Spinach dahl

It's been a while since I've had a recipe post on here. Mostly I've been too busy to cook. But tonight we had something worth repeating, and since I never measure while I'm cooking, I'll never remember how to make it again if I don't post it here.

It's adapted (liberally, as usual) from this recipe on allrecipes.com, which I use quite a lot.

1/3 c butter
1 large onion
4 large cloves garlic
1 red pepper
4 cups broth/water (I used 2 cups vegetable broth, 2 cups water)
1 cup lentils (I used 1/4 cup French green lentils, 1/4 cup black lentils, and 1/2 cup brown lentils for variety)
2 Tbsp garam masala
1 Tbsp ground ginger
5 oz (one largish box) fresh organic baby spinach
1 can coconut milk

1. Rinse lentils and soak for 20 minutes or more. Slice onion thinly; mince garlic and chop red pepper. Start basmati rice in rice cooker, if desired.
2. In wok or deep saute pan, melt butter. Saute garlic and onion together over medium head until onions are soft, clear, and just starting to turn golden. Add red pepper and cook 2 minutes.
3. Heat broth or water in microwave until near boiling. Add to pepper and onions. Add lentils, garam masala, and ginger. Cover and simmer for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Uncover and mash or taste a lentil. If soft, add spinach and coconut milk, stirring over low heat until coconut milk is incorporated and spinach has wilted. Serve over rice or with naan.

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.

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.

As long as we've all learned something

We seem to be getting Thomas to eat more consistently again. For the past couple of weeks, he's been really unpredictable. We were constantly having to persuade him to open his mouth and worrying that he wasn't getting enough. And we couldn't figure out what was wrong. Part of it was definitely that he had that cold, but I think there were some other factors contributing.

First off, I think Thomas is starting to make connections between his mealtimes and how they operate, and our mealtimes and how we behave. This means that he wants to eat when we're eating, he wants to eat what we're eating, and he wants to feed himself. We've discovered that if we give him finger foods (especially if they're from our plates) on his tray while we're eating, and lean over to feed him bits of the things still too small for him to grasp, he makes an effort, and is more willing to be spoon-fed when we're done. Likewise, if I snack on some of his finger foods during snack time, off his tray, he's more enthusiastic about eating. He's also getting better about feeding himself. Today he figured out how to hold the bottle with one hand, balancing it along his forearm, while holding a piece of bread in his other hand so he could alternate. He's also putting the spoon in his mouth. Yesterday he squealed while we were eating lunch, so I plopped a bit of refried black beans (with cumin in them, even) down on his tray, not thinking he'd eat them anyway. He started grabbing them and putting them in his mouth, so I gave him a spoonful, and he took the spoon from me several times and got it into his mouth. He's never done that more than once before, which brings me to my next strategy.

Variety. Thomas absolutely loves to try new foods, and gets bored easily. I've discovered that offering several different dishes at a meal helps (none of those "chicken-rice-and-vegetable" dinners for him), and offering him new foods or foods he hasn't had in a while will convince him to pay attention and eat. Spices work right into this, as it happens. Sometimes he's turned his nose up at something and when I add a little cinnamon or ginger, he perks up and eats quite a lot. Tonight I gave him the leftover mango chicken and he ate all of the serving -- after I added a dash of cinnamon, a dash of ginger, and a dash of garlic and mixed it all up. So basically Thomas is motivated by taste and by variety. It makes total sense -- I am too.

He has to wait on tea though.

Yesterday's dinner was: roasted chicken, and I pulled some of the meat apart into very tiny shreds for him; stuffing, and I gave him a few squares; and steamed broccoli, and I gave him a few tiny sprigs. He has an easy time eating steamed green beans, steamed very soft, because they are long, so they're easy to hold and bite off bits.

Indian food for all

Well, I made Indian food for Thomas and us tonight. I am not sure how successful his share was, but our share was pretty amazing. I'm going to go ahead and record it here. He didn't sleep well last night and this evening has been too fussy to eat much of anything, even milk. So I'll try it again tomorrow. The texture is a little grittier than what he's used to (I put it through the food mill) so maybe that's the problem. I wonder if I should put it through the food mill then blend it...

Presumably as we test other spices on Thomas, like garlic and onions, this will become closer and closer to one meal for everybody.

Indian Mango Chicken for the whole family

1 ripe mango
1 c plain (whole-milk or low-fat) yogurt, with extra yogurt for blending baby's portion
2 c basmati rice
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sunflower oil
2 yellow onions
3 chicken breasts
1 chicken thigh, with skin removed
2 tsp ground ginger for adults' portion
1/8 tsp ginger for baby's portion
2 tsp cumin
about 1/3 head fresh garlic, minced
10 cardamom pods
10 cloves
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 dash cayenne pepper
salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:
1. Peel mango (wear gloves if you might have a sensitivity to mango skin - it makes some people break out). Wash hands, knife, and cutting board. Cut mango flesh away from pit. When you can't cut any more off, pick up the pit and squeeze the juice into a blender container. Add the flesh and 1 c yogurt, and blend until smooth.
2. Preheat oven to 350.
3. Rinse rice and soak for at least 30 mins. Drain, add 3.5 c water, and cook in rice cooker.
4. Thinly slice onions.

Cook:
1. Pour 1/2 c yogurt mixture over chicken thigh in covered baking dish. Add 1/8 tsp ginger (and any other spices your baby has already had without trouble) and turn to coat chicken. Cover and put in oven, bake 35 mins.
2. Add butter and oil to saute pan on stovetop and heat. Add onions and cook until they are becoming clear (about 10 mins).
3. Add whole spices (cardamom, cloves, bay leaf, garlic) and cook until onions start to brown.
4. Add ground spices, stir, add chicken. Cook about 5 mins on each side until browned.
5. Pour yogurt mixture over chicken, stir, heat until bubbling, then turn down heat and simmer, covered, for about 25 minutes until done.

Serve:
6. Pull baby's chicken off bone, add rice, and add extra yogurt or water if needed. Run through food processor or food mill.
7. Put adults' chicken on bed of rice, pour sauce over top.