Thursday, March 24, 2011

14 month food update

Fork use is proceeding apace. There was an unfortunate incident in the first couple of days where she was all excited and showing off at a restaurant and nearly stabbed herself in the eye, but other than that, she's getting the hang of it.

No new recipes of my own at this point, but this lentil soup from 101Cookbooks was a huge hit with everyone, including Mae. It's the best lentil soup I've ever had-- usually lentil soup makes me feel at best virtuous and satisfied, but this one actually manages to seem indulgent. Without actually being so. Amazing. Go try it. (Browned butter, I'm telling you! Browned butter.)

Also made Ma Po Tofu last night. I was worried it would be a little too spicy for her, but she tucked into it, yogurt on the side just in case she needed a cool down. Even ate some of the tofu, which she has so far mostly given a pass despite its surface resemblance to cheese. She is not to be fooled.

In the last couple of months we've discovered Trader Joe's freeze dried fruit, it's our go-to portable snack now. In order of preference: strawberries, banana, mango. Blueberries were briefly a hit, but now get set out onto the floor. If we go to the park (which we have every day for a week or so, until today when the temperature cruelly plummeted again), snacks are a must, otherwise she starts trying to confiscate other people's snacks.

Now that she's a bit older, I don't feel the need to be quite so strict about her sodium intake. Sugars I still try to avoid, though I do share anything I've got so she doesn't feel excluded. I'm not quite sure yet what the right approach to take is with sweets. On one hand, I don't want it to seem special or like a "treat" (which implies that there's something wrong with the other food she usually gets), yet I do want it to be enjoyed infrequently and in moderation. I guess maybe those aren't really at cross-purposes-- after all, I enjoy, say, Thai food infrequently and in moderation, but that doesn't make it A Big Treat. Not like cupcakes. Sweets occupy a certain place in landscape of desire, and I'd like them to have a different role in hers-- but I'm so bound by the way the system works for me that it's hard to imagine it really going any other way.

But what I was going to say was that now that the sodium thing isn't such a big deal, I'm going to frame my preferences for her in terms of avoiding processed food. And if you do that, the sodium and the sugar tend to be minimized automatically.

She's waking up from a nap now, more on this later (maybe).

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