Locally Grown Veggies

I just want to brag briefly about my husband.

Since we moved into our house 2 years ago, he has had visions of starting a vegetable garden in our backyard. And with lots of work since earlier this year, we now have a young, but strong garden!

He has put in a lot of time, but now very soon, we'll able to walk right out there and pick what we need for snacks, dinner, or whatever.

In the above photo is the bulk of it. We also have a couple other things planted throughout the backyard, and there is more on either side of the house.

Here's what we will have to enjoy:

Kale
Green Beans
Corn
Turnips
Beets
Bell, Banana and Jalapeno Peppers
Cherry, Grape, and Chocolate Cherry Tomatoes
Zucchini
Butternut Squash
Cucumber
Tomatillos 
Watermelon
Blackberries
Blueberies
Fig Trees
Strawberries
Herbs (Basil, Parsley, Cilantro)
Sweet potatoes (to come soon)

Our son, Luke, going to see what he can get into

Thanks, Sean for all your hard work in trying to feed this family right.

Baby food (Part II)

As I wrote in a previous post, there are 2 main reasons to make your own baby food: to avoid ingredients that you don't want to give your baby (like preservatives, flour as "fillers," added sugar and salt), and to save money since store-bought jars are way overpriced.

If making your own baby food is a new concept for you, a good place to start is reading this article on babycenter.com: How to make your own baby food. It covers the basics.

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The Equipment

Baby Food Processor

You don't need much to get started making your own baby food. Mostly, you just need some type of gadget to puree the food.

Before our first child was born, we received a baby food processor as a gift. We've used it through three kids and it still works great. It blends up one or two servings at a time and can be thrown in the dishwasher for an easy clean up.

Hand Blender

We also use our hand blender when it's a larger batch of food, or just simply a fork if it's a banana or something really soft. Occasionally I'll use our potato masher.

So you certainly don't need to go out and buy an expensive appliance, just use what you already have.

The food

Starting out. 

When your baby starts eating around 4 to 6 months, you're probably going to be making single-ingredient meals. You'll be using all the basics: bananas, applesauce, peaches, pears, carrots, peas, sweet potatoes, squash, etc.

For young babies, you will probably have to take off any fruit skins since you need to get it down to a fine texture. As they get older, you can leave the skins on when you puree it (a lot of the nutrients are in the skin).

(One thing to always consider is if the produce was grown using pesticides and chemicals, in which case you should always remove the skins. But if it's organic or a local pesticide-free farmer, then it would be okay.)

For vegetables, cook them as you would for yourself and then puree. Things like sweet potatoes and butternut squash can be done in the oven, and others can be steamed on the stove-top in water. Be sure not to overcook the vegetables or you will start to lose nutrients. Just get them soft enough to be able to be pureed.

The experienced eater.

Once your baby gets to the 8 to 9 month range, he/she will be ready for some more texture and multi-ingredient meals. Now you get to start using some more creativity in your preparations.

To make a big batch of food, what Sean and I do is pick two or three ingredients to mix together. We usually pick a grain or bean - like brown rice, quinoa, barley, pinto beans, navy beans - and one or two vegetables. Now is also when we start adding in leafy greens which have a lot more texture - kale, collard greens, spinach. So many nutrients! 

Once everything is cooked (often we'll cook all the ingredients in the same pot), we just use our hand blender to blend it up. The older the child gets, the less you need to blend it. We'll keep about 3 days worth in the fridge and freeze the rest.

And of course we still give the fruits as single ingredient meals or snacks. Other foods to add at this age are cottage cheese and yogurt (maybe mixed with fruit).

12 months+

Once you have a one year old, they should be eating a lot of what you make for dinner for the whole family. That's not always possible - like the nights you have pizza - so having the batches of pureed food around is still useful until they have most of their teeth in.

When I can, I take our dinners and either cut them up really small (like with pasta), or put them in the baby food processor (like homemade soup or chili).

Here is what our one year old typically eats: pureed grain/bean/veggie mixtures, adult meals pureed or chopped when possible, plain sweet potato, plain squash, mashed or pureed fruits, cottage cheese, whole wheat bread, and oatmeal (for breakfast).

A tip for storage

This is not my original idea by any means, but use an ice cube tray to store your baby food in the freezer. When you need a meal for that day, take out what you need (my one year old will eat 4 to 5 cubes per meal) and let it defrost for a bit and then microwave it the rest of the way.

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I just hope to give a little encouragement in trying to make your own food for your little one. If you use a lot of jars, but it seems overwhelming to switch completely over to homemade overnight, then start small. Just try one batch and see what happens. 

Baby Food (Part I)

Erin @ 7 months, eating mango

One of the things Sean and I got better about with each of our kids was making our own baby food. Our first born, Erin, had probably 85 to 90% of her baby food come from jars, and the rest was mashed up fruits from whatever we had.

Noah @ 4 months eating rice cereal

Our second born, Noah, started out with mostly jars, but as he got to the 9 to 12 month range, we started making batches of food at a time (but still had jars).

Luke @ 6 months eating
purple sweet potato

Then came our third, Luke, and I am proud to say that he is 13 months old and has never had a single jar of store-bought baby food.

So which is the better route to go? Of course pre-made meals in a jar are convenient (especially since babies eat so often). Not every mom has the extra time to make her own, especially for those who also work. But from my experience, it's not really that big of a deal to throw some food together and store most of it in the freezer for later. It's quite simple actually.

It's definitely cheaper to make your own, and you know exactly what you're feeding your baby. No preservatives and no added sugar or salt. Just fresh food.

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I came across an article on the Center for Science in the Public Interest website entitled Cheating Babies: Nutritional Quality and Cost of Commercial Baby Food. It's from 1995, so of course things could have improved within these baby food companies since then. But for the most part, I bet it's mostly the same. The article looks at the nutritional value and cost of commercial baby food within the top 5 companies at the time (one has since gone bankrupt). Here are some statements from the article (it's worth reading the whole thing if you have a baby):

• Gerber and Heinz add substantial amounts of water and thickening agents (flours and chemically modified starches) to more than half of their twenty-five most popular fruits, mixed and creamed vegetables, desserts, and dinners for babies over six months (second- and third-stage foods). Not only are those products a monetary rip-off, they are also nutritionally inferior to similar products made without fillers...Many fewer products made by Beech-Nut and Earth's Best contain starchy fillers.
• The use of starchy thickening agents can mask the addition of a good deal of water. As any cook knows, a little bit of flour or starch can thicken a lot of liquid. The presence in a baby food of one or more fillers, such as rice flour, wheat flour, or modified starch, is a good indicator that the food is a dilute and nutritionally inferior product.
• Gerber and Heinz' cereals with fruit all contain added sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. The addition of refined sugars to cereals is unnecessary. The added sugars may encourage a preference for heavily sweetened foods.
• Baby foods are greatly overpriced compared to similar regular foods. Examples include applesauce and fruit juices, as well as diced fruits and vegetables for toddlers. The nutrient content and physical characteristics of those baby foods do not differ significantly from those for adults. However, the baby foods cost up to several times as much per unit weight.
• Four million babies are born in the United States every year. By the time they reach twelve months of age, each of those infants has consumed, smeared around, or spit out an average of 600 jars of baby food.

Assuming all those statements are true, do you think you can do a better job? As long as you're not adding flour, sugar and salt, I think you will be.

Making your own baby food does not require a magic formula. Or if it does, then it's: Cook food. Puree.

To be continued...

Oatmeal

If I had been asked 10 or 15 years ago to explain to someone how to make oatmeal for breakfast, I would have told them to get a packet of Quaker Oats Maple and Brown Sugar (my favorite) instant oatmeal, put it in a bowl with water and microwave it for however long.

I have since been shown how easy and much more nutritious it is (and cheaper) to buy the big container of oatmeal and cook it in water on the stove. Let’s compare ingredients between the two:

Maple & Brown Sugar (Instant): Oat(s) Whole Grain Rolled, Sugar, Flavor(s) Natural, Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Guar Gum, Oat(s) Flour, Caramel Color, Iron Reduced, Vitamin A Palmitate (ingredient list came from here)

Old Fashioned Oats: 100% Whole Grain Oats

I think I'll take the one with a single ingredient....

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In the colder months, oatmeal is what the kids and I eat every morning for breakfast (our other option is our homemade granola…our kids don’t even know that Lucky Charms exist). I usually just sweeten it with brown sugar or occasionally honey and top it with skim milk. Sometimes I add other things to make it more interesting.

Ideas of things to mix in to “spice it up” a little:

Strawberry jelly (or whatever flavor you have)
Apple butter or pumpkin butter
Fresh or frozen berries – blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries
Fresh cut up apples or peaches
Dried fruit – raisins, Craisins, apples, apricots, dates
Chopped walnuts, almonds or pecans

Oatmeal doesn't have to be boring. You can dress it up and have a warm, yummy, nutritious breakfast...so much healthier than boxed cereal.

Rules to live by

Before I start in on any recipes, I want to say a little about our family's general guidelines for how we eat. We certainly don't always follow this. My husband, Sean, and I have a weakness for ice cream (and brownies, and cookies...) and those wonderfully delicious crunchy kettle chips...barbeque flavor. Yum. But overall, we try to stick to these "rules."


Eat at home.

For budget reasons, as well as health reasons, we avoid restaurants (especially fast food). They always give you enough to feed two or even three people, and it's packed with way too much sodium, sugar, fat and calories.

Early in our dating and marriage life, restaurants were our weakness. But since being forced to back off from them for money reasons, we now only go when traveling, or on the occasion when we don't have anything prepared to cook, dinner was ruined or we're stressed out and/or tired and we say screw it, let's go out to eat. But that's not very often.

Eat as few highly processed foods as possible. 

In this country, it's nearly impossible to cut ALL processed foods out of your diet, even with home-cooking. Besides fresh fruits and vegetables, pretty much everything has some level of being "processed" simply because it's produced and/or handled in such large quantities.

But I'm talking about things that are boxed up with a list of 25 ingredients in them: some natural, some genetically made/modified, some you don't even know what they are, and packed with too much salt, sugar and preservatives. You know what I'm talking about.

Can we just make it ourselves?

There are some things you just don't need to buy. Like chicken broth. Buy a rotisserie chicken from the store, have chicken salad sandwiches, put some chicken in your home-made soup, and then boil the bones in a bunch of water for a half hour...then freeze it for later. It's not that hard, people.

We also make our own popcorn, granola, oil & vinegar salad dressing, pizza crust, red pasta sauce, soup, sweet tea, sunbutter, pickles, frosting (on the rare occasion we need it), and who knows what else. The point is, if we can, we try to do it ourselves. You know what's in it, when it was made, and it will probably taste better.

Try to buy local.

During the warmer months, we buy all (except bananas) of our produce from the farmer's market. We have actually gotten to know pretty well the lady we usually go to. We know where her farm is and that she's pesticide free. And she'll often throw in an extra something-or-another for free for us.

We are also trying to vamp up our own garden. We've done a few things so far, but this Spring we're really going to step it up. And that, my friend, is local.

Avoid the white.

We cut out white bread, white rice, white pasta, and white flour. We go for the 100% whole wheat (well, brown rice...not whole wheat rice :)

Water. Milk. Sometimes Sweet Tea.

Oh, and sometimes beer, too.

That's all we drink. And as I said before, we make our own tea...a huge pot of water on the stove...sugar and a few tea bags. No store-bought tea jugs for us.

On average, I'd say I have 1 to 3 sodas a month. And usually that's when we're at a restaurant. Here's a link to a story on what one soda does to your body.

Our meals at home.

Breakfast is either our home-made granola or oatmeal cooked on the stove. One morning meal per weekend we like to have a little brunch of eggs, pancakes and either grits or bacon.

Lunch is usually leftover dinners. If nothing's available, then some scrambled eggs or a sandwich or something.

Dinner is almost always home cooked - with the rare exception of the store bought pizza or jarred pasta sauce.

Snacks are fresh fruit, cottage cheese, yogurt, whole wheat crackers, nuts (except for Noah who has a nut allergy), raisins, or other dried fruit. We try to avoid all pre-packaged snacks for the kids.

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Wow, I think that covers it. I had more to say on that than I thought. But it comes down to eating real food and avoiding the over-processed stuff. Cook for yourself. And for your family.