This is such an amazing recipe. The bread is beautifully moist and such a lovely flavour. It uses less eggs than other recipes I’ve tried, and the addition of the coconut is unusual but brilliant. It’s also really quick to mix together, and fills the house with a subtle and warming fragrance.
Continue reading Just Have to Share – Fantastic Banana and Coconut Bread
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Continuing on from last week’s ode to beetroot, I want to share this fantastic cake with you. I know you might think I’ve gone mad, but the truth is, beetroot and chocolate are a fantastic mix. Especially beetroot and bitter dark chocolate. And what a great way to get such a healthy vegetable into your children too!
Continue reading Out the (Organic Food) Box – Beetroot and Chocolate Cake
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I feel really sorry for beetroot. As far as vegetables go, it really drew the short straw. A lot of it’s unpopularity is, I’m sure, owing to some genius with a funny hairstyle (in my mind, anyway) deciding to shove it in bottles and drown it in vinegar. So today, when most people think ‘beetroot’ they think of strong vinegar stuffed pink things that make your mouth go all funny and colour everthing on your plate in pink streaks.
Everything salad can also be everything pasta. It is a quick and easy way of clearing out all those left over bits in the fridge and the vegetable bowl, while making a great, nutritious and filling meal.
The key to a good ‘Everything Salad’ is colour and variety. An easy guide is to use the primary and secondary colours, and the five food groups:
Red, yellow and blue white and green and the grains, fruit and vegetables, dairy/proteins, meat and sugar/fats/oils. (You can use as many or as few of these as you wish)
We spent last week with my sister and her boyfriend and his family in Croatia, where his Bosnian mother cooked us three meals a day unless we went out. She doesn’t speak a word of English so conversation was a non-starter, making getting recipes out of her very difficult so I have pieced this one together as best as I could. Bosnians, or at least these Bosnians, eat a very different diet to ours, with at least two courses and bread at each sitting. In addition, their meals are really heavy – in sweltering heat we were still consuming hot pots and soups.
Continue reading Just Have to Share – Bosnian Borek (Meat Pitas)
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I love zucchini flowers. They don’t taste much like zucchini’s, or courgettes as they’re known in England, but instead have a flavour entirely unique. We first had them in a café in Varazze, Italy, then a few years later in a restaurant in Rome, stuffed with mozzarella. We have often scoured markets near us searching for these beautiful yellow flowers, but to no avail.
Continue reading Just Have to Share – Zucchini Flowers (Courgettes)
As much as I love camping, little is more frustrating than trying to make food in the middle of nowhere only to find you don’t have the right equipment. It’s like cooking in someone else’s kitchen: it’s really hard and the food doesn’t taste as good. Unless you are prepared and comfortable with your equipment, that is.
One of the things I really like about baby led weaning is the theory that a baby will only eat what isn’t bad for them. According to this theory, when a baby won’t eat something, they will generally later be found to have an intolerance or allergy to it.
Welcome to the July Carnival of Natural Parenting: Let’s Talk About Food
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month our participants have written about their struggles and successes with healthy eating. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.
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It’s always been an issue in my life. It’s not that I eat too much of it – on the contrary, I sometimes don’t enough – or at least, don’t eat often enough. As a working woman, I often didn’t eat anything all day, until home time when I would pass the snack bar and perhaps grab a bag of crisps.
As a mother, I’m sorry to say, these habits have only marginally improved.
But as my daughter Kyra has begun weaning, and we have chosen baby-led weaning to do so, we have certainly made attempts at improving the way we eat. We are not the ‘drastic change’ type of people. Emptying the cupboard of anything remotely unhealthy is more likely to steer us towards a shopping trip than a healthy lifestyle, so we’ve had to make small steps. So far, we’ve made three.
Lime leaves, from the tilia x europaea, fill the streets of London at the moment. These edible leaves make a great substitute for vine leaves. The leaves are best harvested in the spring, when they are still soft, and in the summer, the flowers make a refreshring drink. The tree doesn’t actually bare limes as fruit, but have a slight lime flavour without the tartness. They can be stuffed with anything you desire, really, but here’s a recipe to get you started.
Continue reading Foraging for Food – Lime leaves stuffed with Bacon, Barley and Lentils
