Carrot Muffins

Mathematics is difficult. carrots are tricky things to plant,  you have to work the soil well to make sure there are no lumps so the carrots grow straight. Planning for teaching maths is like planning to teach Swahili. carrots originated in Afghanistan. I can never seem to concentrate long enough on one topic and the topics seem all over the place anyway. carrots never used to be orange, they were purple, red, white and yellow. Geometry. Chance & Data. Measurement. Number & Place Value. And what's the other one? the orange carrot we know today was invented to honour the Dutch Royal family, known as "The House of Orange". Patterns and Algebra, that's the one. The most horrible one of all. I think that you either have a maths brain or you don't. There's no halfway with maths like there is with English. beta-Carotene is the substance that gives carrots their orange colour. it is in a lot of different fruits and vegetables and if you eat too much sometimes your skin will start to glow orange....natural tan much. The tricky thing is, maths is exactly like learning a new language. If you don't get the basics you can't do anything else. people used to wear the leafy tops of carrots as hair or hat accessories. Trying to plan to teach something I don't enjoy is very challenging and makes me want to eat. one cup of carrots contain 52 delicious calories. I don't know much about maths. i know a lot about carrots and i know you should make these because they make planning to teach maths a little bit bearable. 

Carrot Muffins
1 3/4 cups wholegrain self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarb soda
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup sultanas
1/4 cup walnuts
2 or 3 grated carrots
1 cup of milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons oil

Preheat the oven to 200 Celsius and line a muffin tray.

In a large bowl combine the flour, bicarb soda, sugar, cinnamon, sultanas, walnuts and carrots.

In a small bowl whisk the eggs, milk and oil. Tip the wet mixture into the dry mixture and combine (don't mix the heck out of it, just gently fold it together).

Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin tray and bake for 15-20 minutes.  Once they have cooled slightly you might want to top them with cream cheese icing (30g butter, 80g cream cheese, 1.5 cups of icing sugar beaten and dolloped on top), I did this while mine were still warm and so the cream cheese became extra melty and delicious. They are also amazing served with butter and just on their own with a nice glass of iced chai tea.

3 days to go!

oh Christmas, how my mouth loves you and the stomach loathes you!

Datelicious

I made this just a few days before the removal crew came to our house. I was trying to empty out my cupboards which meant lots of creative meals and making things that I have been putting off for some time.

The week seemed so long that I felt I needed dessert to spice things up a bit. I had a packet of dried dates in the cupboard and thought it would be a great idea to make date loaf.

After a bit of contemplation I asked myself when did I start considering date loaf to be dessert? Tragic. So instead I walked down to the shop and purchased a tub of ice cream and came home to make a REAL dessert - Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce!

What you need
200 grams pitted dates (more or less!)
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
1 1/2 cups of boiling water
125 grams butter
1 cup of brown sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 3/4 cups of raising flour

Caramel Sauce (the best bit!)
1 cup brown sugar
300 ml cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
60 grams of butter


How you do it
Place the dates and the bicarb soda into a small saucepan. Pour the boiling water over the dates and let sit for around 15 minutes.

In another bowl beat the butter, sugar, vanilla and eggs. Sift the flour over this mixture and then add the dates and water (which should now look like chunky brown glue) and use a spatular to combine.

You can make this as a large pudding or individual puddings. Spoon the mixture into your desired pan and bake in a 180 Celsius oven for approximately 35 minutes.

For the sauce - place all the ingredients into a medium saucepan. Stir over a medium heat until it begins to boil. Simmer for a few minutes. The sauce will be runny and delicious and this MUST be served with ice cream.

Gingerbread Boxes

how I felt about my gingerbread box project

Source: memebase.com via Holly on Pinterest

how it actually turned out

My mum and I had a fantastically hilarious two nights in the kitchen constructing these four little (dare I say) "masterpieces"! 

It was our very first attempt with gingerbread-like cooking. It involved a lot of rolling and cutting and baking not to mention the huge amount of patience it took to actually put the things together. As well as baking all the tasty, delicious treats to put inside the boxes. 

As a side note, I keep calling these 'gingerbread' ....here's the thing. Gingerbread burns my throat and mouth. It smells weird. It sometimes makes my eyes water. So instead of using ginger I used cinnamon. Best. Choice. Ever. 

My Gingerbread Box Recipe 

(3 batches of this made four boxes)

125g butter (softened)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup golden syrup

1 egg, separated

2 1/2 cups plain flour

1/2 teaspoon ginger (or more if you like)

2 teaspoons cinnamon (or more if you like)

1 teaspoon bicarb soda

Icing

3 egg whites

3 cups pure icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180 Celsius (or 160 for fan forced) and prepare baking trays. 

Beat the butter and brown sugar. When it is nice and creamy add in the syrup and the egg yolk and continue to beat lightly. Sift in the flour, ginger & cinnamon and bicarb soda and use a spatular to combine.

Tip the mixture out onto baking paper and knead gently then split the mixture in half. Put one half to the side. Roll the other one out. I find rolling very tricky. I put another piece of baking paper on top of the dough and roll over the top if it to stop the dough sticking to the rolling pin. I rolled my dough to about 3mm. I think this might have been a bit too thin but at the same time I don't think it really matters. It rises slightly as it bakes plus ....do what you feel is best, it always works out better that way! 

After the dough has been rolled cut it to size. You can use some pre-cut cardboard as a guide or save yourself some hassle and get a Gingerbread House Cutter Set. After the pieces have been cut put them in the fridge for about 10 minutes. I don't know why but every recipe I have read recipe I have read suggests this. Also some suggest you put the dough in the fridge after you roll but before you cut it. 

After the pieces have been chilled put them in the oven. Bake for about 10 minutes and the let the pieces cool. If you're not making the houses or boxes straight away put the cooked pieces in the fridge. I left mine in a container on the bench over night and found they became a bit soggy making the construction part much harder.

The Icing

(this was a real test of skill!)

Beat the egg whites until peaks start to form. This takes a while so be patient! Slowly add in the icing sugar constantly beating until it the mixture becomes thick.

Think of this as glue - everything it touches will become sticky, it also dries quite quickly so it is important to do things fast but carefully! 

I put the icing into a piping bag and piped it onto all the pieces of my boxes. This was very tricky and I'm so thankful I had an extra set of hands (my mum!). I began by placing the base onto a piece of cardboard I had wrapped in aluminium foil. I then piped icing along the bottom edge of one long side piece and using a tin can held it onto the base. I did the same with the other long side. I then added the two ends and used tin cans to help hold it all together. I piped inside and outside the edges just because I had no idea what I was actually doing. Basically just fill in all the gaps and hope for the best!

Again, if you have space put the boxes in the fridge otherwise they become a bit soggy. We filled ours up with Hedgehog Baubles, Maple Nut Tarts, Rocky Road, Red Velvet Christmas Trees and White Chocolate Macadamia Cookies (recipes to come!).

Seriously, I had so much fun doing this and, on reflection, I am super impressed with them and loved giving them to friends and family as gifts. I feel next years efforts will be better but, as a first attempt I'm pretty darn happy!

Spicy Lamb in Coconut Sauce

Yay!! We have finally got our new life started. After a 5 hour flight delay we are finally back together in our "old-new" house and it is great. The best part: the kitchen! I'm talking bench space. Dishwasher. One and a half ovens!! And to top it all off - Christmas is just around the corner (but more on that later). Tonight I cooked my first meal in the kitchen I designed - Spicy Lamb in Coconut Sauce.

I always get a bit funny about lamb cutlets. Sometimes they are really fatty or there isn't much meat on them and I never seem to cook them quite right but I totally committed to cutlets tonight and it was awesome. Also, they are called "spicy" but they really aren't and you can decide how spicy you want them to be anyway.

Spicy Lamb in Coconut Sauce

What you need

250g pumpkin

1/3 cup peas

small tin chickpeas

coriander leaves

parsley leaves

lamb cutlets 

1 teaspoon curry powder (more or less!)

1/3 cup coconut milk

1 clove garlic

2 tablespoons chicken stock

What to do

Preheat the oven to 180 Celsius and dice the pumpkin into about 1cm chunks. Pop in chunks into an oven dish with a splash of oil and put into the oven for about 10minutes.

Rub the lamb cutlets with curry powder (as much as you like) and place into a lightly greased fry pan on medium heat. 

Meanwhile add peas, chickpeas and leaves to the pumpkin and return to the oven on a 140 Celsius until the cutlets are cooked as desired. 

Once cutlets are cooked, put on top of vegetables and leave in the oven to keep warm. In the fry pan add the coconut milk, garlic and stock and bring to the boil. Let the sauce simmer until it is as thick as you like. 

Serve the cutlets layered on the vegetables and drizzle sauce over the top. 

The Red Tree

This week in year 7 English we have been keeping up our paragraph hamburgers but also trying to add critical thinking. To help with this we have been talking about literal and inferential interpretation.

We have been using one of my favourite books, “The Red Tree” by Shaun Tan. This book has countless learning opportunities for English classes and is an easily accessible text for most kids. It is the perfect combination of simple words and complex images. We have been using this book for a week now and every time we pick it up almost all of my students have found something new and interesting to talk about.

We began the week by examining the front cover and doing a brainstorm on the content of the text. We then chose 3 words from the brainstorm that we thought were most likely to reflect what the text is about.

Next we only read the words of the book, without seeing any of the pictures on the inside. As we read, each student made a storyboard of 8 images. We discussed visualisation and how words can put images in your head.

The next thing we did was read through the text together. We spoke about the meaning of the text (and how different people make different meanings) and the intended audience. Students were then split into two levelled groups. The upper group reread the book and then chose a picture to deconstruct. With the lower group we read through the text together and very explicitly identified the meaning of images and words.

Later in the week, we began to review the paragraph hamburger so spent some time focusing on how to improve our writing. Finally we read through the book together again. At each page we stopped and made a list of words that reflected the mood or theme of the page. From this list we practiced writing a paragraph to examine the literal and inferential meaning of the page. We did one together and then students wrote on their own.

The Paragraph Hamburger

I really don't spend enough time talking about my job on here. Which I guess is good and bad! This week in year 7 and 8 English we have been studying the Paragraph Hamburger.

This is one of those writer's workshop type lessons that I always wish I had done during the first few weeks of school and right now I am making the promise to do that for next year! I am going to do it and do it right from the very beginning!

The paragraph hamburger is such a simple and effective metaphor to get most kids thinking about how they write. It is also a valuable tool to use when a student asks you to read their work. It allows you to have a conversation that is easy to understand (example: "Well, I see that you have made a lettuce burger...let's see if we can add some tomato and meat to make this paragraph a bit tastier").

I tend to start this sequence of lessons off by going right back to the start and asking kids what are paragraphs made up of? Very quickly I get the answer: sentences.

I then break down 3 essential elements of a sentence - Capital letters, punctuation and words (which can obviously broken down further if needed). I then show students an example of a paragraph hamburger graphic organiser (and here is another one) and discuss how this will help their writing improve.

The next step is getting students to understand what they need to do before they write. I take students through the brainstorming phase. Usually I get them to brainstorm between 5 and 12 things they know about a topic. I know 12 seems like a lot and would probably do less for younger grade levels but I tend to find that the first 5 things are what EVERY kid thinks of, so for those who can think out of the box I try to encourage them to go with the more unique ideas they brainstorm later in the process. I often tell kids - if you can't brainstorm 5 things you can't write enough so go find out more information!

We then look at an example of a paragraph (one that is a very obvious example that easily "fits" into the hamburger graphic organiser). I also usually put a title on this paragraph. Often when I ask students what the topic sentence is they will tell me the title which gives me an opportunity to teach them to think of the title as the wrapper of their burger. It gives a little taste of what is to come. We then go through each sentence and identify where it would fit in the graphic organiser.

We then look at another paragraph and rewrite it. At this point I get students to actually draw their own hamburger and write the sentences into it. I find this is a bit more consistent with getting them to see each part is important otherwise they wouldn't have a complete burger. This also gives me an opportunity to go back over writing sentences - I ask students to check their capital letters and their punctuation. I tell them to think of these things as sauce:
1. sauce usually ends up going the whole way through your burger
2. burgers just don't taste right without sauce

The next step is talking about super-sizing your burger or making a "lot" burger. In this phase I get students to go back and see if they can add in something extra (example: "This burger is looking pretty tasty but I like my burger to have extra bacon. Can we add in some bacon!?"). This sometimes gets students to go that one step further to add an extra sentence.

Finally, I will give students a familiar topic or some information to read and let them make their own burgers. After writing I will ask students to make sure they "have sauce" (capitals and punctuation) and also that their burger has a "wrapper" (title). We will then swap burgers and have a taste of each others, maybe get a partner to try to supersize the burger or simply conference to see if they get the concept.

So there we go. A little snapshot of my classroom this week. Sadly no pictures, but I will get some to add into this soon. This is something that I try to do over two weeks or so to ensure students become familiar with the idea and the steps. It is also something valuable to teach to refer back to all year, especially for those students who sometimes struggle to write.