Meatless Monday

Today's menu was simple. Tomato soup with rice and crackers and goat's cheese. Followed by snacking on dips and cut up vegies while doing some art. Followed by strawberries and cream (whipped with some vanilla essence and a little brown sugar).

Tomato soup
1. Prepare full tray of halved tomatoes, drizzle with olive oil and salt and pepper.
2. Roast for 45mins at 180 degrees celsius.
3. While tomatoes are roasting, grate two carrots.
4. Pick leaves of basil stalk. Finely chop basil stalk.
5. Lightly saute carrot and basil stalk in olive oil.
6. Remove tomatoes from oven. Preferably let cool slightly and remove tomato skin.
7. Add to pot with carrot and basil stalk, add stock and bring to boil.
8. Add tomato puree (or called passata), salt and pepper and sprinkle of brown sugar.
9. Simmer for 30-40 mins
10. Add handful of white rice and simmer till rice is nice and soft.
11. Garnish with basil leaves and enjoy.

We ate ours with goats cheese and crackers. While my head was turned, Zahara decided to moisturise her hands with the goats cheese. Awesome.

Dinner was followed by more party preparation. This time, painting some cut out pigs. These will be strung on fishing wire and hung up to decorate Zahara's little farm party. The two older girls also continued making paper chains. Pink for Layla, and multi coloured for Zahara.

We make as many of the decorations as we can. This gives the girls a sense of purpose leading up to the party and hopefully a feeling of pride when we put all our decorations up the night before the party.

In this way, preparing for birthday celebrations also becomes a shared family project and hopefully, encourage everyone to share the excitement and anticipation of a birthday.