Cinnamon Raisin Loaf

Ok so I know it’s been way to long since my last post! I blame the hard work we’ve been pitting into the start of our new business Bubs and Up (which you can find on Facebook)… Anyhoo

We are really enjoying this new cinnamon raisin loaf for breakfast and it’s an easy one to make the night before, or if you are like our family,really early I the morning so it’s nice and fresh 🙂

Recipe:
2 cups almond flour
1 tbsp coconut flour
2 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
Pinch sea salt (not recommended if your child is under a year old)
5 eggs
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup goji berries
1/4 cup macadamia nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 170 deg Celsius
Line a bread tin with parchment paper.
Combine almond flour, coconut flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a medium sized bowl.
Combine eggs, honey, coconut oil, and vanilla in a larger bowl and mix with an electric beater until all ingredients are well mixed.
Slowly add dry ingredients to the wet, and continue mixing.
Once everything is well mixed, add raisins, goji berries and macadamia nuts
Pour batter into bread tin and bake for about 35-45min or until toothpick comes out clean.
We enjoyed it with plain with some butter but I’m sure some nut butter or jam would taste just as nice

Enjoy x

Fish fingers

Thanks to the busy holiday season we were a little more unhealthy than we might usually be. In fact I still have some ready made pizzas in the fridge that hubby and I were eating for a quick and easy lunch. One of the unhealthiest things we gave Mr B was some fish fingers. Now don’t get me wrong if you buy ready made fish fingers I’m not judging, but for us the amount of wheat and salt or the type of acidity regulators in the ingredients just don’t sit right with me when it comes to our little man’s maturing gut.

Anyway, so since he just loved eating fish in any form I thought I would try make my own fish fingers.

Recipe:
(This recipe depends on how much fish you have so just keep adding more of each ingredient as you need it)
Coconut flour
eggs (beaten)
Desiccated coconut
White fish (we used Hoki)

Set up the ingredients in their own dishes and cut the fish into strips.
Dip the fish strips into the flour first (coating the whole piece at each stage), then the egg and finally the coconut.
Fry immediately in a medium pan with oil of your choice. For this recipe I would suggest coconut oil but olive will do too.
Let them cool before serving, we also checked each piece for bones when we were cutting them into strips.
We served this with homemade potato and sweet potato chips coated in rosemary.

Enjoy x

Veggie Omlettes

Well we are finally back into the swing of the New Year and as much as I would like to say we are starting off the year with a bang or with great new ideas and lots of energy it’s ended up being more like a slow waddle into the year, while yawning and carrying a teething baby one hip and holding a cup of coffee in the other hand. But we made it here to 2014 in one piece and loved every minute of the busy holiday season and having a baby around to help make it even more exciting and special.

To get us back into our routine we have a very simple veggie omelette recipe for you. This recipe fed all 3 of us so you may want to cut back if it’s just for your bub.

Recipe:
6 large eggs
1/2 tsp rosemary
1 tsp mixed herbs
1/2 cup of diced tomato (roughly 1 big tomato or 2 smaller ones)
1/2 cup diced zucchini
1/2 cup diced ham
1/2 cup grated cheese (we used tasty cheese)
1/2 cup of crumbled fetta

(You may have noticed in previous posts that we don’t usually give our son cheese, but healthy eating kind of took a back seat during Christmas so if you are dairy free just leave out the cheese and add more of the veggies. Which is probably what I will be doing next time).
Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl except the herbs and egg and set aside.
Beat the eggs until they are light and fluffy.
Add the herbs to the egg and mix through.
Heat a pan over medium heat (you will need a pan that has a lid) and add a splash of oil or butter to prevent sticking. You may need to add more between each omlette depending on the type of pan you have.
Pour enough of the egg mixture into the pan to coat the bottom of the pan evenly and place the lid on the pan. I find the thicker omelettes tend to be easier to work with but it’s up to you how thick you want them.
Just before the egg is cooked all the way through add some of the veggie mixture to one side of the omelette and fold the omelette in half, replace the lid and cook till the cheese is just starting to melt.
If you have any left over veggie mixture fry it up in the pan after you have finished making your omelettes, as it turns into a delicious saucy mixture, and pour over the top.

Enjoy x

Gingerbread cookies

I’m loving The Lovely Little Lunchbox, her recipes are usually great, different and tasty. The author isn’t quite as strict about sugars, salt or wheat as I like but the recipes are fantastic and pretty easy to change up if I need to. In preparation for christmas tomorrow we tried to bake her gingerbread men and what a great recipe, they came out great even with my small changes.

Recipe:

400g almond meal
1 tsp cinnamon, ground
1 tsp ginger, ground
1/2 tsp nutmeg, ground
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup coconut
4 fresh soft dates, pitted
1/3 grapeseed oil
1 very ripe banana
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg

Place the almond meal, spices, baking powder, coconut and dates into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until combined and the mix is crumbly. Add the oil, banana, vanilla and egg and pulse until combined and a soft dough forms, it can be quite thick and may give your blades quite a workout so don’t overdo it 🙂
Place the dough between 2 sheets of baking powder and roll to about 3 mm thick. Put it in the fridge, I ended up leaving it overnight as I ran out of time, so just see how it feels after a hour. You need it to set a bit so it’s not quite so sticky. Preheat oven to 150 degrees celsius. Remove the top layer of baking paper and cut the dough into shapes using christmas cookie cutters, I didn’t have gingerbread men do just made Chrissy trees. Place the cookies onto an oven tray lined with baking paper. Shape dough scraps into a ball, flatten until 3mm thick and continue to cut cookies until no dough remains. Bake cookies for 10-15 minutes or until golden and cooked. Allow to cool.

Enjoy x

Scones and homemade jam

Sorry we have been a bit quiet the last week. Christmas with a child is a whole new world for us and we have been so busy with all Mr. B’s events and play dates, shopping for pressies, decorating our home and just day to day activities. I still have some homemade pressies to make before the end of the week and of course a few Christmas parties to cook for but it’s all so much fun!

For now though how about an easy breakfast, today we had some delicious spelt scones and what I call homemade jam but it’s really just chunky puréed fruit that we spread on our scones.

The scone recipe is from a great book called I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson. She calls them Finnish scones and they are delicious.

Recipe:

1 1/2 c whole meal spelt flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tbs Olive oil
180 ml water

Line a tray with baking paper. Mix the flour and baking powder in a bowl. Pour in the water and oil and stir with a woodie spoon until smooth. I usually cut out scone shapes but this time I accidentally dropped the baking tray as it was heading into the oven so I just salvaged what I could and made one big scone that I sliced into 4 (not all the way through) before placing in the oven. We baked it for roughly 15 minutes. For the “jam” I blitzed a handful of cherries (de-stoned), 4 good sized strawberries and 1/2 a banana in my. Bellini. It was delicious, messy and nice and healthy, with most of the jam ending up on Mr. B’s forehead (not sure how that happened though).

Let me know if you try this and what other “jam” combinations you try.

Enjoy xx

Vinegar solution recipe

No don’t worry I’m not advocating giving Mr B vinegar to drink. I’m actually talking about our homemade and safe surface cleaner.
We have one of those Ikea high chairs, you know the one everyone else has that is bright white and pretty easy to clean. But since we have been doing BLW and it’s impossible to give Mr B a bowl or plate of any sort I really hated the idea of using the store bought surface sprays to keep his chair clean. So instead I use the simple recipe below and a cleaned out old surface spray bottle, vinegar and water and what success. Keeps his high chair so clean I now use it on every surface in our house.

Recipe:
(We use this one for his high chair and I use straight vinegar for really stubborn stains)
1/2 c water
1/2 c white vinegar

Mix it all together in a 500ml (told you it was easy)! Let us know if you have another safe mixture you use.

Enjoy xx

French toast roll ups!

I love French toast, dripping in honey or maple syrup and covered in fruit! I especially prefer it with white bread and with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar.
Delicious but it couldn’t be more unhealthy!
So what did I make for us over the weekend French toast roll ups. Now I would like to say that I managed to make these more healthy but alas that was not the case! It was however incredibly delicious and well worth having even if it is just once.

Recipe:
A couple of slices of bread with crusts removed.
Diced fruit if your choice, we used strawberry and banana
3/4 beaten eggs
Cinnamon

Lay out your piece of bread place the diced fruit in a line on the slice, close to the start of where you are going to roll them. Roll the bread and give it a bit of a squeeze to keep it all together. Dip it in the egg as you would normally make French toast and fry them in a pan till golden and cooked through. Sprinkle with a bit of cinnamon if your baby likes it.
I would not add any extra sugar or sweetness to these if giving it to my Mr B especially if you have used white bread but we also don’t give him any refined sugars so white bread had him bouncing off the walls all day and super moody!

Enjoy xx

Banana and Date loaf

I was not expecting breakfast to work out so well. As many of my readers know we don’t do sugar or salt with our BLW recipes and we are trying our best to limit dairy and gluten so I found this great Banana bread recipe using coconut flour and maple syrup. But that was still just a bit to much sugar for us, so I tweaked it and changed it and here is our new recipe. But let’s be honest a banana bread with no sugar or normal flour just sounds like a recipe for a failed breakfast…I couldn’t have been more wrong Mr B LOVED it and even ate some of mine 🙂

Recipe:
Ingredients
3 ripe, peeled bananas
3 large eggs
1 cup chopped dates (we used dry but fresh would work too)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup whole meal spelt flour

Method
Preheat your oven to 180°C, or gas mark 4. Prepare a baking pan with parchment paper. Mash the bananas in a large bowl. Add the eggs, dates and vanilla to the mashed bananas and blend well. Add the baking pwd, coconut flour and spelt flour to the wet batter and mix well. The coconut flour will absorb the liquid so if it looks too runny let it sit for a minute or 2.
Pour the batter into the baking pan and bake for 50 minutes or until the top begins to brown and a toothpick inserted in the center of the bread comes out clean.

Because this was an experiment, if you do make it please let me know how it goes so if there are any problems I can tweak the recipe even more, thanks.

Enjoy xx