The best chocolate chip cookies EVAH!

We all know I love me some chocolate chip cookies. Over the years I have tried & tested all the cookie recipes - brown sugar or white sugar, eggs or no eggs, condensed milk or no condensed milk. 

Countless hours in the kitchen & I have the recipe down to perfection.

Out of the oven they are super fudgey. I recommend taste tasting the cookie dough prior to cooking - roughly every seven balls rolled & placed on the tray for optimal quality control.

The Best Evah Chocolate Chip Cookies

175 grams Unsalted butter, softened

3/4 tin Condensed milk

1 teaspoon Baking powder

1/4 cup Caster sugar

2 cups Plain flour

250 grams (or so...) Chocolate chips (white, milk chocolate or dark - or all three)

Preheat oven at 170 celcius & line two baking trays with baking paper.

Cream the butter & sugar together in a large mixing bowl. With an electric mixer, beat in the condensed milk (feel free to be quite liberal here, often I put in nearly all of the condensed milk. The more the merrier) Beat for two minutes.

Sift in the plain flour & baking powder together, gently stir with a spoon until just combined. Add the chocolate chips & combine.

Place teaspoonful balls on the baking trays 2cm apart. Once all the cookie balls are on the trays gently roll each one between your palms, then flatten slightly.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until lightly golden.

Remove from oven, cool for two minutes.

Eat.

Makes approximately 44 cookies {depending on how much of the dough you ingest for quality control & the size of your cookies}

NaBloPoMo status failed

November saw me committing to posting every day over here at HomM. Over on the right hand side in the blog archives, under November there should be (30) right next to it. I'm only seeing (7). 

Fail.

When I signed up for NaBloPoMo  {National Blog Promotion Month} I thought it would be, well not easy, though maybe not as hard as folding the washing. Folding washing is a tortuous task. As far as I'm concerned it sucks hairy dogs balls. I'd rather clean windows. Hang on, that's not true, especially if you could see the present state of our windows & the height of our clean washing piles. 

I have a better analogy, I figured blogging everyday would be like cooking everyday. While it has to be done, some days you can choose to cook up a three ingredient spaghetti bolognaise (thank you Dolmio jar sauce) other days may find you serving up a roast pork with crackling, golden roast potatoes & crispy edged pumpkin, honey drizzled carrots, peas & beans tossed through melted garlic butter. With sticky date muffins topped with warm caramel sauce to pop that last button on your jeans.

For each day of November I planned to have proper posts where I would ramble about whatever hot topic was going viral, or about our minions as they are a constant source of inspiration & daily exasperation. A full roast dinner affair. Then those 'full bellied posts' would be interspersed with 'photo a day' snippets, or a recipe for muffins & cookies that find their way from the cooling racks to mere crumbs in ten minutes flat. Two minutes if I'm not watching those sneaky little hands. These would have been the 'three ingredient posts'.  

Then life happened & procrastination bit me on the arse, pigs might fly moments of rest found me on the couch instead of at the computer. Plus the kids needed to be fed fifty thousand times a day - not kidding. Doug expected to be able to wear clean clothes & I got sick of stepping on dirt & grit. Our exciting, riveting lives carried on full steam ahead NaBloPoMo or not. 

Unfulfilled plans & fabulous unexecuted ideas are no stranger to me. Failing to deliver on the daily blogging front is not even close to the first time I've planned to do something that never happens. It also will not be the last. The only times I planned to do something & actually followed through, without fail or procrastination, was giving birth to our six little squawkers. Not that there was any choice.

On the fridge there are three To-Do lists - one for the immediate do today/tomorrow, another is the must-get-done-soon cleaning/organising/decluttering list, the last is projects/plans I want to do when I get a spare day or two. You know, sometime before the year 2024. Midnight is also a popular time for inspiration to hit. I'll lie there thinking of everything I want to get done the next morning, freeing me up for the rest of the day - all in between school drop offs & picks ups, cutting crusts of sandwiches for three year olds, slicing fruit into baby friendly fingers, stepping on toys, picking up toys, putting away toys, loading the washing machine, turning on the dryer, mopping little boy urine up off the toilet floor, de-fusing toddler tantrums...where was I? Oh that's right, mentally composing a get-your-shit-together-in-the-morning list at midnight. Then 7am rolls around, & I roll over in bed wishing the kids didn't have to go to school so I didn't have to get up. That midnight inspiration flies out the window at the hands of 9am's procrastination. 

It seems when I decide to commit to something habits from my high school days suddenly plague me, many a night before an essay was due would find me furiously scribbling away trying to make hasty indecipherable notes transform into a 1000 word essay. If there is a deadline sudden onset of last minute-itis & procrastination fever would always strike...oh look a diary filled with poems & frivolous, fleeting declarations of love from 1998, let's waste five hours pouring over every page. 

As for unexecuted ideas, well there is an outfit of a creamy beige dress with purple tights that has never been worn. Though perhaps that is for the better. In store it seemed amuhzing however after getting home it seemed my enthusiasm had been left behind on the change room floor. Unless you count that in store try on, it has never been worn. I blame that purchase on those crazy post natal hormones & the fact my fashion choices were no longer dictated by the beach ball impersonating abdomen I had been sporting two months earlier. 

The list of fruitless intentions is long - 
- Packets of hair rollers used once in an unsuccessful attempt to create voluptuous waves.
- Untouched circular knitting needles & balls of wool to make beanies. Along with several patterns bookmarked or Pinterested. Because it seems easier to relearn how to knit a beanie on circular needles than to quickly crochet another one. Totally makes sense.
- While we're on the topic of Pinterest, my crafty/foodie/kids activities/decorating inspiration folders are bursting with tutorials & recipes I whole heartedly intend to use one day in the near future. Just like the other millions of time poor, inspiration rich Pinterest followers.
- Bottles of japanese rice wine, boxes of pastry mix, packets of lentils & split peas going dusty & out of date in the pantry from a recipe never cooked.   
- Old glassless photo frames sitting behind a cabinet, waiting for the day I wipe them down, paint them pretty & hang them up in an abstract yet totally pulled together look. {That I can never seem to quite pull together on the wall the way I saw in my mind or in someone else's house.}
- A $140 hair curling device I purchased after reading raving reviews, I have only used twice. Because when it comes down to sleep or pretty hair the sleep will win. Every. Single. Time.
     
Seriously I could go on. We're all the same though. There are so many 'things' we want to do - house projects to start or complete, recipes to try, places to see one day both near & far, Christmas shopping to do, friends to catch up with before another year is celebrated out with the new one cheered in. 

I'm not sorry I couldn't keep up with everyone else participating in thirty days of blogging, one month soon I'll commit again with the hopes of being able to stick to it. Maybe I'll be successful next time & you'll get the roast dinner posts along with the simpler posts of photos & food in between. 

Oh, & if the mention of those delicious sticky date muffins had your stomach growling & your taste buds craving that caramel gooey goodness, I promise I'll put the recipe up this week. Pinky promise.

 Then again life may happen.

Post script from Doug, when informed of my intentions to blog every day during November "if you planned to blog everyday we would have all starved to death & I would have been wearing the same undies for ten days straight. I'm glad you didn't."

Well, I didn't think it would have been that bad. Ben knows how to make toast & macaroni.

fourteen day do over

Our last school holidays kinda sucked. Back then, when we were all stuck inside the house with no fresh air or fresh company, I blogged that the next school holidays would be here soon enough, when the sun would be shining, no one will be sick & we could make the most of getting our feet in the grass & the sun on our faces.

It has been ten weeks since that statement, & you know what that means - the next round of school holidays are upon us. Yay. No, seriously, that is a very enthusiastic "Yay" - complete with happy smiles & invisible pom poms.

I've written lists of everything I want to squeeze in during the next fourteen days. Friends to catch up with (visits that are long overdue), beaches to visit, forests to explore, bike rides to go on, trips to our local oval to kick around the soccer ball - because five onto one is completely fair & ridiculously fun. We have recipes to follow, board games to play, movie days (or afternoons) where we get to stuff our faces with popcorn. Museums to revisit, city gardens to explore, playgrounds to climb, picnics to eat, friends to sleep over & water balloon fights to have.

And you're coming along with us.

Well not really, I don't have enough room in my car to take you all. But you can come along through my camera.  I have my photographer hat at the ready, my bucket is filled with motivation & inspiration, my shutter button happy fingers ready for capturing snapshots & memories. I'll be sharing them here, a visual narration of our ventures. 

Hold onto your hats, we're going to be busy.  

Cookbook junkie I may be, Foodie I am not.

I have a confession.

I am enamored with cookbooks & the anticipation of cooking. I would love to say I am a Foodie, passionate about passion fruit, organic quinoa, farmer fresh vegetables, grass fed beef & free range chickens. Loading photo after photo on social media sites of home cooked meals made from scratch (not a jar or sachet in sight. Boasting hand made passatta & home ground almond meal) that would leave Maggie Beer in awe. But that would not be true or accurate. I love the thought of lavishly presenting our family with a feast of dishes every evening, reminiscent of any rustic Jamie Oliver three course spread. I even have three Jamie Oliver cookbooks in my collection of paperback heaven to help me fulfill this dream. But my lofty ideals fall short more often that not. I can cook, I can cook well. I just can't reach the state of perfection & full-bellied nirvana I fantasise of. While Foodie I am not, family chef I am.

The only prerequisite any cookbook that fills my shelves must meet is the recipes cannot exceed more than half a dozen steps & all ingredients can be sourced at any major grocery store. I don't have time to spend mincing prawns, combining with spices (that can only be found in a small specialized delicatessen that does not bode well for a time restrained mum with at least three little minions in tow who would love nothing more than to touch everything in the lovingly presented displays & shelves filled with exotic food stuffs.) Then spooning the delectable but fiddly prawn mix onto wanton wrappers, before they dry out & stick to my fingers making wrapping them up a task in advanced origami. Then to steam, no more than two at a time, in a bamboo steamer. Not to forget there is still two side dishes to slave through yet. At this stage in our lives we need not so much five star gourmet, but five step gourmet. 'Good food fast', 'Midweek Mains', 'Fast, fresh, simple', '30 minute meals' are just some of the tittles that match our current culinary conditions.

Cookbooks are the only books I still buy in non-digital form. It's well known that I am an avid reader, staying up until the late hours reading e-book after fictional e-book. But when it comes to recipes & food inspiration it must be on a glossy page, not a touch screen. Plus, trying to wake up the tablet touch screen with food covered hands is always an inconvenience. It's so much easier to glance at an oil splattered, flour doused, well loved cookbook. 

Every week on a Monday night I sit down with a small hoard of cookbooks & magazines to plan our dinners for the week. Don't get too carried away, I only pick two or three meals from the taste bud taunting pages, the remaining four dinners are assigned from frequent rotation meals I can cook with my eyes closed (or on the minions) & my arms occupied with a six month old baby. Lasagne's, Stir-fry's, Roasts, Pasta dishes, Meat & Veg.

With the meals decided, the shopping list written out, & the shopping ordered, my motivation & inspiration levels are high, amped up from perusing pages of delicious, mouth watering dishes. Then the lead up to dinner time arrives, coinciding with the disappearance of my motivation & time. Instead of the dukkah crusted chicken breast served on a bed of wilted greens & char-grilled vegetables I was dreaming of the earlier, plates are served up with grilled chicken breast sans dukkah. The vegetables are not so much char grilled, but steamed. & the wilted greens, they are wilted...by the end of the week at the back of the fridge, unless I remember they are there & throw them in a stir fry.

Serving up our meals on rustic wooden chopping boards or large funky hand painted platters goes out the window (the idea, not the food). Serving up from gorgeous fancy tableware only results in mine & Doug's food going cold as we spend ten minutes dishing up for the minions. Requests for more of this, less of that & none of those coming from every chair. Or if we let them serve their own dinner they are more successful in turning the table into a scene not unlike a Pro Heart inspired commercial, with less food on their plates & more food on the table. If I needed any more reasons that center piece dishes served up in the middle of our table is just not a good idea right now, the fact that every meal see's our dishwasher loaded to capacity is just another strike against banquet style platters. The less I have to wash by hand the better. So for now, while the kids are young, the serving platters remain in the cupboards & dinner is dished straight from stove top to plate to table. Fast. Simple. 

Don't get me wrong, I love cooking, I enjoy baking. There is a huge sense of satisfaction obtained from the kids claiming "These are the best cookies ever Mum!" or the feeling of fulfillment when every morsel is devoured. But at the moment, often it feels like more of a chore, lacking the sense of comfort & joy I used to get. At the end of the day with the clock ticking down, I just want to get in the kitchen, get dinner cooked & serve a meal that is nutritious, tasty & pleasant to seven individual taste buds. This goes for snacks too. Every week I plan to bake cookies & muffins, but every morning sees that planned baking time eaten up with something else that is not baking, & often not important. I've been waiting for the motivation to come back, but it needs a little nudge along.

In the event of procrastination, take action. Tomorrow, I bake! 

Life with six

For a while I've been playing around with a post detailing what it's like having a large family, beyond having at least double the little bodies to tuck into bed at night. Really, whether you have two children or six children we all have the same daily tortures - tantrums & food battles. Mother guilt & toilet training. Identity crisis & nap time warfare. Rescuing octonaut figurines from the toilet & saving books from turning into shreds. Maintaining a facade of alertness & lucidity in the face of three hours broken sleep. Juggling one on one time between each child, date nights with our other halves & finding conversation that doesn't solely revolve around the little people.

So what is different now compared to when we just had Ben & Rianan? What does (our) life entail with six children?

The obvious one is our food budget. Over the years as we've doubled the size of our family so has our grocery bill. The only thing that's remained constant is the packets of nappies in every over full & precariously stacked trolley I take through the check out. If I knew then what I know now I would have bought shares in Huggies back in 2004. Or used MCN's - aka cloth nappies. I have a dozen excuses why we have used a disposable nappy for every three hourly nappy change over the last 85,440 hours...or nine & a half years. MCN's really only became more user friendly around the time Jack was born, & back then we had figured he would be our last baby (because 'everyone' stops at two or three children we thought there must be a universal reason why & that it would also apply to us. Approaching Jack's first birthday we knew that we definitely wanted another child & realised there was no reason not to add to our minion count.) Back to the topic at hand though. Figuring Jack would be our last there wasn't much point in selling my left kidney to fund an MCN stash for just one child. Then Blake came along. At this point I seriously considered abandoning the nappy aisle at Coles & going the environmentally friendly way. But with four children aged four years & under time was a little scant & our little washing machine was already spinning at a 1000rpm 16 hours a day. So for my sanity & our poor washing machines last legs (that managed to hold on for a further 18 months. We've never had a more faithful washer, 8 years & 5 children later she finally gave up. Bless her 5kg white cotton socks) So lack of time & a surplus of washing dictated we continue our regular walks down aisle eleven. 

Clearly my attempts at appearing alert & lucid are falling a little short today, I've gone from talking about food budgets to justifying (to myself more than anyone, even after all these years) why we have used a hoard of disposable nappies instead of doing our bit to neutralize our carbon footprint & go the alternative way. 

Back to food. Our quota of bread & milk has reached ten loaves of bread & often eighteen litres of milk a week. Forget the 275gm boxes of cereal, which barely stretches between five bowls on a good morning. I reach for the 800gm suckers - half a dozen of them at a minimum. We've dedicated an entire pantry shelf just to house our weekly breakfast cereal requirements & even then I have to employ my tetris skills to get them all on the same shelf. You will never find a single box of cracker & cheddar dip LeSnacks in our house - you'll find several. Even then they rarely see the school week out. Our weekly fruit quota is equal to the combined weight of our six minions. By now you've probably gathered that we buy double or triple of everything. Extend that line of thinking a little further & we come to cooking. Dinnertime is not unlike a catering event. A 30cm fry pan & two 4lt saucepans are barely adequate when cooking a basic meal in our house. At this stage we can manage, but give it a few more years & I will be sourcing catering sized cooking equipment to try & keep up with the nutritional needs of several growing pre-teen bodies. I don't know what we're going to do yet when they are teenagers, devouring & digesting more food than a herd of elephants.

Bath & shower time is reminiscent to running a gauntlet on a Japanese game show. Dodge the sweaty, putrid socks discarded haphazardly around the bathroom, narrowly avoiding the dirty & stinky undies as they are thrown in the air with gleeful abandon, while launching forward to catch the two year old as they attempt to bomb dive into the bathtub. Only to be foiled by the tube of toothpaste on the floor & end arse up in soggy towels. This is only round one, there's still more bodies to reach a state of cleanliness yet. Then the real fun begins, cleaning up the bathroom & revealing the floor tiles once again beneath all the water logged clothes, soaked towels & soap bubbles.

The amount of washing our crazy tribe creates these days is more than enough to keep me struggling to maintain a hold on the cotton-poly blends that procreate by the hour. Not unlike us - so we've been told. Our washing machine works harder than I do, often churning through four loads on a good day, or ten loads on a bad day. The amount of dishes we go through isn't much better either. I thank my lucky stars for our dishwasher everyday - because it wasn't all that long ago I was still doing them all by hand. The dishwasher job I had in my early teenage years at our local popular restaurant gave me a valuable skill set that I never dreamed I would be needing again once my dish-lackey days were over. Back then I also never imagined I would be a Mother to six.

Between our minions they have enough shoes to rival a Betts & Betts shoe store. A couple of those shoes may be a little lonesome, with their other half swallowed up somewhere. Probably where all our socks & teaspoons have ventured off to. There's often little point of packing away clothes that have been outgrown, instead they simply get shipped from one wardrobe to the next. If I can't find a specific shirt of Blake's in his drawers inevitably it will be found in Will's - sometimes even I can't keep up with what item belongs to who. I think it's only a matter of time before we're entertaining thoughts of a communal wardrobe for the boys. Maybe not, that's a little to extreme larger family style for my liking.

Always a hot topic when it comes to families greater than five, cars. Clearly the average family sedan is too small. Heck, even the people mover we drive at the moment is still too small. My automobile dreams are not filled with Dodge's & Jeep's, but mini buses that don't look like a childcare or community bus. Given that's the next step up for us after the people mover category to have any spare seats available.

Twelve seats, ten child restraint anchor points, tri zone air conditioning & enough boot space to rival any wagon, plus all the bells & whistles included in any luxury vehicle, on top of tinted windows & any paint job that isn't white. Oh, & doesn't come with a Mercedes Benz price tag. Surely I'm not asking for much.

Family movie nights with bodies strewn haphazardly around the lounge room, with piles of pillows, blankets, teddies & little people taking every available space. Weekend family soccer or cricket games with enough people to make teams bigger than two on two. Knock knock jokes at tea time coming from all sides of the dinner table - some making sense & others just adorable as they make no sense at all, but have us all giggling regardless. Every Mothers Day & Fathers Day see's our bedside tables covered in drawings of round bodied, stick legged families, love hearts & smiley faces & homemade card upon homemade card filled with misspelt words, back to front letters & being their favorite Mummy & Daddy in the whole entire universe.

My heart feels like it has grown bigger than a full term pregnant uterus. Each time both my heart & my belly expanded beyond belief with every tiny body we have bought into this world & each time I never imagined I could love any more than I already did, or fall deeper in love with Doug as I watched him hold his new son or daughter. I figured after three children it would all feel the same, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

We may be busy, whether we're busier than others I honestly couldn't say. Regardless, in no way does it compare to the happiness, pride, love & memories our family is filled with. Every now & again Doug & I will say to each other "Can you imagine if we stopped after Ben & Rianan, or after Jack. Not having Blake, Will & Clay in our family." 

I can't imagine it, I honestly just can't. Impossible. Unfathomable. Unthinkable. Inconceivable to think they may not have been conceived. Life truly would be so different if they weren't here. Which has me thinking, who else are we missing in our family? What will the future look like if we call our family complete now, or what would it look like with another not yet conceived little soul. Can we imagine our lives without them, even though we don't know 'who' they could be? 

Seeing five toothbrushes lined up on the kids bathroom sink this morning made me a little mushy & indescribably grateful for each & every one of our little minions. Imagining seven toothbrushes all lined up made me a little clucky & has Doug genuinely questioning my sanity. 

Not that this would surprise anyone. The cluckiness that is, not the sanity.