First wave of baby food posts

First a few more family recipes, 10 months:

Thomas's first stir fry:

Stir fry 4 chicken breasts, cubed, in vegetable oil with garlic, soy sauce, and ginger.
In separate wok, heat vegetable and safflower oil. Add garlic and broccoli, stir fry for a few minutes. Add kale, stir fry for a few minutes, add snow peas and stir fry a few minutes, add ginger and soy sauce. Add water chestnuts and cherry tomatoes and stir fry for a couple minutes. Stir in chicken and serve over rice.

Take one serving and puree in blender. This worked out way better than I expected. I think if I'd known how well my blender would handle meats, I wouldn't have bothered buying a food mill. Thanks Ty! It's six years old and still blends like crazy.

This was Thomas's favorite meal so far, I think.

Beef stew with beets:

Cut up 1.5 lbs. beef roast. Dredge in flour and brown in large saucepan with fresh garlic. Add 2 Tbsp cooking wine to loosen brown stuff on bottom of pan. Add 4 cups vegetable broth, 4 baby beets, cut up, 6 small potatoes, cut up, 1 large onion, cut up, 2 carrots, cut up, and any other loose vegetables looking for a meal to be part of. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour, covered. As before, put one serving in blender. The beets give a really nice richness to the broth.

Barley risotto:

Add 1 cup barley to large saute pan. Add about 3/4 cup chicken broth or enough to just wet barley. Add about 4 cloves fresh garlic, sliced. Bring broth to a boil, stirring constantly, and boil until most of the liquid is gone, then add a little more broth. Keep doing this for about 40 minutes, then add 1 zucchini, sliced, and a bunch of spinach, torn into pieces. Cook 2 links sausage, removed from skin, in a separate pan and add towards end of cooking. Continue to cook barley until it has absorbed about 4.5 cups of liquid (I used 4 cups chicken broth and 0.5 cup water).

In retrospect I think this would have been better with chicken instead of sausage, but it's hard to tell. Thomas liked it, anyway. So did I. Barley risotto is pretty excellent. I'll have to make it more in future.

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.