candles, cooking and kayla

my eleven year old niece, kayla, came to stay with us for the weekend so we got up to a little candle lighting and cooking action.  i nearly burned the house down on friday and we are still recovering from the smell of smoke, this is why we needed candles to help with the smell (kayla seems to have a candle lighting obsession so she was in charge of that).   

we came up with the idea that dinner would have a taste of a few different cultures, so we had corn chips with sour cream & sweet chilli as an appetizer.  then we made our very own sushi rolls as the entre.  this is a bit of a process but was fun and interactive.  first we had to make the sushi rice and cut up all the things we wanted to go in the sushi.  we had avacado, cucumber, chicken, carrot and capsicum.  then we all sat down and went to work.  kayla decided she would put wasabi in her sushi roll, so she did not have to put it on afterwards, the funny part was she put a little too much...needless to say her mouth was very hot!  she did a good job eating it anyway.

the main was a bit of australian culture a new recipe from Bill Granger, chicken and leek pies.  first you lightly toss the chicken in a bit or cayenne pepper, white pepper and flour.  then you fry it in oil until enclosed on both sides.  then remove the chicken from the pan and add leeks and garlic, sautee that for a few minuted add some white wine, chicken broth and cream.  next comes the peas and then put the chicken back in, i also added some extra flour to thicken the sauce.  we dumped it all into little ramekins and put a pastry cover on top, making sure to brush it with egg yolk so it would look nice and shiny.  they were delicious and i will definitely make these again!

by the time dessert came around i was losing at our epic game of monopoly and we were also all pretty full!  so although we had originally had lots of good ideas, we ended up having good old vanilla icecream with a homemade chocolate mint sauce.  nice and refreshing....the sad part was i went bankrupt just after i served it :(  it looks like kayla is going to win this time around, she is slowly destroying pete! 

what a lovely weekend it has been....just contemplating if we should make some buttermilk scones for breakfast???