Wordless Wednesday :: In the Kitchen Lately (a great helper and lots inspired by Pinterest!)

Blueberry Muffins and Whole Wheat Banana Honey Muffins

Cheese crackers

Cranberry-Apple Crumble Pie

African Dinner by Adrienne

One of Adrienne's projects for her unschooling experiment was to research and learn more about Africa and Australia. She also wanted to try some food from these two continents. She chose a couple of books from the library and selected three different recipes. Last night, she cooked everything for us for dinner. I helped her only a tiny bit, she did amazing! 

She made a Moroccan Carrot Salad as an appetizer. She found this recipe in "Cool African Cooking" by Lisa Wagner. I really don't like coriander, but I could handle it in this recipe. She boiled the sliced carrots for about 10 minutes until just tender and then let them cool. The dressing was made with 3 tablespoons of lemon juice, 3 tbsp of olive oil, 1 tsp of paprika, 2 cloves of garlic minced, 1 tsp ground cumin. The dressing was whisked then mixed with the cooled carrots. Then she added the chopped cilantro, mixed everything and put in the fridge to chill for about 1 hour. 

The main dish was Palaver Chicken. The cookbook she used, The Complete Illustrated Food and Cooking of Africa and the Middle East, explained that there are many variations of this dish existing in Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Adrienne made hers with chicken, tomatoes, and spinach. She served it over brown rice. This stew had peanut butter in it, but we couldn't really taste it, it was delicious though and Celeste (my picky eater!) ate it and even said it was good!

Adrienne made a dessert too! I told my kids last night that if they wanted to be competitive with dinner, that was fine with me! Andre was already talking about what dessert he will be making next Tuesday to go with his dinner....


For dessert Adrienne made a Tropical Fruit Salad. The recipe is super simple and came from the little Cool African Cookbook. It was very refreshing and tasty. She mixed 3 sliced bananas, 2 cubed mangoes, and 2 cups of cubed pineapple (she used canned pineapple tidbits) with the juice from 1 lime. She made this salad first and put it in the fridge to cool. It was in there for a little over 1 hour. She took it out when we were eating the chicken and just before serving added unsweetened shredded coconut on top. Delicious! 

Dinner by Andre

A couple of weeks ago, Andre received a book he had been asking for a long time: The Usborne Cookbook for Boys. {That title seems to be out of stock/out of print through Usborne but I noticed it in a Scholastic Book Club flyer}. I think it's funny and so fitting that on the Usborne site, the review from Bookfest for that cookbook says "An excellent book for budding Jamie Olivers. We're big fans of his cooking! 

He spent a long time reading through the cookbook then announced that he would like to have one evening a week to cook dinner for all of us! I quickly agreed to this arrangement! We agreed that Tuesdays would work for us, then he planned out the two meals he would start with and I made sure he had the ingredients. 

Tonight was his first night cooking. He made pizza, including the pizza sauce and dough. He also made a green salad with a delicious French jam jar dressing from Jamie Oliver. There was a lot of chopping involved, mixing, measuring, etc...

Dinner was delicious and he was very pleased that everyone loved it. All my kids enjoy cooking, but it has been mostly baking in the past. In my opinion, cooking dinner is an important life skill! I think it's wonderful that he took the initiative and is learning about planning meals as well as cooking them. We are looking forward to more dinners by Andre! 

Feeding my family :: being sneaky

I tend to stay focus on homeschooling here at Canadian Home Learning, but lately I have felt the desire to share a bit more of our lives. I keep a personal blog where I share my adventures in quilting, photography, reading, and other "stuff" (you can visit my corner here).

I am not sure how often I will post in this new category of posts that I am starting called "feeding my family". I think a lot of us moms have an interest in what we feed our families. I like to make meals that nutritious. I also make a conscious effort to keep artificial ingredients out of our house, or as I usually call them "fake stuff". We are not vegetarians, but we don't eat meat often, and when we do it's usually chicken, turkey, or fish.

I am always trying new recipes. I have always been that way and my family is used to looking at something new to them at dinner time. My kids know that they need to try the food I make for them and that I won't make them something else.

Anyway, what I would like this new series of posts to be about is food. Recipes I have found that pleased my family or a particular cookbook that has become a favourite.

This past week, I have tried several recipes from the Sneaky Chef cookbooks. I took three books out of our local library.  The titles are "The Sneaky Chef", "The Sneaky Chef: How to Cheat on Your Man (in the Kitchen)", and "The Sneaky Chef to the Rescue", all by Missy Chase Lapine. My oldest daughter helped me make our meal planning for the two weeks and chose many recipes from two of the books (the man one and the kids one). We both narrowed it down to a few to try and so far, we have been very pleased with the results.

The Sneaky Chef's recipes all include a little boost of nutrition. The boost comes from purees (best made in advance) full of healthy vegetables and fruits, or extra grains. I made these purees last Sunday afternoon. It didn't take very long and I froze a batch of green and orange purees for the week ahead. The rest of the purees I used I made right before starting on the recipe.

Our favourite recipes so far are the Enlightened Enchiladas (kids), the Doctor's Choice Chili (men), the Blockbuster Blueberry Muffins (men), and the Roasted Squash Soup (kids). [kids or men refers to which cookbook the recipe came from].

The Enchiladas were my husband's favourite. The kids loved them too. At that point, only Adrienne and I knew what was in them! I didn't tell them until yesterday that the delicious meals they had been eating contained extra veggies! These had ground turkey and extra veggies were sweet potatoes, carrots, baby spinach, broccoli, and green peas. All those were blended with the meat so you couldn't see anything! I didn't use whole wheat tortillas this time, but will next time. We'll be making this one again.

Another favourite was the Doctor's Choice Chili. I forgot to take a photo of that one, but we all liked it. Made with ground turkey again, it contained extra veggies too: baby spinach, broccoli, green peas, cauliflower, and zucchini. It also had red kidney beans and tomatoes.

Another recipe that I missed taking a photo was the Brainy Brownies. They didn't last long! Very moist and tasty, they had purple puree (blueberries and baby spinach)!


Today I made some soup, the Roasted Squash Soup from the kids cookbook. It has extra veggies from the orange puree (sweet potato and carrots). I love butternut squash soup and this one is delicious.

We will be trying a few more recipes, some drinks and breakfast recipes from the Sneaky Chef.  

Sneaky Chef has a great website with lots of information, free recipes and videos. You can visit here, and also find her on facebook and twitter.  I always recommend checking your public library before buying books. I think it's a good idea with cookbooks to try a few recipes first, then decide if the book is for you or not. So far, this is a winner in our house!

Cooking with Celeste

Celeste loves to cook with me. Today, she wasn't feel well. She has a cold and is coughing.

She still wanted to help me bake. Sunday for me usually means cooking and baking, I like to make snacks and soups for the week ahead.

As I was getting all the ingredients out for making muffins, she told me she wished she had a little mask to cover her face so she could still bake with me. She then left the room and told me to wait. She came back with a bandana around her face! She wore it the whole time we were cooking this afternoon :)

"Not-So-Wordless" Wednesday

I first posted this as a true Wordless Wednesday, but I wanted to tell you more...Here is the story behind this photo:

My oldest daughter loves these Pillsbury Ready to Bake sugar cookies...and I had promised her last Easter that I would buy her a pack of the next holiday ones we see. We both laughed when we saw these school bus ones at the store on Monday, but I kept my promise and took some home.

After baking them, I thought it would be perfect to use some icing to add a line across each of these! I didn't have icing, so I just played around at picnik and voila!

This would be perfect for a not-back-to-school homeschooling get-together, don't you think?

Home Learning Report :: Year 5 :: Week 8

We have had a great week here again.

We continued with our study of Mexico and also moved on to Central America.

Adrienne and Andre worked together to complete some trivia questions related to the P is for Pinata book. You can find them here.

I encourage them to work together, even though they would prefer not to. I think it teaches them useful skills, like patience for example! 

I made the Pan de Muertos (Mexican Bread of the Dead) but I have always

had a difficult time with rising bread. The taste

was really good, I love anise, but it didn't rise right.

With our study of Central America, we talked about the Panama Canal and watched this cool time-lapsed video:

Celeste continues to show a lot of interest with Math and is doing great!

This week, she started learning about subtraction.

Andre decided to teach Celeste how to play Battleship,

but ended up telling me that she wasn't ready. She understood the game,

but he didn't think she took it seriously enough!

Too cute!

Adrienne and him ended up playing together.

They both started laughing so hard and came to show

me why...they realized that they had

positioned their ships in a very similar way

without meaning to! 

You can see in this photo: 

We worked on science this week again, learning more about gravity

and doing another experiment. I am using this Thames & Kosmos kit.

We built the potato trap and had a lot of fun learning about the force of gravity!

We continued our art and music appreciation this week. We learned more about Mendelsohn

by completing our biography notebook pages and listening to his music.

We also looked at a few more paintings by Rembrandt.

Next week we will be studying a new composer and a new painter!

As part of the art and music appreciation, we are also doing a little

bit of art ourselves! We are using a fun Klutz book:

We are doing this all together. The kids are using loose watercolour paper

and I am using the book. We had a lot of fun with the first

assignment, it was simple and relaxing.

Andre started a new lapbook. I don't have photos yet, because it is only

in the information gathering stage.

One of his career choices is to become a movie director, the other is

a pilot for the Canadian Air Force. He told me this week that he wanted

to do a lapbook about famous movie directors.

He has already started gathering information on

M. Night Shyamalan and Steven Spielberg.

That wraps up our report for this week!

With fall here, we have been busy baking too...

baking is a great learning activity as well, and it's yummy!

In the kitchen today...

We did a little baking today. Andre made some ginger cookies. During our last grocery trip, we had picked up a cookie box mix from President's Choice. When I read the ingredients on the box, I could pronounce and recognize all of them! They were easy to make and they taste really good, very gingery. Andre loves them. 

Celeste didn't want to be left out, she wanted to bake something too so Adrienne brought us one of her baking books, Sweet Treats (I did a Book Sharing post about it here) .

We made the thumbprint cookies with apricot, strawberry, and blackberry jam. Celeste loved doing the thumbprint part. She needed to put her thumb in a little bit of flour first, then press on the cookie and was telling me how much she loves the texture of flour. She ended up playing with a bowl of flour after the baking was done!

These cookies were delicious too!

Book Sharing Monday :: Kids' Fun & Healthy Cookbook

During this month, my children and I are doing a special unit study on cooking. We are studying nutrition, kitchen safety, kitchen tools, and of course cooking! I requested many children cookbooks from our local library and this is by far my favourite one.

Kids' Fun & Healthy Cookbook is written by Nicola Graimes and published by DK. The book is full of great photos, clear explanations on how each recipe is prepared, and extra information on food, nutrition, and healthy eating.

It is divided into 6 sections, the first one is the Introduction which explains why healthy eating is important and which types of food will make good and tasty choices. Breakfast recipes come next, then Light Meals, Main Meals, Desserts, and Baking. Finally a Glossary and Index are at the end of the book.

In my search of appropriate children cookbooks, I found that many had ''unhealthy'' choices, either fatty foods or high in sugar recipes, so I was very pleased to find this one!

If you are participating in Book Sharing Monday this week, don't forget to add your link to Mr. Linky below. It was so much easier to visit the participants last week!

home made dog treats by Adrienne

Orion is so happy...and so spoiled! Adrienne baked him a batch of dog treats yesterday...these have fresh mint and parsley in them. He loves them!

Oh MY...that was delicious...

I decided to give Jamie Oliver a try after finding his book called "Jamie's Food Revolution" at Costco. I had a few minutes to look through it while Celeste and her daddy were looking at something else..and I really liked what I saw! So Jamie came home with me! Now I understand Carol :)
Last night, I asked my husband to pick a recipe from the book to try for dinner. We only needed a couple of ingredients. We hopped on our bikes, put Celeste in the bike trailer, and headed to the grocery store. We ended up getting soaked by the rain but had a great ride.
Anyway, this isn't about our bike ride but about the recipe we tried. "Baked Camembert Past".

It was very simple to make and so so so delicious. Not very good for the figure, but so worth it.

First, you need to cut off a bit of the top of the Camembert. Jamie tells in his book to discard that top...hmmm... I discarded it in my tummy (I am french after all, can't waste perfectly good cheese!). Next you slice some garlic, add fresh rosemary and drizzle olive oil on the Camembert. Put it in a small oven safe dish and bake for 30 minutes.

Isn't that beautiful? It smelled even better than it looked! I love cheese...and garlic too.

While the cheese was cooking, I cooked the pasta and spinach, and added a very basic olive oil-Parmesan sauce to it.

The last step is to mix the two together, you could leave it like that and just spoon a little of the melted Camembert onto each individual serving of pasta. We just mixed it right in. I did remove the rosemary leaves, because I knew my kids wouldn't like them much mixed in. They like the flavour, but not the crunchiness.


The final picture. "Baked Camembert Pasta".. not an everyday dish, but oh boy...delicious!

Mmmm....Cinnamon!

When she came home from school today, Adrienne asked me to make something cinnamon-y. I didn't mind, but I didn't want something that had to sit overnight. We searched online and found one that could be done in 90 minutes.
They turned out really really really yummy!



The recipe can be found at allrecipes.com. It is called Ninety Minute Cinnamon Rolls. Ours don't look that pretty, but they are delicious!
~We didn't add a glaze on top, just smeared some of the extra filling we had on the top...they were sweet enough! ~

Warm in the kitchen...on a cold winter day

Celeste and I were so cold this morning, coming back from our walk to the library, we decided to do some baking. If you are a regular here, or know Celeste, you might already know that she loves to participate in whatever cooking I am doing.

We started by making banana bread. Same that we made before , but this time without the chocolate chips.

Then, we moved on to making croutons. Following the simple instructions from the More with Less cookbook, I cut up some Italian style bread that was going stale into chunks and sprinkle some olive oil on them, then added a bit of garlic powder and parsley. Place that in the oven at about 325, for around 30 mn or so. They are delicious! I am not crazy over croutons, not like my son is, but these are so good. I have a feeling these will become a staple in this house. They will be perfect with salad or in soup.

Finally I made some stewed tomatoes from canned peeled tomatoes. A few recipes that I have been wanting to try call for stewed tomatoes, but I don't have any. What I do have is a few cans of peeled whole tomatoes, so I put those in the pot, added a bit of olive oil, sugar, salt and pepper and let it simmered for around 30 mn.