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).

Futari-- pumpkin and yam stew for baby led weaning

In our final installment of Pumpkin Week, we've got another East African dish: futari. It's a wonderful stew of coconut milk, pumpkin, and yams. The pumpkin begins to fall apart and thickens the liquid a bit, while the yam retains its integrity a little better and prevents it from being entirely porridge-like. Serious comfort food! Not photogenic, however. No glamour shots this time. No photos at all, in fact: Mae took a late nap and the good light vanished before I could take a photo of her eating this. (There are leftovers; perhaps tomorrow).

There seem to be only one or two recipes for this out there on the web, and I used one of them. It does taste a lot like what I had when I visited Tanzania, so it works for me. The only change I made was to add peanut butter. The recipe I found suggests that if you don't have coconut milk, you can thin down some peanut butter with water and use that as the liquid. But seeing as I do have both, and I feel strongly that they would be yummy together, I added it in addition to the coconut milk. I was right: they are good together.  (Feel free to omit it if you want, though. I won't get mad.)

Futari

1 large onion
2 Tbs oil
2 lb peeled, chopped pumpkin
2 lb peeled, chopped yams/ sweet potatoes
2 cans coconut milk
1/2 tsp cloves
1 tsp. cinnamon
uninhibited spoonful of natural peanut butter
juice of 1 lemon
salt to taste

Heat oil in a large, deep pot. Throw your onions in and let 'em go till they're brown.  Add the cloves and cinnamon, fry briefly. Add remaining ingredients; cover and let simmer until vegetables are tender.

I think this would lend itself well to crock pot preparation, but I haven't tried it yet.

Quick Tomato Bisque recipe

I've been on a quest for the perfect tomato soup for some time now. I've been pursuing my goal in a haphazard and lazy way, admittedly, but it still counts as a quest. What I want is a soup that pairs well with a grilled cheese sandwich or saltine crackers, has the flavor of a good bistro tomato bisque, but the easy prep of a can of Campbell's.  I made fresh soups, and tried a canning recipe. They were delicious, but not quite what I wanted (particularly from the 'quick prep' angle). They weren't as smooth as I wanted, the flavors not quite as rich as I was hoping for.  In the end, the answer was far simpler than I'd imagined.  Well, sort of. Let me explain....

It started when I spied the box of paste tomatoes for canning at the farmer's market. I had gotten a food mill for Christmas, and this is what I had been waiting all year to use it for. I made some tomato sauce, canned it up, and had a little left over in the pan. So I made a sort of soup-- just threw in a little garlic powder, pepper, dried basil, and cream.  And it was goooood.  So the next week, I got me another box of paste tomatoes, and made sauce again, this time added a little garlic powder and dried basil to each jar. Voila! Perfect canned tomato soup! Just add cream upon opening.  I'm a bit embarrassed that the perfect soup turned out to be so simple. But perhaps I should have expected that.

So you can do this a couple of different ways. 1) can your own tomato soup concentrate from fresh tomatoes, like I did; 2) Make a fresh puree of tomatoes and use that to make the soup (I did this, too, and 2 lbs of tomatoes got me about 2 1/4 c. puree, which reduced to about 1 1/2 cups of soup); 3) buy a can of tomato sauce and add the spices and cream when you're ready to eat you some soup.  If you do that, just make sure it's the best quality sodium-free sauce you can find, as I suspect the success of the whole thing depends on the quality of the tomato sauce.  I also am able use my homegrown and dried basil, and home dried garlic (I love my dehydrator!), and I'm sure that helps as well. I know that's not an option for most, but just use the freshest dried ingredients you can.

Making the sauce

If you want to make the puree yourself, quarter your tomatoes and heat them in a pan. As I mentioned, 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes got me about a cup and a half of finished soup. Crush them up a bit as they come up to heat. Soon they'll get all juicy and begin to break down. Simmer them for about 10 minutes until they're all nice and soft. Then put them through a food mill or force them through a sieve. Discard the seeds and peels, and return the resulting puree to a saucepan. Simmer it for a while to thicken-- let it go until it's a little thicker than you want the resulting soup to be.  There you go. Now you have puree. On to the soup...

Quick Tomato Bisque

2c. of tomato puree (homemade or canned)
1 tsp dried powdered garlic
1 tsp crumbled dried basil
black pepper to taste
cream

Heat the puree in a pan and stir in the spices. Bring to a simmer, and stir in cream to taste. Enjoy!

Mae, looking like a little tomato vampire.

Pumpkin Soup baby led weaning recipe

Ok, generally speaking, we don't do purees. I like to let Mae feed herself, and purees are, as everyone knows, a bit on the messy side for self-feeding. But she does need spoon practice, so as often as I can bring myself to, I give her yogurt or a thick soup. We're still using the 'loaded spoon' method-- I dip the spoon and hand it to her, she navigates it into her mouth (or not), does her best with it (which may involve eating it, or turning it around and sucking on the handle), and then generally drops it onto the tray or, more likely, the floor. Then I reload, and we repeat.

Every fall I become some sort of squash-crazed lunatic and buy more winter squash than any human really needs-- I dutifully roast and puree it, and then spend the rest of the year trying to find ways to use up the quarts of puree I've stashed in the freezer. I know this is a bit early for fall pumpkin recipes, but thus is my madness revealed-- I'm currently stepping up pumpkin consumption in an effort to make room for the new batch that I'll be working on in a couple of months.

Anyhow, I started with this recipe from Epicurious. My version is a bit thicker, omits the salt and sugar, and increases the spices a bit. I like that it's not a sweet squash soup, but cheesy and savory, and easy too-- nothing needs to be sauteed. You just stir things together, add some spices, simmer, and you're done. Autumn any time of year!

Little Punkin Soup

1 cup low sodium chicken broth

1/4 cup whipping cream

1 cup pumpkin or winter squash puree

1 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp chili powder

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 cup shredded cheddar

Bring the chicken stock and cream to a boil. Whisk in the pumpkin puree and spices. Let simmer 10-15 minutes. Remove from heat. Whisk in the shredded cheddar. There you go. Slurp it down.

If desired, you can remove a portion for the baby and then add salt to the rest for the salt-loving grown-ups.