Recently I went on a three week “elimination diet”, not for weight loss, although I did lose a few kilos, which I’m not missing at all.  No this was in fact to help me know for sure what it is that I eat on a daily basis, that doesn’t agree with me.  After two years of casual experimentation I thought I should actually see what makes my digestive system become extremely anti-social.  I have been pretty sure that dairy is not my friend but what if there was something else like tomatoes, gluten (please Lord no) or something unexpected that I literally put in every meal, like garlic or olive oil. You remove A LOT of things; citrus fruits, gluten, dairy, tomatoes, bananas, beef, pork and lots more besides – for the full list I used, go to Cleanse Program. I ended up eating a lot of apples and kiwis, quinoa, salmon and rice cakes.  I missed bananas, beef and cooking only one meal for the family.  During the three weeks I found out almost all nuts are the enemy for …

In our family we refer to the restaurant with the golden arches as “Dirty-donalds”.  I’m not proud to admit that my children have tasted a McNugget or two from there but we haven’t been through in months and I intend to keep it that way! That’s not to say that our children don’t have junk food, in fact at least once a week I throw caution to the wind and serve up a dinner for the children…pause for mum to turn away from what I am about to type… that doesn’t have any green vegetables in it!!  Six days a week I plan and cook evening meals for the family that are clean, healthy, representative of all the food groups and one day a week, generally Friday because it’s curry night for mum and dad, I provide what I like to call good junk food.  It’s junk because something on the plate came from a can or the freezer or has added sugar.  It is good because it’s the highest quality of its kind, I cooked part …

I am not surprised that my first blog after over a year of radio silence would be a food one, as my interest in baking has grown stronger in the last few months.  I have actually considered creating a new blog that is called ‘My Training For The Great British Bake Off’ where I track the development of my baking skills with the sole intention of entering that blissful show.  But I don’t know that I’m there yet.  Let’s just play with the theme on this blog for a little while shall we. And where better to start than with a little recipe I’ve invented.  And when I say invented, I began with a Nigella recipe and then made several changes due to personal taste and lack of required ingredients, so that it now looks nothing like what the goddess was aiming for. They love their “free from” food over here and after three years of living here I must confess I do like the odd liberated recipe to keep me intolerance friendly.  This one has no gluten or dairy. …

When I decided to add this to my library of blogs I thought I should finally find out why sausages in Yorkshire pudding mix is called ‘Toad in the Hole’.  You’d think as I once lived in the good city of Wensleydale I’d know already, but I don’t.  Allegedly it’s because the sausages peeping out of the Yorkshire pudding resemble toad’s legs popping out of a hole… well yes of course.  Needless to say it’s raised some Kiwi eyebrows over here when I’ve mentioned I’m cooking it.  They can’t judge, they have yo-yos and cheerios. So this is a good hearty meal and it includes sausages, and what child does not like a sausage or three?  You are meant to make it with onion gravy, which I would if I was cooking it for adults but I think that extra effort would be lost on my children so I let them have tomato ketchup.  I would like to stress at this point, that on average we have one meal a week that has ketchup with …

In one of my previous blogs I said I hated eggs so it may come as a surprise that essentially I’ve cooked an omelete for my children.  I’m pretty shocked I went for it myself but not as shocked as I was when my children LOVED THEM.  Which is why I have decided to recommend it, I mean who knew! This recipe is from the River Cottage Baby & Toddler Cookbook.  This is a good book and they don’t shove their organically charged aspirations down your throat as much as you may think. As they say, you can put in almost any vegetable into this recipe and I would also be tempted to add in crispy bacon, chorizo or cooked chicken.  What I’ve written below is my adaption of the recipe – if you want the original, buy the book you probably won’t regret it. Recipe: 350g new potatoes (cooked) 2 tbsp olive oil 1 yellow pepper 8 cherry tomatoes Handful of frozen corn Handful of frozen peas Bunch of spring onions 5 eggs 100g …

This recipe is very basic and therefore adaptable.  I am just giving you one example but there are many variants. It’s really more a principle that I am sharing here, which is, if you want to get vegetables into your children, have soup at lunch time.  My little boy has been harder than his sister to wean, and I cried a lot weaning her.  One of Jackson’s top three annoying-to-feed features is he doesn’t want to eat vegetables or fruit so I have to adapt.  I make fruit puree which he eats every breakfast with yogurt and five days out of the week we will have vegetable soup at lunch time.  This may change when we get into the hotter months. I generally use three vegetables from the following; carrot, swede, leek, parsnip, sweet potato, pepper, tomato, squash, pumpkin. This is the soup for the next few days (I make a batch and don’t worry if I serve it two days in a row – it’s only lunch). (I will try to improve my food …

I’ve changed my little blog a bit to accommodate a new section I want to put in on family cooking.  My children are not naturally big eaters, certainly as babies they have not been the type to eat whatever is put in front of them.  This has forced me to work very hard on feeding them.  And what they have discovered is their mother is no push over on this matter. I was brought up on the ‘you cannot leave the table until you have cleared your plate’ regime.  And whilst I now feel that there are some down sides to how my parents ruled the dinner table, like eating beyond my hunger, I generally am in awe of what they did.  The result is that my brother and I will eat anything.  OK so I think eggs are of the devil but I would eat them if someone gave me them for dinner (please no one test me on this!). Here are the highlights from our upbringing that I wish to teach the future …