Good recipe

Yay! I finally made something that used my abundance of produce and turned out well. This borsht recipe is great. It uses in-season tomatoes (I substituted fresh for canned), onions, beets, pepper and carrots, has some meat (which I’ve been lacking lately in the attempt to use my veggies) and a great taste. I’ll be pureeing some of this for baby, who could also use the meat and will hopefully appreciate a different soup on the menu!

Drowning in Vegetables

I am so drowning in vegetables that I don’t know what to do. I made a giant pot of minestrone. It didn’t turn out as well as I’d like. But it’s chock full of vegetables and nutrients, so would make good baby food. I blended up a bunch last night and filled THIRTEEN 8-ounce bottles with soup to freeze. And I STILL have a bunch in the fridge. I sure hope River likes it because he is going to be eating minestrone very frequently in the coming days and weeks.

Even after the minestrone, I have a bunch of vegetables I need to use quickly and the freezer is beginning to overflow. Ratatouille is next on the menu. Help!!!

An Easy Guide to Homemade Baby Food

If you prefer to feed your baby fresh food but are concerned it will be a lot of work, here are a few tips to make it easy.

1. Get yourself a few silicone ice cube trays and silicone muffin pans. The silicone makes the food very easy to remove. The ice cube tray is a good portion size early on (and makes it easy to mix – ie. 5 cubes of sweet potatoes with 3 cubes of green beans to sneak in the greens) and then the muffin size becomes a better portion later. The muffin pans are also great when blending up entrees. You’ll have a bunch of complete meals on hand for baby. You can get these on ebay, in local kitchen stores, or in department stores, Target, etc.

2. Get yourself a small food processor or blender

3. Have a box of large zip-locs on hand.

If you have the three things above, you are ready.

Start out with individual vegetables or fruits. We always added a spice (carrots with ginger, sweet potatoes with cinnamon, green beans with basil, broccoli with lemon pepper etc.) so that baby would get used to a variety of flavors.

To make your first batch, peel the vegetable, boil until it’s soft, blend or puree and add spice (if desired). Fill the silicone tray and put the tray into a Ziploc bag. Close tightly. When the cubes are frozen, press them out into the Zip-loc. Remove air from Zip-loc and close tightly. The cubes don’t take up much space in the freezer and you can remove as needed. This method avoids the problem of freezer burn.

It’s easiest to do this in quantity. It takes the same amount of work to boil and blend five sweet potatoes as it does to do one, but five will last a lot longer. We found that making food 2-3 times a week (a different vegetable each time) was sufficient in the first month or two.

Blending the cubes as the baby is ready is a good way to introduce mixtures. They are also helpful in getting baby accustomed to tastes that aren’t a hit right off the bat. For us, green beans didn’t go over so well. So our babysitter found that River liked them if she mixed 5 sweet potato cubes to three green beans cubes. Each day she reduced it, 4 to 3, 3 to 3, until he was able to eat green beans.

Just over a month into solids, we realized our baby was eating everything with gusto and we stopped being so methodical about introducing one thing per day. We began to give him whatever we were eating, though we avoid giving him sugars and white carbohydrates.

I made a soup with turkey, black-eyed peas and collard greens. Before adding the salt, I blended up a portion, put it into bottles in the freezer, and we had several meals on hand. If the soups needs thickening, we add baby cereal. We’ve given him a kale, chicken, tomato and corn tortilla casserole blended into muffin-size portions, wheat pasta with pesto, a squash and corn soup, a rustic cabbage soup. We blend fresh fruit with tofu for dessert.

I don’t know whether it’s genetics or early encouragement to try a wide variety of foods, but River will eat anything – including lemons and spring onions. Since daddy is a very picky eater we’ve been especially diligent about trying to help him develop a taste for healthy foods.

The combination of preparing staples to freeze 2-3 times a week and blending up whatever I’m eating as additional meals during the week hasn’t been too onerous. It probably would be a bit easier to feed him organic baby food from jars. But he wouldn’t get the spices, the variety, and the exposure to the typical foods that I eat on a daily basis and that I’d expect him to eat eventually. It’s been easy to get him used to those foods early on so that we eat together from the beginning (I’m hoping to avoid making separate kid meals). And since my husband usually isn’t interested in the healthy things I prepare, it’s been wonderful to be able to share them with a baby!

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.

Another Week of Vegetables

As the harvest season progresses, the weekly farm pick-ups become increasingly more fun.

This week cabbage and fresh basil was added to the assortment. I collected the usual salad mix, arugula, swiss chard, Russian kale, beets, and giant lettuce. I got to pick the last remnants of peas off the vines as well as flowers. Best of all, the herb garden was ready for use. I walked alongside rows of two types of mint, oregano, chives, lavender, thyme and lemon verbena, free to cut whatever I’d use during the week.

With a greater variety of veggies came more variety in dishes. I made an herbal tea by boiling one bunch of mint with a bunch of lemon verbena. I used ½ pound of arugula in a pasta recipe provided by the farm. With the peas I made a mint-pea hummus, wonderful with whole wheat pita wedges and fresh veggies (the recipe is in the Oprah Cookbook).

I told an employee of the farm how wonderful it is that River began eating just as the local soil began to reveal its treasures. As a result, he’s including sautéed beet greens, turnips, beets, collard greens, broccoli and kale in his very first tastes and is accepting them all well. She told me it’s only a few more weeks until the early tomatoes are ready. I can’t wait!

Visit to the Farm

This evening my visit to the farm was a smorgasboard. I filled a bag with arugula, salad mix, a pound of the spindly but fresh broccoli. There was a sign near the broccoli saying that they had cabbage worms. They farm had tried to wash them off, but warned people to be careful when washing. Moving on to the next table, I picked up a bunch of turnips, two of the delicious beets, rainbow swiss chard with bright yellow stems, a head each of escarole and lettuce.

Then it was on to the pick-your-own options, the first time I was able to do that. I got to pick one box full of fresh peas and 10 stalks of black-eyed susan flowers. I walked amidst the rows of peas, immersed in the wild growth of the plants, the little white flowers and the long, green peas that occasionally appeared like a half moon in the evening sky. I snacked as I walked, enjoying the crunchy sweetness of vegetables right off the vine as I breathed in the scent of compost and thick vegetation.

Then I strolled alongside the patch of black eyed susans. Some of them opened with confidence, like suns with a black fireball at the center. Others still had their petals wrapped up, hesitantly beginning the process of unfolding. I gathered a bunch to place on the table at home, bringing the colors of sun into our house even after it has set.

I’m really going to have to ramp up my consumption of salads this week. I’ve been eating one a day, but it looks like I’ll have to go to two. I’ll also have to decide what to do with the broccoli and the swiss chard. I’m considered a chicken and swiss chard enchilada recipe I came across. And maybe some broccoli soup or chicken broccoli stirfry.