Chocolate and banana muffins
Easy chocolate and banana muffins.
Category: Home Sweet Home
You are what you drink
Do you know what is in your tap water? Or the environmental impact of bottled water consumption? Until recently, it wasn’t something I had given much thought to. We use a lot of bottled water in our house each week, purely for the convenience. Tap water can be a chemical cocktail with many impurities, [...]
Red wine lamb shanks with herb mash
Red wine lamb shanks with herb mash
1 cup plain flour
sea salt and black pepper
4 lamb shanks, frenched
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 brown onion, diced
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 cups full bodied red wine (such as Cabernet Sauvignon)
1 cup beef or chicken stock
2 bay leaves
For the mash
4 large Desiree potatoes, diced
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup hot milk
1 tablespoon [...]
Dirty Water
The United Nations declared this decade (2005 – 2015) as the decade of “Water for Life”, but how much is changing?
Today 1.1 billion will have no choice but to drink dirty water. That is 1 in 6 people who are exposed everyday to diseases such as malaria, cholera, dysentery and typhoid without access to safe [...]
RSPCA Cupcake Day
Those marketing folk at the RSPCA are a clever bunch..no? Can there be a better combination, cute animals and yummy cupcakes!
Monday August 18th (a day after my birthday!) is Cupcake Day for the RSPCA. RSPCA Cupcake Cooks across Australia will descend on their schools, workplaces and social groups with batches of yummy homemade cupcakes to [...]
Nature babycare – Good for baby, good for Mother Earth
I often think that it is really hard to be environmentally friendly when you have babies and small children. There is so much washing, so much wasted food, so much packaging and SO MANY NAPPIES.
I will admit that I like the convenience of using disposable nappies. I know many cloth nappy users don’t find it [...]
Landscaping with natives
Let me preface this article by stating that I am not a gardening guru. I have a distinctively black thumb and I am constantly astonished that there are green things in my garden at all. But I love native plants and I love the Australian bush, so I like to try and recreate even the [...]
New national car seat safety laws announced
Car safety for children is an important issue for all parents. Currently 500 children under the age of ten are killed or seriously injured every year in car accidents with a further 2,300 receiving minor injuries.
Last week, Transport Ministers from around Australia announced unanimous support for new national child car restraint laws.
Babies up to six [...]
Environmentally friendly cleaning
It is refreshing to see that environmental issues are getting more of the spotlight in recent times. Even more so, the changes that individuals are prepared to make in their own homes so that we have a beautiful environment for future generations to enjoy. This week I want to focus on what is going down [...]
Back to School
The count down is on to back to school time. We just get over Christmas/New Year and then jump straight into the chaos and expense of preparing to get the kiddies off to school again.
We have put together some information to help make Back to School a little bit easier.
Do you have a little [...]
Helping girls move beyond Bratz, Britney and Bacardi Breezers.
Guest post by Dannielle Miller, CEO of Enlighten Education.
What is really going on in the playground and behind closed bedroom doors?
Teenage girls are living in a girl poisoning culture and, whilst they may appear to be coping as they are still performing well academically, underneath that “oh so perfect” façade, many are silently imploding:
A quarter [...]
Reducing Our Pet Over Population
We have one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world, with two thirds of Australian families owning at least one pet. Yet, did you know that over 200 000 unwanted, healthy cats and dogs are destroyed in Australian pounds and shelters every year because there are not enough homes available? I [...]
