Dairy Free cooking

Nate is Dairy Free due to suffering from an intolerance to Dairy along with Soya so we are constantly looking for recipes and ideas. At the moment we seem to be baking biscuits every fortnight, Nate likes to help with the rolling and cutting the biscuits out. I found a recipe for a simple biscuit which is very nice.

Here is our variation
165g Plain Flour
100g Dairy free spread
50g natural caster sugar
1tsp ground ginger

We roll it out to roughly 3-4mm thick use cutters (the fun part) to cut biscuits out and bake at 160C for 14 minutes. Our oven can be fiery so it may be best to check the biscuits often.

Nate cutting out his biscuits

Another thing we love here is rice pudding, we've had to change it a bit for obvious reasons as we used to love it with clotted cream stirred in at the last minute. 

I found a recipe last year that was made with coconut milk, and black rice. I decided to give it a go. 

Nate's Portion in a heart bowl

"Yummy in my tummy"

Now the black rice turns a purple colour and does stain little people so best on a nice hot day when you can strip them down and then pop them in the paddling pool. 

I don't have the exact recipe for this as I have made this different each time. This is the basic outline:

3/4 cup of black rice (we found the black rice in a small local Asian shop)

1 small can of coconut cream

20g sugar (I've limited the sugar due to Nate having it and the coconut cream is also sweet)

1 1/2 cups of Water

Put the rice, coconut cream and water in a saucepan bring to the boil and then add the sugar. Turn down to a simmer. Simmer for an hour, keep an eye on the pan as you may need to top the water up.
Enjoy!

The rice has a slight bite to it but it went down well here.

Little Swim School

When Nathaniel finished swimming with Little Dippers are few months ago, we had high hopes of continuing with his swimming every week. We started well, we went twice in a month the first month to our local swimming pool and then three times since and that was roughly 5 months ago. When I saw the little Swim school was starting lessons a two minute walk from home, I knew we should sign Nathaniel up. We managed to miss the start of term. However, we had our first lesson yesterday and I can't say Nathaniel loved it but as soon as we were out of the pool he wanted to go back in.  I think it might take a little time before he is throwing himself in like he was last year.

British Museum

Midweek we had a day in London when we didn't have to rush back home and there is an exhibition at the British Museum I wanted to see. Crazily I thought it'd be a good idea to visit the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition with Nathaniel. As we entered "mummy, dark" "mummy dark in here" and finally "no like it". Thankfully we are British Museum members and can visit again another day, this time it'll have to be nap time.

Digging through pictures

I've been promising myself that I would set up a electronic photo frame with all of the pictures we have taken of Nate, we try to take at least one a day. There is a good reason for setting one up, with all the pictures we have some get missed or totally forgotten about. I've just found one from Nate's first encounter with Father Christmas and it's quite funny so I thought I'd share it here.

Nate hiding from Father Christmas

No Bot The Robot

Not too long ago, Sue Hendra the author/illustrator of No Bot and a few other books appeared in our local book shop.
She gave a reading of No Bot and then helped the children to create a cardboard robots of their own, using pipe cleaners, a little cardboard box and stickers. Nate being one of the youngest, if not the youngest, loved the reading but as always loves to stand up in the middle of the carpet to get the best view. He needed a lot of help creating his robot but he genuinely loves drawing and sticking things down and still plays with his robot even a couple of months after the event.

On to the book, No Bot is a book about a Robot who manages to lose his bottom. Nate loves this book and some days we have to read it over and over again. The illustration style is lovely and deceptively simple, we love the way the front inside cover pages contain circuit boards with the pictures of animals. Nate can identify the animals within the circuit board and really enjoys finding the animals 'hidden' in the circuitry. A big thumbs up from Nate for this book.

In The Night Garden

We don't watch much TV with Nate here but somehow we ended up on one of the Children's channels when In The Night Garden happened to be on. We soon found out that Nathaniel loved it, he has lots of conversations about the Tombliboos and Upsy Daisy. He can name all of the characters and can sing the songs.
His favourite being Upsy Daisy. He loves bouncing up and down singing Upsssy Daisey, Daisy Doo.
He is even more taken with the magazine, he loves the counting pages and can count confidently from 3 to 9, he doesn't like starting at one.
All after one accidental viewing, our bedtime routine got turned upside down to include In The Night Garden.

Quiet Book

I've been very quiet and for a few good reasons, Christmas and Crafting. I found mid way through last year something called quiet books which are an American idea where you make books out of fabric for young children to play with. I love crafting so I thought I'd have a go, finding felt at a reasonable price in the UK I have found isn't very easy especially at the sizes to make a book for little hands.

My favourite place to find ideas is Imagineourlife.com Stephanie makes the best patterns to follow and they are free and mostly step by step instructions. I have just finished making her dolls house quiet book for Nate and he seems to be enjoying it, mainly by putting the bath duck in the oven. Using Stephanie's pattern I also made a little boy doll by just adding a little brown hair just so he had both.

Above are my versions of the kitchen and bedroom page. The backyard page was the last I made and I still haven't had the chance to photo it. You'll find the patterns here. Have a look around her blog because there are a lot of great ideas. The book I'm currently working on uses the same dimensions as Stephanies but is based on Nate's dads illustrations which you can see here.