The Breakfast Club March 2012 - Deliciously Dairy Free

"Breakfast Club: Because breakfast should be more interesting than tea & toast or coffee & cereal!"

Hello lovely bloggers and blog readers alike, and welcome to the March 2012 Breakfast Club Challenge.
The Breakfast Club event is the brainchild of Helen at Fuss Free Flavours, and it encourages us to get creative in the kitchen and turn our attention to that often overlooked meal - breakfast. I have the pleasure of being the March host, and my chosen theme is Deliciously Dairy Free.

Now I have a mental image at the moment of everyone reading this getting ready to hit the 'close tab' button, shutting down their browsers, and generally feeling the need to escape before I get all evangelical about soya milk. Well stop, and fear not! I hate the stuff.

Just take a moment to read a bit further, and hopefully you'll be back to feeling as enthused about the challenge as you were when you first clicked over here...

So why dairy free? To explain briefly, I need to skip back in time to July 2010, in which Mini-M, the little chaos pixie popped was dragged kicking and screaming into the world. Shortly after that we discovered that part of the reason she was sooooooo grumpy was due to discomfort caused by dairy intolerance, so she (and me by association) started a very strict no-dairy diet. That means no milk, butter, cream, chocolate, or anything with whey or lactose in it. Once you start looking into it, that's quite a lot of things! I'm gradually phasing dairy back into my diet, and hopefully we'll get there one day too with Mini-M - apparently lots of intolerant kids grow out of it.

No chocolate. Sad face. (Picture from wildlife online.me.uk - apparently it's bad for foxes too!)

In the meantime, I thought I'd inflict the non-dairy inconvenience on blog-land for a month. Mwah hah hah ha (evil laugh - not sure how to write it!).

Actually that's not at all true. I've chosen Deliciously Dairy Free as the Breakfast Club theme this month because being forced into avoiding so many kitchen staples has improved my cooking skills hugely. It's made me discover ingredients that I never knew existed - some of which I love (like oat milk and almond milk) others which I hate with a passion (like soya cheese!). But more importantly it's made me start to really understand cooking; in order to successfully substitute ingredients you need to think about what job they're doing in a recipe - are they there to bind, to flavour, to bulk out etc etc. And it's that experimentation and thinking outside the box that I'm encouraging you all to dabble in.

The Rules

• Use your culinary wizardry to rustle up a Deliciously Dairy Free breakfast dish. 
• Milk, Cream, Cheese, and Butter, or products containing them are off the menu for March, but anything else is fair game.
• I'll leave it up to you whether you want to find a recipe that is dairy free to begin with, or whether you fancy the challenge of de-dairifying a classic - (Dairy Free Eggs Benedict anyone!?!).
• It can be sweet, savoury, hot, cold, the breakfast table is your oyster.
• You must include links to this Makey-Cakey post, and Helen's Fuss Free Flavours Breakfast Club page.
• You must also include the breakfast club logo (which is at the top of this post)
• Entries can be sent to other events as well as the Breakfast Club
• Previously posted recipes are fine, but please re-post them with the links and logo included
• If you're on Twitter, then please use #blogbreakfastclub and tweet your entry.
• Closing date is the 31st March, and a roundup will go up here soon after.
• Once you've posted, use the linky tool below to add your submission, or alternatively email the link.

Have fun! And if anyone would like and dairy free substitution advice, then just leave a comment with your query, and I'll do my best to answer.

Well I've written quite enough for one post - so my submission will have to wait... but here's a sneak preview... any guesses?