Table manners. Sort of.

1. She went through a phase a couple of months back where she tossed everything over the side if she didn't want it. I would have to try to catch it in my hand to teach her to give it to me, or to put it in the little cup holder area of her tray as a special place for undesirable morsels. It mostly worked, although stuff still goes over, particularly when she REALLY doesn't want it and is tying to be emphatic (No, Mommy, I really don't want any of the orange stuff. Really! *toss*), or when we're at a restaurant and she's all done and bored but the rest of us are still eating.

2. Spoons. No real development on this front. She's always been good with taking a loaded spoon and navigating it into her mouth if she's sufficiently interested in what's on it. Sometimes she gets too excited about having a spoon and wants to wave it about in celebratory fashion before putting it in her mouth. That doesn't work so well. Can't get her to try the whole dipping-and-scooping procedure herself, though she does like to take the handle end and bash things with it pestle-style. I think they should make a kayak-paddle type spoon with scoops at both ends.

3. Plates and bowls. I've been giving them to her with a few pieces of this and that on them, hoping that eventually the novelty will wear off and she'll get on with eating off of them. She doesn't knock them onto the floor or anything dramatic like you see in paper towel commercials, but she is far too interested in them as objects and wants to pick them up and turn them over and so on. Still working on this, in other words.

4. Forks.  Haven't tried it yet, but as soon as I see a plausible toddler fork, I'll give it a go. Why not?

5. When she's getting full and/or bored, she tends to pick up pieces of food, get them most of the way to her mouth, and then drop them in her lap. Very little ends up on the floor, lots in her lap and in the chair. And it's harder to tell when she's getting full, because stuff keeps disappearing. I keep telling her she can leave it if she doesn't want it, but I suppose that won't be a useful instruction until she can understand what I'm saying.

Still here!

Did you miss us? We're still here, still eating, if blogging (and reading blogs) a lot less frequently. I haven't quit on you! Mae is turning into a very busy little toddler. She had her first birthday recently, and has started to walk.  She's got a few words now, too-- besides some approximation of 'mama' and 'daddy', she produces 'uh-oh', and 'kitty' (pronunciation may vary, and I have a newfound respect for child language acquisition researchers who have to be able to transcribe this stuff and try to assign it a meaning). She stacks blocks, works on baby puzzles, and puts her toys through the cat door down the steps to the garage.

Foodwise, we're still going strong. She's not quite the chowhound she once was-- she balks a little at carrots, sweet potatoes, and brussels sprouts, and doesn't wolf down a peach the way she used to (maybe it's the out-of-season peaches). Doesn't care for the stewed apples of her youth, either, although she enjoys a slice of fresh apple for an afternoon snack. But she still loves avocado, peas, broccoli, meat of all sorts (still no sausage). Bread, pasta (but not soba, puzzlingly enough), beans, anything garlicky, all sorts of cheese (cheddar, blue, anything really).

My determination to keep exposing her to new foods at home has not waned, although my ability to do so has suffered what with lack of time to think of new dishes to try.  as she gets more active, she eats more, and it's all I can do to keep up with 3 meals and two snacks. Breakfast is usually one or more of the following: eggs (fried or scrambled), banana, avocado, or orange, toast, pancakes, 10-grain cereal with dried fruit, or toasted oatmeal in plain yogurt.  Lunch is leftovers from the last night's dinner, or soup. Yesterday we had roasted veggies-- sweet potatos (which she had about 2 slices of before losing interest), and roasted garlic mushrooms. She surprised me by eating mushroom after mushroom. Sometimes she hasn't the slightest interest in them, then other times...!  Just goes to show, never give up on offering certain foods. You never know when they'll develop a (perhaps temporary) enthusiasm for something.

Snacks: cheese, fresh bread or muffin if I've got it on hand, apple. Still no Goldfish! Still no Cheerios! Though I do understand others giving those out. It's hard to find neat, handy snacks that you can tote around without them going bad or stale on you.

She had a taste of pound cake at New Year's, and on her birthday, an entire mini-cupcake all to herself. Brown sugar, brown butter with orange frosting, thank you very much. Yeah, she liked it. As if there was any doubt? Got it on video, but no still photos, alas, so I can't put one up.

More on how her table manners are developing in the next post.

Food and fun

I came across an interesting article on the notion that food for kids should be different and "fun". 

"...fun food works to clearly carve out and validate the cultural category of childhood by affirming that certain foods are specifically for them, that adult fare does not fulfill children’s particular culinary needs. The culinary “need” here is not about nutrients; it is about fun. Children’s packaged supermarket foods suggest that fun is imperative to the consumption experience. Adult fare (...) bears scant resemblance to the colorful, bizarre and interactive eatertainment found in child-oriented packaged foodstuffs."  -- Charlene Elliot, "Eatertainment and the (re)classification of children's foods" Food, Culture, and Society 13:4.

In other words, the marketers are working hard to sell everyone on the idea that kids' food should be different from adult food, and that the point is entertainment rather than, oh, taste or nutrition. Elliot gives a few reasons to be concerned about this trend; I'm daunted at the task of how to teach Mae to continue to rely on her own hunger cues in the face of such advertising, marketing, and social pressures.

I've always found marketers' promises of "fun" to be often empty-- guess I have to try to help Mae notice this on her own, too, when the time comes.

What? Where did I go? Well you might ask. Just have not had time to update with recipes and photos and so on. I have been cooking, though!

Highlights include: buttermilk crackers (lightest, fluffiest crackers I've made yet, although I think Mae prefers the pumpkin ones), chili, a shepard's pie with leftover pork loin, mushroom gravy, and a mashed roasted yam and pumpkin topping.  Gosh, that was good.  Due to Halloween, which marks the onset of my annual empty-calorie food-preparation extravaganza, aka the holiday season, I've also been busy making all sorts of things I can't share with Mae: marshmallows, caramels, butter 'mints' (not minty). 

I need to get back into my recipe posting groove. I'm not quite there yet, I'm afraid. We're hosting Thanksgiving this year, though, so I promise yumminess before then.

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.

Bacon and cheddar butternut gratin recipe for baby led weaning

Ok, we're venturing a bit further from pumpkin proper here, but any good winter squash or nice fresh sliced pumpkin would work in this.  I use butternut because it's so easy to peel (and yummy).  Just as any vegetable is good roasted, I'd also contend that almost any vegetable is good slathered in cream, surrounded in cheese and, if possible, bacon, then baked.  (Maybe I should try that with beets, but they might prove the exception and just be a waste of good cheese.)(Can't risk wasting cheese).

Bacon and cheddar butternut gratin

2 strips bacon, chopped
1 2lb butternut squash, peeled, seeded, sliced into 1/4 inch thick slices
1/2 c. whipping cream
4 oz. sharp white cheddar, cubed
1/2 c. grated parmesan

Grease up a large casserole dish (the shallow rectangular kind). Preheat oven to 400.  Fry up the bacon, drain on paper towels once it's nice and crispy. In the casserole, array half of the squash slices.  Scatter the cubed cheddar over it. Cover with the remaining squash slices, douse them liberally in the cream, sprinkle the bacon and parmesan over and finish it with some freshly grated black pepper. Bake for 30 minutes until it's all brown and bubbly and irresistable.

The quantities of all the ingredients are highly adjustable-- more or less of anything. To tell the truth, I never measure with this one.   

Cuminseed, Poppy, and Coriander Pumpkin Crackers

 Now 9 months old, Mae is getting much better at eating crackers! It's funny, she's been eating solid foods for three months now, so I shouldn't be surprised that she's making progress-- but since she doesn't have any teeth, I guess I wasn't expecting a huge change in how well she eats certain foods until she sprouted some more chompers. But she still just has the two, and yet is getting better at eating.  She now has the technique down for sucking on these crispy crackers until they are moist enough to break up and swallow.  It takes her a little while, but she perseveres (and it keeps her out of trouble for a few minutes).

These pumpkin crackers don't taste all that pumpkiny-- just a little.  I used banana squash puree; perhaps canned pumpkin puree would give a stronger flavor. In any case, they're a good backdrop for a number of flavors, from sweet pumpkin spices to more the savory.  I chose to go with the savory-- coriander, poppyseed, and cuminseed. Their lovely golden color is a bonus-- I think I know what I'll use when it's time to finally unleash my faux-Goldfish crackers.

Pumpkin Crackers

2 c. whole wheat pastry flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 c. butter

1 c. winter squash or pumpkin puree

cumin seeds

poppy seeds

ground coriander

Preheat oven to 375.  In a bowl, mix together the flour and baking powder.  Cut in the butter with a pastry blender or with your fingers-- you want small pieces, no larger than peas.  Mix in the pumpkin.  Start the process with a spoon, but finish by kneading it in gently with your hands, as the pumpkin needs to get squooshed around to mix in properly-- don't overwork the dough!  Mix until just combined-- it'll be the consistency of a medium-stiff cookie dough. (Note: I used fresh squash puree, so it was a bit wetter than canned pumpkin. Add a little milk if you have difficulty incorporating all of the flour into the dough).  Divide in half, and form each half into a flattened disk.  If you're confident that you didn't overmix, you can roll it out right away-- otherwise, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least a half hour just to be on the safe side.  Generously flour a baking parchment or a silpat, and roll out one of the disks as thinly as you can-- 1/16th of an inch of possible, and no more than 1/8 of an inch. Sprinkle the dough with ground coriander, poppyseeds, and cumin seeds-- roll over them gently with the rolling pin to get them to stick. Cut the dough into rectangles using a pizza cutter or, if you're feeling fancy, deploy thematically appropriate cookie cutters (I wouldn't try removing the extra dough from around the shapes, as it's a bit delicate-- leave them in situ and pop them out once they're baked).

                                                                        Just before baking.

Bake for 12-15 minutes.  The trickiest part of this is getting them done just right-- underdone and they're a bit chewey and relatively tough; overdone and they're, well, burnt. I usually take them out at 12 minutes, remove the crackers from the edges that are starting to brown, and return the rest to the oven for 2 minutes, let them brown a bit, repeat the procedure until all of the ones in the center are done properly.  Break them apart once they're cool.  Repeat the procedure with the second disk of dough. Devour.

                                               

Variation: Instead of the seeds, add 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp ginger into the flour mixture. 

Rubbed sage or curry might also be nice mixed into the dough, but I haven't tried them yet. If you do it, let me know how it turns out!