How children have changed my view of food and cooking - for better and for worse!
I have had a long time interest in food and cooking and baking. This has included some successes and many failures along the way, but the only way to learn and improve is through practice (oh and a good oven and the right equipment helps too I've found!)This blog has come about due to my son's (from now on known as A) more unusual ways of eating and has challenged me a fair bit over the last nearly 7 years of his life! It all started with weaning. "Let's try baby rice" I said to my husband as A hit 24 week. Well that did not go down well at all! So I thought then - some mashed up veg would be a better idea ('ve personally never been that keen on pureeing all baby food but that's just my opinion!). I mashed up some peas and tried to feed them to A; he was happy enough eating the peas (and at nearly 7 is still a vegetable he eats!) but not keen on the spoon. This lead me into the world of baby led weaning and experiments with food I'd never had to think of before. I remember arranging to meet my NCT friends out for lunch when our babies were about 9 months old. Hours were spent looking at recipes online and in books (big shout out to Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett for their book “The Baby-led Weaning Cookbook: Over 130 delicious recipes for the whole family to enjoy" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Baby-led-Weaning-Cookbook-delicious-recipes/dp/0091935288/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1516194725&sr=1-8&keywords=baby-led+weaning) until I was able to get something prepared that I could take along to a restaurant that A would happily eat!
Favorites at this time included:
Homemade hummus with toast
Rice balls -cooked rice, add in some protein or veg (e.g. I used chicken and cooked carrots) made into balls, flattened slightly and fried to keep their shape. As you can imagine this can get very messy when eaten so make sure you have bibs and wipes to hand!
Drop scones -still a favourite in our household. The recipe is adapted from Gill Rapley:
125g flour (plain if you want them flat, self-raising if you prefer them a bit fluffier)
1 egg, beaten
100-150ml milk
Any extra ingredients e.g. sweetcorn, cheese, tinned fish, spinach, grated apple etc.
Sift the flour into a bowl, make a well in the middle and pour in the beaten egg. Start mixing and slowly add the milk until you have a batter. Add in the other ingredients if using. We regularly add in ½ tin creamed sweetcorn and some grated cheese. Mix it up -you can add more/less milk depending on the consistency of what you're adding so that you end up with a fairly thick batter.
Fry the drop scones in some butter, turn when bubbles appear to cook the other side. There are all sorts of shapes you could make - A likes dinosaurs and C likes butterflies! I prefer making plain circles to be honest :-)
Other combinations that have been successful are spinach (cooked, liquid squeezed out) and nutmeg or grated apple and cinnamon. For those of you wanting to cut out carbs here's another variation:
Cooked, mashed butternut
Cooked, drained spinach
Greek yoghurt (full fat or fat free, but must be Greek!)
Egg
Salt and pepper
Grated cheddar (optional)
Mix it all together so that you have a fairly thick mixture -you don't want it too running otherwise you'll end up with a thin omelette, trust me I've been there!) and fry -butter, coconut oil, fry-light all work! Or pour the mixture into mini quiche pans and bake at 180 C for about 15 minutes until they are set.
