Lately I’ve found some time to do some cooking and have picked out some new recipes. Some have been good, some have not. Here’s what’s gone down:

• Chili Cheese Corn Muffin from Rachael Ray. These were edible but that’s about it, they made a regular non-sweet muffin and added chili and corn and Parmesan cheese to it which we’ve decided is just wrong. Plus mayonnaise in muffins? Kinda ick. We’ve been trying to work our way through them, but it’s been rough. Previously Josie and I made corn muffin’s from the Magnolia Bakery cookbook, those were good. Jordi says to next time take those corn muffins and add cheese and chili’s.
• Cake Balls! Yum yum, but somewhat a pain to make. They take a lot of time for cooling, it was helpful that it’s winter because I just stuck the cake out in the snow to cool down. They are delicious, especially keeping them in the freezer. We used chocolate my brother in law just sent us from Brazil which was a nice added touch! Jordi thought they went nicely with a chocolate martini.
• 17 bean soup from Trader Joes. I added in some cheese rind from some old cheese which I keep around for this purpose, adds salt and flavor. It was nice, nothing inspirational. Feels good on a cold winter’s day and very healthy.
• Sweet potato Gnocchi. Sweet potatoes were cheap cheap cheap a few weeks ago and so I had to find a way to make them in into something more interesting than just baked sweet potato. Here comes the gnocchi. I got a lot of help from the toddler set in mashing the potatoes, both Zach and Josie. These took a lot of physical labor to mix it all up, but they were exceedingly tasty and I have several bags of them in my freezer. When made with the accompanying sauce of brown butter with sage (and maple syrup) they were decadent.
• and tonight, Tapioca pudding from non-instant tapioca. Let’s hope it’s good!

Josie has become a bit of a help in the kitchen, she can wash fruits and vegetables, take grapes off the stem, and measure and pour with a small bit of help (like making sure she actually fills said measuring cup). Here she does a great job rolling out some scallion pancakes. Thanks to Alice for teaching me back at Zeta how to make them!

I made some home-made pasta with pesto today without pine nuts. Turns out Josie likes it. Seems to follow her general trend of liking anything I put lots of cheese and garlic into!

She is a great eater at home and whenever I’m making the food. She doesn’t do quite so well at restaurants unless we order extremely plain food, so we always bring an avocado as backup. Not sure what’s up with that.

I’m behind in the food category, but it just hasn’t been terribly exciting. She’s had a few new things. One fun one though was chickpeas. I introduced it to her in whole form just as a bean to start with. That was a severe disappointment. Then next day I made it into some baby hummus with some cumin, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. I gave her a spoon and a cracker to eat it with and it was a big success! It was also one of the biggest messes she’s ever made. There was hummus in her hair, her ears, and the underside of the seat somehow. She enjoyed it again today for lunch.

One story I hadn’t mentioned a while back was when I was grocery shopping with my mom when Josie was probably about 8 months old. My mom gave Josie a full bulb of garlic to hold to entertain her. Josie (ever the eager eater) decided to take a big bite of the raw garlic. I caught her too late and she had already sunk her teeth into it. And then she went back for another bite. So we know she’s not a vampire!

I’ve fallen behind in the food documenting arena again, but there haven’t been any great reactions. Over the last several weeks since she turned 9 months we were able to introduce some new foods like egg yolks and olive oil! She doesn’t eat or drink the olive oil, but I can use it now to cook some of her foods. None of these foods were particularly big hits to begin with, but after a few weeks of offering it to her Josie has decided that avocado now beats broccoli for best food in the world. Good thing the stores had sales on avocados last week. She will sit and eat almost an entire one in a meal. We started on black beans yesterday but it took a lot of cajoling to even get her to put it in her mouth. I expect that like avocado she’ll try them more later and like them more then.

One thing that the egg yolk and oil gave me was a chance to actually do some food combinations and cooking. For instance, I made her broccoli potato “fries” shown below. They weren’t a huge hit although I thought they were pretty tastey.

Her appetite for food has increased quite a bit and she will eat surprisingly large amounts of food. I’m also starting to appreciate the fruit that she eats because I don’t have to cook it, just cut it. I think the avocado mask she gives herself nightly also might be helping to improve her complexion!

Her cold from last week finally ended after almost three weeks, and that combined with the daily avocado and olive oil on other foods seems to have given her the small double chin back again which makes me feel better. This week she goes to the doc to confirm the ear infection is gone and we’ll get another weigh-in.

Broccoli potato fries

I’ve gotten a bit behind in the food photos department, although they’re all starting to look the same so it’s not so much fun. We’ve been trying lots of new foods and basically Josie still is preferring the old standby of broccoli, rice cakes, and potatoes and seems moderately eager about carrots and sweet potatoes. From the title you can see we’ve tried a bunch of new foods and pretty much all of the fruit was summarily sent to the floor after trying it. The blueberries did a pretty good job of painting her face. The oatmeal was fairly interesting to her although the spoon concept was thrown to the floor. Instead I just make the oatmeal thick and put it in a pile in front of her and she dug in. She seems to have my food preferences quite a bit, man the peach was sour. Can’t wait until we get back to some new vegetables rather than all these fruits although I am doing a good job trying new fruits this way too.

Josie eating blueberries and rice cake

Final results of the blueberries - note the eyebrow

Josie and the peach

One of our favorite restaurants since we came to Cambridge post-CMU has been Border Cafe. While I like to eat a lot of different foods, I often find one thing per restaurant that I just love to get again and again. At the Border Cafe my favorite was the corn and black bean empanada. Now this dish really wasn’t an empanada, it was more what Americans would call a chimichanga, it was a deep fried burrito covered in red pepper sauce. It was delicious and was the same for the last 8 years that we’ve been going there.

Now for some reason they’ve changed the dish to make it more like real empanadas, four little pouches of flakey pastry. Problem is that they just aren’t as good, it’s too much dough, not enough beans and cheese and veggies. It’s just ruined for me, and it’s not that they don’t have good chips, salsa, quesadillas, and fajitas still, but they just removed my favorite food.

And, I have asked previously for the recipe and they refused it. Now I can’t even enjoy it at the restaurant! So Border Cafe is dead to me.

Our friend Wing posted about how to make an ‘easy’ loaf of homemade bread on his blog so I thought I’d give it a try this weekend. I bought the yeast and all. I didn’t have a bunch of the equipment (stone or a peel) and I (once again) didn’t read the whole way through the recipe before I started. So come dinner time the bread had risen the first time, but not the second. So we had some flat bread with our dinner of curried split peas; it was fairly appropriate actually. Then I made the rest of the bread into a big loaf and baked it off on a pizza pan. It was crazy delicious and the whole huge thing was gone very quickly even with just me and Jordi eating it. So I must say it is a very forgiving recipe and very good. I just may have to do it again, but next time I’ll bake smaller loaves so we don’t eat so much bread at once.

my funny looking loaf

This year I made pies and sweet potatos for the thanksgiving feast. This year’s apple pie was a new and odd recipe where I made a caramel sauce ahead, put apples in the crust and then poured the caramel on top of the top crust through the holes! This is another example of me not reading through the recipe because this was a real surprise to me when I sat down to make it. I started very early in the morning at least so no problems!