Beachcomber Banana Bread

Sprout loves any kind of making or baking at the moment. In particular, one of her and her Daddy’s morning rituals is that she makes him a cup of tea!!!!..... Half of you have just thought how cool, and the other half have winced at the thought of her wielding a kettle of boiling water! Unfortunately, I’m going to have to disappoint/reassure all of you - it’s not that cool and she doesn’t get to pour the water into the cup, but she does choose him a teabag and spoon a teaspoon of sugar into his cup…and that’s cool enough for me!

So this afternoon has been spent testing another recipe suitable for Sprout’s little tummy. 

Here’s the recipe from The Intolerant Gourmet.

• All the ingredients are easily sourced from your local supermarket. In fact, the only ingredient we had to buy was the agave syrup.
• This is a dairy free, wheat free, gluten free, sugar free, yeast free, egg free and soy free! (We did use real eggs though!)
• It was delicious….we barely waited for it to cool down before having a taste and it certainly didn’t last long!!

• Our cake was quite moist even though we cooked it for longer than the recipe stated…..however Sprout’s Daddy did deviate from the recipe by adding some of Willie’s Cacao Chef’s Drops, so the extra moistness was definitely our fault.

• It may not look pretty or be beautifully presented, but half eaten, half an hour out of the oven that’s a pretty sound recommendation!

Are you tempted? We’ll definitely be making this again.....and sticking to the recipe!!

Sprout’s House

           xox

New Recipe Feature!

Drum roll please……

It’s finally here…… A huge……

Thank you so much to everyone who voted in my poll, and a special even bigger thank you to those of you who came up with a selection of even better names! If you missed the back story to this post click here!

So after a lot of umm-ing and a bit or err-ing I finally settled on

Sprout’s Sensations!!

There was another name that I really liked too and it was definitely a strong contender, but I’m going to save that for another occasion.

So on to the important bit – the recipes. Since throwing the no dairy no wheat thing out there I’ve been cooking up a bit of a storm in the kitchen in an effort to produce food that Sprout will like and therefore eat. The good news is that her mucus–i-ness has dried up - yee haa, the bad news is that sometimes she likes the recipes…… and sometimes she doesn’t……and quite a lot of the time what she liked the other day she doesn’t like today….. hey ho that’s the job of a typical three year old!

One of the first recipes we – and that’s the royal we as Sprout’s Daddy cooked the dish that appears in these photos although I have cooked it since then – cooked was one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s recipes from her new book It's All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes that Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great

Here’s the recipe.

• Delicious, satisfying and hearty. I’m pretty sure this would satisfy the most dedicated carb eater.
• We’ve eaten it on its own, and also with baked potatoes and green beans.
• All the ingredients are readily available with quite a few already in most people’s cupboards eg s and p, chicken stock, olive oil, cumin etc. Although I have to confess to omitting the saffron due to the cost and the fact we never use it for anything else.
• Plus my initial scepticism that the recipe contained 6 cloves of garlic and a whole packet of coriander was totally unfounded – yum!

• Long preparation time! The lamb needs a minimum of 6 hours (preferably overnight) to marinate. So you need to prepare this the day before, and if your meat needs to defrost too you’ll need another 6 ish hours on top of this.
• Then it takes one and half hours to cook, then another half hour once you’ve thrown the squash and chickpeas into the pot.
• In short, plan ahead and allow a lot of time!

• Nothing ugly about this dish unless you count our left overs!!

This dish has definitely made it on to our list of regular recipes! Have I convinced you? Try it out and let me know what you think.

Sprout’s House

           xox

P.S. If Sprout’s Sensations was your suggestion let me know!

Bank Holiday Gardening

How’s your bank holiday been? I hope you’ve had a chance to sit back and enjoy the time off!! Sprout has been enjoying the sun with some paddling pool action yesterday and a trip to the playground today. Isn’t it nice to go outside without having to pile on the layers and put up with the cold?

So all in all a chilled out weekend.....until I decided over lunch today that I couldn’t stand the trees at the end of the garden a moment longer. These are the culprits….

Four rather sad looking conifers that have taken over the flower bed at the top of the garden.

Sprout’s Aunty and I wielded a saw, a pair of secateurs and a glove each - the expression all the gear and no idea springs to mind or perhaps that should be half the gear in the case of the gloves!......

However, in a matter of about 20 minutes we had dispatched all the trees leaving four stumps ready to dig up.

Here’s a couple of after photos –

The photos don’t show the full effect, but in real life it really opens up this part of the garden and also gives the other plants a chance to grow properly. Another unforeseen bonus - we managed to cut up some of the trunks to use for fire wood!

Did anyone else do a little impromptu demolition over the weekend?

Sprout’s House

           xox

P.S ‘Tis the season of reports and exam marking so posts might be a little haphazard over the next three or four weeks whilst I tackle them!

Sprout's Garden

A few readers have requested a look around the Sprout’s House garden, so whilst the weather was warm last weekend I took a few photos. If you’ve missed the house tour you can find it here!

There is a raised patio area and summer house/workshop. This is another top priority on our ‘to do’ list. It is piled high with stuff that needs sorting out. It’s just a matter of waiting for another sunny weekend!!

We had to carry out a bit of maintenance on the lean-to’s guttering as originally it was attached to two water butts. 

However, whenever we had a lot of rainfall these overflowed on to the render and concrete – we are trying to avoid any more damp at all costs!!

The garden is on many different levels so it’s up a little set of steps and on to the grass. Sprout’s last garden had grass many moons ago, but it was the size of a postage stamp and barely worth mowing so we paved over it and gave our lawn mower away! Cue a quick trip to equip ourselves with another one last weekend. (Sprout’s Daddy was quite specific about the one he wanted – it does stripes apparently!!) 

At the top of the garden is another patio area, and a big flower bed. We’ve spent quite a few hours cutting all the plants back and also doing a bit of demolishing! There used to be a couple of ponds and a little waterfall, but with a Sprout we decided to get rid of it – better safe than sorry!

And then a shot of the back of the house……I think the last one you saw was snow covered! You can just see one of the water butts and the marks on the render. On the left, you can still see where we need to extend the drain pipe so it meets the drain at the bottom.

Last but not least the glorious blue sky. This is what makes all those cold, damp days a distant memory…..bliss.

Happy Bank Holiday weekend! I hope the sun is shining wherever you are.

Sprout’s House

           xox

Spring Has Sprung.....

Or not……amusingly as I write this the sky is leaden and it is hailing! Yes....I kid you not.... hailing!! 

After a week of sun, blue skies and more importantly warm temperatures – my car recorded an oh-so tropical 23˚C mid-week – the weather has, once again, turned. However, I’m going to plough on regardless in the hope that the sun might return ……at some point!!

Last weekend, a little glimpse out the kitchen window signalled that spring had really and truly finally sprung. 

Our lilac tree was sporting little buds, some daffodils had popped up along with some other unidentified plants?! Can you tell I’m not really a gardener? Can anyone tell me the name of the blue and purple flowers in the picture?

Sprout’s House

           xox

P.S The sun also meant we had little bit of Sprout Scooter-ing action!

What's cooking?

Well......okay that's a slight over exaggeration, but nothing with dairy or wheat in it that's for sure!!! Following a long, hard winter of continuous colds, flu and the norovirus, Sprout and I took a little trip to see a nutritionist so we could start to lay the groundwork for a healthy and germ free winter later this year.

The upshot being that Sprout now takes a multivitamin, fish oil capsules and a probiotic supplement to increase the good bacteria in her tummy. What I hadn’t realised fully is that once you take antibiotics it kills all your good bacteria too, and it can very hard to get these back especially in a small person.

Some of you may know that Sprout is already dairy-free as we have found that it seems to make her very snotty, but we have now been advised to eliminate wheat too. This was definitely something that I had hoped to avoid as I’m not really keen on ruling out whole food groups never mind two of them, but if it improves her health then it has to be worth doing.

However, it does throw up a few issues!!

So as I’m going to be experimenting with lots of new recipes, I thought I would introduce a new food feature at Sprout’s House called 

Sprout's Spread.....

or should it be Sprout's Smorgasbord.....

or maybe Sprout's Mishmash/Smishsmash(is that even a word?). 

Don't judge me......I know I might be (okay I'm definitely) scraping the barrel with these suggestions, but I quite like the idea of the name including some sort of alliteration.

However, I need some help (isn't it obvious)!!!??? Here's what I'd like you to do - take part in the first ever poll at Sprout's House (Yay!!) by voting for the name you like the most......

Or if you’re not keen on any of these add your own suggestion to the poll. 

All ideas welcome!!

Sprout’s House

           xox

UPDATE: Sprout's Sensations, Simply Sprout and Sprout's Scrumptious Snacks have all been suggested as alternative names. Feel free to vote for any of these by filling in the 'other' box in the poll.

Steamy Windows.....

Or should that be steamy bathroom! You’ve had a little peek at our very modern and luxurious(!) shower room, and you all know how much I love it – so much so that I want to replace it as soon as possible. In the meantime, in an effort to make it a little more sumptuous (who am I kidding?!) I decided to tackle the very attractive mould that has made the ceiling its home.

One of the more well thought out features of our wonderful shower room is that the shower enclosure goes from floor to ceiling, however…..and it’s a big however, the extractor fan is located on the opposite wall and crucially outside the shower. 

So once you’ve enjoyed a lovely hot shower, jumped out and shut the door behind you all the steam gets trapped inside and before you know it those friendly, little mould spores are rubbing their hands with glee at the lovely moist environment you’ve created. It also means we spend a lot of time propping the shower door open in an attempt to air it and halt the mould growth – but that’s another story!!

So you can see the need for OPERATION MOULD ELIMINATION!!! This was also the chance I had been waiting for to use my new steam cleaner. Two birds, one stone - brilliant!!

It was as simple as filling the steamer with a litre of water and turning it on – just like boiling a kettle! Then I could steam away to my heart’s content.

The steam did a great job eradicating the mould from the corner of the bathroom, but the mould directly above the shower was little more ‘hard core’, and eventually I found I was taking the paint off the ceiling! Not sure I'm ready for that stage yet!!.....

This weekend I’m going to have to implement mould elimination PLAN B!!

Has anyone else got a steam cleaner? What do you use yours for?

Sprout’s House

           xox