Sunday Night Chilled Out Dinner - Homemade Pizza

I find making pizza a really enjoyable process – from the dough to the toppings to the eating! I can’t substitute the base for anything other than pizza dough from scratch – there’s just simply nothing better. The only problem I sometimes face is not starting early enough in the day – I really need to start at 4pm to be ready to eat at 6pm (our target, given the kids need to be in bed by 8pm latest).

Today I used this recipe:
1 teaspoon (or 7g sachet) of yeast
¼ teaspoon caster sugar
¾ cup of luke warm water
1 ½ cups of plain flour
1 teaspoon salt

I start by activating the yeast. This is done by mixing the yeast, sugar and water in a small container or cup and letting it sit for 5 – 10 minutes until it starts bubbling. You can see mine getting frothy here:

Then I mix the salt and flour and make a well in the centre. I pour the yeast mixture into the well and mix it until it forms a soft dough. I continue to knead the dough in the mixing bowl, before turning it out onto a floured surface and knead for about another 10 minutes or until the dough is smooth and elastic (so that it contracts back into place when a section of dough is pulled).
And this is the part that takes time. I then need to leave the dough to proof for 30 – 45 minutes. I do this by putting the dough back into the mixing bowl, which I’ve coated with a little oil. I cover the bowl with either glad wrap or a tea towel and leave it in a warm and draught free place.
After about 45 minutes when it has doubled in size I knock the dough back (punch it in the middle). Actually I rarely do this as for some reason my 7 year old has always enjoyed doing it and always comes in to help at the right time. So today, true to form it was my daughter that punched the dough and then we divided it into two balls to roll out into bases.
I preheated the oven to 220 degrees C. I was following a recipe today which gave a tip to heat the pizza trays before greasing them with a little oil and placing the rolled out pizza dough on them. This was a great idea, as it means that the bottom of the pizza has more chance of cooking – nothing worse than well-cooked topping on a not-quite-cooked base! 
Moving quickly once the trays were out of the oven, greased and the rolled bases laid on top, I started adding topping. Both daughters were in on this action. One pizza was a bacon, pineapple and cheese pizza on traditional tomato sauce. The other pizza was salami, capsicum, jalapeño, tomato and cheese on taco sauce. And here’s the result (one of the two we made):

Unfortunately the 7 year old still doesn’t like pizza, even these delicious creations. Luckily for the rest of us, there’s more to go around!
If you have a favourite Sunday night meal, I’d love for you to share it. You can write me a post or send an email to livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .

Father's Day - Gifts from the Heart

This Father’s Day, the kids and I decided that we wanted to create some home-made gifts for the three main men in our lives – Daddy, Poppie and Grandad.  Through school, kindy and daycare they had already been busy making cards and small gifts for the Dads over the last couple of weeks and I thought we could complement these with some more home-made presents.  The internet is a wonderful source of inspiration and we literally found a million ideas to choose from.

We decided that as it’s now Spring and we’re coming into barbecue season, a barbecue bucket would make an ideal gift for Dad and Poppie.  So, we headed off to our local hardware store to gather the items to go into our BBQ buckets.  We found some excellent stainless steel buckets and for Dad we put in BBQ cleaning products, a scraper and scrubber, canola spray oil, and oil catching sand.  For Poppie, who loves seafood, we put in a BBQ grill cage for fish, some wood chips to add some smoky flavour to the fish, and some cleaning products. 

Here’s the final product!

 

For Grandad – who lives on the other side of the country – we made up a relax pack of magazines ….. Science, Astronomy and Gardening ….. and included some tea, coffee, chocolate, health bars and licorice.  We included a beautiful painting of a rainbow created by the 4-year old and packaged them all up in a box.  The box was promptly mailed to ensure it got to Grandad on time.

As an extra gift for Dad, we put together a 6-pack of snacks.  We took 6 empty beer bottles, washed and dried them and used the templates and printed pages from Lil’ Luna’s blog page (http://lilluna.com/fathers-day-super-dad-pop-box-set/) to add decorative touches to the bottles, bottle tops and cardboard carrier.  The result was terrific and super easy for the kids to get involved in and do.  It ended up looking fantastic:

 

Our bottles were filled with M&M’s , cashew nuts, chocolate coated nuts, Maltesers, jelly lollies and a fruit-and-nut mix. 

The Dads were all so pleased with their gifts and the kids and I found it so very satisfying to have put extra time, energy, effort and love into making the gifts rather than just choosing something off the shelf.

For more Father's Day gift ideas - or birthday ideas for the fellas in your life, here are some wonderful ideas at Melissa Goodwin's Frugal and Thriving blog. 

If you’d like to share your home-made Father’s Day gifts, please send me a post or email me at livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .  I’d love to hear about it!

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind

A healthy mind and healthy body are profoundly linked.  It’s a well-known fact that daily physical activity is the single most important tonic for staving off the negative impacts of a busy, modern life, stretched to the max with activity.  Just 20 minutes most days of physical activity can make a huge difference in your state of well-being.

While I do believe this, I’ve unfortunately been neglecting my physical health over the last few months.  Time has just seemed to get away from me, my days filled with launching into a new job, running after two kids at primary school and helping my husband maintain our home.  Oh, let’s be honest – these are just excuses!  Now it’s time for me to put some focus into my physical health and reap the benefits.

 

Just do it! Exercise - Exercise is known to help you live a longer and healthier life. The body needs to stay in action and movement. Move it, or lose it!

And what perfect time to start, with Spring upon us here in Perth.  Getting outside and soaking up the warmth of the sun and enjoying the lengthening daylight hours with brisk ½ hour walks is exactly what I need.  I’ve never been much of a long distance runner, but maybe it’s time to begin?  In his article 7 Habits for A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body, Christopher Bergland says that humans are built to run.  “… the human body evolved to run great distances hunting prey and gathering food.  The ability to spring through the air using our gluteus maximum muscles is what sets us apart from primate cousins.” 

He goes on to share his 7 habits for a healthy mind in a healthy body, which are:

1.       Daily Physicality: Exercise for at least 20 minutes most days of the week.

2.       Intellectual Curiosity: Spend some time in focused thought, exploring new ideas every day.

3. Foster Creativity: Challenge your mind to connect unrelated ideas in new and useful ways.  
4. Human Unity: Create and maintain close-knit human bonds and a social support network.  
5. Spiritual Connectedness: Identify a Source of inspiration that is bigger than you.
6. Energy Balance: Balance Calories in/Calories out, and reduce your carbon footprint.
7. Voluntary Simplicity: Embrace the liberty that comes with wanting and needing less.

I’ve discovered the perfect motivation for my new-found focus on my physical health – it’s a programme called Steptember, and it promotes walking or running 10,000 steps a day to raise money for the Cerebral Palsy Alliance.  The event challenges people to take 10,000 steps a day for 28 days straight in the month of September.  I’ve signed up a team of four including my husband and our friendly neighbours and now have my pedometer ready to go!  If you want to set up a team and join the competition go to www.steptember.com.au to register.

As a warm up for the event, today I went on a 7km walk with the family and my visiting brother and I feel fantastic for it!  I’m excited to imagine how great I’ll feel by the end of September! 

If you have a regular physical activity regime that you’d like to share, please send me a post or email me at livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .  I’d love to hear about it!

Chicken Salad Meal

One meal that I just love to make at the end of the weekend, and to set our family up for a good start to the week, is a warm chicken salad.  The salad’s delicious fresh flavours hit the spot for a fabulous dinner and it’s so easy to make – perfect for winding down the weekend.

I am very proud that tonight’s base salad ingredients for the meal are purely from our kitchen garden – a variety of lettuce leaves, Italian and curly parsley and torn basil leaves, all picked fresh from the garden less than an hour before eating them. 

Other ingredients I like to add to make this a really wholesome and hearty meal are tomato, capsicum, cucumber, egg, bacon and of course chicken.  Tonight I’ve also added pumpkin seeds (pepitas), quinoa (cooked for 10 minutes in boiling water with a teaspoon of powdered chicken stock) and a sprinkling of chia seeds.  I’ve topped the lot off with some shaved parmesan cheese – my 4 year old is a cheese fanatic. 

We also have some left over ingredients from a nacho/taco night we had recently which go well with this meal as dressings – guacamole, sour cream and mayonnaise.  Otherwise a dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar or balsamic glaze also works well. 

 

Delicious!

If you have a regular Sunday night meal that you’d like to share, please send me a post or email me at livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .  I’d love to try it!

Overcoming Sleeplessness

I appreciate that I can’t have my best day every day.  There are always going to be some times when things are tough and I feel stressed.  Times of change, issues to deal with at work or home, worrying about the kids, about family issues….. there are a myriad of things that can cause me to feel uneasy and may even keep me up at night.  This year, I reckon I’ve had the least amount of aggregated hours of sleep compared with any other year ….. and that’s even counting the years I had my newborn babies!  I’ve gone through a lot of change, a stressful restructure at work and some new beginnings have meant lots of new ideas buzzing around my head at 2am in the morning!

I really value my sleep, and know that the more sleep I get (I need 8-9 hours) the better I perform.  I heard a radio DJ say the other day that he can get by on 5-6 hours a night, but I really think that is just bravado and the reality is that everyone should be getting between 7-9 hours of sleep a night.  It’s a most frustrating thing to recognise that I need sleep, and really want to sleep but just not be able to.  Usually I don’t have trouble falling asleep, it’s when I wake in the middle of the night that I can’t go back to sleep.  I just can’t seem to still my mind. 

There are a number of things I’ve tried to give myself the best chance of a good night’s sleep:

-          Keep a list of important tasks to remember, so that I don’t keep them in my head.  Ideally these should be in my MS Outlook calendar as meetings or tasks, but a notebook on the bedside table also works well.

-          Don’t drink coffee after 12 noon.

-          Try to relax before bedtime by doing some mediation

-          Turn off my laptop/TV/tablet a good 30 -45 minutes before sleep and instead read a book or the newspaper.  The light and backlight can stimulate brain activity, preventing it from relaxing and preparing for sleep.

-          Eat dinner in the early evening

-          Get some exercise!

This last one I really need to work on.  I’ve found the perfect motivation, too.  I’m going to take part in the Steptember program (www.steptember.com.au) which promotes walking at least 10,000 steps a day, while at the same time raising money for Cerebral Palsy.  I really need the extra motivation, and hope that after 30 days of increased physical activity it will become a habit and part of my daily routine.

I’ve also found some other ideas from the website http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleep_tips.htm which have worked for me in getting back to sleep:

• Deep breathing. Close my eyes, and take deep, slow breaths, making each breath even deeper than the last.
• Progressive muscle relaxation. Starting with my toes, tense all the muscles as tightly as I can, then completely relax. Work my way up from my feet to the top of my head.
• Visualizing a peaceful, restful place. Close my eyes and imagine a place or activity that is calming and peaceful for me. Concentrate on how relaxed this place or activity makes me feel.

I also recognise that I need to let a lot of stuff go.  There’s no need to worry about things – it’s a waste of energy and clogs up my mind with negativity, leaving less room for positive, creative thoughts and solutions.  What gets me by on those days that don’t go so well, where I’ve got a lack of energy and no pep is that if every day was a brilliant day, then I couldn’t recognise a brilliant day!  There will always be an awesome day to follow a tough one.

If you have any tips on how to get a great night’s sleep please share them with me!  Write a post below or send me email to livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .

 

Image by Marin, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Simple Living - how does the garden grow?

Living simply is a journey that I decided to embark on at the start of the year.  For me, it’s a conscience effort to slow down, live more in the moment and get back to the basics of life.  Growing my own vegies was one of the ways I wanted to get more in touch with nature and so I planted a vegie patch in April.  Time to see how the garden grows!

 

We’ve been enjoying many salads and sandwiches from our rather extensive lettuce crop!  The beauty of it is I just pick off as much as I want at the time, and then by the next time I make a salad… it’s grown again.  This mix is just lovely…. Grown from seed it is so inexpensive to grow and barely needs any care.  I’ve probably planted a bit close together, but the baby lettuce leaves are just so sweet and delicious.

 

 

Carrots that my daughter and I planted using newspaper pots haven’t fared so well.  Over winter they have barely grown at all.  Now that we’ve had some warmer weather though, they seem to be have a bit of a growth spurt.  I hope so! 

Unusually, a tomato plant that my daughter potted last year and we transplanted into the vegie patch has thrived.  It’s grown incredibly huge over winter – something I certainly didn’t expect.  It already has a baby green tomato growing, and plenty of promise for more to come with its budding yellow flowers. 

 

We had also planted broccoli seeds, but the seedlings ended up being overgrown by the tomato plant, and they didn’t survive.  I’d like to attempt broccoli again next winter. 

So, a few hits, a few misses.  Lots more to learn about what to grow when and happily I have replaced having to buy lettuce with growing my own.  I’m certainly proud of that!

If you have successfully grown vegies over winter, I love to hear about – please share your tips with me!  Write a post below or send me an email to livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .

Mindfulness - right here, right now

“I want two!  I want two!”  My 4 year old was whinging about not being able to have two slices of the delicious, fresh Tuscany loaf that we buy from the local farmers market every second week.   She had already struggled to finish off her fruit salad and yoghurt, and not being a big eater I was fairly certain one slice would do her.  A second slice would be wasted and we weren’t going to be able to buy another loaf for a fortnight.

“You haven’t even started the first one!”  I objected.  “Eat that first and then if you’re still hungry I’ll cut you another slice.”  “No, I want two, like her!” (big sister), came the retort.

I thought to myself what a perfect opportunity for a lesson in mindfulness … living in the present moment rather than thinking about the future.  So I told her this:  Enjoy this slice of fresh, soft Tuscany loaf.  Feel its texture, soft and crumbly.  Smell the wonderfully homely aroma of the durham wheat.  Look at the creamy colour of the slice, and the perfectly baked warm brown crust.   Smother the slice with a generous amount of butter and then savour the flavour of the bread in your mouth as the butter and bread melt together on your tongue.   Enjoy your slice of bread.

 

She was silent and I knew I’d struck a chord.  She did exactly as I had said, taking an enormous whiff of the bread, then smothering it in butter and eating it all, bite by bite without another word.  She’s not usually a fan of crusts, but this loaf was so delicious that every last crumb was licked off the plate.  She was in the moment!  She finished off her lunch and left the table without asking for another slice. 

Mindfulness is all about being in the moment rather than trying to make sense of the past or planning for the future.  It has been said to improve daily life in the following ways:

1.        Chronic pain.  By being relaxed in the moment rather than worrying about the future, sufferers of chronic pain have been shown to produce less coritsol and more oxytocin which increases ‘relaxation’ chemicals in the brain.  Patients have been able to cope better with the pain.

2.       Anxiety and worry.  Mindfulness teaches people to notice when they’re worrying and to return to the moment by recognising what they can see, hear and feel now. 

3.       Eating issues.  Eating mindfully and appreciating everything from the feel of the cutlery to how you cut the food, the muscles you use to rise the food to your mouth, the texture, smell and savouring the taste of the meal as you chew it slowly can all reduce overeating.

4.       Household chores.  Mindfulness can put you deep in the moment of the chore you are doing, whether that be the dishes, vacuuming, hanging the washing or gardening.  Being appreciative of the objects or appliances you’re using, taking the time to look at your house or garden in detail and to take it all in.

5.       Being stuck in a traffic jam.  Turn a negative into a positive and use the time focus on the feeling of your hands on the steering wheel, the sun on your arms, if you’re alone in the car – the time for yourself, and the music on the radio.

6.       Relationships.  Mindfulness teaches you to recognise negative scripts in your head and gives you a chance to counter them with a more positive frame of mind before they have a chance to play themselves out to your partner.  This helps to improve your relationships

7.       Parenting.  Being a busy working parent it can be easy to dismiss the relentless questions that children have.  Busy routines mean that the day’s structure becomes important and time cannot be wasted.  But using mindfulness can help parents to be really present with their children and tune in to their needs.

According to Wikipedia:  “Mindfulness is gaining a growing popularity as a practice in daily life, apart from Buddhist insight meditation and its application in clinical psychology. Mindfulness may be seen as a mode of being, and can be practiced outside a formal setting.  In 2000, The Inner Kids Program, a mindfulness-based program developed for children, was introduced into public and private school curricula in the greater Los Angeles area.  In the U.S. business world, interest in mindfulness is rising strongly. Many companies are providing training programs in mindfulness. These include Fortune 500 companies (such as Raytheon, Procter & Gamble, Monsanto, General Mills, and Comcast) and others (such as BASF Bioresearch, Bose, New Balance, Unilever, and Nortel Networks).”

Do you use mindfulness in your daily life?  Have you seen the benefits of practicing mindfulness?  I’d love you to share your insights and experiences, so post a comment or send an email to livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .