Saturday, April 6, 2013

Sunday Morning Cooking Time

I woke up early this morning - it's Sunday - my one day of rest and leisure. I have a lot of rest and leisure to squeeze into one day a week! In Australia I often get into some type of baking on Sunday morning - a nice banana or carrot cake or some chocolate and date, or apple and yoghurt muffins: some type of a mildly healthy treat to take for lunches through the week.

I started making a cup of tea and took time to look at the assortment of foodstuffs on our pantry shelves. Bob had an unexpected lift to Chamkar yesterday and came back with a great haul of vegetables, fruit, bread and cereals including a huge bag of puffed rice which Bhutanese people like to snack on with their tea. For us it is an easily accessible and cheap (about $1 for a kg) and healthy (at least no sugar) breakfast cereal for my breakfast cereal loving boys.

So I saw the enormous bag of puffed rice and the tin of condensed milk I bought a while ago and thought - there has to be something I can make with these. In a flash I found this recipe online for Chewy Rice Bubble Bars.

In the time it took me to make my cup of tea, I had assembled the other ingredients: butter, honey, muesli and sultanas (I substituted these for the choc-chips). While I drank my tea I stirred the condensed milk mixture until it turned to caramel, and then it was a quick stir and into the fridge to set.


Stirring the caramel.



Adding caramel mixture to the dry ingredients.



And into the fridge to set, can't get much easier than that!!!

It needs at least 6 hours in the fridge which is a bit of a shame as we are going on a day trip today with one of the teachers and his daughter who is in my class to Ura - another valley in the Bumthang region where we live. It is supposed to be very beautiful and we thought that at this time of year with the first signs of spring all around - the blossom trees puffy and pink and the willow trees sprouting green foliage - it would be gorgeous. Perfect for a little picnic with rice bubble bars and tea! Anyway, lets hope there is a momo shop on the way!

I am pretty passionate about cooking - it has become probably my favourite hobby in recent years as a part time stay-at-home-mum. Living in Bhutan presents challenges to my inner Masterchef  - a lack of many of the basic and also exotic ingredients I love - and also a more limited kitchen. But on the other hand I am opening to new ingredients, new kitchen appliances, new cuisines and so I thought that I might add a 'new dimension' to my blog and write about some of our kitchen miracles. I hope you will enjoy reading along!

Oh and if it seems this post is a bit inconsistent with my previous post about Dental Health, well I guess it is!!! We all need one day a week off to just have fun, right?  I promise we'll all brush and floss after eating, ok!

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