5-Minute Dessert

Yesterday was my first day where it was just the boys and me. Until that point, either my parents or Y's mom were with us. On Sunday, Y was of course home with me. Come Monday, however, Y was at work, my parents were in the US and Y's mom had returned to Yokohama where his parents live. Since last week, a typhoon has been trying to make its where here and it has been pretty much constant rain.

Going outside is taking a huge risk given that it might downpour at any minute. On top of the rain, K has come down with a cold. This means, we are stuck in the house. K had been sitting in front of the TV or the iPad for the entire day. When he is sick, he gets special TV/iPad privelages. But, enough was enough - it was time to do something. We were going to make a little treat!

I got K started on crushing up pretzels.

Then we put some chocolate chips in a bowl, added a bit of oil and microwaved it until mostly melted.

Then I stirred it up until it was all nice and smooth.

We added the pretzels and some dried cranberries. It was about 1:1, chocolate to pretzels/cranberries.

Then we put it all out onto a parchment lined cookie sheet and popped it in the refrigerator.

Then we went to the bedroom to take a rest - K with the iPad.

T and I in my bed.

By the time we got up, the chocolate was hard and we had a nice little snack.

It's meant to rain every day until next Wednesday. Any other ideas of what to do with a sick 3-year old and an infant?

Basil Infused Lemonade Jelly

It's hotter than the blazes here and I am still pregnant. I only have 9 days until the due date, but the baby doesn't seem to be in a hurry. Possibly this little one doesn't realize how uncomfortable it is for me to sleep? Regardless, I thought I deserved a nice, cool treat and found this recipe for Lemonade Jelly with Basil. I thought it sounded interesting, but more than that - cold.

I halved the recipe for a few reasons, one of which was that I didn't want to buy that many lemons and the other is that I didn't have too much basil in the planter on the balcony and I didn't want to use it all in one go.

Start by combining sugar, water and freshly-squeezed lemon juice.

Put it to boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved.

Tear up the basil and pour the liquid over it, then let it steep.

Put some orange juice in a pan (I recently read a different article about making jellies that said to use a tad bit of orange juice to give lemon flavored jellies a nice, lemony color without changing the flavor - lo and behold, that is exactly what the recipe called for!) and sprinkle with gelatin. Turn on the heat to melt the gelatin, then whisk in the strained lemon/basil mixture.

Then pour it into little containers. I used flower-shaped ones that I was hoping I would be able to unmold from and have cute little lemon jelly flowers.

The next step was to make up some whipped cream. I just used cream and some powdered sugar - no recipe, just add some sugar until it tastes good, then whip it up!

The end result was delicious; like seriously good. The jelly didn't get hard enough to unmold. It was quite similar to Japanese-style jellies - something that I really do love. As in the very first photo, I piped on a bit of the whipped cream and added a tiny basil leaf.

For K's I asked him if he wanted some whipped cream and he turned it down. He loves yellow anything and so I think he was just really excited about the yellow jelly. One bite in...

and huge smiles abound! After about three bites, however, he said it was "spicy." I kept telling him it was sour, but he wasn't having it - it was spicy. I told him that if he put some whipped cream on it, it would be nice and sweet. He took one bite and then said that my mom and I could have the rest of his. Lucky us!!

Children's Day

As I mentioned in a previous post, Y has had 10 straight days of holidays this Golden Week - a series of public holidays to give the good people of Japan a much needed break from work. Yesterday was "Children's Day." It is a day where we celebrate the health, growth, strength and happiness of children. There is a tad bit of a focus on boys on this day; as we have a day dedicated to girls in March, this is the boys' time to shine!

Two main symbols for the day are samurai and koi nobori (flags of fish). Both of these symbols are meant for boys only. Many families with boys have a samurai, or just a samurai hat, as well as a set of fish flags that are displayed during the month. When K was born, Y's parents sent us Y's old samurai set up to diplay for a few weeks in late April/early May. We were pretty slow to set it up, but got it all done a few days ago.

 Y and I set it up while K was asleep and when he woke up in the morning it was quite a surprise. For some reason, he didn't remember it from last year and asked a lot of questions about it - many for which I had no answer!

We have Y's old set of flags as well, and while they are set up on our balcony, I failed to get a good photo of them. I did, however, remember to take a photo of the fish flags that are set up for our condo while K was outside playing before dinner tonight.

To celebrate Children's Day, we decided to do something that K would like. If there is one thing this kid loves, it's a picnic in the park. He particularly likes it when I make him his own bento, instead of one big one for the whole family. Yesterday morning, I got to work on making him a Children's Day themed bento - a tiny samurai onigiri and a set of koi nobori sausages. I wasn't sure if he would like the whole "chara-ben" (character-themed bento), but he ended up being pretty stoked on it.

After lunch, he played soccer with Y, we looked at the boats on the pond and then we went to the playground - his most favorite spot in the park. It was packed full of kids, apparently we weren't the only ones with this brilliant idea, but he found plenty of room to play.

He even got a few rides on the bouncy boats. It was super hot yesterday, but we stayed playing in that area for hours. He had such a wonderful time.

 

On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store to get a few things so that I could make K a nice Children's Day dessert.

 

 

It was so hot, however, that before even making it home he begged and begged to stop for an ice cream from the convenience store. As it was Children's Day, and to be honest, ice cream sounded delicious, we stopped and got a treat for each of us. Then we got home, ate our ice cream and gave the little guy his shower - he was filthy. While he was playing in there, I got cracking on his cake.

 

I, of course, would have liked to do this cake up from scratch, as per usual, but with Sunday's party preparations, I have been really busy and didn't have time. Instead, I bought a roll cake and some whipped cream (we already had the strawberries). First I spread whipped cream on the top and sides of the cake.

Then I sliced up about a million teeny strawberries and carefully placed them on the cake for the fish's scales.

Finally I cut a strawberry round and sliced off the end of a green grape for the fish's eye. Although his expression looks pained, K seemed stoked on it when he was out of the shower.

After dinner, we watched a DVD Y's mom had made of photos from K's second year of life and ate cake - the perfect ending to a lovely day! K particularly liked the strawberries; he didn't care much for the cake, but I shouldn't have been too surprised. In hindsight, I should have just given him a bowl of strawberries and called it a night!

Steamed Banana and Chocolate Bread

Today was K's first full day of preschool. He got on the bus at 7:53 in the morning and I picked him up at the bus stop at 2:26. As awful as it sounds, a day to myself was glorious. I took out the trash, did the laundry, cleaned the house in record time, went for a walk, then to the grocery store, and finally to another shop, made and ate my lunch, made dinner, and then since I had some time before heading to the bus stop I made K a treat for after school - steamed banana and chocolate bread.

As today was a full day, he had school lunch. This had me a tad worried because K can be a tad picky about his food. I really wasn't sure if he would eat anything, so I thought having a nice snack at the ready would be a good idea. Turns out he had sandwiches, one of them (from what I can gather) was egg salad. The concept of eggs in a sandwich cracked him up. What a nutter.

Anyway, for the steamed breads, I started by mixing up 150g of flour, 5g of baking powder, 30g of sugar and a pinch of salt.

Then I added 150ml of milk and a tablespoon of vegetable oil.

Once that was all nice and mixed, I roughly chopped up a banana and also threw in a small handful of mini chocolate chips.

Once that was all mixed up I spooned a little into cupcake papers and then put them in my oven on the steam setting for 20 minutes.

They spread out a lot, and don't look much like little cupcake breads at all, but they were really quite tasty. I'm wondering if I could put them in cupcake tins and then steam them. Otherwise, I need to invest in some stronger cups to steam them in.

 

Either way, it really didn't matter. K was stoked on them and that is all that counts!

Homemade Jellies (the Japanese kind)

 

This week has been all about K, so I figure we should keep with the pattern to finish out the week. One of K's favorite snacks is jellies - Japanese style Jell-o. They usually come in little plastic cups that kids squeeze into their mouths. While K adores these, I am not too keen on most of them. I think a lot of them have tons of unnecessarily added sugars and many aren't made from real juice. On Sunday, we had pretty crummy weather, so it was the perfect time to do something fun (and delicious) with the kid.

We went to the grocery store in the morning, before the weather got too bad and I had him pick out two juices with which to make our jellies. He ended up going with a fruity blend, as well as his favorite vegetable juice. I was personally leaning towards tangerine or maybe grape, but he was pretty set in his plan. I bought two of each juice; they were about 200ml each.

Once we got home, we got cracking. K was really excited to make these and helped the whole time. He generally is over it after a while, but not with these! First we put 1 and 1/2 cups of the juice in a pan to boil.

In a separate bowl, we measured out 1/2 cup of the juice into a bowl and addded 2 tablespoons of gelatin. I thought we should stir it, but the gelatin started to melt straight away, so I figured it would be fine.

Once the juice boiled, I added it to the gelatin mixture and K stirred it up. The gelatin dissolved super quickly so this only took about 10 seconds.

Then we got to pouring. Before going to the grocery store, we stopped by the 100 yen shop to get some cookie cutters. K spotted these molds as well and wanted them, so we picked these little guys up too. They were so super tiny, but I figured we could try. The remaining liquid was put into a cake and a pie pan. Then all of them were put into the refrigerator.

Once they were in the fridge, I got to making lunch and by the time we were finished eating, the tiny ones were ready to eat. It was really difficult to get them out of the mold and they ended up not being cute at all.

That being said, K didn't seem to mind one bit.

Once K woke from his nap, I set him loose with the cookie cutters. He liked the bear cookie cutter most of all, so we ended up with a lot of bears. I threw in a few hearts, flowers and bows for good measure.

K definitely helped himself to the scraps while he was cutting. He kept picking up tiny pieces and asking me, "Mama, it's ok if K eat dis?" "Sure, baby."

You can't tell from the photo very well, but he ended up with jelly all over his face.

Once we got the shapes cut out, I let him go to town on both of scraps and the shapes. Turns out he didn't care which he ate - he just wanted his jellies! He told me that he liked the vegetable juice one more than the fruit juice one. I was quite surprised, because the vegetable one wasn't nearly as sweet. Not that either of them were too sweet, given that we didn't add any sweetener. Next time, I think I might add a bit of honey to the vegetable juice. While K liked it, I would have enjoyed my jellies a tad bit sweeter.