Happy Meatless Monday everyone!

Hope you all had a lovely 4th of July weekend.  Did you BBQ? Maybe you are looking for a Meatless Monday option today after all the gluttony.  Here’s an easy dish to prepare for your family, one that every member, even the littlest ones can enjoy.

Dal, or lentils, are an incredibly healthy member of the food world.  They are packed with protein and high in fiber, not to mention other nutrients.  They are eaten all over the world–India, France, the Middle East–and are considered the ideal baby food due to its nutritional value and ease of preparation.  Dal is versatile too!  You can serve them with just a little bit of salt, any kind of ground spice you can think of, and they take well to onions, ginger and garlic (my personal culinary holy trinity).

Start simple by serving your baby/toddler/child just boiled (or pureed) dal, with no seasoning or a small pinch of salt.  Then, as your little one gets used to the flavor and texture, start adding seasonings–a pinch of coriander powder, cumin powder, garam masala.  Work your way up to the adult version with onions, ginger and garlic.  Personally speaking, I fed my little Kirina a pureed version of whatever my husband I were eating when she was 9 months or so.  She took to it nicely, most likely because she was used to the lentil flavor at that point.

Here’s a recipe for everyone to try.  I used whole masoor dal here, which is a red lentil easily found in Asian grocery stores.

There is a split red lentil called masoor also, which simply means the lentil is skinned and halved, making for an even faster cooking time (I’ll do a separate post on that in the coming weeks).

Ok, so here goes, with pictures.

1.  Soak your dal for 30 minutes, then boil for 45 minutes until super soft.

Dried masoor dal

2.  Mince your (my) holy trinity, onions, garlic, ginger:

3.  Coat a heavy-bottom saucepan with a little bit of oil.  Sautee onions on a medium flame until golden brown, about 10 minutes.  Add garlic, ginger and tomato paste, if using, and sautee until the oil separates from the mixture, 10-15 minutes.

4.  Add spices.  This part is up to you…traditional preparations call for a teaspoon each of garam masala and/or coriander and cumin powder, along with 1 teaspoon of turmeric and chili powder and salt to taste.  Select your baby’s adventure level and add to mixture. Cook for about a minute.

My spice tin

5.  Add boiled dal and simmer for 5-10 minutes to allow flavors to come together.  Add water to thin out if necessary.

6.  Dal is ready! Puree for small babies and leave as is for older children and adults.

From Kirina’s highchair to your little one’s bon appetit!

Happy almost Fourth of July everyone!

We are sooo excited about summer over here! It is in full swing and full of fresh fruits and vegetables.  In my previous posts I mentioned loving this time of year because it enables my little Kirina (age 3) and I to visit farms and pick all sorts of yummies, from berries to peas to melons.

We discovered this concoction after one of our hot afternoons outside: Watermelon Agua Fresca.  Sooo good! Agua fresca in Spanish simply means “juice made with fresh water.”  What a great way to beat the heat.  Also a great way to introduce some herbs.  Mint has been the herb of the week over here…it just sings summer! Kirina enjoys picking it and I enjoy muddling it into a mohito (did I mention babies make us want to drink? 🙂 ).

This agua fresca recipe is barely even a recipe and can be worked into any BBQ party you are having this weekend.

Recipe:

Ingredients: 2 cups watermelon + 1 leaf fresh mint

Method: Blend together 2 cups chilled watermelon chunks with a few spoonfuls of water.  For babies, simply puree and serve.  For toddlers, add more water to make a refreshing drink that they can drink out of a straw.  For adults, well, you know the drill.  Find some alcohol and add slowly. 😉

Um, yes, that is it.  I wish I had a picture.  It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to grab a camera.  I’ll leave you with a summery picture of my almost four-month-old instead.

From our highchair to yours, bon appetit!

Minced cantaloupe sprinkled with cardamom

When I was little my mom always served this combination at dinner, particularly when we were eating Indian food.  Since Indian food always has a mad amount of masala going on, something cool and refreshing provides the perfect balance.  For children, it’s also like having a little dessert along with dinner (which I remember as feeling pretty special, like I was getting away with something).

The recipe is super simple.  Simply mince some cantaloupe and stir in a pinch of ground cardamom and a pinch of sugar (you can omit this if your cantaloupe is particularly sweet).  The key to this dish is the way you cut the melon–mincing it allows the juices to accumulate, which when combined with the cardamom makes for tasty sips at the bottom of the bowl.  The other key to this dish is serving it well-chilled.   Refrigerate for 15-30 minutes before serving.  The juices will have enough time to accumulate and the cold enhances the summery taste of the dish.

Puree for very small babies, serve as is for toddlers and kids.  What a great way to introduce a new spice!

Enjoy!

Hello everyone!

If you read the title of this post and thought of a music duo then you are a well-seasoned human being (that’s a nice way of saying that you’re old, ha ha.  Don’t worry, I myself am ancient. I grew up in the 80’s).  (For those young ones who are puzzled, Peaches and Herb was a popular music act in the 1970’s best known for their hit, “Reunited”).

Ok enough kidding around. I’m here to write about peaches! Peaches and baby food to be specific. Our local orchards and my favorite grocery store Wegmans, have a lot of juicy, ripe peaches on hand.   May and June are typically peach season, depending on where you are.  Where we live, lovely Jersey Peaches are available starting late June and can be picked right off the tree until August.

Making baby food from peaches is not only easy, it’s delicious.  And beyond that, there are excellent ways to spice up your peaches! Often when you look in the baby food aisle at jarred or pouched food, you see a peach mixture of some sort, but never anything that resembles how an adult would eat a peach if they were cooking it.  Peaches can be grilled, with a little sage, they can be cooked with spices into a sublime chutney, and they can be eaten for dessert as a melba or cobbler, scented with spices like clove and nutmeg.  Why can’t your baby have a taste of what you are having? Here are some creative ideas for introducing your little one to seasoned fruit:

Peach and Ginger Chutney for babies

Peach-Ginger “Chutney”

This recipe is so simple! And healthy.  Traditional chutney preparations call for a good heaping of brown sugar, which I’ve omitted here since we are focusing on babies and toddlers.  In a small saucepan, simply combine 2-3 peeled and sliced peaches, 1 teaspoon of water and 1/8 teaspoon (or so, you can add as much as your baby likes) freshly minced ginger root.

Add, if desired, a few drops of lemon juice for some brightness.  Simmer together for 5-7 minutes, stirring frequently.  You can add a pinch of all or some of the following while cooking: ground clove, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, or, my favorite, garam masala.  You can also simply start with ginger and work your way up!  Let cool and serve.  For babies, puree in blender for smoother consistency.  For toddlers, serve as is, spread on crackers, or dress on a piece of turkey or ham.

Fresh ginger root

Roasted (or Grilled) Peaches with Sage

Rinse 4 peaches and wipe dry.  Cut into halves and remove the pit.  Rub flesh with a tiny bit of butter (optional for very young babies) and place 2 sage leaves into each cavity.  Arrange in a baking dish skin side down and roast at 375 degrees for 30 minutes (or until flesh is extremely soft).  Allow peaches to cool and remove sage leaves.  For babies: scoop out sage scented flesh and puree.  For toddlers, scoop out flesh (or let your toddler scoop out flesh) and go to town.  Grilled peaches also have a unique and different flavor profile.  To do, simply place peach halves on grill and cook until soft, taking care not to overly char the fruit.  Rub cooked fruit with sage leaves and serve (pureed or chunks) accordingly.

Peach and Basil Puree

Steam or roast peaches (2-4 depending on what you want) until soft.  Puree with 1-2 fresh basil leaves.  This is a super summery mix that is a great way to introduce your little one to basil.

Chili (or Paprika) Peaches

You read that right! Babies in several parts of the world routinely eat chili powder (Mexican babies eat avocado with chili powder and lime juice for a snack and it’s considered totally normal).

Spiced Peach Cobbler

Finally! Dessert! What baby won’t go for this one? Cobblers are wonderful dishes that allow you to use a lot of familiar spices.  To cooked peaches (steamed or baked) add a pinch of ground clove, cinnamon and nutmeg.  You can also add a pinch of pumpkin pie spice instead.  For babies, puree and serve.  For toddlers, you can drizzle a bit of honey and/or add some brown sugar during the baking/steaming process.

So excited for summer.  Lots more recipes on the way and little baby Ela will be starting solids soon.  Stay tuned!

From Kirina’s highchair to your little one’s, bon appetite!

Happy Friday everyone!

Hope everyone is finally enjoying some sort of nice weather across the states.  Here in New Jersey we have had a wacky mix of rains, floods, and finally sunshine.  As soon as I post this I’m taking the little ones outside.

So normally I’m whipping up different meals for Kirina or thinking up ways to spice up baby food.  But baby Ela, our newest addition, could care less for such things at the moment.  To put it bluntly, she’s into milking the cow.  That would be, um, me.  Yes, that is what I basically feel like these days.  🙂  It is pretty nice nursing a baby actually, especially since I couldn’t do that with Kirina (she was in the NICU for many days, hence we had a breastfeeding crisis of sorts.  Actually it wasn’t a crises, it was a total nightmare! Pumping an ounce or two, supplementing with formula, feeling unnecessarily guilt-ridden for all of the above.   Ugh!).  Ela came into the world looking for milk…I had not experienced anything quite so natural before.  She is a nursing addict.  🙂

Having had both rocky and easy breastfeeding experiences, I thought it would be worth writing about what to do when you are not having such an easy time with milk supply.  I learned a lot the last time around and since we are discussing all things spices and global, sharing some insights might help other moms out there.  There are things to learn from all the global mothers and grandmothers out there.

For instance, spices are not just for cooking!  Meet my friend fenugreek:

One of the oldest and most common methods for increasing a mother’s milk supply is by eating fenugreek seeds, which come from a plant cultivated largely in India, but also in Egypt, Turkey and Morocco.  The above is a close-up of what the seeds look like.

Below is me trying to take creative pictures and failing:

This reminds me I need to sign up for a photography class.  Or something.

At any rate, fenugreek, or methi, as we call it in India, is used primarily in curries in India, Persia and some other Middle Eastern curries.  Usually the seeds are ground into a powder and used in a spice mixture to season the curry.  The leaves of the plant are often folded into roti (Indian flatbread) for an extra dimension of flavor.

Medicinally, fenugreek is a known…(get ready)… galactagogue.

Say that 5 times fast and you get a prize!

For us normal, SAT-flunking humans, all this means is that fenugreek has properties that are known to increase lactation in nursing mothers.

The first time I heard this I thought it was an old Indian grandmother gimmick (other gimmicks include eating yogurt while you are pregnant so your baby is born with “fair skin,” but that is another post and topic entirely, and one that makes me too angry to talk about…people, ahem, out-laws, need to stop giving such ridiculous “advice”).  Anyway, after a lot of research I discovered that fenugreek is commonly used all over the world for mothers struggling with milk supply.  How cool!

Does it work?

Yes! Though my results were sort of all over the place.  I think the problem was that I stopped doing it regularly.  Friends who have done this regularly have seen remarkable results.  Their supply increased by almost 50% which is huge!

There are ways to take fenugreek.  First of all you have to ask your doctor what to do because, as a lawyer, I know I can’t dole out medical/herbal advice without getting my ass sued. 😉  But from my own experiences, you can either find fenugreek capsules in a health food store, or go old school and whip out your methi seed jar from your cabinet:

Don’t have this stocked? Most of us don’t! Any Indian or Asian grocery store can help you out there.  I took a tablespoon of seeds and soaked them in water overnight, then gulped the mixture down the next morning.  Yes, this might sound off-putting, but the taste is not so bad and it goes down quickly.  Lore and research suggest that you need to do this many times a day until (stop reading if you are going to get grossed out) your pee smells like maple syrup (no, I’m not kidding).  If you hit this point, you are ingesting enough.

Some women see an increase in milk production overnight, some need to add pumping sessions to increase the seeds’ effectiveness, and still others can’t rely on just seeds alone (they need the supplements).  Regardless, I think it’s pretty cool that a spice has such power and that before pumps and related gadgets were invented, this is how women dealt with things.  Amazing.

Ask your lactation consultant for more personal advice…but if you are struggling, give this a try!

I’ll close this post from Ela’s highchair to your little one’s…bon appetit! (oh dear.  no pun intended).