Recipe Monday #2

Okay, it's the first Monday of the month so that means it's time for another easy, kid-friendly recipe. If you read through this recipe you'll see I'm no Julia Child, but my 14-month old is eats a fair amount of my food before relegating it to the floor. Obviously, I haven't concocted something worthy of a sit-down dinner party, but to a small child, this little ditty contains a fair spectrum of nutritional needs and only takes a half hour to prepare. It makes 2-3 kid-sized servings.

Canadian Bacon with cheesy vegetables

Two rounds of Canadian Bacon
1 cup of carrots, peeled and sliced
1/3 cup of broccoli florets (I get a big package of frozen broccoli)
1/4 cup of milk
1 tablespoon of shredded mild cheddar or mozzarella cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Cook the bacon to your liking. Since Eliza still doesn't have a lot of teeth, I cook the bacon over a low flame in canola oil for about 20 minutes to keep it soft. Then I drain it on a paper towel. Meanwhile, steam the carrots and broccoli until they're soft.

Cut the bacon into pieces small enough for your child to chew, then cook the pieces in the milk over a low flame. After about two minutes, stir in the vegetables and cook for another two minutes. Then turn off the stove and add the cheese. Stir it into the mix until melted and serve.

I've found that adding a little bit of milk and cheese is a great way to get vegetables and protein into Eliza. Let me know how this recipe works for you.

First Recipe Monday

Okay, so I'll admit when I worked I often longed for a life as a happy Mom whose main responsibility for the day was what to cook for dinner. I like to cook, I'm good at it and boy do I like to eat what I cook. The fact that my daughter enjoys a good deal of what I cook is added incentive to keep at it.

That's not to say that I haven't come close to setting the apartment on fire a few times. And one night C rescued me as I sat on the floor in front of the open refrigerator crying because I had no idea what to serve Eliza for dinner and it was already past her dinnertime. He quickly picked up a precooked rotisserie chicken and a ripe avocado. Often dinner can be as simple as that.

I hope a bevy of sophisticated, experienced Moms won't find my recipe for chicken soup insulting. We all know how to make chicken soup, right. That's the beauty of chicken soup, we make it the way we like it. But for the woman out there who really isn't that interested in cooking and would like a few guidelines before she goes off into the world of chicken soup cooking, this day's entry is for you.

Billy's Favorite Cookies

Here's my contribution to the virtual cookie exchange. This is my mother's recipe; Billy's my older brother. These are not only his favorites, but mine as well. Mom only makes them once a year.

1/2 cup Crisco
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1 1/2 cups of flour
your favorite fruit preserves or jelly

Preheat oven to 300

Mix ingredients together (except the jelly) and form a ball. Then drop by teaspoonfulls onto greased cookie sheets. Put small finger indenture on each cookie and spoon a cherry-sized drop of jelly onto each cookie. Bake 10 to 12 minutes. Do NOT overcook.

My brother is autistic and 30 years ago my mother included this recipe in the cookbook she did to raise money for his school. This cookbook has been a bible of mine since I left home.

Oats

Eliza has taken to eating her oatmeal with her hands. While I'm all four unassisted eating, the clean-up has become epic. I make the oatmeal thicker, to make it more hand-mouth friendly, but this new consistency turns generic oats into something like Crazy glue.

I spend a half hour cleaning up the booster chair. Dustbuster, wet rags, paper towel after paper towel and I still find oats stuck to the side of the chair at dinner time. For some absolutely ridiculous reason, my booster chair has two indentations where the seat belt straps are so food falls down into these two ice-cube-sized crevices never to return to this world again. No amount of vacuuming or wiping can rid this chair of its oats. I do wonder why one would add these two food sucking indentations into a chair where a baby eats and then I realize; whoever designed these chairs clearly hates children.

I get down on all fours and scrub my now gluestick floor. I wipe, I vacuum, I pick up oat flakes one at a time.

I just switched the laundry from washer to dryer and found several stray oats on Eliza's pajamas, my daily sweatjacket that I swath on like a security blanket, and Eliza's green velvet party dress. Again, the rinsing and soaking of clothing before it hits the washer is apparently no match for this super glue. I hate to think what I'll find when I wash my hair.

The good thing about all this is I'm getting milk into my daughter's body. Basically, she's refusing to drink it. I might get her to take two ounces a day from a bottle, if I'm lucky.

On a side note, I've added my name to the list of people participating in the virual cookie extravanganza next Monday. Click in on Monday to find Billy's (my older brother) favorite cookies. It's my Mom's recipe. When it comes to cookies, there's no one like Mom.

Ice Cream!!!

I caved and allowed Eliza her first taste of ice cream yesterday. It was such a beautiful day and after an hour spent at the indoor playspace, I wanted to do something a little festive. So on the way home I stopped by Chelsea Market to get a little ice cream for myself.

I got myself a small cup of Mexican chocolate and sample size of blood orange for Eliza. She mowed through the sample in a matter of seconds, pointed to my chocolate ice cream and screamed.

I wanted to hold off on the rich chocolate, especially this version that comes with a healthy kick of hot pepper flavoring. But as Eliza's screeches echoed through the indoor market, I figured, we'd just see what happened. I gave her small spoonfulls and administered them slowly, hoping to instill in her the satisfaction of savoring. I guess 11 months is a little too early to expect her to understand that she should enjoy the ice cream, not just wolf it down. With chocolate all over her face, she pointed to the cup in between bites and screamed. She screamed when I took a bite, as soon as she'd had some, when I held up the empty cup.

I'm definitely seeing Eliza's personality emerge. She's willful, headstrong and extremely impatient. I've noticed as soon as she sees her Elmo bowl she starts screeching. She doesn't understand that Mama is preparing the food, that Mama has to get the food on the table. She sees her bowl and she wants food and she wants it NOW. No matter how calmly I talk to her about patience and Mama's working hard to prepare her dinner, the screaming continues often until after the food hits her mouth. I can't say her reaction to ice cream was much bigger than that to her favorite fish stew.

Last night, she had terrible gas. It didn't bother her but I felt several explosion-sized toots as Eliza and I enjoyed our pre-dinner dance party. Now all that's really left for her to try is cow's milk, tomato sauce (not served together), lobster and her first taste of cake.

Stew on her face

After chopping vegetables, stirring the cheese sauce and frying fish for over an hour to create stew, there isn't a more satisfying sight than my daughter with both two hands scooping the bowl in a rush to get fish stew into her mouth. Like a crane, she dug into the bowl and smacked her starfish hands over her open mouth. When I removed the booster chair tray to lift her out, she noticed stew on her lap and excited, slopped the rest into her mouth. She even let me feed her a second helping with the spoon. She's not so into the spoon these days as she continues her quest for independent eating.

I have to say I'm loving this cookbook entitled "First Meals" by Annabel Karmel. I'm trying not to plug items here because I'm not quite sure of the etiquette but this cookbook is taking me out of my brand-endorsing hibernation. I've only made tried two of the book's recipes so far but both were good enough for me to eat alongside my daughter.

I'm working tomorrow so I hope Eliza will enjoy the leftovers as much as she enjoyed the first round. I'm going to make another serving of the stew because I accidentally bought too much fish and I don't want it to go to waste.

Good food, happy baby, big mess. What to do? Eliza hates the dustbuster so I use it sparingly when she's around. Now she's in her crib and I don't want to wake her for the night. So here I type, still needing to fix stew and other meals for tomorrow, pack up my work kit and clean up tonight's mess. Here's to procrastinating.

Sunday

Since I'm working on a Nickelodeon show tomorrow for the day, today's my day to cook. Although it's just one day of work, I want to make sure my babysitter can just pop stuff in the microwave and in ten seconds provide my daughter with a nutritious meal. Let's hope I don't burn the house down in the meantime.

I have to hit the grocery store but after that, here's the menu I have planned. I'll make some sweet potato fries today (not so great as a leftover for lunch tomorrow but Eliza enjoys their handy portability), some kind of chicken in broth so it's soft and a lentil stew (new recipe) for dinner tomorrow night. So after Kim (babysitter) feeds Eliza her cereal breakfast, she'll then feed her leftover peas, sweet potato fries and chicken in broth for lunch. For dinner, C, a strict vegetarian, can enjoy the lentil stew with Eliza.

This'll be her first bean eating experience. If it doesn't go well, I'll suggest C give Eliza eggs scrambled with a little bit of cream cheese and water. Plus she'll have melon, bananas and whatever fruit looks good at the store today as snacks throughout the day.

On Tuesday, I'll make my mother's meatloaf, which went over very well with Eliza, as well as mashed potatoes. I hope she starts to favor avocado more because it'll be so easy to serve her lunch made of mashed avocado and steamed vegetables.

Tonight, I want to bake some squash with tomatoes and pine nuts. Eliza can have nuts yet but she loves squash and I'll offer it up with some kind of fish and maybe some fresh sugar snap peas. I'm so lucky my daughter seems willing to eat most things. However, I did try real oatmeal today and she threw the spoon, dipped her hand in the bowl and rubbed oatmeal all over her face and head. As I bathed the oats out of her hair, I wondered, at ten months is my daughter already savvy to the facial cleansing benefits of a good oatmeal scrub?

Cooking with Gas

Since Eliza seems more interested in table food these days, this week I embarked on a quest to master the art of baby-friendly cooking. I purchased one of those cookbooks aimed towards nutrition-obsessed mothers but found most of the recipes were a little too complicated and called for leeks. As onions cause me a great deal of heartburn, I'm not in a rush to introduce my daughter to this flavorful bulb of esophagel distress.

So I'm making my own, very plain recipes. Earlier this week, we discovered Eliza really likes meatballs or at least my Aunt Carmie's meatballs. My aunt's grandchildren have various allergies so Aunt Carmie's meatballs consist of nothing more than ground meat and parsely. I concocted my own similar recipe with fresh parsely, egg yolks and organic ground sirloin. Going back to my heartburn problem, I'm determined to wait until Eliza's a year old before I introduce her to citrus. Therefore, I opted not to cook my meatballs in tomato sauce. Instead I lined a cookie sheet with canola oil and added the meatballs for an oven bake. The problem with the sauce-free oil-and-bake method is the meatballs were too dense, not flakey enough. So while I fed them to Eliza she made gagging sounds that scared me enough to add pureed carrots to my meat mixture. Unfortunately, this meat-and-carrots souffle didn't stave off the scary sound of one child gagging.

Sworn off meat for now, last night I decided to feed Eliza some steamed carrots and potatoes. After I'd boiled the water and added the carrots and small, red-skin potatoes, I kept wondering why I smelled plastic burning. Eliza enjoyed watching my kitchen antics the way some people devour 4th of July fireworks so I had to close the kitchen doors to prevent her from crawling under this huge pot of boiling water. She seemed content to toss around the paper recycling while I looked for the source of the toxic stink. Then I realized a skillet's handle was too close to my boiling pot (I've got one of those space-saving stoves with very chummy burners) and quickly turned off my boiling food. I breathed deeply, terrified that my stupidity could have set my apartment on fire. Grabbing oven mits, I moved the skillet but couldn't get the burner under the boiling water to light. I had to move the pots and the tea kettle (we never use it) on the stove to get my veggies over the one little burner that could.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, yes, I use my stove more as a storage space for pots than as a working, functioning kitchen appliance. Eliza's sudden, voluptuous wail indicated she wanted food now. The carrots and potatoes were still as firm as Pam Anderson's boobs so I quickly cut open an avocado and sat her down in the booster chair. For the next ten minutes, I'd spoon in avocado, watch her move it around her mouth (I can't leave a baby alone with food in her mouth!) run into the kitchen to check the veggies, then rush back into the living/dining/den to feed her another spoonful.

The carrots softened first and quickly I lifted them into a bowl. Eliza screamed from the next room. I placated her with more avocado as I waited for the carrots to cool. While I cut the carrot into tiny, tiny pieces, I kept hearing crackling sounds come from the kitchen. With the potatoes still on the stove, I repeatedly ran into check that I wasn't, in fact, burning down the house. Coming in to find the water spilling over and the flame under the pot growing to Vesuvius-like proportions, I turned off the stove, hoping the potatoes would continue to steam in the pot.

It took a while for the potatoes to cool to baby-friendly temperatures but on the plus side, Eliza did seem to enjoy half of a skinless potato. There is something supremely satisfying about serving my daughter food that I cook. I just have to figure out how to do it without all the drama, fire risk and the industrial smell of burning plastic.

Tonight's Menu

Forgive me for writing about something as banal as tonight's dinner but I'm so excited to be venturing away from the world of jarred baby food this evening. I'm going to make a crock pot bean stew for C and myself with a salad of vegetables and cut up soft tofu. For Eliza, I'll mash up some of the soft tofu and avocado so she'll have the opportunity to actually join us for dinner.

I've noticed lately that the candy bar or sandwich I'm eating is far more interesting to her than the umpteenth serving of pureed peas. She prefers playing with the spoon and mixing the pretty colors of sweet potatos and green beans on her booster chair tray to swalling yet another cube of baby mush. At a restaurant on the Italian Riviera, Eliza swiped a piece of bread from my hand and jammed it into her mouth. I realized then we were moving into new territory and that I'd have to step up as not only the primary caregiver but family cook as well.

C is a vegetarian and when you live with some one who won't eat the roast you threw in the oven, dinner becomes something of a challenge. Because I don't believe in limiting a baby's diet based on your own beliefs, I was relieved when he agreed to allow me to serve Eliza meat. So far Eliza has already enjoyed chicken but since I eat and actually like tofu, I'm happy to offer her the soy staple alternative.

My mother said that as babies, my brother and I both enjoyed meatballs. Perhaps Eliza will allow me enough time next week to make our family meatball recipe. I can't wait to share some of our family dishes with our daughter. I hope she's ready!

It Tastes Like Burning

Okay so I'm going to try to come out of the starting gate with as much gusto as possible. I'm a not so new Mama, considering that my little darling daughter Eliza recently passed the eight month mark despite the fact that she has yet to sprout teeth.

The toothless thing provides a bit of a dilemma as far as the three feeds a day go. One one hand, as I'm still nursing, the idea of a bite free breastfeed makes me feel as I've escaped a minimal maiming or at least a blood draw from a bad nurse. However, as Eliza has officially plowed her way through all the pureed food Earth's Best and my blender have to offer I really have no idea what to feed my toothless little Joe. The idea of meat so pureed you can eat it through a straw is unappealing, melon still seems too threatening a choking hazard and teething biscuits, something that looks like it could keep her occupied for hours, are out of the question.

Having just returned from a two week vacation in Italy, I can say their views on baby food very different from ours. As I stood in the grocery stores of Rome, Florence and Santa Margherita Ligure, I couldn't understand the words but the little drawings on the jar let me know this was bunny, this was cow, this was some kind of fish. Being that Vitello is one Italian word I recognize, I knew I was looking at jar for a four month old of veal. Here in the States, meat doesn't start until later so for two weeks in Italy, Eliza existed on pears, apples, carrots and yogurt, lots of yogurt.

This morning as I surveyes the same jars at Whole Foods I wondered why I didn't open my mind up a little more to the prospect of starting Eliza on a little pureed meat. The only offering of pureed meat here is a little chicken, a little beef soup. For the budding carnivore, the pickings are pretty slim. I was afraid to experiment in a foreign country away from our pediatrician and the safety of our diaper pail. But if Eliza's big brother could be brave and drink wine a few nights even though he described it by saying "It tastes like burning," perhaps I should have chosen some experimentation of my own. After all, what happens in Rome, stays in Rome, right?

Any suggestions on what to feed a toothless little crawler, I'll welcome them here. Meanwhile, perhaps I'll do some research and get back to you on what to feed the older eater with no teeth.