Baby bites

Hard boiled egg with 1/8 avocado and six leaves of the curry bush, finely chopped, topped with chemical-free sesame seeds. Fancy-pants shape optional.

Emme absolutely devoured this. Her chubby little hands were clapping together in glee as she tasted the buttery concoction with the very mild curry flavour.

The week in our kitchen

I just love that my two year old is a keen cook. I would like to take responsibility for this. He has, after all, literally grown up tugging at my apron strings, watching me make bread, cakes, passata pomodoro, roasts. He was indoctrinated to gastric adventure-seeking whilst in utero. He truly is a baby foodling. However, I think most kids, given the opportunity, love to have a play in the kitchen.

Firstly, it is something they regard as being particularly grown up, and therefore excessively desirable as an activity. But beyond this, it involves measuring, stirring, rolling, destruction (well, cracking eggs). It is child's play. Maybe that's why we like it so much? Maybe it appeals to the Big Kid jumping around inside of us?

The Pamela Druckerman book I mentioned a couple of weeks back, "French Children Don't Throw Food", explores the concept of patience. French children, Druckerman explains, engage in a ritual that sees them baking a yoghurt cake every Sunday morning, which they don't eat until that evening. It is a great national tradition, but also an exercise in patience, for children. What better way to gently introduce little people to the concept of delayed gratification than with baking- which, by its very nature, requires a period of clock watching and waiting?

Last week, we made a cake for my daughter's nine month birthday (no surprises- we are big celebrators in this snug) and last night, it was ravioli. Sure. He kept calling the pasta dough "play-doh" but he was fastidious in his rolling efforts and I love that he helped make the family's dinner. That he WANTED to help.

I think one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids is a good relationship with food, and by that, I mean good food. I want my kids to love flavour, to love texture, to seek quality, to question production techniques and ethics, and to see food and food preparations as cornerstones to a healthy and rich family and social life. Thankfully, I think they're already well on their way.

Salmon Spaghetti

A great way to get those vital omega 3s into fussy eaters, as well as some sneaky veg, this pasta is a sure-fire hit.

You will need
A handful of spaghetti, snapped in half and cooked according to packet instructions
100g butter
2 tablespoons spelt/wholemeal flour
1 cup low fat milk
1/2 cup grated cheese
1/2 cup grated or finely sliced veggies (cabbage, zucchini, eggplant, carrot all make great additions)
Large tin pink or red salmon
1/3 cup finely chopped fresh herbs (I used parsley and Dill)

Melt the butter in a saucepan over moderate heat. Once it begins to bubble and has turned a lustrous gold, add flour and stir until you have a ball. Add milk in very small quantities, starting with a tablespoon, and stir continuously.

Once you have a nice, thickening white sauce, add the veggies and cheese. Strain off the salmon and incorporate, mashing down so that there are no large chunks. Add the drained, cooked pasta and the parsley, stir over low heat, then serve. This is a firm favourite for us- the white sauce mix cooks in the time it takes to boil pasta. From start to finish this is a fifteen minute dinner.

Artificially sweetened Easter chocolate? No, thanks.

An open letter to the Children's Hospital Foundation Australia:

I have to preface this letter with a statement of strong support and admiration for the work that you do. As a fundraising effort spanning the five most prominent children's hospitals in Australia, I can only imagine the number of families you have helped navigate unbearable scenarios.

That being said, I am motivated by a strong sense of outrage to question your Easter fundraising efforts.

I am a mum to two small children and I struggle daily with making the right food choices for them- weighing up flavour with organic ingredients and food miles and production wages, additives, colourings, carbon footprint of packaging. The modern mum's foodie conscience is fraught with pot-holes. Easter isn't just a pot-hole, it's a major crater. Let's face it, most kids love chocolate, and lots of it, and it's an up-hill battle to control their lust for it.

When I was perusing my local supermarket and saw your charity offerings, I was immediately swayed to them. Here was a chocolate that supported a local charity. Nay, a local kids' charity! Sweeter than sweet. I picked up three bunnies and stashed them in my basket, before a bright orange label on your box packaging caught my eye. "No added sugar!", it proudly proclaimed.

That can't be right.

I have type 1 diabetes and I've learned to be sceptical of anything sweet that has no added sugar. I turned one of the bunnies over and read, with depression, the listed ingredients. The first, "Carbohydrate modified chocolate". Doesn't that just sound like something nature wanted to dish up to your school-aged child? Next? Maltitol. That's an artificial sweetener of the sugar alcohols variety. It has no nutritional benefit, it's highly processed and manufactured, and excess consumption may lead to intestinal discomfort and bloating and diarrhoea.

Which brings me to my third point. Underneath the ingredients list, there's a bold, capitalised warning to unsuspecting parents: "EXCESS CONSUMPTION MAY HAVE A LAXATIVE EFFECT".

In all seriousness, who thought this was a good idea? Children are, undeniably, excessive consumers of chocolate. Parental watchfulness aside, children are wily little beings, and they *will* find a way to over-indulge on chocolate. Particularly at Easter.

I really do admire the great work the foundation does, but this product is sheer madness. Why not an Easter card? Calendar? Cook book? Bunny ears? Or, a bonafide dark chocolate bunny, at the very least? What a shame.

I'd prefer to not give my kids the unpleasant gastric side effects and just donate straight to your cause...and I'd urge every other mum I know to do the same thing. Www.childrenshospitals.org.au

Best wishes
LittleLunching

Homemade organic baby rusks

I can't believe I used to religiously buy baby rusks for my son. This is the first time I have attempted making them, without a recipe, and they were SO easy. Not to mention healthy and quick (well, a quick preparation time), and budget friendly. The best thing though is how much both of my children enjoyed them.

Ingredients
1 cup organic wholemeal spelt flour
1/3 cup sesame seeds
1/2 vanilla pod
1 tablespoon cashew paste (so long as you know your baby isn't allergic)
1/3 cup filtered water

In a bowl, combine all the ingredients (scraping the seeds from the vanilla pod) until it forms a firm dough ball. Dampen your hands and roll the dough into rusks size biscuits.

Bake in a really low oven (around 110'c) for 3 hours, until they are hard. Leave to cool and dry and then store in an airtight container for up to a week.

Once you can get over their more-than-passing-resemblance to turds, you will love making these.

Peach, pea and goats cheese "risotto".

Ingredients
1/2 cup organic brown rice
2 peaches
1/3 cup frozen organic peas
3 tablespoons goats cheese
Parmesan/cheddar to serve

Prepare to cook the brown rice according to packet instructions, using the absorption method. Add the peaches in and cook, though check a few minutes earlier and top up water as required. At the last minute, add in the peas and goats cheese and stir.

Everyone loved this, from my husband to my son to little miss fussy nine month old. I froze the leftovers in perfect-for-one tubs and was so thrilled with the nutritional value of this delicious and easy meal.

Dinner for my sweet peas

Crisp fried salmon with carrot infused polenta and baby peas

Baby bites

For brekkie today, on her nine month birthday, a delivious avocado mashed with organic wholegrain cous-cous. She was much more interested in her sippy cup, today, though!

Parmesan crisp baskets

I love the recipe book for Thomas Keller's The French Laundry, and in it he has canapés that are served in Parmesan crisp baskets. Mousse type things, yum. Tonight, Jonathan had a perfectly ripe avocado with a poached egg served in a Parmesan crisp basket (and with a strawberry from the garden, too!). I will most definitely be making these baskets en masse for our next event- they're so salty and crispy and yummy.

"Ducks" and eggs

Another time, perhaps when I'm functioning on more than three hours of broken night time sleep, I will blog the recipe for these organic mash veggie "ducks". But I have to skite a little here about my poached eggs. I seem to have discovered the perfect cooking technique for me, but it works every time! And it's so easy. I know everyone has their own take on poaching (swirling water, vinegar, lid.....) but here is my super simple method.

Take a small saucepan and fill it 1/3 with water. Bring to the boil with the heat on max and break up to four eggs in- no more. Do this as quickly and gently as possible so that they cook evenly. Place a snug fitting lid on top and leave heat on max. As soon as the water bubbles over and froths out of the lid, remove the pan from heat. Leave for one minute or so for perfect soft poached eggs (about as long as it takes to butter toast and assemble cutlery). Leave for two minutes for hard poached. You actually can't go wrong with this- they form perfect shapes! Remove from the water with a slotted spoon and hover over a paper or tea towel until they're not dripping and then place onto toast. Poached eggs are Jonno's egg du jour- he likes them soft so he can dip toast soldiers in the yoke and carve out the white. Emme also loved them.

Pumpkin (sweet as) Pie

I had to post this photo of my sweet little pumpkin eating her first pumpkin, from our garden. I roasted and then mashed it and it made her giddy with glee.

Home-made brekkie bars

Lots of store-bought breakfast or muesli bars are so packed with sugar and other nasties, yet they're a really good way to get wholesome foods into stubborn kids...especially when they're choc-coated as a special treat! Normally, I would make without the choc but my little guy has been off-colour and I wanted to inspire him to rediscover his appetite. Even with the chocolate, they're still a pretty good snack option.

I combined spelt rolled oats, sesame paste, peanut butter, melted butter, honey and a little rice flour in a bowl and baked as a flat slab at low temp for about 15 minutes. Once it had cooled off, I spread a thin layer of good-quality chocolate (the equivalent to 1.5 cubes per bar) and set in the fridge. Once fully set, I sliced into bars and have kept them stored in the fridge.

Baby bites

We had family taco dinner tonight and even 8 month old Emme got in on the action, with some mashed avocado, grated cheddar and home-made garlic sauce. She loved it.

At 8 months, Emme has been eating voraciously, with gusto and enthusiasm, for over four months, and after devouring this smash up, she had some corn taco and a piece of tomato, both of which she almost choked on. When I introduced my son to solids, it was a markedly different experience. He was our first. And we were such newbies. We adhered to almost all of the advice (except with regards to eggs, I think). But sometimes he would choke too, and it scared the bejesus out of me. One day, when lamenting the precarious and risky state of toddler-feeding to a girlfriend with a baby five months older than mine, I learned a valuable lesson.. She leaned in to me and confided, "Babies choke! You just fish it back out!" It was a lightbulb moment and probably a very crucial parenting concept to grasp. Shit happens, and your job isn't to prevent it altogether but rather to help them through it.


The pleasure Emme got from sucking the flesh from a perfectly ripe side of tomato, juice running down her chin and pooling on her chest, well, it was immeasurable. The skin proved too much for her and I had to remove the fruit before it blocked her windpipe(!), but I would never avoid experiences like this just to err really far on the side of extreme caution.

Food should be fun. Healthy, fresh, delicious and fun.

Baby cakes

Perfect for little fingers at a busy and important playdate, these muffins are a treat for adults and kids alike.

Ingredients

1 cup spelt flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 cup almondmeal
2 tablespoons butter melted
1/2 cup ricotta
1/3 cup brown sugar loosely packed
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs, whisked
1/3 cup desiccated coconu

Preheat oven to 180'c.

Sift spelt flour and baking powder into a bowl and add sugar and almond meal. Stir until combine, making sure any lumps of sugar are squished into the mix.

Add the remaining ingredients and stir until JUST COMBINED. You don't want to stir any muffin mix too thoroughly as they become chewy.

Spoon the mix into muffin cases and bake in a 180'c oven for around 20 minutes. Check they're done with a skewer (should come out clean when inserted.).

These are awesome with white choc, though for little people I chose to keep them pretty clean and healthy.

On the brekkie bar today

Poached egg with a kumara scone and banana slices

Fruit loaf

This is a much loved favourite in our snug. Fruit loaf, or Tarni toast, is an oft-requested item from cafes, and a great snack when we are rushing somewhere. Which we are, often- more often than I would like to be a-rushing, anyhow. I'm a control freak 95% of the time. Which means I would always prefer my kids to eat something I had prepared at home, so that I have total knowledge of the ingredients etc. But I'm realistic (and lazy) enough to have made my peace with convenience food. So, if we are at coffee and Jonathan wants fruit loaf for brekkie, I'm usually happy to oblige, but I far, far prefer to be able to toast it from my freezer and take it out with us, thus knowing what flour, what sugar, what yeast and which sultanas are used. I told you. Control freak. 95% of the time, anyway.

Kumara, apple and cheddar scones

2 cups wholemeal atta flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
60g butter
1 cup vintage cheddar
1/2 cup low-fat organic milk
1 tsp caster sugar
1 cup stewed apple & sweet potato (you could vary your veggie mash- include some fruit and some veg for a flavour balance)
A little extra flour for dusting
Egg for egg wash

Preheat oven to 180'c

In a bowl, sift the flour, baking powder and sugar and stir to combine. Add butter and use your fingertips to rub together until you have the consistency of breadcrumbs. Add mashed veggies, cheddar and milk and use a wooden spoon to incorporate. Do not over mix it as your scones will be tough. Once incorporated, turn dough into a lightly floured bench top and roll until you have a slab around 3cm high. Cut into rounds. (I just love the sound it makes as you push the cup through the dough!)

Place each circular piece of dough onto a flat baking tray, lined with baking paper. Once finished, egg wash and bake for around 20 minutes. Cooking time varies depending on your oven but you'll know they're done when they're golden and springy. Test one by slicing in half and serving with a lovely farm-fresh butter.

I had to tell my son they were "muffins" but he quickly devoured two so, slight mummy tricking aside, these are a "ten out of ten, must make again" for me.