A Joyful Keeper

I’ve tried hard to stay on track with my weight watching this week. I have planned my meals and managed to stick to them! I am so pleased! Tomorrow I will step on the scales and see if there is a difference. Even if there isn’t, I am glad we had a good week with food.

This is what has gone on in my week:

~*~ I used my crockpot twice this week. First I made corned beef and we had a lovely meal of that on Monday night. I just put the corned beef in the crockpot, covered it with water, added a little bit of brown sugar and some vinegar. Then I let it simmer all day until we cut it at night. It was so tender, it was falling apart!

I used the leftover meat to make a macaroni casserole that my mother used to make. I just diced the meat and added it to a packet of cooked pasta. I added some seasoning, a tin of diced tomatoes and around 200g of light cheese. Then I put it in the oven until it was all nicely melted together. Everyone loved it! I made two casseroles from it – one for dinner and one for the freezer. Now I know that one night next week I won’t have to cook!

~*~ The next thing I used my crockpot for was to make an Irish Stew. My in-laws gave us some lamb that my dmil thought was too tough to cook as a roast. I defrosted it and then diced it. I put the diced meat along with the bone in the crockpot. Then I added diced potatoes and onions. This is your traditional Irish Stew – just these three main ingredients. But, I couldn’t help myself and decided to add some carrots and mushrooms too I served it with Baking Powder Biscuits that I hadn’t made for years and years! Everyone loved them, so I must make them more often. They were so easy!

Here are my “old faithful recipes” for Irish Stew and Baking Powder Biscuits:

Irish Stew

1 kg lamb neck chops

2 kg potatoes

500g onions

1 1/2 cups water

pinch of herbs

1 bay leaf

salt and pepper

Trim excess fat from chops. Peel and slice the potatoes. Peel and slice onions. In the crock pot put sliced onions, potatoes, then the meat, then the other ingredients. Cover and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.

To thicken, blend a little cornflour with water, stir into gravy and turn to high until thickened.

 

Baking Powder Biscuits

2 cups sifted flour

2 tsp baking powder

¾ tsp salt

1/3 cup fat

1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 450F

1. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together into mixing bowl.

2. Cut or rub in fat until well blended.

3. Slowly mix in milk, using just enough to make the dough soft but not sticky.

4. Turn dough onto a floured board and knead a few strokes.

5. Cut out with glass and cook in oven for about 15 min till golden brown.

~*~ We got stuck into some baking as well as cooking this week. Elizabeth (10) made sugar cookies and I made muffins. We were given a 25kg bag of plain flour which is such a blessing, and also some muffin mix where you just add water (and chocolate chips!). Elizabeth loves to do things with me in the kitchen, and this past year I have been trying to teach her some recipes that she could do on her own. She also made hot chocolate mix which is sooooo yummy I am sipping it right now!

~*~ Daniel (13) is learning to mow the lawn. Dh has been very patiently teaching him and yesterday he did it all by himself. We want to teach all our children to work hard, and it is good for them to do jobs around the house. We also all pitched in to help tidy up the garage. There were a lot of empty boxes there from when we got our stuff out of storage. Daniel helped to put up a shelving unit so that we could stack things neatly. Elizabeth and Matthew helped me put all my empty preserving jars on one of the shelves It made me want to start preserving! But for us winter has just begun, so it isn’t the right time. I will have to be patient!

~*~ Elizabeth has been learning to sew for over a year now. She is making her first “real quilt” at the moment. She hadn’t worked on it since we came back home, so today I got the ironing board out for her and she ironed all her squares up nicely and started sewing them together. It is just a simple one, but she chose the colors and arranged them all nicely. She sewed three rows together with my old Singer sewing machine and then I told her she’d better go have a break!

~*~ School went quite well, although we are all finding it hard to get back into a routine. The kids are working fairly independently at the moment since I have still been having to do things around the house with regards to unpacking and getting organized with being back in Australia. Our shipment from overseas should be arriving this week, so it will be all hands on deck then and a lot of independent work from the kids then too!

That’s how my week has been

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