The other night I was desperately searching for a cheesecake recipe. My tweeter friends sent me links, I checked out Delia Smith and Martha Stewart, but I was looking for instant gratification. So I opened up my new favourite recipe book by Jamie Oliver. Its not a baked cheesecake (although I do truly love those) and it is not low-fat – no indeed.

This is a quick cheesecake recipe that really satisfies:
Ingredients: Mixture: 3x bars of cream cheese : 1.5 cups of cream : vanilla pod : 3/4 cup of fine sugar : rind and juice of 1 lemon : rind of 1 orange. Base: 1 pack of biscuits (such as cream crackers or milk biscuits) : 1 cup of fine ground oats : 3/4 cup of butter.

What to do:
In a saucepan, brown your oats until golden, then add your finely ground crackers crumbs and the butter and mix until it is all buttery and crumbly. Put into your cake pan (with removable base) (I made 2 smaller ones rather than one big one), and press down until firm. Place in the freezer for an hour to firm up and chill.

In your mixmaster place the cream cheese and sugar, lemon and orange rind and lemon juice. Scrape out the vanilla pod seeds and add them in too. This mix with your paddle attachment until all creamy and gooey. In another bowl whip your cream and then fold this into your cream cheese mixture. Splat into your chilled base pans and smooth over. Then chill again for another hour or so until ready to eat.

Jamie recommends serving with berry coulis (which I made with frozen berries and sugar and then strained the seeds from). But we decided that it was better to have this on the side as overwhelms the subtle vanilla lemon flavour a little too much for me. Devour this quickly – yummy!

You can store the spare cheesecake in the freezer until you are ready to eat it too. As per Jamie’s instructions I am passing on this recipe to my friends, so if you do the same then we can help Jamie in is homemade food revolution. (check out Jamie’s TED video for some inspiration.)

The cherry association of Australia is promoting the healthy lovely aspects of cherries and the aussie summer obsession with everything cherry. Here is the event guide for local cherry seasonal events near you – including cherry spitting competitions and cherry picking and more – the cherry growers website also has a few recipes - and there is a chance to win an ipod. I was offered a box of cherries to help with my summer celebrations – but because I am away on hols I couldn’t take them up on the offer – but I will be eating cherries where I am going anyway – and will no doubt be visiting a cherry farm to pick our own – the kids love doing that – you should try it with your kids if you can.

I have a lot of trouble making food for my kids that they will eat. I am not a great cook, and I don’t have a lot of love of cooking, but I am constantly trying to think of things that they will eat. There are some old staples that I roll out that I know that they will eat like fried rice and bolognese.But I get very bored of eating these.

Last night I completely ran out of energy to make the kids something interesting. Instead of making something interesting like cassoulet or lasagna (neither of which they love, but I do), I just made up some spaghetti with olive oil and parmesan. I felt really guilty about serving something so basic, but they completely surprised me by LOVING it. and Liam told me “Dad, you are a great chef!”. They even ate multiple helpings…

Maybe this is the direction I should be going in for meals. Simple food is better. I just need to get over the guilt…