Do you have a special way of painting Easter eggs?
It has been a long time since we blogged, and we have much to tell the world, especially about the amazing holiday we went on. But first of all, let us wish those who celebrate it a (belated) Happy Easter. In our family, we have one Easter tradition that goes back at least six generations, and that has its roots in Eastern Europe; and that's the painting of Easter eggs. It is called "Pysanky", or "drop-pull method". You mark the egg with hot wax, before dying it batik-style. Take the egg out once the colour you want has been achieved, then paint more wax on, trapping that colour. Dye again, then repeat if you want. At the end, you carefully scrape off the wax and use a tiny amount of oil or butter to give the eggs a nice shine. We paint our eggs raw, so that if we like any, you can blow them out and hang them on an Easter display. The process is very hit-and-miss - this year, some years, the eggs don't accept the colour well, others, you scrape a lot off when you scrape the wax off. But each year, there are one or two worth blowing out. Below is our haul from this year, painted by all the family. Toby painted his first egg when he was two years old, and we paint them every year - this year, a day later than normal, because of our holiday.
Do you have a special way of painting Easter eggs?
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Crista sent us a fabulous recipe for Dirt Cake, and we knew it would only be a matter of time before we tried it. You can read her full recipe on the Kansas page: http://www.writingtotheworld.com/kansas.html We couldn't get all the ingredients, so we kind of muddled stuff together. We used - a bag of oreo cookies - some toffee yoghurt - some cream cheese - some cocoa powder - a bag of gummy worms We mashed up the cookies and kept some pieces back, then we mixed the yoghurt, cream cheese and cocoa powder. Then we mixed it all together, filled it in a clean flower pot and crumbled the remaining oreo cookies on top. We artfully arranged the gummy worms and plopped in the next best thing to a flower we could find. It's super-yummy, but very, very rich - we'd put some crushed tin foil in the bottom, because we figured our flower pot was quite big :). Toby has reached his fourth full ShelterBox, so we thought we would post here to celebrate and to say "Thank you" to everybody who has helped him achieve this goal. We never thought, when he started, that donations would come from nearly all continents, and we are truly grateful to everybody who made this project possible - by becoming a letter-writing partner, helping to find a partner, being part of our "little world" on Facebook, sharing ideas, recipes, etc., and, of course, donating - thank you" http://www.justgiving.com/writingtotheworld We know that people eat different things everywhere all over the world, and often, we can get these things in our shops, too. But yesterday, we had the chance to explore a type of food that we never tasted before (not even Mummy) - bugs! We went to a talk by a food futurologist, who explained lots of things about food, and how what we eat depends on whether it's "fashionable", like clothes! For example, 200 years ago, lobster was seen as food for poor people, and now it's very posh and super-expensive. The food futurologist explained that, because there are more and more people living in the world, we need to change what we eat, because there isn't enough space to have cows and pigs and chickens to feed all carnivore people for ever. So she said we might end up eating insects, like lots of cultures already do. We got to taste salted mealworms, BBQ mealworms, silkworm pupae, weaver ants, bamboo worms, salted grasshoppers and salted crickets. Then, we asked on the Facebook page whether people ate insects, and quite a few people did. We got messages from people who had tried insects in Uganda, the Sahara and Japan. Kung sent us a link to a video about insects in Thailand (see below). Several people told us they are vegetarian, too, and that is probably the best way forward to make sure that we have enough space to feed everybody. Toby says: We bought this book when Nelson Mandela died, but it took us a while to read it. I didn't like how people weren't all treated the same, because that isn't right. Naledi and Tiro were very brave to go travelling all by themselves. Mummy says: We'll probably re-read this one in a couple of years, there are so many undercurrents in this book that we'll keep returning to it many times, I'm sure! Toby says: There was a girl called Naima, she liked painting. Her Daddy worked as a rickshaw driver, and her family were very poor. Naima wanted to drive his rickshaw to help out, but she wasn't allowed, because she was a girl. But she took it out for a drive anyway and she crashed it. The rickshaw needed repairing, and the repairing person was a lady! And Naima got to paint rickshaws and work for the lady! I liked the book because Naima got to paint rickshaws and help her family. Mummy says: When Toby writes to other countries, it is often difficult to understand how some children might live there. Boys and girls might not get the same chances in life everywhere, and this was one example where we could look at this in an age-appropriate book. Naima paints alpanas, and looking at these was also a lovely introduction to art and culture. We make a variation of these every winter, they are essentially meringues "with bits in". You'll need: 3 egg whites 250g caster sugar 150g flaked almonds 50g small dark chocolate drops Pre-heat the oven to 140 degree celsius. Whisk the egg white until stiff, adding the sugar. Once stiff, add almonds and chocolate drops, stirring by hand with a large spoon. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto greased paper and bake for about 25 minutes - if they are not quite done by then, just turn the oven off but leave the meringues in, to dry through a bit more. You can also add cinnamon, ground or chopped hazelnuts...we've done a lot of variations over the years. Enjoy :) Toby says: James' parents got eaten by a rhino, and he had to live with his not very nice aunts. He went into a peach and there were insects in the peach, they were living in the stone. They had lots of adventures, and they were really cool. They ended up in New York. I liked that the book was really adventurous. Mummy says: Toby got a whole pack of Roald Dahl books for his birthday, and this was the first one we read together. It was such fun - we were scared of the Cloudmen, talked about how many seagulls it would take to lift a house, and decided that it would be very cool to live in a peach stone house in Central Park, and have giant ladybirds and centipedes as friends. Toby says: Wombat lives in Australia. He lives underground in a deep burrow. He loses his Mummy, and he meets some animals and a little boy. They make fun of him because he only digs and thinks. Then, there was a forest fire, and he dug and dug and dug. All the animals and people he saw, they all went into his little tunnel, and they were saved. Then he told all the animals that he had lost his Mummy, and they all split up and found her. Mummy says: This was our first reading around the world book that Toby read to me (with the others, he'd read the odd page, but not the whole book). The text is just repetitive enough to not be daunting, and you meet lots of creatures from Australia - kookaburra, wallaby, koala, and emu, for example. The book was a lot bigger than we expected, it's a proper big picture book, and a lovely addition to Toby's book shelf. Tatjana told us about these very yummy sweets - here is what she said: Here's one of my favorites: Melt 125 gr butter, 100gr powdered sugar and 200 gr dark chocolate. Take candy paper cups, put a cherry in each (we use cherries from '' slatko'' , a traditional thin fruit preserve but you can just boil cherries and sugar until it gets the consistency of syrup) and fill in with melted chocolate. Refrigerate. As luck would have it, we were hoarding a couple of jars of sour cherry compote, which is not easy to get hold of in the UK, and which sounds like it's very close to the Serbian "slatko" Tatjana mentions. Looking at Google images, there are lots of ways to decorate these, we went for the messy "let's just plop them in the paper cups" approach. |
AuthorThis blog is mainly a way to keep track of our recipes - for day to day updates, please check out Toby's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/writingtotheworld Archives
May 2018
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