Egg Free Dairy Free Pancakes

The kids decided they wanted Pancakes for breakfast today and so I dug around and made this recipe from a number of others I found around the web. I was surprised how well they turned out!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup Plain Flour
• 1/2 teaspoon B-Carb Soda (Baking Soda)
• 2 teaspoons Baking Powder
• 1/4 teaspoon Salt
• 2 Tablespoons Sugar
• 1 cup Soy Milk (or water will do)
• 1.5 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
• 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla Essence

Method:

Sift flour and baking soda/powder and salt.

Add sugar. (Whisk these together is you don’t have a sifter.)

Add Vanilla and Oil and half the soy milk. Whisk together.

Gradually add the rest of the soy milk until thick pouring consistency.

Heat Frying pan – needs to be reasonably hot. I used vegetable oil – but you could use spray. Oil/spray for each pancake – they do stick otherwise. I found with this recipe the pancakes worked best if they were on the small side. If the were too big they were difficult to turn.

Can be eaten hot or cold. Our favorite toppings are Maple Syrup; lemon and sugar; and butter (milk free) and jam on the cold ones.

I originally posted this recipe with water as the liquid. Soy milk produces a far better result.

Happy eating!

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Share Investment Club – Women Invests

In December 2000, I gave birth to Myles and took 6 months off work. During that time I decided to try my hand at Share Trading. I really enjoyed it – and although the market wasn’t that flash at the time, I still managed to make a profit thanks to my short positions. My friends from Mum’s group asked me about what I was up to.. and from there we decided to set up our own Stock Market Investing Club for women.

We decided to make it women only as everyone interested was a woman and wanted to learn. There were some concerns that men might take over and inhibit those less experienced and confident to ask the dumb questions and learn.

We began by meeting at a neighbourhood house in the evening, with 10 or so women. Many of the initial women didn’t join – but we ended up with around 9 or 10 members. We agreed to set up a partnership and each contribute $100 to startup and $32 dollars per month. (The $2 was to cover the room charge.) We agreed on our investment strategy and selection criteria and began doing our research. One of our ealiest purchases was Select Harvest (SHV) which has been the dream pick of the bunch! We bought them in May 2002 for $2.65 each and they are currently trading at $14.20, and the dividends have been quite good too!

Our portfolio has performed quite well with roughly $8K profit – though that does not take into account the ones we lost a few bob on.

We have now disbanded the partnership and set up a unit trust. In hindsight – this structure is far superior… however it cost us $1300 to set up, which would have been harder at the start than it was when we already had a fair bit of cash in the bank. We still use the original agreement wording for the group – it determines the roles and rules for the group.

We now meet at each others houses – which is far more pleasant – and we go out for dinner once or twice a year – AGM and Christmas usually. We’ve had our ups and downs with lack of motivation – but it seems good at the moment. The shares are performing well – which always helps. We have increased our monthly contribution to $50 – and plan to stick it out for the next 5 or so years….. so time will tell.

If you are interested in finding out more about how we set things up and what we learned along the way – or would like a copy of our agreement I’m happy to oblige just drop me a comment and I will get back to you.

Happy stock market trading!

Photo Album Set up

I have finally gotten around to setting up my account with Flickr and loading some pics onto it.

Here are photos of the kids

Here are some photos of Bella’s reactions to allergies

I will add more as time goes on – but it takes a while to get the pictures uploaded onto the web.