Sweet potato coconut muffins (gluten-free, dairy-free)

When I decided to focus on the Dominican Republic this weekend, I was attracted by a recipe for a recipe for pan de batata from the excellent Aunt Clara’s Kitchen Dominican cooking blog. It looked to be naturally gluten-free and probably tasty. However, it looked more like pudding than bread (“pan” means bread) or cake, and other pan de batata recipes I saw on other sites confirmed this. I didn’t want pudding. I wanted muffins. Partly because they freeze well and go nicely into lunchboxes. Partly because, well, I just like muffins.

In addition to the aforementioned pan de batata recipe, I found a couple of gluten-free sweet potato muffin recipes that sounded good, one at The Roasted Root and one at Meg’s Vegucation, but neither of these seemed 100 per cent perfect to me, though the Roasted Root one ended up being my rough template. It’s true – although I was going to be baking with the notoriously difficult coconut flour for the first time, I couldn’t resist experimenting a little.

Chicken with wasakaka

Our whole family loves roasted chicken and we also love fun words, so when I was researching our Dominican Republic weekend and I saw a recipe for pollo con wasakaka, or roasted chicken with garlic sauce, it was hard to go past. Unfortunately, garlic is high in FODMAPs, so I knew I was going to have to come up with an alternative. I’m a little ashamed to admit just how easy it was.

Dominican Republic – Children’s activities

The Dominican Republic celebrates its Independence Day on February 27th, and I figured this was as good a reason as any to designate this weekend Dominican Republic weekend. Besides, after all the rain we’ve had this winter, we needed a dose of the tropics. I figured there was no better way to start than with a little tropical music and dance.

Merengue is the dance of the Dominican Republic and, handily, it’s probably the easiest of the Latin dances. I’m no expert dancer but I figured even I might be able to teach my four-year-old the basics of merengue.