Peter's Cross Station

Spring Garden Soup

You will need:

one pound of fresh spinach
one head of cauliflower, coarsely chopped
one large onion (or two smaller ones), chopped
about 8 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped
a pinch (or two, depending on your taste) of red pepper flakes
4 tablespoons or so of butter (you can sub olive oil)
6 cups of vegetable broth (chicken broth would work too)
fresh yoghurt (or sour cream if you must)
salt and pepper to taste

In a large, heavy saucepan, melt the butter then add chopped onions and garlic. Cook until the onions are translucent. Add the red pepper flakes and cook another minute or so. Add 1/2 cup of water and the spinach. Stir it around a bit, maybe put a lid on the pan for a minute until the spinach is cooked down a little. Add the cauliflower and the broth. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat, put on a lid and allow to simmer for about half an hour.

Blend the whole concoction until completely smooth. I used to use a food processor, but I am a total convert to the immersion blender now.

Salt and pepper to taste and serve in bowls with a dollop of yoghurt in the middle.

Beautiful and oh-so-tasty!

P.S. You can eat it chilled on the second day.

Why We're "Mostly" Vegetarians

We are omnivores over here, but we eat very little meat. We simply can't afford to eat it more than about once a week, because we only eat expensive, locally, organically raised meat. When this news came down on Wednesday, I wasn't exactly shocked:

"The current industrial farm animal production system often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves, according to an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production..."

This video is a great 20-minute documentary which highlights a piece of the problem and impressively addresses the environmental racism that is often overlooked when people discuss this topic:

Bottle Update

I probably get 5-15 hits on this blog per day from people googling for info on nontoxic baby bottles.  We've been quite happy with the evenflo glass bottles while home and the Avent drop-ins while out.  (Yes, googler, the Avent drop-in liners are recyclable if you have access to #1 plastic recycling--same as a spring water bottle--but don't re-USE them.  #1 plastic starts to leach after one use.  Just remember #1=1 use.)

But Selina is coming up on eleven months next week and I remember weaning Nat from a bottle around that age and I'd like to do the same with Selina.  But the 12 oz Kleen Kanteen sippy cups (we have two for Nat to use in the car and for a treat, in front of the t.v. very rarely) are kinda clunky and heavy for Selina.  I considered a hot beverage cup I use that holds only 8 oz, but it's designed for adults and doesn't seem quite right either.  I thought about skipping the sippy stage altogether and Selina has practiced a little bit with juice glasses with about a tablespoon of water in them, but I can't do it cold turkey.  I want to fall back on a sippy for a while after all.

Today I found this product and I am so excited about trying it out!  Anyone ever use a foogo sippy by Thermos?  It holds 7 oz and comes with the handles (you can get these handles for your Kleen Kanteen, too, but it's still 12 oz which is just too heavy for Selina, when full of liquid).  As soon as it's May 1st and my monthly budget is all fresh and clean, I'm gonna order a couple.

I'll let you know how it goes!

ETA: Whew! Upon a closer look at the Thermos website, I saw that the plastic parts of the foogo are "rubberlike" and "soft" which is a red flag for phthalates (long banned in Europe). But a quick search this morning brought me to this page" which says they are BPA- and phthalate-free. So they're still on tomorrow's shopping list!

So Many Posts, So Little Time...

I am strapped for blogging time this month. If I had time, here's what I'd be telling you about:

1. Stuff White People Think is Funny (or not) and Why (or not). (Topic requested by reader and jewelry patron, Martha.)

2. Lazy Home-Made Baby Food Shortcuts Discovered by Shannon the Second Time Around

3. Interesting Ways in which Nat is Beginning to Express Growing Understandings of Her Adoption

4. Cute Things the Sisters Are up to These Days

5. Pics of Nat's Birthday (more than a month later!)

6. More about the Big Freelance Writing Job and Why I am Asking for Your Help and Whose Help I'd Like Next

7. A Roundup of Books I've Been Reading Lately on the Topics of Race and Homeschooling (but not both together in one book)

8. Other (specify)

Please vote for your favorite! I'll try to get them out in order of popularity within the next month.

Air kisses!

We Have Yoghurt!

It worked! Yeehaw! I am so impressed. It was one of those things I just didn't believe in, but there it is in my fridge, my first batch of yoghurt, smooth and tasty and set-up beautifully. I used some store-bought yoghurt as a starter and plan to set aside some of this one for next time.

(Still no David Grandbaby--at last report, Katrina was 9 cm, 95% effaced and "numb from the boobies down" having had an epidural.)

Eco-Resolutions '08

This is my post for the BlogHer conference trip giveaway! I’d been planning to post about this anyway. Here’s a list of my 2008 resolutions to help reduce my ecological footprint:

- Reduce our solid waste output. I am horrified to admit that we fill a “tall kitchen” garbage bag every 36 hours! We use disposable diapers. But I am not up for changing that, so I’m increasing my bulk-buying to cut down on packaging (hence the yoghurt query). Nat will be potty-trained this year and that will help.

- Switch to Seventh Generation diapers for our disposables. They are not much better, but they are chlorine-free. I’m trying to reduce the chlorine in our lives overall (unbleached paper towels, dinner napkins, baby wipes, etc.).

- Use less water or at least, less hot water. I can’t break myself of pre-rinsing my dishes. So I’m cutting back by rinsing them in cold, instead of hot water. I still take long showers (it’s my only “down time” most days) and I wash my hands and Nat’s in very warm water (hygiene!) but I’m trying to be conscious of how much I run the tap and how hot it really needs to be.

- I started the plastic purge last year, as you might remember, and I’m still at it: getting rid of plastic, replacing it with glass and metal, not buying new plastic.

How about you? What are you doing these days to reduce your footprint (however slightly)?

Yoghurt Making, Anyone?

I am really tired of throwing away plastic quart yoghurt containers. I only have about three "re-uses" for them and recycling is difficult where we are. Organic yoghurt ain't cheap, either. We go through a quart or so a week. I just ordered a $15 yoghurt maker. Anyone have tips, recipes, book recommendations?

Some Recipes

We almost never eat chicken (or any meat) but occasionally I splurge on pricey, organic, grass-fed, local chicken at the pricey, local health-food mart. I made this the other night and don't want to forget how I did it!

Chicken and Rice on the Stove

2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut in two equal pieces each
1 cup of brown rice
2 cups of vegetable broth
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 medium onion
4 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup of red wine
some olive oil
salt, pepper, thyme to taste

Heat some olive oil in a large, heavy skillet (medium high).
Add the chicken pieces and sear them on one side, then turn them and lower the heat to medium and cover the skillet.
Chop the onion and garlic and toss it in the skillet with the chicken.
Keep the skillet covered, but stir the onions etc. every so often until they are cooked and maybe sticking a bit to the skillet.
Deglaze the skillet with the wine, add the rice, veggie broth, tomatoes (including the liquid in the can), salt, pepper and thyme.
Bring it to a boil, cover and reduce the heat to low.
Let it all sit there for about an hour.

Serve! It was really yummy.

Because Alison wants to know:

Green Supper*

1 large head of broccoli and/or onion, asparagus, potato or other veggie (in about a 3/1 broccoli/other ratio)
oats
brown rice
and/or quinoa, millet any other whole grain you have on hand (I mix grains in an equal ratio for a total of about 2 cups dry)
1 cup of dry beans (any combination is fine)
1/3 cup wheat germ
4 tablespoons blackstrap molasses
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1 tablespoon ginger or sparing amounts of other spices your kid likes

Steam the broccoli and/or other veggies.
Cook the grains (I use a rice cooker for mine--imprecise but fine for this purpose--If your beans are just lentils, you can toss them in the rice cooker too).
Cook the beans.
If you have a child with plenty of teeth and chewing experience toss everything but the grain and beans in a food processor and blend until smooth. Then add the grain/beans and mix it all together well. If you have a younger baby who needs smoother food, blend the grains and beans too.

I freeze this mixture in my old baby-food cube trays, though it takes three or four cubes to make a nice meal for Nat these days.

When I want to feed it to her, I take a few cubes and put them in a glass dish and microwave them for about 25 seconds. They come out soft. I can cut them into finger-food bites or give her a fork to mash them around and eat them more like a thick cereal. She has no problem if they are still cold or even half-frozen, so her non-pickiness helps a lot. I've even fed them to her on cross-country road trips where I put frozen cubes in a glass dish with a lid in a cooler and gave them to her to eat as finger-food in the back seat while we were driving.

It's still handy to have this nutritious food on hand that she always likes to eat. If I'm having a lazy cooking day and telling Cole to scrounge for leftovers or cheese toast or a frozen burrito, I can still give Nat something healthy and balanced with zero effort.

The weirdest thing about this food is that she loves to eat it though she's been much pickier lately about eating straight-up broccoli or any other vegetable in the past few weeks. I'm going to go back to making a similar blend with sweet potatoes and carrots and see if she won't eat it too. These two (the orange and the green cubes) were her staples last year. I think she regards them as comfort foods. These days she is more of a normal 2 year-old eater in that she mostly wants tried and true favorites which amounts to lots and lots of fruit, more cheese than she needs on any given day, milk rather than solid anything and bread or other carbs (pasta being a favorite). It's still not terrible, if I remind myself that plenty of kids her age won't eat anything but box macaroni and cheese powder or mystery-meat dogs, or in the case of a kid I once taught in preschool, blueberry pancakes. But I want to keep her as balanced as possible!

*inspired by "Super Porridge" in Super Baby Food.

Bottle Update

By the way...

We used the drop-ins throughout our visit with Grandmom and Granddad. They are Avent brand and use the same nipples as the old, evil bottles. I kind of hate to reward Avent for using bad plastic by buying more of their products, but at least this way I am still using the nipples we already had that Selina likes.

Fortunately, the glass bottles (Evenflo) arrived while we were away and she is okay with those nipples too. She doesn't like them as much as the others, but she doesn't reject them. So we can stick to glass at home and drop-ins on the road.

All is well. I'd recommend either product.

Struthious No More

Back when I reviewed The Complete Organic Pregnancy for MotherTalk, I used its advice to conduct a plastic audit. I threw some things out and got different versions in different plastics and even canceled my bottled water delivery and researched a good under-sink filter instead, having discovered that the 5-gallon bottles for my water were made of the unholy #7 plastic that is said to leach hormone-disruptors. (I have had water delivery for years due to my flouride sensitivity. Post water delivery I've tried drinking water that's been left out overnight so the flouride can evaporate. It sort of works. I wish I could just get my spring water back in glass bottles...)

I noticed, at the time, that Nat's baby bottles were lacking a recycling number label. That was odd. I was suspicious. But I buried my head in the sand and kept using them. What could I do otherwise? Go hunting down some other bottle, after finally having found a nipple she liked?

Well, a bit of labyrinthine linkange last night found me here and then found me ordering first a half-dozen glass baby bottles with nipples of unknown acceptability to Selina, then ordering the Avent bottles that have drop-in liners (and use the nipples we already know Selina prefers). Disposable liners are not so great for the environment, but lightweight for travel purposes. Hopefully these will get us through to bottle weaning, some 8-9 months away.

I am not too worried about Nat's prior exposure (though until she had teeth, I was mixing her formula with my bottled water, of course!), since they advise a few things to minimize risk when using the #7 bottles (like our old Avent ones). They advise buying new bottles for each new baby you have, and Nat was our first, so that works out. Also, they advise not heating the bottles to high temperatures. Well we did do that. I mean, come on, you sterilize baby bottles by boiling them, or at least running them through the sterile cycle in the dishwasher, right? (We used the dishwasher.) But Nat had little concern about the temperature of her bottle, so once we figured this out, we stopped warming the milk (well, formula) before feeding her.

Not so with Selina! She is using Nat's old bottles. (Some are "cloudy" or scratched, oh horror! I threw them out last night, too.) They are being washed in the high-heat dishwasher cycle. Selina spits out any nipple that contains formula a half degree below 98.6 F so we warm the bottles with religious zeal before offering them to her.

The glass bottles I ordered are out of stock, (well of course they are! And the land fills are brimming over with Avent bottles leaching their hormone disruptors right into the water table, too) so I have to wait a month to start using them. I am hopeful the drop-ins will arrive before our week-long trip to the in-laws next week. But meanwhile whenever I feed Selina now, I feel like I'm pumping poison into her poor unsuspecting little body.

I realize (or maybe "theorize" would be a better term) that baby bottles alone are probably not going to give my kids neurological damage. But combined with all the other toxins and contaminants out there, well, they must build up. Bio-magnification and all that, right? And I don't hold with the argument that 50 years ago people didn't know about this stuff and they used it and they're fine, because A) a lot of people aren't fine. People die too young of cancer and who knows why? Autism is on the rise and who knows why? and B) things really are different now. The sun is hotter/more damaging (due to ozone depletion) pesticides have built up and gotten tougher and tougher to combat resistence, etc. ad nauseum. I certainly can't prevent my daughters from ingesting any poison at all in their daily lives, but I sure as heck plan to prevent what I can.

And a Recipe

I don't want to forget how I made this batch of granola. As usual, the directions are a bit hit-and-miss, so feel free to improvise as you like.

Cheaper and Healthier and Tastier than Store-Bought Granola

1/3 cup of oil (I used about half melted butter/half safflower oil)

6 tblsp blackstrap molasses

6 tblsp cup honey

lots of cinnamon

lots of powered ginger (maybe a TBLSP of each?)

a tsp of vanilla (real vanilla)

because I am allergic to real almonds: 1 tsp of fake almond extract (but you should put in 1/4 cup of almond slivers)

1/4 cup of wheat germ

1/4 cup of wheat berries

1/4 cup of quinoa

4 cups of oats (raw, rolled)

Set the oven to 300 degrees (F)

Mix the dry ingredients and the liquid ingredients in separate bowls. Once they're each well mixed, slowly mix the dry ingredients into the liquid ones until well covered.

Pour into as large and shallow an over dish as you've got. and put it in the oven.

Every fifteen minutes, pull it out of the oven and stir it well. Do this for about an hour--more or less depending on how shallowly you are able to spread the granola. Eyeball it. When it's pretty dry and toasty-smelling, it's done.

Allow to cool and place in an airtight container.

You can add fruit or raisins to it upon serving.

Cole loves it, because it isn't as sickeningly sweet as the store-bought stuff. But if you like sweet, you can add sugar when you serve it. It's full of pricey ingredients, but given the difference between bulk organic oats and organic granola in a box, it's considerably cheaper.

Yum!

Wee Foodie

One of Nat's favorite books these days is Eating the Alphabet by Lois Elhert (one of our favorite artists, and also illustrator of Chicka, Chicka, ABC). We have this edition, a lap-sized board book, and it is just gorgeous and bursting with color and yummy images.

I was just looking at a post on Family Food about having "gourmet" children and I thought about Nat today in the grocery store.

We shop at two grocery stores. One is an evil big-box and the other is a small, local, independent organic place. One sells national brand diapers by the truck-load (and we buy them, yes we do!) and one sells locally grown organic garlic (we buy that too!). So today we were at the garlic one, and the produce aisle is beginning to pick up a bit after a slow winter (they try to stay as local as possible) and Nat sat in the cart shouting with glee, "Leeks! L for leeks! A! Avocados! B is for broccoli!" Then there was the Swiss chard, the pears, apples, onions, peppers and other delights. It did my heart good. At least as good as hearing her make farm animal sounds. My baby knows her produce.

Put This in Your Pipe, Popeye

Spinach Potato Soup

10 oz frozen spinach
1 large potato
1 onion
4 cloves of garlic
6 cups of broth (we used a combo of veggie and chicken)
1 cup of heavy cream, whole or low-fat milk, as you like (we used soy milk, actually)
a cup of shredded mild cheese (we used colby)
teensy dash of pepper sauce
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the broth, while coursely chopping the onion and garlic, peeling and chopping the potato
Add all those chopped things to simmering broth and cook for a while until they are all soft (20 mins?)
Add the spinach (I defrosted mine first so it wouldn't suddenly cool the soup)
add a teensy dash of pepper sauce, salt and pepper as you like it

Simmer that for another 30 mins or so

Transfer to a blender/food processor and blend until smooth
slowly add the milk and cheese while blending until that is also all smooth.

Serve!

When I gave Nat a taste, she said "yum! mo' pweez!" So I put about 1/3 cup of soup in a bowl, thickened it with a heaping tablespoon of wheatgerm, gave Nat a spoon and let her feed herself. She really loved it. And it's the best yet she's done with a spoon.

Cautionary Tale

In keeping with my book review topic, I might as well share the story of our experience with the spinach recall, last week.

I had not bought much produce from the grocery store at all in months, having been more than pleased with what we were getting from our CSA. But after about a month of Nat having no green leafies (too hot on our farm), I started to fret that she needed them in her diet, so I broke down and bought some pre-washed, organic, baby spinach. I made and froze a huge batch of whole-meals made with the spinach and fed her from that batch for two days before I heard about the recall. I checked online, and sure enough, our spinach had to go. So I threw out all of that food (which included much more than spinach) and called poison control to make sure that Nat's symptom-free state meant we had an all-clear for e.coli (we did).

The next day, Nat and I strolled over to pick up our CSA food, and guess what? We had a bunch of Russian Kale in the share. The weather has cooled back down now, and we are back to a weekly green leafy. I remade all that baby food and promised to trust nature in the future.

For those of you who haven't read about this yet, here's some information about why the green leafies from our CSA probably have as close as you can get to a 0% chance of ever being contaminated by e. coli.

The Complete Organic Pregnancy

Welcome to the latest MotherTalk blog book tour: The Complete Organic Pregnancy!

"What the heck does Shannon, never TTC'd, never been pregnant, never given birth, know about pregnancy?" you ask?

Well, not so much from a direct experience standpoint. But there have been, are and will be plenty of pregnant people in my life, and as you know, I am an organic-natural-humane-ecologically sound-local-poison-free-food nutjob to the extreme. And I am loving this book--pregnant or not. It tells you how to start doing all the things I've been doing for Nat since she was born, before your baby is born, sometimes even before your baby is conceived. I am never letting a friend go through pregnancy without it, again.

As a part of the blog book tour, I was able to ask the authors three questions, for a Q&A to post here. I was pretty impressed with their responses. They will give you a sense of the book itself. Here they are:

Q: If an expectant mother could only change one thing in her environment or diet, what should it be and why?

A:We’re splitting hairs with this answer (to encourage moms to change a bit more than one thing!). If you’re talking about changing her environment, it depends on what environment. In “The Complete Organic Pregnancy” we talk about home environment and work environment. For home, we’d say the most important thing to do is to not renovate your home or a nursery even though the urge often strikes when pregnant. The chemicals that are released into the air during demolition, building, stripping, revarnishing, caulking, painting etc. aren’t safe for your growing baby. If you’re not renovating, the most important (and easiest) thing to do at home is to replace all conventional cleaning products (including laundry detergents, carpet cleaners, oven cleaners, bathroom scrubs etc.) with nontoxic ones. The ingredients in conventional cleaning products (think bleach and ammonia among others) are often carcinogenic, can harm lungs and eyes, and are sometimes hormone disruptors. Despite all of this, the companies that use them are not required to disclose their ingredients on their labels because they’re considered trade secrets. Nontoxic cleaners, which can easily be found at health food stores or chain stores like Whole Foods, are a much better option for growing babies and for mom.

We realize you have less control over your work environment than you do over your home environment, so the most important thing to do at work is to try to raise awareness. Ask your boss if it would be possible use better cleaning products (the company has to buy them anyway…). And try to sit away from things like copiers and Xerox machines and near a window that opens, if at all possible.

With regard to diet: buy organic whenever possible. Join a CSA (community supported agriculture) which is a less expensive way of buying organic veggies (and sometimes fruit and meat) and support a local farm at the same time. If you can’t find organic meat, make sure to buy pastured and hormone and antibiotic free. Same goes for dairy. And always choose whole foods – things as close to how they came out of the earth as possible – over packaged foods (processing makes them less nutritious).

Q: I heard a story on NPR once about the breast milk of certain Native Alaskan women being so toxic as to be labeled a bio-hazard (after repeated testing). This was due to bio-magnification of toxins in the whale blubber that constituted the majority of their diet. Should mothers in any part of the U.S. be concerned that a toxic environment could be contaminating their breast milk? How can a breast-feeding mother check for this?

A:In the book we have 27 diaries on many topics pertaining to what it means to have an organic pregnancy. One of these diaries is written by Florence Williams, who wrote a fascinating story for The New York Times Magazine in January 2005 about testing her breastmilk (she sent it halfway around the world to have it checked for pollutants). Breastmilk is sadly somewhat contaminated by chemical pollutants that have made their way into our food, water, and our bodies (flame retardants, jet fuel, and the like). If you live in an environment where whale blubber is your main diet, or if you happen to, as Williams writes in our book, live near the site of an industrial accident, then breastfeeding probably isn’t safe. In these instances, you may want to have it tested (though this isn’t easy or cheap). The majority of the American population doesn’t need to be tested. Moms should rest assured that even if their milk contains some toxins, as unfortunately all breastmilk does, studies show it is still the best and healthiest choice for their babies.

Q: What can we do--as expectant biological parents, as parents, as concerned citizens--to ensure that all babies get the kind of safe and healthy start recommended in your book? I ask as an adoptive mother to a child whose in-utero experience was filled with toxicity based on the poverty of her biological family.

A:Speak out – if there is something you don’t want to be breathing, a crop you don’t want to see genetically modified or even an ingredient you don’t want in your shampoo, write/email/call both the government and product manufacturers and let them know. Educate – tell people (friends, family, colleagues and especially your children who will inherit this world, toxins and all) what you know and what you’re learning. Vote for lawmakers who want to clean up the environment, and for those who want to ban packaged foods and bad nutrition from schools. And vote with your dollars, too – support local organic farms, frequent farmers’ markets, buy organic cotton, better paint, and nontoxic cleaning products. If you can’t find what you want for your home at stores around you, demand and get others to demand. Supply will follow. Make better choices at every turn. Buying organic produce means allowing a farmer (and a farmer’s family) to not have to breathe pesticides all day long. If you’re pregnant it will be better for your growing baby, but it is also better for all of the other babies in the world, too.

I was impressed with their answer to that last one. Because I am a socialist, I can be pretty critical of health advice that sounds like it is all about "me and my family" building a safety fence (whether of bricks and mortar or of clean, non-toxic food habits) around oursleves. In this particular subject area, that's kind of impossible anyway. As the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed, in upholding Clean Water Act regulations, what poisons your well will eventually poison mine. This matter of choosing food thoughtfully is not just a matter of doing something for yourself, but of doing something for the world at large. Activism in the form of political advocacy on these issues is better yet.

Thanks to the authors and their PR person for this book. Much as I feel silly keeping it, rather than giving it away to my next TTC friend, I sort of don't want to let it leave my shelf. It's just full of handy information that is plenty useful for pretty much anyone, not just pregnant women. So run, don't walk, to your nearest independent bookstore and buy this one. Okay, you can reserve it at your local public library too!

But read it. It's awesome. Really.

More blah (with recipe!)

Lisa and dish both sort of asked about lectures in my online teaching gig.

There aren't any lectures per se. The class is what they call "asynchronous" in the online teaching world, which is to say "not at the same time" which is to further say that the students are spread across the globe and so we can't really get together across time zones and have any real-time chat, video or otherwise. But as for video, we don't do it, because the courses have to have as low a common tech denominator as possible, to make them accessible to as many students as possible, so we try to avoid anything too fancy that might require expensive or brand-new equipment from students. I like dish's idea of photos, though. I do have one photo on my instructor's "bio" page and it links to my online resume which also features a photo, but perhaps more photos, sprinkled in with my responses to their conference conversations might make things seem friendlier. I could toss in a couple of Nat eating their exams (which get fed ex'd to me). I'm sure they'd love it.

Lisa specifically asked how the heck I get anything done around here and all I can say is, I don't know, and I don't get nearly as much done as I'd like. But at her request, here's a break down of my time usage on an average weekday:

9 am: I wake up. Some days, Cole brings me tea and a toddler in bed. On those days (the nice ones) we chill together as a family (Cole and I sip tea while Nat reads books and plays with other toys in our bed) for about a half hour. Some days, when Cole has to be at work early and David isn't around, I have to get up considerably earlier, but I'd say 75% of the time, I get to stay in bed until 9. Nat will have been up since anywhere from 6:30-7am, and either Cole or David or both will have had her since then.

9:30ish: I give Nat milk and often, a second breakfast. If I'm lucky, I'm getting a little breakfast in this time slot too. I try to do it every day, but I don't always make it.

10ish: I dress Nat and comb and style her hair. Lately, I've been using t.v. as a hair distraction (Sesame Street or Blue's Clues dvd's mostly). The whole thing takes about 20 minutes.

10:30ish: Nat toddles about while I clean the kitchen. Anything left over from the night before (like clean dishes in the dishwasher) and anything messed up from the morning (Nat's breakfast(s), milk, highchair tray, other people's breakfasts and tea cups etc.). Again, if I didn't already, I try to eat something in here. I also start a load of laundry at this point almost every day.

11ish: I'm either still cleaning stuff or playing with Nat. She may get hungry again this early, but I usually hold lunch until 11:15 or 11:30 or so.

11:30ish: I feed Nat lunch. Again, if I didn't do it yet, I try to eat breakfast. You'd think I'd get something in there, with all these opportunities, but there are always a million distractions (Nat flinging food/beverages/screaming for more/rubbing food into her newly-styled hair, etc., you know...), so it isn't as easy as it sounds.

12ish: I put Nat down for nap. We read a book or two, I sing "You've Got a Friend" while rocking, I put her down, sign "I love you" and I'm free.

Naptime: While Nat is napping, I fit in the following: shower, eat something (at this point it's lunch), do anything in the office that needs to be done (our office is not Nat-friendly and I can't do anything in there with her awake), relax outside on the top of the stairs with some tea and a book. That last bit is something I aim to do every day, but only do about 25% of the time. Nat sleeps between 1.5 and 2 hours. What naptime usually amounts to is about an hour of computer time.

2ish: Nat gets up and gets a snack and some milk. This is the part of the day when I do household chores. I have a cleaning schedule (a really toned-down version of flylady) so that every week, I'm in a different room (the rooms in question being my bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the living and dining rooms) with a different list of detailed tasks. I try to do one task on the list per day of the work week. Most of the time I accomplish this at least four days per week. Today, for example, I changed the sheets on my bed. Nat's room is not on the list, because I am in there every day and I usually just keep it up while we play. This is also our window for going out. We go shopping or to the park etc. during this slot of time. Sometimes I prep-cook dinner at this point, too. Nat plays along with me at these tasks, "helping" or undoing what I've done so I have to do it again (like unfolding laundry or pulling out plastic containers I've just put away), and asks me to pause frequently and read various books she spends all day scattering about the house or insisting it's time to "hug, hug hug!" If it's a light chore day, or I just decide to blow chores off, we spend some time in more structured play.

4ish: I almost always start dinner by four. Nat usually gets hungry by 4:45 and sometimes as early as 4:30, so we rarely get to wait until Cole is home to sit down and eat together. Sometimes Nat is willing to sit for a second shift later.

5ish: Nat and I hang out and play until Cole gets home. We read, play with blocks, feed the dollbaby, read some more, play with the train, play with puzzles, read, roll the ball back and forth, read, etc. If she needs one, she gets a bath in here.

6 pm: I turn on the Newshour and Nat plays and reads and gets up and down, on and off my lap and/or Cole's while we take in the news sort of. Cole and I might sit down and eat (sans t.v.) at this point too, while Nat either eats some, or hangs out with us in the dining room. She and Cole play and I clean up the kitchen post-dinner. (Sometimes David is around for dinner too. Sometimes he doesn't get home until later and he eats on his own.)

7:30 I put Nat down for bed. That entails books, lots of singing, prayers, lots of rocking, signing "I Love You" and a cd that plays rainstorm noises.

By this point, I'm wiped out. Cole and I have some time together, often, watching t.v., but sometimes reading and talking in bed. If we watch t.v., that's when I make jewelry or do other crafty/mend-y stuff.

Cole usually goes to bed between 9 and 10 pm, and that's when I get back on the computer or do other office work. So most often, my blog posting gets done then. But during the semesters, whatever I didn't get done during nap gets done then, too. Lately I've had that nasty kind of insomnia where you can't sleep, but your brain is fried and you can't do anything else either. So I've tried getting in bed by 11 and reading myself to sleep. This has mixed results. My problem with parenthood is that my body, left to its own devices, would stay up until about 2:30 am and sleep until about 10:30 am, but it doesn't like to sleep during decent, normal, red-blooded American hours. So even if I get in bed at that decent hour, I lay awake for an hour or two (or some torturous times, more) before I actually sleep. This is why Cole is so sweet as to leave me alone until 9 in the mornings. I tend to sleep better in the morning than I do at night. And Cole is very much a morning person, so taking baby care in shifts works well for us. Or as well as possible.

David is technically on duty three mornings a week until I wake up, but much more often than that, he's just around. That's nice, because it's another set of eyes, and occasionally, for this reason, I get a shower before nap, or Cole and I run down the street and have dinner out for an hour in the evening. But I hesitate to ask David to do much unless it's official, because he does so much anyway. Regardless, he often keeps me company on and off throughout the day which is nice. Sometimes he's with us on our errands or Nat and/or I go with him on his.

And that is the long, boring saga of my daily labors.

Now, for tonight's dinner:

Mock Pasta

You will need:

all that summer squash and zucchini sitting in the bottom of your vegetable crisper

five medium tomatoes

about 1/4 bulb of garlic

a medium onion

half a can of beans (I used black soy beans)

a cup of chopped spinach (I used frozen, since it isn't in season here now)

a tablespoon of wheat germ

a tablespoon of olive oil

a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar

some Italianesque spices (I used tarragon, basil and oregano)

a handful of pine nuts, toasted (I actually put them on a tray in my toaster oven and put it on light "toast.")

Clean and shred the squashes. Steam the shreds for about 15 minutes. I imagine you could put a tablespoon of water in them and nuke them, too, but I like to steam things on the stove.

Pour the olive oil in the bottom of a small saucepan and turn on the heat while you chop the onion and garlic. Once it's chopped, add it to the hot oil.

Chop the tomatoes. Once the onion is translucent, add the vinegar and the tomatoes and stir it all up nice. You can add spices now, too. Let that simmer, covered, for about fifteen minutes.

Add the half can of beans, drained (that is, don't include the liquid!), the spinach and the wheat germ. Let that all simmer for another ten minutes.

Remove from the stove and puree in a food processer. Return to the stove and let it simmer, covered for however long it takes for everyone to be home and ready to eat dinner.

When you're ready to eat, place the squash in the bottom of a bowl, top with sauce and sprinkle pine nuts over the top of that. I bet some grated parmesean would be lovely with this, but we don't have any at the moment.

Yum!

My Baby Smells Like Raw Garlic

But boy, does she love my baba ganouj!

Beans, Squash and Tomatoes: Yum!

Since everyone else seems to be a CSA veteran, I am going to share my solution to the beans, squash and tomatoes a'plenty problem these days:

Tonight's Dinner

Take:

About two cups of beans (I used three types because that's what we got: roma beans, yellow wax beans, green beans)

A couple of squashes of whatever variety (I used one yellow and one zucchini)

Lots of garlic (I probably used 5 cloves)

(You can also add onions at this point but I didn't because Cole is against onions at the moment)

Trim the beans and slice the squash and put them in a bowl.

Add:

a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
about 1/4 cup of olive oil
some salt and pepper
some thyme

Stir it around and let it sit there for awhile. I did this part at 2 and didn't cook it until 5, but you don't have to wait that long.

Steam some brown rice.

Sautee the vegetables in the juice they've been sitting in. (I used a nonstick skillet so I wouldn't need any more oil, but if you don't use nonstick, you might need to add a little more.) When they are almost as done as you like them (for me, I browned a few of the squash), chop a medium tomato fairly small and add it to the skillet. Cook a couple minutes longer.

Serve over the rice.

This recipe serves two (plus a baby eating off our plates), but I have enough beans etc. left to do it at least twice more. That's okay, though, because Cole and Nat really loved it (me too).

I Blog in My Sleep

What's your posts written in your head/posts written and published ratio?

Mine is about 5/1.

I had a great one this morning, but it's been a busy day and I completely forgot it, so I'm going to revert to the "To Blog" list and tell you more about our eating habits, since that ranked only slightly below the ill-fated foray into home schooling you voted for ages ago, before our trip ("you" en masse, not "you," dear reader, who may not have voted for it, or anything else, at all).

I realize that many of my readers are way ahead of me on this stuff. I only discovered that kitchens contain more than electric kettles and imported tea about three years ago when I moved in with Cole. I was writing my dissertation then and was supposed to work from 2-5 pm, but often, pooped out at 4, turned on "All Things Considered" and cooked dinner to be ready for Cole's arrival home at 5. (My they do things early here in the Midwest!)

Once we started planning for a baby, I had moved our eating habits up a notch, health-wise and now hoped to move them further in time for Nat, in the hopes that I wouldn't spend too much time as a mother being a total nutritional hypocrit and sneaking my velveeta dip after bedtime while insisting Nat eat raw carrots and quinoa. I know good and well that children do what we do, not what we say, so I knew I needed to whip us into shape as fast as our lifelong bad habits could handle it if I wanted my baby to eat healthy food and develop healthy habits in a natural, thoughtless way.

As with all topics that interest me, I started buying books and reading them. I have bought a number of books and read them thus far, but as this sort of thing goes with me, I'd say I'm still on the upward curve of my reading in this area. The first book I read was the Super Baby Food book (linked somewhere in a post below on feeding Nat). Just that book gave me all kinds of nutritional information and I started tweaking our adult (pre-baby) diets based on that. No more white flour, for example; more oatmeal for breakfast.

I felt really good about how I fed Nat in her first year. If I had known pre-Nat, what I know now about adoptive breastfeeding (see Suzie for loads on the topic), I am fairly certain I would have tried it. Everyone I know in real life is completely freaked out when I mention the concept, but so many people here in the computer have done or are planning to do it that it doesn't seem freaky to me personally, at all. At the time, though, I had only read a brief clip about it on the LLL website and it sounded like more trouble than it was worth.

But breast feeding or no, I still feel like Nat had a fabulous first year, nutritionally speaking. And so far, I feel really good about her developing tastes and eating habits in her influential second year. Right now, her candy is blueberries recently plucked at our CSA. That's what she begs for more of and whimpers about when they're all gone ("aw gaw" being her latest favorite phrase). When she sees the pictures of actual candy in a couple of her books, she points to them and says "uck!" ("Yuck!" being her word for not-food, that shouldn't be put into one's mouth).

I know that I would be naive to think these days will last, but I am determined to stay the course on my end of things. People (you know who you are) have a tendency to say "she'll learn what McDonald's is! You can't keep her from it!" I know that. My goal is to raise a child whose biggest rebellion is to secretly eat twinkies and watch commercial television at sleepovers and think that I don't know that she did it. I learned this parenting technique from my detractors themselves, in fact. As a kid, my big rebellion was to tell my parents I was going to the movies with friends, and then go instead to the art gallery, alone. (And I am in so much trouble right now, because they just found out.)

Anyway, back to books. Some are cookbooks. My mother-in-law is one of those people who wants you to give her a list of Christmas presents she should get you sometime around September. The first Christmas I was with Cole, I was a bit intimidated by the need to generate a list, so I told her I wanted measuring spoons and cups and a copy of The Joy of Cooking. I figured it would make a good impression on my new mother-in-law if I asked for things that would help me put a timely dinner on the table of an evening for her daughter.

I love The Joy of Cooking because it just tells you how to do everything. I didn't know how to do some pretty basic things. (Like make oatmeal from oats instead of from a paper packet of "instant oatmeal." Ha! What a scam! You don't have to buy that stuff, all you need is oats and you can make oatmeal very nearly instantly! Who knew? Not me.)

I also have an encyclopedia of the healing uses of foods which seems to more or less say that everything is pretty much really good for you and you should eat lots of it. I appreciate knowing the details though.

The book I read a few months ago that sent me flying to the computer at 2 am to find and join a CSA for the seaon, however, was Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating.

I am not someone who thinks it is categorically wrong to eat other animals. I never have been. There are hunters in my family and while I personally would never want to shoot a deer, I don't think people who do are unqualifiedly evil. I do have a lot of picky notions about meat, however and what makes for ethical inter-species relationships (and I think hunters often have exceptionally ethical inter-species relationshps, by the way) and though I probably won't send any money to PETA anytime soon, part of the reason I gave up eating meat a few years ago was disgust with factory farming. I had got a glimpse of a chicken "processing" plant on some documentary in a hotel room and was so horrified not at the fact that chickens were being killed for food per se, but at the complete lack of balance in how it was happening. The scale was just "off" somehow. I remember vividly a scene in which dead chickens hanging from their feet were being hauled through a factory on some kind of pulley-line. Chickens by the hundeds flying upside down through an ugly, dark, dirty building.

I didn't stop eating meat right away, but I started buying kosher chicken after that. It was my first act ever of "mindful eating." I figured, however it was processed, someone had at least prayed over it when it died and I liked that better than the cold industrial image in my head of chicken-as-commodity.

Are you bored yet? I'm really rambling here. I've been trying to write this post mentally for a while, but like I said, I'm still on the upward curve of the topic, so you're getting some pretty stream-of-consciousness stuff.

Anyway, Jane Goodall's book forced me to reconsider my feelings about factory farmed animals (and mind you, I only read it a few months ago, and was not eating meat at that time, nor had I been for years). Along with the animals of course, there's the earth in general. And what poison goes on the earth gets into the water, so then there are the fish (which I never stopped eating--if anything I've eaten much more fish in the past five years than I ever did before), and the drinking water and all of it eventually ends up in Nat's body, as far as I can tell. And as my reasons for not eating meat had been, up to that point, to eat lower on the food chain and lessen my footprint on the planet, what Goodall had to say about "Industrial Organic" farming versus "deep organic" and local food sources made me realize that however convenient, frozen blueberries from Cascadian Farms were not going to save the world.

Hence my rush to join a CSA (and ours was just closing the week I joined). The CSA has proven easy enough to handle, armed as I am with this book and this book along with others of lesser importance. We have a whole share. David often eats with us and has taken up the task of retrieving and eating the food while we've been away and that helps a lot. As long as we eat it, it saves us money on groceries.

Ironically, I now feel ready to eat meat again. Now I know more about how to come by meat that has been raised responsibly, sustainably and humanely, and since a basic prohibition against killing other animals for food is not part of my problem with meat, I am okay with eating it in moderation if I get it from good sources.

I have never, ever, ever liked beef. Giving up beef was not a problem for me, because I never wanted to eat it in the first place. Cole likes it, though and often gets herself a steak when we are at high quality restaurants, since I don't make it for her at home. Well, guess what? Every year, David's father, who still has many acres of farmland in Indiana, buys three calves and runs them painlessly and harmlessly in a pasture behind his house that is bordered on three sides by forest and hasn't had any chemicals on it for at least 30 years. In the winter when they're big enough, he has them butchered and gives a side of beef to each of his kids at cost. So David comes into our household with a freezer of beef that meets my meat standards and that Cole says is the best stuff she's ever tasted. So I'll probably cook with some of that in the future, even if I don't personally eat much of it.

I found out as well, that our CSA raises chickens according to practices I like and they are available for sale on Saturdays at the farmer's market. So this weekend, I'm off to buy my first chicken in a long time. I've decided a roast chicken on most Sunday nights is a reasonable amount of meat to eat, as long as raising and processing the chicken didn't take up considerably more than its fair share of space on the planet.

The book I've been reading that converted me to careful and considered meat eating is The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

I didn't know who Micahel Pollan was until Joylynn told me that a good friend of hers is headed to Berkley to study science journalism with him. Turns out he's a lovely, lovely writer as well as a smart person with thoughtful food values. Run, don't walk (or bike, but don't, by any means, drive!), to your nearest independent bookstore or public library and pick this baby up. You won't be able to put it down until you've read the last acknowledgement. I wasn't. In its pages you will learn the connection between high fructose corn syrup and the war in Iraq.

And finally, before I give up and go to bed and leave more polished posting on this topic for a future time, I must recommend What to Eat by Marion Nestle, whose name I am always forgetting and calling, "the grocery store woman." She also wrote a book a while back called Food Politics which is on my list. She's great. The book I linked takes you through the grocery store and gives you an aisle-by-aisle geneology of what's there, why it's there (and not in some other aisle) who might have tried to keep it off the shelves, who kept it on and their stakes in its being there etc. ad nauseum. It is highly researched and informative in terms of what is going on and has been going on in the U.S. food supply for the last 60 or 75 years. There's an explanation, for example of why we hear more about things like salmonella and e.coli than we did twenty years ago (it's not because people are more squeamish or reporting on food poisoning is heavier, it's because they weren't around exactly--at least not the same way--twenty years ago as they are today).

And with that, I abruptly leave you to plop into bed by my snoring better half.

Long Time, No Blog

Sorry about that.

We were on the road for over two weeks and on the last bit, we did a 13-hour stretch, which would be one thing if we could ever get out the door before 1 pm, but we can't, so.

So I was tired for a week. Okay, I'm still tired. But there is work to do and there are blogs to read. I was barely abreast of the most major of happenings out here on the Internets while we were away.

First, my in-laws have one of those phones that hangs on the kitchen wall with a long, curly cord and a dial (remember those? from whence we get the quaint linguistic anachronism "dial the phone?"). They do not have cable television (not such a biggie--I didn't have it myself until I moved in with Cole three years ago, but in the context of my in-laws, it is a meaningful lack). They do have a dvd player, purchased for them by us last year so they could view the video I made of Nat for the grands for x-mas, but they don't know how it works and in fact, had bought and programed a new remote control since our last visit there that rendered the dvd player useless. (Here, Cole would like me to assure you that she figured out/corrected the remote problem and thus we were able to watch Trans America with her mother one evening.)

So when it comes to the internet, all they know is what they hear on the local network news (and it is all alarmist), so our access there is limited to tri-weekly (or so) visits to the s...l...o...o...o...w computers at the local branch of the public library or the expensive wireless on offer at the Evil Empire chain bookstore in the strip mall.

Once in DC, I was able to steal a wireless connection from the pal upon whose couch I slept for two nights' row house neighbors, but upon the third night, Cole and Nat had arrived and we'd all moved to a hotel where the internet cost a zillion dollars a minute or something, so I just gave up and lived "Real Life" for a while, which included a Real Vist with a Real Blogger and which was swelteringly hot. It was so hot, I didn't even take Nat to the zoo, even though she's going through a big animal phase. Instead we looked at the Calder mobiles in the air conditioned National Gallery and ate gelato in front of the waterfall at its cafe. I had conveniently forgotten the hottness of the Federal Swamp in July. Nat went around saying "hot! hot! hot!" pleased to have an appropriate context for using one of her more clearly pronounced words.

Speaking of, she has many more clearly pronounced ones these days. I'd say about a third of her vocabulary would be mostly understandable to most strangers with a passing acquaintance with toddlerease.

Her clearest word, of course, is "mama" which she says a lot. In fact, she made a nice little song out of it the other day and serenaded me while I chopped vegetables for dinner. "Mamamamama!" she sang, "mamamamamama...hug! hug! hug!" and then she'd grab my legs and smoosh her face into the back of my knees. It is my most favorite song ever.

Here is a recipe for the tonic that warded off a return of The Sinus Infection That Wouldn't Die (though it's been in remission for a couple of months, I admit) which threatened recurrence yesterday morning after one allergy attack and two sleepless nights in a row:

Garlic Broth (medicinal strength)*

To 4 cups of boiling water add:

an entire bulb of garlic, peeled and crushed (but not chopped)
about a one-inch cube of fresh ginger root
a small onion chopped into quarters
a small carrot roughly chopped
a small tomato chopped into quarters
a teaspoon of sage
a teaspoon of thyme
a bay leaf

Once all of that is boiling rapidly, cover it, reduce the heat to low and pick up all the paper plates your child has strewn across the kitchen floor having suddenly developed enough strength to open a lazy susan corner cabinet that she could not open before you left for vacation. Pick up said child and carry her off to her room to change her diaper, get her dressed, condition, comb and style her hair; return to the kitchen and fix lunch for the child on a little shatter-resistant plate, cover it with plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge. Holler at the child's other parent that you are going back to bed and to please feed the child in half an hour, put her down for a nap, then wake you to inquire about the status of your medicinal broth.

Sleep for forty-five minutes. Wake up and tell your child's other parent to please strain the broth into a cup for you and deliver it to the bed. Drain that sucker in thirty seconds, stumble out of bed to the stove and pick the water-logged garlic cloves out of the pan and eat them whole just for good measure.

Go back to bed.

Hey, it worked for me.

* You can cut back a bit in the garlic content and make a nice little soup base out of this same recipe.

Kohl-Whati?

Kohlrabi Pie

(Disclaimer: I have no training in the writing of recipes, so bear with my inexactness)

You will need:

Enough mashed potatoes to cover a medium casserole dish (4-5 potatoes’ worth, depending on how big they are). I actually made this in a pie-pan.

About 4 small kohlrabi
One head of broccoli
1 cup of grated cheese (I used medium cheddar which was good)
some béchamel sauce (2 tbs butter melted in a skillet + 2 tbs of flour stirred in carefully + a cup of milk poured in and stirred slowly)
an onion
lots of garlic

Chop the kohlrabi into about 1 inch square pieces about 1/4 inch thick.
Chop the broccoli into bite-sized pieces.

Steam them together for a good twenty minutes or so.

Saute the onion and garlic.

Make the béchamel sauce.

Dump the béchamel sauce and the cheese into the bottom of a casserole dish while the sauce is still hot enough to melt the cheese and stir them together. Add all veggies and stir it all up well, making sure everything is coated in the sauce. Spread the potatoes on the top gently and pop it in the oven at 350F for about 30 minutes.

Yum!

My Daughter, the Kiwi

I have added a new category over there, called "You Are What You Eat" to corral my food posts. I feel more food posting coming on in the future because I've been thinking and reading a lot about food lately.

I mentioned before that Nat, the toddler, has an issue with being spoon-fed and so I've had to change strategies for making sure she gets what she needs. Someone wrote me to ask about those strategies, so I figured I'd post them here.

My main tactic with feeding Nat these days is to think in terms of nutritional insurance. For instance, I know she'll have 24 oz of milk every day. So I mix her half-and-half (organic) formula and (non BGH, non antibiotic) whole milk. The formula is packed with nutrition, so I know she's doing okay, even if she eats pickily one day, if she gets her 24 oz of milk.

Similarly, I have adapted the cereal I used to feed her for breakfast and dinner into a finger food by not thinning it when I make it in the food processor. I combine several grains, chick peas and soy beans along with nutritional yeast, wheat germ, molasses and sweet potato puree for a "whole breakfast" and the same thing with spinach or brocolli (instead of sweet potato) for a "whole meal."

I freeze those into cubes and when they are thawed, they are soft, but have enough heft to be cut into bites and given her to eat with her fingers. If she eats one orange one and one green one every day (which is pretty easy, since they're small--she usually eats two per meal) she is at least getting nicely rounded nutritional content in whatever she does manage to eat.

(Yes, these whole meal food cubes sound gross to me too, but Nat gobbles them down with enthusiasm.)

With those basics, I add as she'll let me. She'll always let me add fresh or frozen fruit. She would eat six kiwis a day if I let her (can you imagine the diapers???). She also loves strawberries, blueberries, bananas, peaches, grapes, tomatoes, oranges and lemons (which she gets out of our iced teas when we eat at restaurants). On a good day, she'll eat some green or orange veggies too: brocolli, kale, bok choy (more about that below), green beans, carrots, sweet potato, avocado (not quite a green vegetable, but good for her, anyway). And if I have made a stir-fry, she'll usually eat whatever's in it, including garlic cloves and onions.

Another "insurance food" I use a lot is bread. I bake bread in my legendary bread machine using whole wheat flour and soy flour, plus molasses. I have taken to cutting it into crouton-sized cubes and carrying it in my purse instead of the organic O cereal I used to carry. Even Earth's Best and the other organic baby brands have more added sugar than I want to give her on a regular basis. This is not because I think sugar is totally evil, but because while her tastes are forming, I want to minimize her chances of getting too sugar-addicted and expecting food to always be sweet.

Since I know my bread is rich in protein and iron (for bread) I also feel pretty good if she's having a picky day, but eats a slice or so of it. I also use nut butter-based spreads (we've decided to be peanut-free, because Nat's best pal, Amaya has an allergy, though Nat, it would seem so far, does not) on the bread to boost the protein content along with other good things nuts have.

I took some left-over jars of baby food fruit (we bought them for travel when she was eating spoon-food) and tossed them in the food processor with cashew butter, nutritional yeast and molasses (yes, there is a theme here, and I know molasses is sugar, but it is packed with iron!). I froze that in food cubes too, and one is just about the right size for half a slice of bread. She eats "sandwiches" a lot. Many times for lunch she'll have a half-slice of bread with a nut butter spread, some sliced cherry tomatoes and a string cheese stick. She's fairly willing to eat that combination of food and it's pretty well-rounded, nutitionally.

I try not to be pushy with food, so if she doesn't have an appetite for a day or two, I try not to worry about it. I just make sure that every calorie she does take in is worthwhile, then I feel okay. I also feed her strictly when we're home so that when we're travelling, or out at a restaurant, I feel okay about being more flexible and breaking the rules once in a while.

The baby food book I used last year (and still consult occasionally) has a chart with various food items put into boxes organized according to what nutrients they supply. I looked (elsewhere in the same book) for the number of servings of each of these that is needed every day and wrote the number in each box. That is taped inside my kitchen cabinet. I don't read it every day, but once in a while I glance through it and calculate in my head what she's getting. I usually find she made it through everything by afternoon snack time and dinner can be a fun, new food introduction time with no worries that she's had what she needs. And of course they say nutrition should really be calculated on a weekly basis, not a daily one, so if your kid eats nothing but cheese for two days and nothing but cereal for one and nothing but bananas the next, it likely evens out over a few days.

Okay. I have come clean about what a food tyrant I am. I am really, really careful about what Nat eats. She does not get processed "cheese food." She does not get white bread (or really any white flour products). So far, she's had no meat but tuna (which she didn't like at all, after two tries separated by three days, and I was surprised, because she likes EVERYTHING). She does not get dairy products that do not say directly that they have no BGH or antibiotics and she eats organic frutis and vegetables 99.9% of the time. In fact, most of the ingredients in the food I make her are organic.

Before she was born, we scoured the internet for a source for organic infant formula by the case. If I wasn't going to breastfeed, I was certainly not giving my baby bovine growth hormone-laced formula.

I admit freely that part of what contributes to my Nat-food-obsession is compensation for having had no control over her prenatal care (she had poor nutrition in utero, which I do realize hurt her mother more than it hurt her, as babies will take what they need from the mother's body directly if the mother isn't eating well) and for not breastfeeding her.

But I have also just gotten a lot more interested in food in the past few years.

About 5 Lents ago, I gave up meat (meaning all but fish, which I realize doesn't count for some people), just to see what it would do to my life. And I found my life was not changed much. It turns out I wasn't eating much meat anyway, so I just never started again.

But when I started consciously excluding meat from my diet, I started consciously thinking about my diet. And because I had given up meat in order to eat lower on the food chain and consume fewer resources in the global picture, I started to think a bit more about how the rest of my food fit into a global resource consumption picture, too.

Then, when I moved to the prairie to be with Cole, there was nothing to do but work on my dissertation and cook, so I cooked. And of course, I wanted to cook tasty, healthy food for Cole so I started reading up a bit more on how to do that. When we started planning for Nat, I got the baby food book and started learning a lot about nutrition. I found it really interesting. Doctors (well, most of them) just don't mention it at all, and yet, well, "you are what you eat" so what could be more important, right?

And so far, in her entire life (everyone pause here to knock wood) Nat has never had a fever. She had a runny nose the week of her first birthday. That's the entire extent of her illnesses today at 15.75 months old. (And no, she doesn't go to group child care, but she does chow down on shopping cart handles all over Central Illinois, and she eats directly off of restaurant tables across America that I have not cleaned, so she gets her fair share of community germs.)

I don't know how much credit I deserve for this. It's one of those things that could be my nurture or it could be her first family's fabulous genetic heritage. But I'm guessing it's a combination.

(Now watch, baby #2 will be sick all the time--please do knock that wood, okay?)

*****

To Be Continued

By Request

hmmm... many of you do not find Nat's eating habits boring. I am noting that for future reference when I run out of other things to blog about or can't bring myself to weigh in on more universally pressing current events. Meanwhile, since you asked, here is an in-depth report on a couple of the highlights below:

First, you can click on "Baby Stuff We Love" and find (I think, all the way at the bottom) a post on the homemade baby food thing we do here. Mostly, we used Super Baby Food as a launching pad on food prep, a nutritional guide to Nat's daily requirements and the best ways to get them into her. I followed it pretty closely on most things as far as the schedules of when to start various foods, though I was a bit on the conservative side, not being certain of half her family history of allergies. (Good news: though her half-sister is lactose-sensitive (and was from infancy), Nat appears not to be at all, nor to have any other food sensitivities so far.)

Second, the way I make what the book refers to as "super porridge" is thusly:

I take a half cup each of brown rice, oats, millet and quinoa (all organic) and toss them in the rice cooker and fill it to the 2-cup level. While it is cooking, I cook dried soy beans (which have soaked overnight) on the stove in as little water as possible. When the grains are done and the soybeans are soft, I toss it all into the food processor.

When Nat was just starting to eat solids, I only used one grain, then two, then three, etc. as we worked her up to the current combo. I also put a LOT of formula in the food processer to thin the cereal. Now I don't thin it at all. It's very thick, but always mixed with thinner foods, so it balances out in the actual meals. Super Baby Food doesn't recommend freezing the porridge but I always have. I freeze it in the same cube trays I freeze the vegetables in. Nat eats so much of it, it is never in the freezer for more than two or maybe three weeks, so it holds up fine.

The good thing about the cereal cubes is that if she eats one for breakfast (especially with all the other stuff in her breakfast) and drinks her 24 OZ. throughout the day of 50/50 formula/whole milk, I know she's pretty much set for 75% of what she needs for the day in terms of protein and iron. The rest of the day is fun with cheese and veggies/fruit to whatever extent she is willing.

Third, I will try to recall what went into the pepper soup. Even before I started cooking in earnest as I do now that I am operating under this small-town-lesbian-housewife-and-mom cover identity, I have to tell you, I was a genius at making soup. It's the one thing I've always been good at. My soups are delicious and will heal you of any and everything that ails you. I never make the same soup twice, because I don't follow or record recipes. Last week's pepper soup was awfully good though, so here's my best shot at remembering how I did it:

1. Slice and gut 6 sweet peppers (mine were 2 each of red, yellow and orange). Smear them with olive oil and stick them, skin-side-up in a shallow pan. (I actually roast a lot of veggies in my toaster oven, though this was too many for that.)

2. Slice an onion in half and smear it with olive oil and put it, cut-side-down in a similar (or the same) pan. Peel about five cloves of garlic, toss them in olive oil and stick them in the corner of the pan, too.

3. Put the pan in a 425 (farenheit!) degree oven. Roast the veggies for about 25 minutes. They are ready when the pepper skins start to blister and turn black.

4. Let them all cool.

5. Heat about 4 cups of vegetable broth on the stove in a large pot. Into this pot, toss a large, chopped carrot and some salt and black pepper. Add about a 1/4 cup of tomato paste. (I just threw in some I had in the fridge from using half a can the week before.)

6. When the carrot is nice and soft, spoon it out with a slotted spoon and put it in the food processor.

7. By now, your roasted veggies should be cooler. If not cool enough to handle, you can run the peppers under cold water while you peel the skins off. Once they're peeled, put them, the onion and the garlic all into the food processor with the carrot.

8. Blend that stuff until it's pureed.

9. Return it all to the soup pot, add a pinch (probably a teaspoon) of red pepper flakes and reheat everything and let it simmer for a half hour or so.

10. You can serve it now. I'd add a spoonful of yoghurt or sour cream, if serving it hot. The next day, after it sat in the fridge for 24 hours, I poured about a half cup of milk in the bottom of a bowl, poured some soup on top and blended the two and ate it cold which was my favorite of all the ways I ate it.

Cole found it too spicy (only a pinch of red pepper flakes! Those suckers are lethal, I tell you!) but David and Nat loved it. Nat ate hers 50/50 with yoghurt.

Hope you like it!

Thanks and More on Baby Food

Thanks for all your truly helpful feedback on teaching online. I was worried about some of the very issues you raised, e.g. feeling like class is always in session (try to limit this), to require or not to require minimums for participation (not sure about this yet), whether or not the trainer's exhortations to us to use the group project feature is a dumb idea that should be ignored (probably), worry that students will miss deadlines (remind them), making deadlines in multiple time zones (tricky).

The program I'm teaching for is one of the country's largest (maybe the largest?) online programs and it features several BA and BS degree entirely online, including some humanities stuff. They cater to nontraditional students and military students based around the world. I am really looking forward to dealing with that student demographic. I have always loved military students when I've had them.

My concerns have revolved around how to create the warmth and intellectual freedom and respect that I prize in my real-life classroom. I depend on my students' coming to trust and listen to each other in spite of philosophical, personal or political differences. I think I'm pretty good at making that happen in real life. How to do it online? We'll see, but it's a learning curve.

Frankly, blogging and my involvement on a couple of discussion boards (esp. IB) give me hope that it can be done. But unlike those things, a class is not necessarily composed of people with like minds and similar attitudes (less so, anyway). I mean a blog or even bulletin board attracts people who want to "hang out" together on some level right? But you're stuck with classmates.

Still, I think the subject I'm teaching will probably attract cool students. I'm fairly certain it's not required by any online degree program, but will be a choice for the students who take it. That's always nice. I am working on the syllabus. I pulled a bunch of books off of my shelf and piled them up as a preliminary syllabus plan and realized that of 11 novels, 9 were by women. While I realize that if the genders were switched, no one would bat an eye, in this case, I figured I'd better add some boys or get called mean names and be accused of having an agenda. Of course there are plenty of boys to choose from, but you know, the first things I pulled were my favorites.

Go figure.

If you have further advice, or just got here and want to add yours, please do!

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Before Nat got here, I was starting to cook a bit more regularly than I ever had done in the past. I also knew I wanted to feed her organic formula, since we opted not to try adoptive breast feeding (and even if we had done that, we'd have needed a supplement). So I started cruising the internet for organic formula and found Baby's Only organic formula online. I buy it 2 cases at a time for maximum discount. It's actually cheaper, that way, than a lot of the big brands more common in small town groceries stores like ours (where you can't get the organic). It's a LOT cheaper than buying the organic at the tres expensive grocery stores in cities that have nice organic ones (I know because I bought an emergency can in DC once).

Anyway, in my cruising for formula, I bumped into some stuff about making baby food and I bought Super Baby Food and read it almost cover-to-cover.

Now, Yaron is a bit nutty. I take her advice with a large grain of salt (for instance, I do not use a flame-thrower to disinfect my kitchen before and after blending every banana for Nat). But the book is really loaded with nutritional information that helped me start changing our diets for the better before Nat even arrived on the scene. For example, there is no reason on God's green earth to use white flour or white rice, EVER, as far as I can tell. Not because they're so bad, but because whole grain is so totally fabulous, especially if one is cooking a more or less vegetarian diet. Also, her charts about when babies can eat what and exactly how to prepare it are really helpful and easy to understand. So we've been following her plan pretty closely, giving Nat an extra week or two before introducing things, since she's small and was a little early.

I endorse the book with reservations about the flame-throwers etc. I think, however, that this site gives you all the info you need to really know to do the same thing we're doing with the book. I just really like books. I also bought little trays especially for freezing baby food, rather than using ice cube trays. Why? Because we don't have any ice cube trays I would have had to buy them anyway. Mine may or may not have been more expensive than ice cube trays, but they came with sealable covers and I bought them while waiting for Nat which sometimes required retail activity in lieu of morning sickness to remind me a baby was on the way.

As for the price of organic, well, it's not that bad considering how little produce it takes to fill a month's worth of ice cube trays. Right now, she eats about four cubes of grain a day (two rice, two oats) and about two cubes of fruit or veggies a day (one mixed in each grain meal). Since many things, like the rice and oats, sweet potatoes, avocados, are thinned a bit (or a lot in the case of the grains) with formula, one medium sweet potato, one avocado, one banana, a cup of grain, go a long way. Hence my $5 estimate, which, I admit, is an estimate. But at .69 a jar (two servings=one day), organic baby sweet potatoes from the grocery store are no comparison. Neither are .59 per jar NON organic baby foods, frankly.

So there you have it. Our Nat meal plan. Highly recommended.

Advice Requested/Advice Given

You may have noticed that there's been little posting of substance around here lately, and that would be because I have been uber busy.

Besides the usual baby care, I am preparing to teach an online class for a weird online semester which begins in late October. It's the first time I've done this, so I have to take a long and arduous (if busy-work can be arduous) training course. It's five weeks long and this is week five. I'll be teaching a survey course in African American Literature of the 20th century. Lots of great stuff in there, as you might imagine.

Here's my question. If you have taken or taught an online class before, please give me two or three "Dos" and two or three "Don'ts." Though in some ways, teaching is teaching is teaching, online teaching does seem to have its peculiar issues. Suggestions?

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I am the newest and most enthusiastic convert to home made baby food ever. If you have a baby, you gotta try this! I have a month of frozen food in my kitchen for Nat. It's all organic, all fresh and it cost about $5 total, which is about what a week's worth of prepared stuff would cost (maybe less). It is just as easy and quick as they say it is (put a banana in the food processor and freeze it in ice cube trays--how hard is that?). And I get to make it as nutritious as I want--thinning it with formula instead of water like the jars for example--and Nat loves it. Seriously. It's not some overly zealous super mom thing to do, it's too easy. But it does make me feel like I'm earning my housewifely keep around here.