Homemade Pasta Sauce

My advise for the pasta lovers is to make your own pasta sauce at home, especially if you do it for kids. Try not to buy a ready-to-use one from grocery shop. And if you are in a hurry and just don;t have time enough ot prepare one, then buy an ecological one.

Advantages for the homemade sauce: better taste, much healthier, and a lot cheaper.

You don't need so much time or some chief skills to make it right, so don't panic.

Ingredients (for 3 persons - 1 adult and 2 children):

2 medium tomatoes
1 big carrot
1 medium onion
1 medium red sweet pepper
olive oil - 2-3 tablespoons
iodine free salt
Provensal Herbs - 1 tablespoon

Chop the vegetables into small pieces, with a knife. In this case, I advise you to grate the carrot. Or use the food processor to chop them all together, easy peasy :)

In a pan add the oil and the vegetables, stir with a spoon and let them cook with a lid over, 20-30 minutes. Add 2-3 tablespoons of water, if the mixture starts to be too dry, to avoid burning Add the salt and Provencal Herbs at the end.

When the mixture is done (that means the pieces of onion and carrot are soft), use a blender to obtain a creamy texture of the sauce.

If you have toddlers, you can add in this sauce (after blending the sauce in the blender) small pieces of chicken breast meat, just boiled before. If you have bigger kids, you can add a good quality ham (soy free), chopped.

Top this sauce over your favorite gluten free pasta. My kids love the fusilli shape.

If you are not dairy free, top it with some fresh grated parmesan.

Rice Paper Vegetable Spring Rolls

Tortilla Wrap

Ok, this is not quite a recipe for little picky eaters. It is obviously that my kids are growing up and they start to eat much more diversified. Which is a good thing, but they still have a lot of issues to improve about their diet. So, why did I invent this homemade recipe? For 2 reasons:

1. to use the always remaining leftovers of all kind of steak, roasted meat and so on.

2. and to camouflage some kind of meat that is very healthy but the kids don't want to eat (venison, hunting meat like rabbit).

My mother helps me and she usually cooks the venison for us, by keeping it for days in marinade in order to change the taste, baking it in oven for hours to tenderize it. But my kids still don't want to eat it. So, i came with this amazing idea, to add some sauces over to change the taste and the smell, and to wrap it with salad in tortilla.

First, to trick them, I added also some baked potatoes in the wrap, and then replace them with baked sweet potatoes. But now I don't add sweet potatoes all the time, and that makes the wrap more light and healthy.

So, this is the way to make it: cut the meat into small pieces and cook it for a few minutes in a pan with some olive oil.

I add over 2 sauces: a little of Thai Sweet and Hot Chilli Sauce and Rich Hoisin Sauce.  In the third jar there is homemade hot peppers jam, which I sometimes use instead of the Sweet and Hot Chilli Sauce.

 

For this recipe I use a gluten free tortilla.

Steps:
1. I warm the tortilla for a minute in a hot pan. 

2. Then add some sweet mustard. 

3 - 4. Add some grated carrot, the meat and the salad, and wrap it!

For my eldest son, I add a little of Sweet and Hot Chilli Sauce over, because he likes spicy food.

You can use corn tortilla (picture below) instead of the gluten free one, or any kind of tortilla you prefer, even a gluten version one, if you don't have gluten intolerance.

Dorada in Salt Crust

Handmade Burger

Chicken Schnitzel

Gluten free and oil free! What can be more amazing and more healthful for your kids? Gluten free - because we used corn flakes. And oil free, because we baked the schnitzels in oven, we didn't fry them in oil. 

And do you know what is really amazing for me? Last evening when I cooked this meal, my son said: "Mmmm!... It's the most wonderful thing I've even eaten!"

How can you prepare this amazing healthy schnitzel? Smash by hand the corn flakes into a kitchen towel, until you get the desired size of the crumbs. If you do it by a mixer, you will get too tinny pieces of crumbs, almost like a dust. And you don't want that.

Beat one free range egg and mix it with Provensal Seasoning and Himalayan pink salt iodine free. I used only one egg for the entirely amount of chicken breast you can see in the oven in the end. It was a large egg.

Press the pieces of chicken breast in beaten eggs on both sides and lay them down in the tray on parchment paper. And baked them in the preheated oven at 170 degrees Celsius for 20 - 30 minutes. After 15 minutes I suggest you to open the oven and turn the schnitzels on the over side. 

Oven Baked Catfish with Tomato and Onion

One, two, three, four, five

Once I caught a fish alive!

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten

Then I threw him... 

Into my mom's kitchen!

You know, if your kids are not crazy about fish dishes, you should start going for fishing together. If they catch the fish, they will be more tempted to eat the meal. 

In the pictures above, we were for fishing in the Delta of Danube. My son loves fishing and my both kids love to eat fish, for the simple reason that this was a kind of meat they eat since they were born. So, we came home and cooked the fish caught by him.

Caught or not by you, I highly recommend you to have for this recipe 2 small fresh catfishes, not frozen. The taste is better. Other ingredients: 5 tomatoes and 3 onions, 1 teaspoon of Himalayan salt without iodine, 1 teaspoon black pepper, 100 grams (3.5 oz) extra virgin olive oil. 

Cut the fish small pieces as you like. Cut tomatoes and onions small pieces and put all the ingredients in a tray and then it in the oven, at 170 deegres Celsius, for 30 minutes - 45 minutes, depending of the oven you have. At least twice in this time, flip the pieces of fish, to get a nice color on both sides. 

Traditional Roast Duck with Rice and Carrots

This is the taste of my childhood. Everybody has some nice fond memories regarding special dishes made by grandma when you were little. The roasted duck is one of mine! I know that for most of the people these memories are related to a dessert, like some kind of Christmas cakes, or some magic cookies or... anyway, something sweet. 

I have my sweets too, but the roasted duck is much more important for me, because it was made only on Sunday, when all the family came to my grandparents house to have the lunch together. Moreover, this dish needed half of a day to be done, because it was cooked in a traditional oven made by hand from clay. Unfortunately I don't have a picture with it, I will take one with the first occasion and show it to you.

So, now I am very happy to cook it for my kids, in my modern oven, latest from Ariston. For this dish I need: 

- one nice and fat free range duck ( I usually buy it from a local market where farmers from country are selling organic food)

- 500 grams rice

- 1,5 kg of soup (usually three times the quantity of rice); this soup is the water in which the duck have been boiled, before roasting it in the oven

- 2 onions

- a bunch of carrots

- Himalayan salt without iodine - 2 teaspoons 

- pepper - 1 teaspoon

First step is to keep the duck at least for one day, in a marinade before cooking it, otherwise you can not eat the meat. It's a very strong and tough one, like venison. There are many kinds of marinade, I usually use one made of fresh pineapple mixed in a blender with water and olive oil. The pineapple contains a special enzyme called bromelain, which has the ability to break the hard protein tissue. Here in "Tips and Tricks" category of by blog, you have the recipe of my special pineapple marinade.  

Anyway, then it has finished the time to stay in marinade, I boil the duck in water for 30 minutes (if it's a young one) and for 45 minutes or 1 hour (if it's an old one). Add one teaspoon of Himalayan salt in water, to release the calcium from bones in the soup. 

Then just put the rice in a glass cooking tray, add the soup from boiling, the chopped onions, the grind carrots, one teaspoon Himalayan salt and one teaspoon pepper. Put the pieces of duck over the rice, and grind a carrot over for decoration. And cook it in your modern oven for at least one hour at low temperature, maximum 170 degrees Celsius. 

Tip: for a better taste, add some vegetables into the water when you boil the duck: one parsley root, one parsnip root, one small celery root, one onion and one carrot. This veggies give a better taste to the soup and further to the rice.  

Free Range Chicken - Oven Baked

It sound very simple and delicious - kids love roasted chicken in oven... but how can you convince the picky eaters to eat the hard meat of a pasture raised chicken? Well, you have to hold the chicken meat before cook it in oven, for at least one day in a marinade, to make the meat softer. 

A homemade marinade for any kind of meat must have something acidic to brake down the proteins. Acidic ingredients are usually the juice of some fruits (like lemon, pineapple or papaya) and honey. I can tell you that the pineapple juice can make softer even the hardest and toughest beef meat you can ever imagine... When you have a tough meat, try this pineapple marinade recipe. 

But for a free range chicken I think is enough a much simple marinade made only with lemon, virgin olive oil and non iodized salt. You hold the chicken meat in an glass bowl (not a plastic one, because the acidic juice of the lemon will raise the elimination of xenoestrogens in marinade, especially bpa or bisphenol a) for 1 day, or at least 12 hours. 

When you are ready to prepare the dinner, put the chicken in an enamel baking tray together with the marinade. Add a hand of bacon, a hand of cranberries and a full tablespoon of duck fat. Cover the tray with a lid if you have suitable one, otherwise use a parchment paper as a lid, as I did, because as you can see in my picture, I used the standard tray of my oven, which hasn't a lid. 

Here you have a picture with the cranberries I used for this recipe. There are dried cranberries, but you can use fresh if you have, because fresh is always better. I chose cranberries and not other berries, for their sweet and sour taste. 

Keep the chicken in over for around 2 hours, more or less depending of the oven you have, but don't raise the temperature over 160 degrees Celsius. It's said that after 120 degrees Celsius it begins to occur the carcinogens. If you want to cook this way, you have to agree with a longer time for cooking :) Actually, this is the reason for which I usually make this recipe in slow cooker. Next time I will give you a meat recipe cooked in slow cooker, because it doesn't require marinade and it's much easier to make it.

Anyway, the most important thing you should remember from my article is to replace in your children diet, the farm raised chicken meat with a free range one, because it's healthier and testier, even with the whole work to marinade it before and cook it like my recipe. 

Fish Balls with Vegetables

We usually eat a lot of fish, you will get used to this... so, today I made fish balls.

Ingredients:

I used white fish (catfish and perch), but you can put any fish you want. It's better to use at least two different kind of fish, because this way the balls will have a much better taste. The fish is minced and the quantity of it, is about 2 cups.

I putted also one medium boiled potato peeled and smashed with folk, one small boiled onion finely chopped, one grated row carrot, 2 garlic gloves crushed, one free range egg and finally one hand of parsley. I would like to put the parsley uncut, but for little picky eaters we have to chop it!

Mix all the ingredients and shape with your hand different shapes, like balls, or flat shapes as mine.

Bake it in a glass tray on parchment paper grassed with pork lard before, in the over at 120 - 160 Celsius degrees, not higher because all the ingredients (especially the fish meat) get done quickly.