Hi all

I have a lot of catching up to do on the forum and have had some time off from cooking as my husband and I snuck away to Sth China last week to celebrate our 25th anniversary.  Thought some of you might be interested, so I'm sharing here.

Our school has traditionally low attendances on the day before Melbourne cup day, and with Cup Tuesday itself off, I only had to take 3 days leave without pay--I felt like a naughty girl going away in 4th term, and I'm paying for it majorly now as I struggle to write my end of year reports--but it was so worth it!  We had an amazing time!!  I started hatching this plan when I realised the actual anniversary was the day after Cup Day, but decided we couldn't afford it, however I'd been discussing it with my mum and dad and they, amazingly, gave us the bulk of the trip as an anniversary present! And looked after our two teenage boys. How lucky are we?!  (To any overseas people out there--yes in Victoria, Australia, you really do get a public holiday for a horse race!) Originally we were going to go to Hong Kong and have a few days in Guilin area in China, but when we looked into it, we decided it would be good (and cheaper) to go to China for the whole 7 days.

The food was AMAZING, although not much of it thermomixable due to the very high temperatures used for cooking.  We did a cooking class in Yangshou, at the Cloud 9 Cooking school--higly recommended.  We chose our menu and then went to the market to buy key ingredients, it was fascinating.  I picked up a great tip for frying tofu, which I will share in the new non-thermomix recipe section sometime soon.  I'm also including a picture of my husband and I in Longshen tucking into eggs and garlic chives, local bacon and dried bamboo shoots (which are soaked before use), and bamboo rice--a local dish which is sticky rice, flavoured with local sausage and sweet potato and pumpkin.  They put the rice, flavourings and water in a piece of baboo and seal it off with a piece of corn cob and then cook it on the fire until the bamboo blackens and the rice is cooked. Yum!

Ah well, it's back to reality, and cooking for me, now.  Can't say that I feel overexcited about it at the moment, but at least thermy makes it easy!

PS I'm including a pic of Mark and I, on our big day, 25 years and 1 week ago!

Well I don't know if I did something wrong, but I'm not a fan of this recipe.  I weighed the eggplant, so I had the right amount according to the recipe, but I ended up with heaps extra filling than required to stuff that many eggplant.  I love garlic and onion, but found 5 garlic cloves and 450 g onion wayyyy too much, the garlic taste was overwhelming (I used 3 fat cloves, rather than 5).   The filling was still very watery after cooking for the required time, so when it came to putting the tomato topping on top, I didnt' ad the water and I'm glad because the dish was very watery.  The one thing we did like was the texture of the nuts on top, although I used flaked almonds because I couldn't get pine nuts.  I dont' think this would make a big difference.  All in all, it was pretty disappointing and quite a bit of fiddling around. 2/5

Edit:  Sorry everyone--put this in the wrong spot (again). . . sorry moderators, meant to put in the recipe request section .  Will be more careful in future.

Hi everyone

My son is off hiking at a wonderful outdoor ed facility called Wollangarra.  He is absolutely in his element there and I am so grateful to the staff there who give so much to the young people who visit there and give their time for almost no pay.  Last year when we went to pick him up at their open day I bought the staff some imported chocolates--Jacob (son, now 16) was categorically unimpressed that I would buy the "Wollies" such a gift . . . think of the food miles!!

 So this year, I thought I might make them some biscuits made with eggs from my own chooks, and even my own butter--might be more appropriate and environmentally friendly! I want to make something really special, as they make all their own food there so anzacs and muffins would be quite everday.  Has to be something that doesn't require refrigeration as they have no power and limited fridge (I think they have a gas fridge) and we have to hike 2km to get there.  I was thinking of Julie O's melting moments . . . do you think that would be a good choice.  (We are not staying overnight so we don't have a lot to carry in and I thought I coud wrap them up nicely in tissue paper and in a nice (recycled!) box!

I'm having a lovely time thermomixing through the school holidays!  Don't you just sometimes get a glow of satisfaction from how clever you can be with the help of TMX!!  Today for example I made butter and buttermilk bread, Nay Nay's passionfruit butter to use as a flavouring in my home made yougurt (still tweaking that one), a vegetable soup that I kind of just invented, ricotta gnocci with Farfallina's zucchini cream sauce (this is my DS age 16's favourite meal) and orange cake!  Woo hoo! I was very impressed with myself and my family gobbled everything down . . . although my son did say "So . . . did you make the plates too" in quite a sarcastic tone.  Maybe I'll take him up on that challenge--Heston Blumenthal watch out!!

I made the edc buttermilk bread tonight to use up some buttermilk (yes, I made butter too, yippee!)  I did not see Isi's recipe til later, and I did find the dough from this recipe very sticky as per the discussion on this thread
http://www.forumthermomix.com/index.php?topic=7023.0.  Should have checked the forum first!!

Because the dough was quite wet, it did spread a bit so the loaf was probably flatter than I would like, but the crust was beautiful and the crumb and texture excellent, so I was still very pleased with the result.  Have enjoyed making Chookies no fuss breads, but I felt very virtuous using up the buttermilk--I guess you could use buttermilk with any bread recipe, though? 

I din't find the dough that hard to handle as I oiled my hands as suggested in the recipe book and I know the trick about using the turbo button to get the extra dough out from under the blades, but still looking forward to trying some other recipes with buttermilk.

Hi, we enjoyed these, but feel tweaking is required next time.

Firstly we really liked the crumbed coating (Don't you love those tmx breadcrumbs!)  cook a lot of vegetarian patty type things, and the crisp crumb made a different texture which we really liked.  Secondly, this would be a really time consuming recipe without a tmx, but with being able to steam the potatoes at the same time as cooking the lentils made it a fair bit quicker.

I accidently processed the potato for 9 seconds instead of five and it was very gluey. Still I managed to use it to encase some of the lentil mix, but the main problem I had was that I ended up with nearly double the amount of lentil mix as I had potato.  So I only had enough to make 7 patties with the potato outer casing, for the remaining patties I just coated the lentil mix with the egg and bread crumbs. I don't know if others have had this problem.  I needed two eggs for the crumbing.  Next time I would double the amount of potato and maybe mash them by hand or with the butterfly to avoid the "gluiness". 

Having said this the flavour was really nice and a change from your usual lentil or vegie patty.  Would love to hear from others who have cooked this.  Will definitely try again.  Served with some mango chutney and yogurt they were yum.

We loved this curry!  After the discussion with Hally on another thread, I actually cooked this dish on the stovetop, but Hally has cooked it in the TMX.  I used low fat greek yogurt and actualy preferred this recipe to the butter chicken which uses the same paste.

I also made the chickpea curry from the Indian book and this was a nice change from Chole Palak (Chickpeas in spinach) http://www.forumthermomix.com/index.php?topic=6044.msg78177#msg78177 which I usually make, but I did think that 1 tablespoon of amchoor posder made it a bit sour and next time I would probably add a bit less.

I made some chappatis too, yum, yum 

I was disappointed that I didn't get dinner ready in time to sit down with my family to watch Dr Who--we're all very excited about the new series! My 16 y o son came over and said was everything alright and did I need help. I replied everything was fine and soon I would have Clancy cooking dinner for us so I could come watch Dr Who too.  I made the comment that I just started getting everything ready 1/2 an hour too late.  My darling son replied "Never mind Mum, the next version of tmx will probably have a time travel attachment so that you can go back in time and start dinner earlier!"