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

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

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

Gluten Free Pumpkin Gnocchi

I love Italian food, all of it, every inch of pasta and lasagne or pizza and calzones! My all time favourite though is Gnocchi, it’s tasty, simple and you can add any sauce to make it great. Italian is by far my favourite food group but of course it’s loaded with carbs and gluten and well that’s just not going to work for little Mr B’s virgin gut. So I had to make some changes if I was going to introduce any of it into his diet. You may have already noticed we use rice pasta as a replacement for wheat pasta but since I’m making my own Gnocchi from scratch I thought I would also replace the potato with pumpkin to make sure there was more the one veggie in this too.
It was a hit at dinner time, although I should have made the pieces a bit smaller as they turned out a bit gluggy (as gnocchi can be) and it was sticking to the roof of his mouth so he was eating it like a dog eating peanut butter and I ended up cutting it a bit smaller for him 🙂 other than that these went down a treat!

Recipe:
600g cooked and cooled pumpkin
2 eggs
75g coconut flour
100g white spelt flour
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 red onion diced
1 can diced tomato
A handful of regular spinach chopped
Handful of baby leaf spinach chopped

Mash the pumpkin with a fork, add 1 egg and garlic and mix with the fork. (Make sure you let the pumpkin cool or you will cook the eggs who you add them and the mixture won’t stick together).
Add the coconut flour and give it a good stir through (with a spoon if you like) till it is completely mixed in. Let it sit for a few minutes (I had to change a nappy, so I probably let it sit for about 5min) as coconut flour really absorbs liquid. Then add the other egg and the spelt flour and give it a really good stir till it forms a sticky dough. Break off little balls and add them to boiling water. When regular gnocchi is cooked it rises to the top of the water but these didn’t so I just and to keep taking one out and checking it. You may have to do the same. Ours took about 10-15 min to cook and they stayed a little bit sticky which normal gnocchi doesn’t.
While that us cooking fry your diced onion until cooked. Add the can of tomatoes and simmer to they are warmed through, then add your spinach and cook till wilted. This took just a little shorter than the 15 minutes the gnocchi took.

Hubby and I sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top which finished it off nicely but Mr B just had it plain.

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

Fajitas without the wraps

This seems to be the main way we feed our darling Mr B., we make our own meals and he just gets the healthy stuff from it. In today’s case we had yummy fajitas but weren’t happy to give our son sour cream, wraps or the cheese we had so basically we just left all that off and gave him the good stuff.

Chicken and tomato Recipe:
1 red opinion
1/2 capsicum (red pepper)
1tsp dried rosemary
1 large chicken breast diced
1 can red kidney beans
1 can chopped tomatoes

Dice and fry the onion and capsicum until onto goes a bit transparent. Add the rosemary and chicken and fry till it’s cooked through.
Once it’s cooked add the beans and tomato (whee we used canned goods we try and go for organic) and simmer for about 10-15 min.

Enjoy xx

Mac and Cheese with a twist

Busy, busy week in our household. Besides the usual run up to Christmas events and stuff, I took a few extra shifts at my old job to help out so our meals have taken a slight back-seat! Which is working out pretty well for us because little Mr B is having some terrible teething troubles and food has taken a big back-seat anyway. But between all that we have had some winners every so often and this one was a firm favourite with Mr B 🙂

It’s the usual Macaroni and cheese but I’ve stuffed it full of veggies and tried hard to get rid of as much dairy as I could.
So here is the recipe and see how you go:

(We used a standard sized baking dish but you might need to use less/more ingredients depending on the size dish you end up using)
2c macaroni
1c peas
1c sweetcorn
1c carrots
1/2 head of broccoli
Put it all in the dish and give it a stir

For the sauce:
90g butter (I was going to use coconut oil cause I wanted to make it completely dairy free but forgot)
90g spelt flour (I say this is gluten free but someone mentioned to me that spelt still has a type of gluten in it so will have to do some research into that)
1l almond milk
1tsp nutmeg

Melt the butter over a low heat and stir in the flour till it forms a paste. Slowly stir in the milk and nutmeg until it thickens up and pour it into the baking dish over the above mix. Give it a quick stir to mix it all up thoroughly.
We didn’t add any cheese to this but topped it with a sprinkle of mixed herbs.

Bake in a preheated oven of 180deg for about 30min.

Enjoy xx

Fruit salad… Yummy yummy, fruit salad… In my tummy!

What a busy day, I’m only getting the chance to sit down now to do your breakfast post! We love fruit for breakfast, for lunch in fact even for dinner! So when the Wiggles were singing about it this morning I knew that’s what we were going to have for breakfast 🙂

We always try and eat what’s in season so in this fruit salad we have: Banana, nectarines, peaches, kiwi and delicious mango!

Stewed Apples

If you have been following our Facebook page before we started this website, you may remember our failed attempt at baked cinnamon apples.
They were dry and took forever to bake (which if you have a baby you know isn’t ideal). I had a few porridge cakes left over from yesterday and thought it would be a good opportunity to try stewing some apples instead of baking them. Success they came out so tasty, a little bit sticky and syrupy and Mr B loved them!

Recipe:
Cut an apple into eight pieces.
Pour enough water into a small pot so it just covers the bottom and is about half way up the side of the apples
Mix a tsp of cinnamon into the water and place the apple slices in the pot.
Bring it the boil or until the apples are just soft but not falling apart yet.
I’m sure you would do this anyway but break an apple slice in half before giving to your baby as they stay incredibly hot in the middle.

Enjoy xx