Food – including a scrummy gnocchi recipe

I’ve been trying to expand my meal repertoire and try out some new recipes. I’m almost entirely incapable of following a recipe (unless it’s a pavlova and that doesn’t always work anyway), but I occasionally try.

This week we’ve had an israeli cous cous and aubergine salad, mint and yoghurt lamb kebabs, moroccan inspired slow roasted rolled hogget, and potato gnocchi in a creamy mushroom and bacon sauce.

The gnocchi is an absolute winner – I urge you to give it a go. Easy, cheap, yummy, and great for baby led weaning babies!

For the gnocchi (you can make it up to the boil stage earlier in the day, to minimise the work at witching hour):

Cook and mash 3 good sized spuds, season with salt and pepper.

Stir through a beaten egg and 1-2 C flour gradually, until it forms a firm dough. Parmesan would be nice added in if you have it.

Tip onto bench and knead for a while until smooth.

Divide into four portions, roll each into a 2cm diameter log and cut into 1-2cm bits. Gently roll these into little fingers over a fork to get the ‘gnocchi’ look.

To cook: bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Cook the gnocchi in 3-4 batches. It just takes about 3 minutes and you know they’re cooked when they float to the top.

I think gnocchi would go nicely with a creamy or tomato based sauce – although I’ve never made nor eaten it before so I don’t really know.

My sauce involved frying bacon, mushroom and garlic in olive oil, sprinkling over a bit of flour and adding cream, milk and zucchini, and cooking until it thickened up. I served with chopped cherry tomatoes and flat leaf parsley.

In other news, Toby’s really getting the hang of food. Baby led weaning is fantastic, but it is pretty messy in the early days. The flip side is that they become tidy independent eaters pretty early thanks to all the practise. This is breakfast at our place:

Recipe: Sausage pasta with home made pasta sauce

This is possibly Alyssa’s favourite meal, as it has a bunch of her favourite ingredients (sausage, peas, pasta, cheese). It’s incredibly easy, fairly well balanced with veges (onion, celery, carrot, tomatoes, peas), carbo and protein, and doesn’t have too much sodium and fat (depending on the sausages). It’s an excellent meal for a baby led weaner – full of awesome pick up able things.

– Fry 3-4 sausages in the tiniest amount of oil you can get away with. Chop them into bite sized bits.
– Simultaneously cook your pasta (my favourite is spirals, because the pasta sauce and veges stick well to it, so Alyssa gets lots of nutrients).
– Stir pasta sauce through the hot drained pasta and leave the lid on. While this is heating through grate a little bit of cheese to have on top, and microwave peas.
– Mix sausages into pasta, serve in bowls with peas and cheese on top.

PASTA SAUCE

I would never buy commercial pasta sauce. I make my own so it’s cheap, low in salt, and full of veges. It’s very easy and I always make enough for 3-4 dinners at a time and freeze it – so the above meal becomes incredibly easy after a busy day adventuring.

In a large frying pan heat a few very generous glugs of good olive oil, and gently fry 2 onions, about 6 cloves of garlic, diced celery (about 1/3rd ish) and 2 grated carrots. When this is really soft (about 20-30min) add 2-3 cans of tomatoes, and keep simmering gently until it goes a bit jam like (about 20min). Add a few spoonfuls of tomato paste and season to taste. I usually don’t add salt at this stage, but instead will salt the finished product (with pasta etc) once I’ve taken Alyssa’s helping out.

I think the key here is plenty of really good olive oil, and GENTLY cooking the onions and tomatoes for longer than you think you should.

What are your best meals for baby led weaners, or just to get a balanced meal into your family?

Mmm, fresh baking on a crisp -6 degree morning

I love cooking and baking, but am terrible at following recipes. With baking, I mostly use the specified ingredients, but there are a couple of methods that I can’t stand so always do it another way:

1. Cream the butter and sugar when making cookies. This sounds like too much work so I just melt the butter and then add all the other ingredients and mix it up in the cake mixer. I make my favourite cookies this way:

Ingredients: 220g butter, 1/4C white sugar, 1/3C brown sugar, splash vanilla, 2 eggs, 3C flour, 1/2tsp baking soda, chocolate chips (however much you like). Melt butter, add all other ingredients and mix, form into balls and squash with fork. Bake 10-15min.
* I particularly like these cookies when I make them straight after making a chocolate cake, and don’t clean the cake mixer – so just a little cocoa-ey. YUM! Also, they aren’t very sweet because I try to minimise sugar for my taste preference, and healthiness.

2. I really really can’t stand making scones the proper way – butter and flour into breadcrumbs. Way too much work! So this is how I make my rustic scones, and they are super light and delicious.

Ingredients: 50g butter, 3C flour, 6tsp baking powder, 1C milk. Method – melt butter then mix in everything else using cake mixer. Mixture will be sticky, just put dollops on baking paper using your hands, don’t worry about the shape. Bake 180 degrees until cooked. These are really good with soup – great to pre dip for a BLW baby.

Six things to love about Baby Led Weaning

Firstly, the infrequent blog posts are because life is really quite busy at the moment. Fortunately, baby led weaning (BLW) is a great way to feed a baby in amongst a busy lifestyle.

1. Alyssa feeds herself. We just throw food in her general vicinity, and she tucks into whatever she feels like at her own pace. Therefore, I can do whatever other jobs are required while she has a leisurely 30-60min lunch. I can do the dishes, vacuum, fold washing, prepare dinner, get changed for netball training while she fills herself up. None of this sitting there trying to speed up the spoon feeding process. Organised.

2. We give her whatever happens to be handy – leftover veges from last night’s dinner, a chunk of pear from the fruit bowl, cold meat, the crust off my toasted sandwich… so preparation takes about 3 seconds. No pureeing and freezing food for us. Easy.

3. We all eat together. We sit around the table and enjoy our own meals, at our own pace, while chatting about our days (or blowing raspberries if you’re 7 months old). Sociable.

4. Eating out at cafes or taking a packed lunch requires no extra thought. I’ll throw in a bib and cloth for the clean up, and know that Alyssa will enjoy whatever we eat, whenever we eat it. If ordering food I just make sure it wont be too salty. Convenient.

5. It’s made me have faith in Alyssa’s abilities to move things around her mouth safely. Obviously I’m not going to leave a pile of peanuts and tiny plastic toys around her, but the other day she was sitting on the lawn watching us play basketball and she put a leaf in her mouth. This set off her gag reflex, and while we observed she spat the leaf back out with most of her stomach contents. I’m sure that if we weren’t BLWing, this would have really freaked us out. Educational.

6. I don’t have to consider the what or how much of Alyssa’s food intake. This is a great continuation from demand breastfeeding, where we feed whenever she feels like it or I feel like it for whatever reason. We try to eat a balanced diet so we know Alyssa will get everything she needs. I have absolutely no idea how much she eats, and really don’t care. She’ll take what she needs. Healthy.

I think it all boils down to TRUST, which is an emergent theme in this parenting journey. When I trust myself and trust my baby, all flows well.

Lining it up. The mouth opens to maximum capacity regardless of the size of the object.

Mmm, feijoa. She’s amazing at eating all the flesh and handing back the skin.

And now she has her first tooth! Baby led tooth brushing?

BLW and Sleep

I have been trying to resist the urge to write much about sleep. Everyone knows that babies sleep like babies and every mother can talk for hours about night time challenges. Unfortunately Alyssa’s nights have been very disturbed lately – it’s not so much the waking every 2-3 hours, but the long periods of being awake, such as from 1-3, or 3-5 am.

So, I now have made some decisions and created strategies to survive:

– I’ve had some niggling concerns that doing BLW is contributing to this. There is absolutely no doubt that Alyssa eats a piddly amount of solid food compared her puree fed colleagues. However, extensive research has reassured me on this – the most nutritious and filling food for her is breastmilk. I could feed her nothing but breastmilk until she’s one and she’d be fine (some people do this). Breastmilk has more fats and calories than any other food, and is much more digestible. Which is great because BLW is incredibly fun and easy.

– However, I have also stumbled across some evidence that if a mummy’s not drinking enough fluids, baby wont sleep so well. Some mums have found that if they increase their water intake, their baby sleeps through the night. So, as of yesterday this strategy has been implemented (the moment I read about this I skulled 2 bottles of water, then peed about 5x in the next hour). (And last night her first stretch was 4 1/2 hour, and later a 3 hour stretch – both longer than we’ve had for weeks).

– Just get sleep. Sometimes at night I’ve tried to be persistent with getting Alyssa back to sleep in her cot, which has resulted in a couple of hours of tears and a very tired family. The nights that I just go with the flow (huh, my mothering theme again!) are miles better and I feel a little bit human the next day. So a mixture of sleeping on a mattress on the floor with her and leaving her there, or her spending some of the night in our bed – just whatever works.

So, I’m nearly a co sleeping mother. In addition to demand breastfed, baby led weaned, baby wearing and cloth nappy user. What a hippy!!

Baby Led Weaning – Week 1 of the journey

Alyssa is coming up 6 months, so we’re starting to let her play with food.

Baby led weaning (BLW) has got nothing to do with how you stop breastfeeding (as I thought when I first heard of it), but how your baby starts to eat solid food. Instead of the more common puree route, the baby directs the eating process. The parent offers food, and the baby picks up what they want and eat it – all when they’re ready. This is very similar to demand breastfeeding which we are really enjoying, and feels like a really lovely and natural continuation of this. It’s alleviated my hesitations about starting solids.

One of the key principles of BLW is that the baby must do it all themselves – no helping once you’ve placed the food in front of them. Therefore they must be able to sit up independently, pick up the food unaided and take it to their mouth. Once in their mouth, at some stage they must learn to chew it, manipulate it around their mouth, and swallow it. The beauty of doing it this way is that babies are designed to be ready for food on the INSIDE when they are ready on the OUTSIDE. A problem with shovelling solids in when the parent decides is that it’s really hard to tell if they are ready – which often leads to things like constipation, tummy upsets and allergies.

Fortunately, babies are designed to cope with solid food once they are physically capable of eating it. A very early and effective gag reflex (further forward on the tongue than in adults) ensures they are very unlikely to actually choke. The inability to pick up small and choke-able items until they’ve developed the pincer grip ensures they wont get these things into their mouth until later. If they put the food in their mouth themselves, it goes in at the front so until they’ve learnt to manoeuvre it around it wont get to the back.

So far, a week into our BLW journey, we are finding it fascinating, a little frightening, and a whole lot of fun.

It’s fascinating to watch Alyssa problem solve and develop new skills, and to see what she’s capable of. Every day her ability to pick up food and take it to her mouth improves. Initially she really struggled with soft and slippery things (avo/banana), and the food would more get played with in front of her rather than taken to her mouth. This evening she grabbed a piece of well cooked and slippery carrot, took it directly to her mouth and chomped the end off.

It’s a little frightening because of the gag reflex, and also the fact that this process of weaning is not very mainstream so I’ve never actually observed it in action before. It’s scary watching your baby gag even though I know it’s a normal safe thing to happen, and doesn’t bother Alyssa at all. With the carrot that she bit off, she then immediately gagged and it came out again with a whole lot of mucous-ey saliva. I could actually see the carrot just sitting on her tongue though, she wasn’t anywhere near choking. She was happy – immediately shoved some more carrot in! Earlier today she did something similar with some banana, and vomited quite a bit as the banana came back out. I got a bit of a fright and we finished the eating session at that point.

It’s still taking some getting used to, but I have faith that Alyssa will figure it out. It’s really important to ALWAYS watch her eat, and NEVER leave her unattended with food. Also, Antz and I have both done first aid courses and feel like we know what to do should she choke (not that BLW increases her chances at all).

But my goodness it is fun giving Alyssa the opportunity to explore food and eating in this way! She makes the most spectacular mess – all over herself, the floor, the highchair, the table. Nearly no food is actually reaching her stomach (yet, but it wont be long). Her concentration is amazing to observe. We are having lovely meal times together as a family, including Alyssa in the conversation and hopefully fostering a lifelong appreciation for good food and the importance of eating around the table as a family. Alyssa essentially eats what we eat – so far just a plain version of ours (tonight we had thai green curry, she just had all the ingredients without the curry paste), tomorrow we’ll have pizza and just pick the cooked veges off the pizza for her (so to avoid the dairy and salty ham/bacon components).

A week of firsts

It’s been a pretty good week, full of all sorts of new things:

* First swim with Alyssa – no photos sorry, we were too busy enjoying ourselves. Alyssa was chilled and happy with her big blue eyes taking it all in. Mummy got to swim 6 lengths, Daddy got 10min in the spa. The last day at the pool was 2 Oct, 3 days before Alyssa arrived. (I couldn’t do tumbleturns then).

* First food. Not necessarily reaching the stomach, but Alyssa getting the opportunity to explore it. We’re playing around with this extremely fun thing called Baby Led Weaning, which I will talk about later when I have more time. But gosh, watching her concentration as she tries to pick up soft/slippery food and get it into her mouth is priceless!

* Breaking the 45 min sleep cycle. I’ve discovered that if I just leave her chatting away she’ll usually go back to sleep. It can take half an hour, but often she dozes back off.

* Self settling at night. This happened once at 4am!!! Alyssa woke up, grumbled for 10min, and WENT BACK TO SLEEP!! Incredible.

* Someone other than me putting her down for the night. I fed her, left her crying with Antz and went out to a basketball meeting. Arrived home 1 1/4 hours later and she was asleep! (In her pram, but lets not be picky now).

Got to now do a sleeping baby transition from cot to pram to head out to my postnatal exercise class. More later.

Solid Reluctance – hers or mine?

Alyssa is now 5 1/2 months old, and we’re thinking about feeding her something other than breastmilk. For 5 1/2 months she has had nothing but breastmilk directly from me, and it feels like a huge step to feed her anything else.

A week ago we attempted to feed her expressed milk out of a bottle for the first time. I had been delaying this for the past few months. I’m swinging between wanting her to be able to be fed by Antz to give me the flexibility to be away for longer, but clinging possessively to the exclusive feeding bond we have. But, with things like evening netball trainings and afternoons at work rapidly approaching, I reluctantly expressed into a bottle and watched with a dose of sadness while Antz attempted to feed her.

I admit that I felt some relief when this was unsuccessful. When he asked for advice, I (somewhat smugly) said “I have no idea”. I’ve researched almost everything baby related over the past few months, but have purposefully ignored anything on how to feed a baby from a bottle.

I’ve now happily accepted the notion of Alyssa having my milk from a bottle (so long as it’s someone I love feeding her, like Antz or Mum). She still wont take it, but I’m sure we’ll get there sometime.

But the next thing is starting solids. I alternate between feeling she’s ready, to feeling that I’m not ready. From thinking that her increased night waking is because she’s starving, to remembering that the WHO doesn’t recommend solids before 6 months. What if I give my child an allergy, or constipation, or an upset tummy because we started too soon? And then there’s the practical side – the sooner we start, the sooner we say goodbye to the pleasant breastfeed-only-poohs and have to deal to adult style poohs. Food at the moment is easy – solids mean extra preparation and organisation. We’re going away in a few weeks – perhaps we should wait until after that so we don’t have to worry about food for her? And of course, there’s the baby led weaning vs conventional methods debate to consider.

But, I think that what it comes down to at this point is about what I need and what I want. It’s back to that exclusive feeding bond that we have, and my reluctance to lose it. I have been the sole nutrition source for Alyssa for nearly 6 months; all of her growing and development has been fueled by me. Which is really quite incredible. It’s really really hard to move beyond this.

We’ll get there, I’m getting mentally prepared for it slowly. We have her highchair set up, I’ve cooked and pureed peach and pear and frozen it in readiness. Last night I put aside a couple of teaspoons of rice (ready to feed her some rice and milk today).

I don’t think we’ll start today. Maybe next weekend.

Head control, sitting up, interested in food, loss of tongue thrust reflex. “I’m ready, Mummy!”

“Maybe it’s time for Daddy to do some of the feeding. Don’t worry, I’ll always love you best though Mummy”