Well, all that said though, I can’t refuse a picnic.  Maybe it’s because picnics remind me of the carefree days of being a child.  At my parents’ house, we had a classic-style picnic table in our big backyard and a grill.  Many things happened at that table, not just eating.  They’re all good memories that almost make me want to tear up when I remember them.  I also loved going out into our woods just past twilight, when it was a little scary in the darkened shadows of the trees, where my dad would light a fire inside a circle of stones and we would roast hot dogs and marshmallows.

Eating outside evokes a lot of childhood memories for me, but that aside, eating outside is just plain fun.  Except for the bugs and dirt, ew.

Yesterday was one of the nicest days we’ve had in weeks, literally.  We’ve had to endure wind, rain and cold and it is supposed to be spring, Australia, come on!  Even though I love the rain, enough is enough! I decided that it was a good day to enjoy a break in the weather and have a picnic in the backyard for lunch with the kids.

I took them to the grocery store first thing in the morning to get some ingredients, having decided upon chicken wraps, a basic salad, strawberries, strawberry cupcakes and fresh homemade lemonade for our picnic.  Luckily, I had received a bounty of products from Kitchenware Direct – an Australian online kitchen supplies shop – that would help me get my picnic together quickly and easily, which I will review for you in this post.

The most fun for me was the Zyliss salad spinner.  This is the first ever salad spinner I have owned in my entire life.  After the first time I used it, I wondered why it had taken so long for me to get one.  It’s simple to use – just place your salad leaves in the colander-style basket, rinse the leaves and place the basket back in the bowl.  The fun part is making it spin.  My kids couldn’t get enough of this!  This particular spinner has a locking lever and a stop button, which will fluff the leaves back up when you’re done spinning.

This was just a basic salad – I bought the mixed salad leaves in a bag and added chopped tomatoes and cucumbers.  I used a homemade balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing.

I also needed a bowl for our salad and this salad bowl was perfect.  It’s a very attractive clear glass bowl to show off all the beautiful colors in a salad – a definite must!  See it in my pictures of the actual picnic below.

Next, I needed to make the chicken wraps.  This is a very healthy wrap that is super easy to prepare.  Lebanese bread is wrapped around a delicious filling of chicken tenderloins, lettuce leaves, tomatoes, tabouli, hummous and tzatziki.  The entire wrap was quite gigantic, so I had to slice the wrap in half to make it easier to hold and eat.  What better way to do this than with a Scanpan sandwich knife (which I didn’t even know existed until I found it at Kitchenware Direct!).

This sandwich knife will cut through your sandwich (or wrap) easily without crushing it.  It’s a very heavy knife that feels great in my hand - I was so impressed that I immediately fell in love with it!

On to dessert – strawberry cupcakes!  Okay, so these aren’t homemade, I’ll admit.  They’re a Betty Crocker box mix, but my kids certainly don’t mind.  How hard is it to travel with cupcakes, by the way, when you don’t have a cupcake carrier?  I had a Cupcake Courier while in the US that I had won from Iron Cupcake: Earth, which was great, except that I found it very difficult to store because it was so large.

Kitchenware Direct has a collapsible cupcake carrier that makes it easier to store, yet it can still hold 2 dozen cupcakes or a cake.  This what I used to carry our cupcakes to the picnic blanket.

Here you can see the cupcake carrier on the left and the glass salad bowl on the right.  In the center in the back are our chicken wraps and right in front is our fresh homemade lemonade.

Everything was very delicious and we all had a great time eating our lunch outside!

My daughter’s favorite was the lemonade, but both of my sons preferred the cupcakes.  The chicken wraps and salad were my favorites!

Thank you, Kitchenware Direct, for helping to make our picnic so fun, easy and enjoyable!

Recipe sources:
Lemonade – Country Living
Chicken wraps – Kidspot

Luckily, Kitchenware Direct, an Australian online kitchenware store, came to my rescue recently and offered me a Cuisinart Stick Blender to review on my blog.  I could think of hundreds of things to do with it, but I wanted to especially see if the chopper/grinder attachment that came with it could make chopping my most dreaded vegetables a more fun and pain-free experience.

Flipping through the latest MasterChef Australia magazine, I saw a recipe for Filipino fried noodles with chicken and beans.  This looked like a fantastic, flavorful dish and chose it to try out the stick blender.

Onions first.  I was a little bit annoyed that the instructions insisted that food be chopped into 10mm-length pieces before being placed into the chopper/grinder bowl because this meant that there is still a chance the onions could make my eyes sting and water.  And sure enough!!  However, after placing the onions in the chopper/grinder bowl….

It made short work of chopping the onions up into the fine pieces that I needed for my recipe.  Easy!

Next, chillies.  The ones in this recipe aren’t the fiery bird’s eye chillies, but the more mild, longer ones.  Again, the stick blender made chopping these up a breeze.

I did find that I needed to take the top off the bowl and scrape down the sides and the bottom because some bits were left a little chunkier than I wanted.  The motor on this little guy is quite powerful, so I had to be careful not to chop the ingredients too finely or they might have quickly turned into a puree!

I might take this opportunity to say that if you want to make your own pureed baby food, the Cuisinart stick blender would be perfect for that!

The choppiner/grinder bowl is mainly for small jobs, like chopping an onion or a chili for a recipe, or for pureed baby food, or for making your own breadcrumbs and food needs to be processed in the chopper/grinder bowl 1/2 cup at a time after being chopped into 10mm-length pieces.

The blender also comes with a whisk for whisking egg whites or whipping cream – I haven’t tried this yet, but am looking forward to it!  It also comes with an attachment to puree soups or make milkshakes, in true stick blender style.  If you need to measure ingredients, you’ll be pleased to find that Cuisinart supplies a measuring cup as well.

But I digress on this handy little piece of kitchen machinery!  Back to the recipe.  The rest of the prep work for the recipe is pretty easy.  If you’re not familiar with julienne-style carrots or ginger then you may also need to invest in a julienne slicer to spend even less time preparing your veggies!

I hesitate to say that these noodles make a healthy dinner, as there is quite a bit of soy sauce in the recipe which means this dish is probably quite high in salts.  However, at least you can say you have had at least one, if not two, serves of veggies in this meal!

Filipino fried noodles with chicken and beans.  I was really pleased with how this turned out, it was absolutely delicious!

I gave a serve of these filling noodles to my mother-in-law to take home with her for dinner after she left our house, and my husband gobbled up a ton of it after he got back very late from a day in Melbourne for work.  We even had some leftover for lunch and dinner the next night.  And the flavor does get better the next day!  This is a dish I’ll be definitely be making again!

Now, I haven’t had the Cuisinart Stick Blender for very long, so I haven’t experimented with it very much as of yet, but I have also made my own peanut butter.

Super easy, just put in 1/2 cup of nuts (even try almonds for your very own almond butter) then pulse to chop, then blend until the nuts become smooth.  I added a touch of salt and peanut oil to mine to make it a little bit creamier, and I was really happy with it!  The stick blender got the peanut butter smoother than my new food processor did; I was really surprised!  If you’re looking for a yummy homemade peanut butter recipe, try this one from Alton Brown (it uses a food processor rather than a stick blender though).

I do think a stick blender is a worthy investment, whether you’re cooking for 1, pureeing baby food or soup, or doing prep work for a recipe, or even just simply whipping cream.  It’s a powerful little machine that doesn’t take up much room and is very lightweight.  Choose your own stick blender from the range at Kitchenware Direct!

If you’re after the recipe for those delicious Filipino noodles, you’ll find it below!

 

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Filipino Fried Noodles With Chicken And Beans
Adapted from MasterChef Australia magazine, issue 13
Serves 4 hungry people

Ingredients
600g chicken breast, boneless, skinless
60ml (1/4 cup) soy sauce
250g bean vermicelli (glass noodles)
60ml (1/4 cup) peanut oil
1 red onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
3cm piece ginger, cut into julienne (matchsticks)
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 long red chillies, thinly sliced
1 large carrot, cut into julienne (matchsticks)
400g green beans, trimmed, cut into 5cm lengths
1/4 cup coriander leaves, roughly chopped, plus extra leaves to serve

Tomato Soy Dressing
1 tomato, cut into small wedges
80ml (1/3 cup) soy sauce
2 coriander roots, washed, finely chopped
1 long red chilli, finely chopped
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Method
To make tomato soy dressing, place all the ingredients in a bowl, stir to combine, then set aside until needed.

Place chicken, soy sauce and 500ml (2 cups) water in a large saucepan, ensuring the water just covers the chicken.  Bring to the boil over high heat, then reduce heat to medium and simmer for 10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through (I had to cook mine a bit longer).  Using a slotted spoon, remove chicken from soy sauce mixture, place in a bowl and refrigerate for 10 minutes or until cool enough to handle.

Strain soy sauce mixture through a fine sieve into a small saucepan.  Bring to the boil over high heat and cook for 10 minutes or until reduced by three-quarters.

Meanwhile, soak noodles in cold water for 15 minutes to soften.  Drain.

Using your hands, finely shred chicken into a bowl, then season with pepper.  Toss well to combine.

Heat oil in a large frying pan or wok over high heat.  Add onion, garlic and ginger, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes or until onion is soft.  Add soy sauce mixture, sugar, fish sauce, chillies, carrot and beans and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes or until sugar dissolves.  Add chicken, noodles and coriander, and cook, tossing, for 5 minutes or until noodles are warmed through.

Divide fried noodles among bowls, scatter with extra coriander and serve with tomato soy dressing.

I put together this slideshow on Flickr to share with you…

It looks like a lot of fun, doesn’t it!

Now, earlier, I had made this Easter-themed chocolate mousse cake, but it was way too rich.  So rich, in fact, that I couldn’t even finish a slice of it.  It was very delicious, but basically inedible, in my opinion.

And then came Easter and we found ourselves up to our bunny ears with chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs.  That’s why I haven’t updated here very much, because I haven’t been baking anything sweet as we still have a bowl full of leftover bunnies and eggs!

Therefore, I am not going to give you a sweet recipe today.  I am going to give you a delicious, savory one for a flavorful chicken dish.  It was one of the first recipes that really stuck out at me from Jamie Oliver’s new book 30 Minute Meals.  I’m not normally a fan of Jamie Oliver’s, but the concept of the book was neat enough to get me to buy it.  I’d take Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals over Rachel Ray’s 30 minute meals any day!

So what exactly is this flavorful chicken dish that I speak of so highly?  Let me show you.

Okay, so yes, it has that messy Jamie-Oliver rustic look to it, but this mingling of flavors is a lovely one.  First, the raw chicken is rubbed in a mixture of olive oil, salt, pepper, dried oregano and sweet paprika (Jamie doesn’t give exact amounts for the spices, but in the recipe below, I tried to give you an estimated idea as to the amounts I used).  The chicken is then fried until golden.  It is then added to a roasting tray with a quartered lemon, tomatoes, rosemary and bacon, then the whole thing is placed under a grill until the chicken is cooked through.

In Jamie’s book, he serves this chicken with spinach and potatoes, but I served it with buttered and salted peas.

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The exciting announcement post is still forthcoming – I’m nowhere near completing it.  In the meantime, I’ll share this recipe from Donna Hay with you.  It’s chicken yakitori with cucumber salad – a really easy Japanese-inspired dish that you could whip up on a weeknight.

Mirin, rice wine vinegar and sesame oil make this really flavorful and delicious.  And as long as you have a mandolin slicer you can make pretty ribbons of cucumber as well!

You may read the recipe and look back at the picture only to realize that there is no wasabi on my plate.  I cannot eat wasabi, it is way too hot for my taste!

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In The New Classics cookbook is a variety of recipes, some of which you’ll find on Martha’s website, including the one I’m going to show you today.  I’ve copied quite a few recipes that I hope to share with you, actually!

Today’s recipe from The New Classics cookbook is chicken wraps with mango, basil and mint.  This one was the first recipe that stood out at me while skimming the book.  It sounded very interesting, and on top of that I just love wrap sandwiches!

These are quite easy to make, and while doing so you’ll find that these wraps have an intriguing combinations of flavors.  The chicken is baked in a rub that includes garlic, shallot, fresh basil, salt, pepper and cinnamon.  Yes, that was cinnamon!  It works though, this chicken tastes amazing.

To accompany the chicken, you’ll be making a mango dressing.  This includes mango, of course, but also more shallot, lime juice and cayenne pepper.

Assembly is easy.  Spread the mango dressing on the bread, layer with chicken, mango slices and a few leaves of basil and mint.   Wrap and enjoy!  I preferred this cold, but they most definitely can be eaten while warm.

Okay, my main problem with these is that there isn’t enough filling.  I followed the recipe exactly, but ended up with having to use just two slices of chicken, two slices of mango, and only about a tablespoon of mango dressing per wrap.  If I were to make these again, I would definitely be using more, and bigger mangos and more chicken so I could fill the wraps more.

Chicken Wraps With Mango, Basil, and Mint
Adapted from Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics
Recipe also available on marthastewart.com
Makes 4 wraps

Ingredients:
For The Chicken
1 garlic clove
1/2 shallot
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves
1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Freshly ground pepper
2 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 12 ounces total)

For The Dressing
1/2 shallot
1/2 mango, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
2 teaspoons fresh lime juice
Pinch of cayenne pepper

Assembly
4 lavash breads (3 1/2 ounces each)
1/2 mango, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch-thick spears
8 fresh basil leaves
8 fresh mint leaves

Method
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Make the chicken: Finely chop garlic and shallot in a food processor. Add basil and oil, and process until mixture forms a coarse paste. Stir in salt and cinnamon, and season with pepper. Make a few shallow 1/2-inch slits on both sides of chicken; rub all over with the basil mixture. Place on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake chicken until cooked through, 12 to 15 minutes. Let cool completely, then shred into small pieces; set aside.

Make the dressing: Finely chop shallot in the clean bowl of the food processor. Add mango, and process until smooth. Add the lime juice and cayenne, and process until combined.

Assemble wraps: Spread about 1/4 cup mango dressing in center of each lavash. Top with chicken, mango, and herbs. Roll up diagonally to form a cone. Wraps can be refrigerated, wrapped in parchment and plastic, up to 4 hours.

These were actually much easier to make than I thought they would be, and they tasted so nice!  I left out the chopped green chilies in the white sauce, but if I had to do it over, I think I’d add them after all to give it a bit of extra flavor.

Baked Chimichangas
Adapted from Taste of Home
Serves 6

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups shredded cooked chicken breast
1 cup salsa
1 small onion, chopped
3/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
6 flour tortillas (10 inches), warmed
3/4 cup shredded reduced-fat cheddar cheese
1 cup reduced-sodium chicken broth
2 teaspoons chicken bouillon granules
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 cup fat-free half-and-half
1 can (4 ounces ) chopped green chilies

Method
In a large nonstick skillet, simmer the chicken, salsa, onion, cumin and oregano until heated through and most of the liquid is evaporated.  Place 1/2 cup down the center of each tortilla; top with 2 tablespoons cheese.

Fold sides and ends over filling; roll up.  Place seam side down in a 13x9x2-inch baking dish coated with cooking spray.  Bake, uncovered, at 425F for 15 minutes or until browned.

In a saucepan, heat broth, bouillon and pepper until bouillon is dissolved.  Combine flour and half-and-half until smooth; stir into broth.  Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened.  Stir in chilies; heat through.  Cut chimichangas in half; top with sauce.

I’ve had a craving for butter chicken for the past week and since there are no Indian restaurants nearby in this suburb of Indianapolis that I’m now in, I had to make it myself.  I searched for a recipe and found on that had received heaps of great reviews and had a 5-star rating on FoodNetwork.com.

While it isn’t the best recreation of my favorite butter chicken from the restaurant in Sydney that I used to visit, this is a fantastic Indian dish.  Despite the long ingredient list, it actually is quite easy to prepare, as well.  I was very pleased with my version of butter chicken, and I will definitely be making this again.

My notes:

Now, I say “my version” because I realized that garam masala isn’t the easiest spice to find in the grocery store.  After a big search of the aisles, I ended up using curry powder instead of garam masala.  So technically, perhaps you could call this a red curry rather than butter chicken!?

I also used fresh garlic instead of preminced garlic from a jar; I minced two fresh garlic cloves.

I bought a fresh already-made rotisserie chicken from the deli in our grocery store, so I didn’t even have to worry about cooking my own chicken.  I tore the whole chicken into shreds and added it to the sauce.

The recipe says it serves 4, but the servings they are talking about must be huge – this recipe made heaps of butter chicken.  I think we’ll be eating it for the next three dinners!

All it is is a whole wheat tortilla, romaine lettuce, grilled chicken strips (these can be purchased frozen and pre-cooked, to be reheated in the microwave) and a few drips of tomato & herb based salad dressing. Simple, healthy and tasty!

The other recipe I cooked up was very nice as well. It is super easy and can be made in one pot. All it is is chicken breasts, stewed tomatoes, garlic, mushrooms and oregeno.

I would have liked to have served this with plain white or brown rice, but I didn’t have any. I served it with peas instead. My 18-month-old son loved this and ate every single last crumb of this. I was so pleased because this is a boy who loves his french fries and chicken nuggets, so when he eats any kind of vegetable it is something to write about! My 3-year-old daughter, however, would have nothing of it!

I forget where I got this recipe, it was just printed out in Notepad and stuck in my recipe book, so I’ll post it here in case anyone else is interested in trying this as well.

Chicken, Mushrooms & Tomatoes
Serves 4

Ingredients
4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, about 1 1/2 pounds
Coarse salt and ground pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound mushrooms, trimmed and quartered
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 can (14.5 ounces) stewed tomatoes
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano

Method:
Season chicken with salt and pepper. In a large (5-quart) saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, heat oil over medium-high heat; swirl to coat bottom of pan. Cook chicken, turning when it easily releases from the pan, until golden, 4 to 6 minutes. Transfer to a plate.

Add mushrooms; cover, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, tomatoes, and oregano. Reduce heat to medium-low; cook, covered, until tomatoes have broken down, 10 to 15 minutes.

Return chicken and any accumulated juices to pan; cover, and cook until chicken is opaque throughout, 4 to 6 minutes. Turn chicken to coat with sauce, and serve.

I was not able to enter Iron Cupcake: Earth this month because I have simply not had time to go on a search for necessary ingredients. The only time that I did have a chance, I couldn’t find one of the main ingredients that I needed! This is the first challenge that I have missed, but I do eventually intend to make the wine cupcake that I wanted to make for January’s challenge.

And just as a heads up, coming up later in the week are chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes. Chocolate chip cookie dough baked inside chocolate cupcakes, and frosted with raw (eggless) chocolate chip cookie dough! Yum! I can’t wait to taste these!