Summer Recipes for Baby

Do you have lots of summer produce? Wondering what to make for baby? Here are a couple of ideas that have worked successfully for us:

· Sautee beet greens with olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper and a little red pepper. Boil and peel the beets. Then blend the beets and the greens together

· Blended cantaloupe and blueberries

· Blueberries, peaches and strawberries blended together. If you freeze the extras, you’ll have an easy dessert on hand.

· Squash with sweet potatoes and fresh basil

· Broccoli with lemon pepper. If baby isn’t too excited by this, mixing with carrots or sweet potatoes should help.

· Carrots with ginger

· Blueberries with peach and strawberries

· Cantaloupe with blueberries

This one doesn’t come from local produce, but we copied the idea from a friend and both of our babies love it:
Avocado with banana

As for meat (chicken and beef) we’re finding it works better in small quantities (such as a casserole with some chicken in it) rather than trying to blend up chicken with something else. The texture is too stringy if it’s largely meat.

The Selection Expands

More surprises were in store for me at our farm pick-up this week. As the variety expands, it becomes even more fun to figure out what to do with the various veggies. This week we received:
· Salad mix. So smooth and sweet I could snack on it raw.

· Arugula. The flavor was distinctively more bitter than in the past, perhaps because it’s nearing the end of its season. It was too bitter for me to use in salads, so I’ll be making another batch of arugula pesto, throwing in the bunch of basil as well. I used some arugula pesto the other day, tossing it with whole wheat garlic fettucine, a bit of spaghetti sauce, some grated parmesan and fresh basil – yum!

· A bunch of basil

· Summer squash – boiled and blended with fresh basil to baby’s delight

· Cabbage. Baked in sweet and sour cabbage. This recipe wasn’t especially tasty, but the baking shrinks the cabbage and makes it easy to take in a lot of vitamins in a small side serving. We blended the sweet and sour cabbage for baby as well. Tonight I plan to make rustic cabbage soup. (postnote – it was delicious! Check out the recipe).

· Beets. My favorites. Currently, I’m eating them all in salad with goat cheese, pecans and dried berries. If I wasn’t, I’m sure baby would be happy to get his hands on some.

· Swiss chard. I figured out that sautéing the leaves with olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes (the same way I prepare beet greens) is an easy and fairly tasty side dish. I still like the beet greens better.

· Small red potatoes

I could also pick a bunch of flowers and a few herbs. I repeated making a batch of
homemade herbal tea, pouring two kettles of boiling water over a bunch of lemon verbena, a bunch of mountain mint and a bunch of peppermint. The tastes came through clearly. Chilled in the fridge, it made a wonderful, refreshing drink for a hot summer day.