Beetroot Dip

This was in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago. The original recipe by Lucas Hollweg called for fresh beetroots you then roasted in the oven, but since I had a pack of pre-prepared beetroot that needed to be used I thought I'd give it a go!

Beetroot Dip (my version)

Ingredients
300g beetroots
6 cloves of garlic, in their skins
Extra virgin olive oil
Fresh thyme
Black pepper
200g tub of spreadable goat's cheese

Instructions
1. Roast the garlic in the oven until soft.

2. Finely chop the beetroots and add to a food processor with the garlic flesh, 4 tablespoons of olive oil and the thyme.

3. Season well and blitz till smooth. Add the goat's cheese and blitz again. Then serve!

It comes out a glorious pink that my photos don't really do justice! I served it with rice tortilla chips to dip. It complimented my flowers beautifully ;-)







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Thank you gifts for teachers

With limited funds it always feels a challenge to come up with gifts for the children's teachers that truly express our appreciation for the amazing job they do.

I have been doing a fair amount of experimentation making chocolates lately, so decided to make some homemade chocolates part of the gift. I came up with a very rich dark chocolate and chilli skull-shaped one....

....and a very vanillary white chocolate fish.




I added to these a little swirly round milk chocolate, and a flower-shaped raw chocolate.




I couldn't figure out what to present them in, until I saw these cute chalkboard pots on Classic Campbell (http://classiccampbell.blogspot.com/2010/06/chalkboard-pots.html) and knew I had found the perfect thing! We even already had the pots and the spray paint! The kids helped me spray them up over the course of a few days. Papaya chose pink insides (of course!) for her teachers, and Povey chose red for his.









Then we filled them with tissue paper and the chocolates in ribbon tied bags, and the children wrote on them.












It was a bit precarious getting them into school (I was terrified of dropping and smashing them!) but the teachers seemed happy with them :-)

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