Saturday, May 5, 2012

Ice Blocks


The boys love ice cream but, as they've had dairy allergies and intolerances in the past, I make them a coconut cream based ice cream. They also don't mind an avocado/pear/banana 'ice cream' that I make. A little while ago I thought we'd give ice blocks a go. Except, with winter approaching, it was impossible to find any molds in the local shops. I found some really great looking ones online that were on sale so I got those and the boys have been enjoying ice blocks ever since.

I've been gradually working through the boys' list of flavour suggestions, depending on what's on sale and in season. Shmoo has been asking for orange ice blocks and it just so happened that the fruit and veg shop had big bags of oranges on sale during the week.

This morning we set about juicing the oranges. The kids eagerly hovered around, having their first taste of toffee (I got distracted and cooked some sugar syrup a little too long). Shmoo enjoyed examining the plump, shiny orange juice vesicles (he's remembered what they're called ever since nagging me to find out when he was 3.5). He watched the juice drip down into the jug, keeping track of how many millilitres we'd squeezed out. He managed to work out that if we'd gotten about 500ml from 6 oranges, we then needed to juice another 6 oranges to get to our target of 1000ml/1L. We even manged to do some skip counting with oranges and Shmoo got in a bit more practise with odds and evens.

I then sent the kids out of the room on the pretext of getting them to see how The OH was going with building a worm house (compost bin), and quickly stirred some carrot juice into the orange juice. :-$ Yeah, sneaky, I know. We tend to hide veg wherever we can here so that if the kids don't eat the undisguised veg on their plate (as often happens), we know that they're still getting a decent range of vegetables. I saved the carrot juice from last night when I finely processed a whole bunch of veg. We made a mega batch of wontons, 240 of them, for wonton soup (I often cook in bulk and freeze in small portions for quick and easy future meals). Whenever I used to make the soup the boys would pick out the wontons and leave the veg. So I told them I wouldn't put veg in the stock anymore and they were happy. Instead, I put it all into the wontons themselves :-"

1 comment :

"Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid."