In between whining children and tantrums and all else, we found time to go to the markets over the weekend. It’s one of the few food experiences our two children can tolerate – food served within a few minutes, lots of space, live background music, interesting things to look at and a sausage roll. So we go and get food cooked for us and try different things, and then buy fruit and vegetables on the way out.

This week the two who need routine had a sausage roll with tomato sauce and shared an orange juice, I tried a bao bun with pork belly and a deep fried spiral potato with a lychee and rose flavour iced tea, and Tim had some sort of dumpling soup. The bao bun was delicious – all the goodness of a BBQ pork bun but with good additions of coleslaw and crushed cashew nuts.

Due to whining we had to leave swiftly and just got a few things – mangoes, avocados and strawberries. Because it was close to closing time, we ended up getting extras and therefore had a lot of strawberries for a good price.

I was wondering what to do with them all besides freeze them for future smoothies or mixing with frozen bananas for “ice cream” when I remembered that I’d wanted to make strawberry jam. My breadmaker can apparently make jam, and then when I googling for a recipe I found one for a thermomix, and decided to use the bellini instead of the breadmaker.

So much better than traditional stove top jam with the standing and stirring and testing and stirring and waiting and testing. I used this recipe from Little Bit of Thyme and poured into jars when it was done (I put mine on for an extra 10 minutes). My nan would put the jar into the pantry once cooled but I decided to put mine into the fridge – they’re only small jars so won’t take up much space.