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.

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.