Preparing for the unexpected

I stole the idea from a great post on the Forum Thermomix:

What is your morning tea for unexpected guests?Muffins. I have a small recipe book for muffins and my favourite is the spiced mandarin ones. I rarely have tinned mandarins though, so I use whatever fruit I have around.

Spiced fruit muffins
250g wholemeal plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1T garam masala
1/2tsp ground nutmeg
1stp ground cinnamon
1tsp cardamom
1/2tsp ground ginger
3 eggs
1/2C raw sugar
1/2C yoghurt, milk, light vegetable oil
1C roughly chopped drained fruit

Preheat the oven to 190C. Prepare a 12- muffin tray by either lightly greasing it, or lining it with cute gorgeous cupcake liners. Put the eggs, sugar, spices and yoghurt/milk/oil (use what you have to hand - sour cream also works well!) into the Thermomix bowl and mix at speed 5 for 5 seconds. Add the flour and baking powder, and pulse 3 times at Turbo, to just incorporate. Add the fruit, lock the lid and use the kneading function, on reverse for 5 seconds. Spoon into the patty cases and bake for 25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Adapted from The Pocket Muffin Book by Syd Pemberton. 

What is your quick "slap-up" thermomix tea for your family?Risotto! So easy to make, I have things for it to hand all the time - at least vegetables, vegetable stock, cheese, onion, garlic. Maybe some meat or fish to spice it up.

What do you keep frozen in the freezer for busy times?
Pastry. It's a good thing to keep on hand because it's a pain to make from scratch when I'm also making a filling. But to make a meal all I really need is leftovers and some pastry. 

Wow long time no chat

Somehow I've misplaced the past month. I'm not sure where? But I can post to say that I am using Thelma every day. I'll post about some adventures we had recently with each other, 9 other women, 14 children, 3 other Thermomixes and a lot of butterbeans.

For now, let me assure you that I've done what I thought would happen, to a certain extent. I have fallen into the trap of doing the same things over and over again.

Oatmeal.
Risotto.
Curry.
Vegetable stock to use up veges.
To make more risotto.
Or ragout.
Chai.
LOTS of chai.

And so on. I've also made apricot nectar, to make chicken apricot risotto, and cherry jam (fail - more of a sauce but that's ok!) and ginger beer and orange cordial and a few other things but for the most part, I've used it for the same things over and over again.

So with a month passing between posting, I thought I'd recommit to posting more recipes and less navel gazing instead!