When FairCape Dairies Send You a Hamper and The Secret to our Cocoa O’Clock…

Recently, Fair Cape Dairies sent us a hamper full of treats to try out and share with our readers… We have blogged about this particular dairy and their green practices before. If you want to know more about green dairy farming practices then take a look at our post about our visit there… Meanwhile, back to the hamper, and what a welcome arrival…

The hamper was packed with treats that we don’t normally buy at all… fruit juice, mini-yogurts and chocolate mousse… it was all very fun and we set out to make the very best use of it… and figure out ways how to give our readers value for the treats that we received.

True confession, there are more than a few children in our family that have only ever had a milkshake, such as these, when they visited the Fair Cape Dairy Farm a while back. Honestly, this end of the dairy aisle in the store is one I avoid, the shelves are filled with products to tempt children, who then feel a need for this genre of drink to go into lunch boxes and so on. As a family we cook from scratch, I am not against the occasional treat by any means, its just that I don’t want my kids to ever think that this is a normal part of a person’s diet and something that needs to go into the weekly shopping cart. That being said, the milkshakes vanished in a flash and were thoroughly enjoyed as the treat they are, while we discussed what to do with everything else…

Chocolate mousse was obviously hidden away immediately for a midnight snack for the parents, as one does!!!

And these delicious yogurts, just a little bit lovelier than your average yogurt, were used in the father person’s lunchbox for the week. Yes, grownups need treats in their lunch boxes too…

The other mini yogurts were used for an instantaneous picnic breakfast and everybody was thrilled about that…

This created a bit of a stir, we don’t normally drink fruit juice, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I would rather my kids ate real fruit and got the goodness of real fruit, rather than a diluted sugary version in a beverage. And secondly if my kids are thirsty I would rather they drank water. I think in our western culture and our rush for quick nutrition, kids are given juice to drink, but our kids are losing out on the advantages of eating delicious fresh fruit, not to mention drinking water. I personally can’t figure out why a sugary drink would be considered a healthy thirst quencher and so my children have inherited my disdain for fruit juice and would choose not to drink it, unless it was for a very special occasion. One of my children always comes home from a friend saying they have the most delicious tea over there… it isn’t tea, its fruit juice and I don’t want to burst their happy enjoyment of it, but it is definitely not the norm in our household and I only ever buy it to use in recipes…

Obviously, frozen fruit pops is the first thing to do with fruit juice, it is a fraction of a glass of juice and a great treat for a snack, my kids love these, they are everything to love.

We used the apple juice to make a delicious spicy wintry tea… we added the apple juice to our morning pot of rooibos tea, along with some cloves and cinnamon and it was delicious…

We added frozen bananas and berries to the grape juice to make a breakfast shake… and everybody loved that…

And the orange juice was used to create an easy chicken casserole for dinner…

We make ricotta cheese at least once or twice a week and add it to baked potatoes, crumble over rice, eat with fresh pasta, on toast and well a million different things. It is so so easy to make and you really can make it with ingredients you have at hand.

All you need to make ricotta cheese is a litre of milk and the juice of a lemon and some muslin cloth. We heat the zest of the lemon and any other herbs we may have picked in the garden, you can add finally chopped garlic, parsley, coriander, thyme or rosemary, really whatever you have and there is no end to experimenting.

Firstly, heat your milk to boiling with all the flavours in the milk, and then leave it to stand off the heat for about half an hour, so that the flavours can be absorbed. You can either leave the little bits of herb and flavourings in your cheese, to add a little texture to it or you can put it through a sieve before continuing. Then return your milk to the heat and gently heat it until it is simmering.

Add the lemon juice from your lemon and stir it through the milk, which will separate into curds and whey. Using a slotted spoon lift your cheek out of the pot and place it in a muslin cloth, in a colander, to drain for a few minutes and then it is ready to feast on.

Cocoa o’clock is a common feature on our instagram feed. folk often ask us how we make our cocoa… so here you go:

A litre of milk, two tablespoons of cocoa and two table spoons of brown sugar, and about two tablespoons of maziena (cornflour).

Use a little of the milk to create a paste with the cornflour, while you heat the milk, sugar and cocoa to boiling point. Then whisk your cornflour into your hot milk and stir it until it thickens and leave it to simmer for a couple of minutes. And you are done… cocoa is ready for cocoa o’clock.

It just so happened that we received this hamper during the month of July, have you heard about the Plastic Free July Campaign, where a number of folk try to live plastic free during the month of July. We did try to reduce our plastic and worked really hard to eliminate our single use plastic. Well it turns out it is almost impossible to eat in our country without plastic. Plastic packaging is the way our food arrives… prepacked, prepackaged and in plastic. I understand plastic is readily available and relatively cheap in the short term. In the long term the amount of plastic we are tossing into the environment is going to cost us a lot more than changing to an alternative packaging right now. That being said, all these products arrived with some sort of plastic packaging… and one of the most collected items in all our beach cleanups, right up there with straws and fishing line, are plastic bottle tops. While the yogurt tubs were immediately reused for crafty projects and as pen storage… we decided to use the plastic bottles to create eco-bricks.

You can read about our eco-brick project here…

This post was not a sponsored post, we were not paid to write it, and all the opinions expressed are entirely our own. Thanks again to Fair Cape Dairies for the wonderful hamper and to Hippo Communications for working with us again.