (I left mine for two days!) and it is frozen solid when you pull it out to beat it, just let it sit at room temperature until it softens.

Many sorbet recipes say to whip raw egg whites into frozen mixture when beating it. With two young kids in the house I wasn't keen on using raw eggs, so left them out.

Last night we tried the sorbet and it got the thumbs up from everyone. My husband was impressed that it was so tasty, and bar the cup of sugar, was relatively healthy.

Best ever Christmas Fruit Mince Pie recipe

I know it's a bit late, now that Christmas has passed, but I finally have a few minutes to type up the Fruit Mince Pie recipe that I make. It's actually a combination of two recipes. The fruit mince is my mum's recipe and the pastry is a Maggie Beer recipe that I got from the Women's Weekly magazine. For years I used a different pastry recipe, but found this one had the right amount of "crumble". I love a crumbly pastry on my fruit mince pies...not too crumbly but not too leathery either.

The fruit mince recipe makes a lot of fruit mince, much more than the pastry recipe does. I would recommend either making 3 times the pastry recipe if you want to use all the fruit mince or, alternatively, freeze the fruit mince so you can make some more pies later on and that way you always have fresh fruit mince pies available.

So here goes, shame I didn't take a photo of them before they were all eaten up!


Pastry

1.5 cups (225g) unbleached plain flour
half cup (75g) self raising flour
one third cup (55g) icing sugar
150g cold butter, chopped
1 free-range egg yolk
2.5 tablespoons iced water

Process the flours, icing sugar and butter in a food processor until well combined and the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolk and iced water and process using the pulse function until the mixture starts to come together. I find that at this stage it is quite crumbly and I need to bring it together by hand. Shape the pastry into a disc and wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.


Fruit Mince

1 grated apple
grated rind and juice of 1 lemon
125grams chopped dried apricots
1 cup sultanas
1 cup currants
1 cup sugar
half cup water

Place all ingredients into saucepan. Slowly bring to boil. Simmer for 10 minutes or until liquid has reduced to a thick syrup. If it is too watery, it will make the pastry soggy. Allow to cool before filling in the pastry cases.

Pre-heat the oven to 210 degrees celcius (approx 420 degrees F if you have an old oven like me!). Roll out the pastry until 3mm thick. Using a biscuit or scone cutter, cut circles large enough to cover the base of your muffin tray. Don't forget to prepare your muffin tray first if necesary. Line the holes with pastry circles and put spoonfuls of the filling in the cases. Cut slightly smaller circles in the pastry and place these lids on top of the pie filling, pressing down on the edges to bring it together. Cut a cross into the tops of the pies to let the steam out.

Bake for about 12 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown. All to cool in the trays and serve dusted with icing sugar.

These are absolutely delicious. The pastry recipe has been copied from the Australian Women's Weekly magazine, November 2012 edition.