breakfast

oh dear.... i have been sprung so to speak. said vegan friend now has internet at home and is back to reading this blog. i'm feeling less like sharing my recipes!! ha......

i did make the zucchini brownie the other day and did not get round to taking a shot of it. you could also go here for the recipe. this is one recipe i would say not to scrimp on the sugar. it needs it to balance out the zucchini in my opinion. i don't do the frosting but just sprinkle with icing sugar.

as i write, evie is feverish and suffering from herpangina, just another form of hand foot and mouth i guess, but just in the mouth. it's very painful for her and i think it's going to be a long week, or even more if it passes to tilly. my poor sweet babes. we visited one play area last week, just one. evie was at home the rest of the time. it only takes one. i'm too tired to proofread this or even write with capital letters..... she needs a lot of holding and loving at the moment.

all she has eaten is some ice, some ice water, and some congee. my milk is too warm for her sensitive throat at the moment (the doctor showed me the ulcers on her throat and they are nasty....) she won't cuddle to feed and i've had to express and chill the milk. even that she isn't real keen on. she had a sizeable amount of the cold congee. so why title this breakfast. well, since we are talking about congee, let me show you what i whip up for my dearly beloved most mornings before he goes off to work. he's doing a good job of working himself to a slow death during this busy summer period so breakfast is our number one, most important time of the day. and i busy myself to make sure we sit as a family and eat together. and here is what he has and it just happens to be vegan. though some days he has a fried egg with it.

Congee peeps....

This is the description Steve gives me of his congee, 'It warms my belly up'. One rice cup of rice gets cooked in 8 rice cups of water. It turns into ricey soup, or soupy rice. This looks like a lot of mafan, but really it's dead simple. The condiments come from the store. There is pickled cucumber, not pickles by the way, different. The little long cucumbers and cut into little knobs. Then there is pickled bamboo in chili sauce. Then there is fermented tofu in chili sauce, so that's basically rotten tofu. To the side I've cut a mango, and above that is fresh bamboo root that I steamed and cut up for him. That gets accompanied with soy sauce and freshly cut birds eye chili. The hot kind. Kind of a running chili theme. Maybe that's why it warms his belly up! cutting up the mango and cooking and cutting up the bamboo is probably as difficult as this gets. the bamboo just needs to be steamed in a bamboo steamer. the rice does its own thing in the rice cooker. the congee gets thick if it stands long enough. it's amazing what one little cup of rice can produce. anyway, as steve likes his congee plain (just the condiments get funky) then it's the perfect thing to give a feverish little bub who won't take anything else. it gets thick and chunky and cold in the fridge and she took quite a bit today. poor sweet baby.