Another family recipe: lentil pasta

We had a great dinner tonight. This recipe is good for babies that want to be able to enjoy dinnertime with everybody else and eat a little finger food.

Lentil Pasta

1/2 lb uncooked rotini or penne pasta (we didn't have this much, so made a little penne for Thomas and spaghetti for Matt & I)
3/4 c lentils
6 cloves fresh garlic, divided
2 carrots, sliced thin
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp dried basil (fresh if you've got it)
1 Tbsp dried minced onion (ditto)
1 Tbsp butter
1 can diced tomatoes
olive oil
8 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 bunch green onions, cut the whitish part up
2 Tbsp wine

1. Put the lentils in a pot with 3 c water and bring to a boil. Add the carrots, 4 cloves garlic, the bay leaves, basil, onion, butter, and tomatoes and boil uncovered for 20-30 min, until the lentils are soft.
2. While the lentils are boiling, start water for the pasta.
3. Slice or mince the last two cloves of garlic. Saute the mushrooms and green onions in a little olive oil with the garlic until the mushrooms start to brown. Add the wine and stir until the wine is mostly evaporated, then turn off the heat on the mushrooms.
4. When the lentils are soft, put the pasta in to boil according to package directions. Put the lentil mixture in the blender and blend until smooth.
5. Cool a tablespoon or two of the lentil mixture, and put it on baby's tray. Put a few pieces of pasta in it and put baby in the chair. For adults, put pasta in bowls, pour lentil puree over it, and top with mushrooms.
6. After dinner, if the baby (like mine) is not so good with finger food, you can give him some more of the lentil puree with a spoon.

Thomas was so excited to be eating with us again. He spent our whole meal sucking on four pieces of pasta, but he loved it. We let him play with the spaghetti too. That was fun.

I should mention that I adapted this recipe from something my college roommate used to make. I've been enjoying various lentil pastas for about 7 years now, but this one has got to be one of my favorite versions ever. For one thing, I never thought of blending the lentils before, and it makes it much more spaghetti-sauce-ish. It's worth trying even if you're baby-free.

A good food day

It seems like Thomas is finally back to eating more. He's got this interesting, and rather nice, routine down now. He eats the same thing every morning and every night for his late-night snack, but different stuff for lunch and dinner.

Today's sample menu:
Breakfast: 1/4 cup plain yogurt, 1/4 cup baby oatmeal cereal, mixed with water. This is all he'll eat in the morning, after much experimenting with various fruit-included mixes. He seems to just not want sweet stuff in the morning. Ok. We can handle that.

Lunch: 1 Tbsp kale, 1 Tbsp tofu, rice and water, with apple juice splashed in his drinking water

Dinner:
Chickpea and Apple Curry

• 1 Tbsp chickpeas
• 1 Tbsp apple sauce (or maybe pear sauce, after we froze them we couldn't tell them apart)
• 2 Tbsp barley cereal
• sprinkles of garlic, ginger, cinnamon, and cumin

This smelled awesome to me, and Thomas liked it so much he got mad when I ran out (we were at a restaurant) and had to resort to leftovers for lunch. He kept grabbing the bowl it had been in and shoving it in his mouth, like "See? This is what I want!" He'll get more tomorrow.

Bedtime snack: Oatmeal with apple (or pear?) sauce and a little cinnamon

Plus he had little bits of finger food throughout the day, including some of the sticky rice at dinner (but what he really wanted was stir-fried eggplant and Taiwanese pork buns (nicely named: "dragon eats pig" )). Poor kid. Gotta wait on that one.

Thoughts on breastfeeding at 9 months

Thomas has been biting while nursing. When he first got his bottom teeth, he sort of chomped a couple of times, I said "ouch", and he never did it again -- but this week he's been doing it a lot. At first it was just when he was tired of nursing, but after a while he'd sometimes do it right at the beginning. I've been doing what they say you should do (take him off the breast and say no, let him nurse again, and if he does it again put him down altogether and wait a few minutes). He cries. Sometimes he doesn't bite but sometimes he does.

There are some odd things I've noticed. He never does it when we're lying down nursing, only when I'm sitting up in the rocker. He's less likely to bite if he's either not very tired or if he's extremely tired, and he's less likely to bite if I hold him closer to me than if I just let him sit on me. He does seem to do better after the "nursing time-out" I described above. And yesterday and today, at the time he'd normally nurse to sleep, he did the biting thing and I said he was done and put him down, and then he climbed into Matt's lap (last night) or mine (this afternoon) and just fell asleep cuddling. Then tonight he nursed himself to sleep again. I don't know what to make of it all but he doesn't seem to be weaning himself (for half-articulatable reasons, I'm not ready for this to happen), he seems to just be experimenting with some different things.

More later, I guess.

Baby hummus

Today I made chickpeas for Thomas. I started last night by soaking 3/4 cup dried chickpeas. Then this morning I drained the water, added fresh water and boiled them for two hours. I put them and the water they boiled in in the blender and added about a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil for flavor, consistency, and fat content. These were much more difficult to blend than I expected, which is silly, because I've made hummus in the blender before and I remember it was very difficult. I probably should have tried the food mill. I ended up adding quite a bit of extra water to make it blend up nicely. Thomas ate quite a bit of this baby (garlic-free, sad) hummus. I let it stay a little lumpier than the stuff I've made before.

I made him a smoothie today, thinking about what benefits my throat when it's sore. Recipe: 1 cube sweet potato, 1 Tbsp plain yogurt, a little breast milk, and water. He ate almost all of that. It's been a relief today to find things he can swallow without hurting his throat. I also put cinnamon in his oatmeal and applesauce mix.

For his snack today he also had all finger foods: cheerios, kiwi cubes, and mozzarella. I took the shredded kind and pressed it into tiny balls -- about the diameter of my pinky finger. He liked that.

Baby food adventures: Kale and kiwi at 8 (almost 9) months

Consider this a temporary thematic overhaul. Not that I've had any discernible theme so far. For now, though, I'm going to make an effort to keep track of my baby-directed food efforts.

This week Thomas is fussy about food. He doesn't want anybody putting spoons or his syringes for his medicines in his mouth. The doctor says he has a sore throat. He accepts cheerios, however. So I decided to try cutting up a kiwi. Up till now he's been decidedly "eh" about finger foods, but he really went for the kiwi.

I cut it into fourths lengthwise, used a grapefruit knife to cut off the peel, and cut it into tiny cubes. He let me put the first one into his mouth partway and clipped off a tiny bit, chewed and swallowed. Then his face lit up and he opened his mouth WIDE, WIDE. So kiwi is a hit. He ended up eating about an eighth of a kiwi.

He also had kale tonight. The kale I steamed for probably about 10 mins in the bamboo steamer and ran through the blender, then froze in ice cube trays. It was actually pretty easy to blend smoothly, compared with some of the other things I've made (like broccoli). He seemed to really like it -- it's one of the few foods he'll open up for this week. I mixed one cube with about 3 tablespoons rice cereal and added water until it was smooth enough.

Kale and kiwi are both supposed to be really healthy foods. And this is a bad food week.