Round Two, Part Two: Homemade Baby Food

Okay, so it's nearly two months later and I am just now finishing the Round Two baby food post.  How sad is that?  The fact that I have a somewhat clean house and a happy, alive baby are two decent reasons that I shouldn't worry about it, but, man.  I gotta get better at this.

Where were we?  Zucchini?  The squash is in the oven.  The zucchini is about to get steamed.

Like the larger pictures??

Don't forget: it is extra important to get organic when you're going to include the skin in the puree!  I pretty much always get organic anyway, because little ones eat so much more than adults do comparatively to their body weight, so chemicals build up in their little bodies in much higher quantities than adults!

A full, medium-sized pot (like mine) of zukes will steam up really quick, about 8 minutes.  And the less you cook the more nutrients baby gets.

Look at that beautiful puree!  Zukes cook down and then puree down even further, so you can feel good about how much good stuff your baby is getting even if they only eat a little.

I thought these were really beautiful.  I may need to get out more, like maybe go to a museum or the opera or something.

(And as you can see, commercial baby food has its place in my kitchen too!)

I froze them up in the small, 1.5 oz silicone mini muffin tins, which are terrible for muffins but awesome for baby food.

Where's that squash??  It ended up taking nearly two hours in the oven, and I didn't even get it cooked enough, which was evident when I pureed it and it was still pretty stringy.  I'm not even going to show it to you it was so bad.

Alright, moving on to the apple sauce.  I don't think I can screw this one up!

I didn't worry about getting all the skin off since these are organic apples.  From my very own home state of Washington.  I cut them up really coarsely since they're getting pureed anyway.

These smelled so good steaming!

God bless food processors.  Can you imagine having to grind all this stuff up by hand?  Oh wait.  Pretty sure that's how my mom did it, with a little countertop food mill.  I love you, Meem.

Who says you can't mix zucchini and applesauce?  That's the beauty of feeding an infant.  They don't have any preconceived notions of what goes with what.  I have been known to put zucchini or even kale in Natalie's oatmeal!

By the way, this applesauce was so unbelievably delicious unsweetened.  I guess they don't call them Red Delicious for nothing.  It was hard to make sure all of it found its way to Natalie instead of my own mouth.  And the house smelled amazing!

I will say, though, that pound for pound and dollar for dollar, I will probably buy organic jarred applesauce in the future.  Or at least until the cost of organic apples drops at the farmer's market later in the season.

Everything else I have made has been more cost-effective than (not to mention nutritionally superior to)  commercial baby food, and much of what I have made is not even available commercially (like the zucchini).

So set aside an hour or two (or maybe two months) and make your little one some apple-zucchini sauce!


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And Now For Some Deals

Ah, Daily Candy.  You have sparked numerous little obsessions for me, from the edible hibiscus flower that goes in champagne to the no-fail way to get bumped to a better class of airline seat, and also amazed me with mind-reading emails about things I've loved for years, like teeny tiny houses. 

from tumbleweedhouses.com

Start with DailyCandy's Deals (here's Seattle's Deal's page, since I am nothing if not a locavore).  You can also sign up for as many daily email editions as you want about your favorite cities, children's stuff, and their Swirl online sample sale.

Round Two

I'm really getting into this homemade baby food thing. Natalie's been eating like a champ (see: cheeks, legs, arms, and belly) and has enjoyed nearly everything we have given her.

This operation was even bigger than the first. It ended up taking me nearly two days to fully complete, so maybe it was a little ambitious. But baby's gotta eat! A lot!

I was armed for cooking all these things with a combination of knowledge from Cooking for Baby by Lisa Barnes and Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron, and striking out on my own from there, also factoring in the Beaba Babycook's manual and recipes.

In this corner, wearing their Certified Organic stickers: butternut squash, Washington apples, zucchini, avocados, and millet!

And in this corner, wearing rice cereal splattered jeans and yesterday's makeup: mom!

No picture of mom. Thanks.

First up, roasting the butternut squash, since it's probably going to take a long time. Oven to 350.

I had to use my biggest, nastiest looking knife. You know, the one you grab in the middle of the night when you are fairly certain that noise you heard was a gorilla with 'roid rage trying to break into your house?

I had a Julia Child moment hacking that thing open. It would have been more appropriate if the squash was a duck or a side of beef, but Natalie's a vegetarian so far. The butchering will be limited to gourds and pineapples for now, sorry meat-heads!

If you happen to be a gorilla on 'roids, right about now you're thinking my house might be easy pickin's, judging by the size of my knife.

So I scooped out the seeds and sent them to compost (still have hopes of getting my garden going this year after last year's pregnancy-hiatus). See the lovely giant composting bag I got ready?

Face down in a baker (I had to use the biggest one I have, the Emile Henri meant for Italian-family sized quantities of lasagne) with 1/4 in of water in the bottom. Think of it as a shallow, deadly hot tub, Mr. Squash.

I really should have put something in the picture for scale. Try picturing each half of the squash as two faces... preferably of someone you do not like, given the hot-tub analogy above.

So those went into the oven for what was supposed to be only 45 minutes to one hour. It took much longer. More on that later.

Now on to the zucchini!

Get more than you think you will need, since zucchini's so full of water it condenses a lot in baby food form. I used 8 medium zukes. And for God's sake, spring for organic since you're not peeling them!

Chop it up coarsely. Don't worry about size or consistency, even. It's going to get the heck steamed out of it and then food processed so it doesn't matter.

Guess who wanted to help out by checking the quality of the zucchini....

It IS Ellie Bluebell's House after all.

Just like the initial operation, this entry is going to have to be finished tomorrow! Someone is awake from her nap and hungry for sweet potatoes....



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Cocktails and Crap Television

I don't watch that much television, so when I actually get around to sitting in front of the tv, I like to watch the crappiest, smuttiest, most low-brow, vapid garbage I can find. Enter Monday night's hot-tub-make-out-scene-ridden suck-fest, The Bachelor!

The Bachelor is best watched with a girlfriend (although most of my friends report that their husbands or boyfriends get really into the show with very little encouragement) or two, so when the Mister was out of town last Monday, I invited my BFF, Katie, over for the show and some dinner.

We made a tasty and healthy treat of black bean taco salad, which was really good and this close to being the star of this post (sharing the spot light with the cheesy but still very cute Jake, aka The Bachelor). But as I was meditating on the fact that our standard beverage of choice, red wine, really didn't go too well with beans, I remembered a certain little beverage I'd tried at the most recent Yelp Elite Event at Salty's.

That glorious evening was sponsored by Pearl Vodka (a very fabulous and surprisingly frugal spirit), and the good people at Salty's were whipping up many Pearl Vodka Skinny Coladas for the Yelpers that evening. I myself took down about four.

Skinny Colada: a pretty stupid name for a delightful and deelish little cocktail.

Given that it's tropical and served over ice, I thought it'd be a better match for our taco salads. Upon further review, however, it's such a good drink that I think you'd be hard pressed to find something it wouldn't go with.

Or rather, once you have a sip, you don't care about the food anymore. Maybe that's how it got it's stupid name.

Anyway, here's how you make two Skinny Coladas:

Obtain coconut vodka (Pearl is very good, and I noticed it was on sale last month in Washington State liquor stores, but they didn't have the coconut flavor in my neighborhood store. So I got Burnett's. Very frugal, and if you're worried about being judged, just pour it into a Smirnoff - or better - bottle before your guests arrive), pineapple juice, sweetened lime juice, and club soda.

You may notice something very scary and tragic about this photo: EMPTY VODKA BOTTLE. Don't let this happen to you! Stock up! There's nothing fabulous about running out of vodka. As a result of my poor booze-stockpiling, Katie and I were only able to have one cocktail each. What the hell kind of nerve do I have writing a blog about entertaining (among other things) with that kind of performance?? I am lucky that she is a peace-loving Christian who believes in forgiveness.

So pour one part coconut vodka and one part pineapple juice into a shaker of ice, add a splash of the lime (our own personal addition and a deviation from Pearl's Skinny Colada), and give it a weak little shake. We're not making martinis or shots here, go easy on the shaking.

Pour into highball (or even stemless wineglasses, as we did. Please notice my appropriated Riedel glassware, courtesy of the 20-Something wine event and my generously sized handbag) glasses 1/2 full of ice. Top with club soda.

Cheers! So tasty.  Just the thing for trashy tv and taco salad.

Here's the only problem we noticed about the Skinny Colada. It made us want to do fat things, namely make a double batch of hazelnut chocolate chip cookies (double, because if you're going to all the trouble, you might as well make a whole bunch).

(Hazelnuts were added, of course, for protein and, thus, health purposes)

Sooo not Skinny.

Desperately Seeking Makeover

It's pretty pathetic that I am a designer, and this is what my blog looks like. Okay, so I'm a designer of buildings, and these days it feels like that life was very long ago and far, far away (with 8 months of stay-at-home-momming under the elasticized waistband of my yoga pants). But I am a designer no less.

Seeing blogs like www.alifeintranslation.com make me realize just how far I have to go. Luckily, those gals are having a contest in which the winner will receive a makeover on her blog, and lucky for everyone who reads Ellie Blubell's House, I have entered. For your sake, I hope to win.

http://www.alifeintranslation.com/2010/01/in-which-i-give-away-a-custom-tricked-out-blog-design/

Adventures in Organic Baby Food: The Maiden Voyage

For whatever reason, maybe because I love to make things, I have been looking forward to making my own baby food for years. Like before I even became pregnant. Maybe because I'm a huge nerd. Maybe because I enjoy making things more difficult than they need to be. But it turns out making your own baby food is one of those things that's more worth it than it is difficult. It only sounds difficult.

I started by visiting my neighborhood PCC to get large quantities of organic sweet potatoes (of course, I'm doing this all organic).

I should back up.

I started by coveting a Beaba Babycook machine. And thanks to a certain aunt of my husband's, I am now the proud owner of one! Isn't it cute?

But it's pretty little, and this was going to be a large scale operation, so I got it set up to do a small batch of sweet potatoes for today's dinner, just to see how it worked.

For the mother lode, I assembled my sweet potatoes, in all their ugly but organic and nutritious glory.

According to the sweet potato baby food recipe on Organic.org one should wash, peel, and chop these guys. I wasn't sure about leaving the skin on or not, so I took their advice and removed it. My three pounds of potatoes yielded a lot of diced cubes! The paper bag is my goes-to-the-compost-bin vessel.

Did you know dogs love raw cubed sweet potatoes? Ellie Bluebell did.

Toss a couple cubes to your sous chef!

So I put the expandable steamer in my pot along with about an inch and a half of filtered water (if I'm going to the trouble of organic, I'm not going to use plain old tap water), covered it, and fired up the burner.

That plethora of sweet potato cubes steamed up really fast! Just 10 minutes later, they were spoon-tender (got lazy and grabbed the nearest utensil, which just happened to be a spoon rather than a fork).

Now here's the tricky part. I wanted to use as few pans as possible, and in order to mash them in the pot, with all that lovely, nutrient-rich steaming water, I had to first remove the steaming basket. Be careful, it's hot. Then I grabbed my handy dandy, low-tech potato masher (you could also use a food processor, a food mill, or even a blender), and gave 'em hell.

You might want to pour out a little of the steaming water, depending on how thick or thin you want your 'tatoes. Then I started loading up my freezing vessels: two silicone mini-muffin pans, and one Beaba food freezing tray.

I covered the mini-muffin pans with some plastic wrap to prevent freezer burn. And then came the second tricky part: finding room in the freezer. By moving the vodka and gin to the lowest shelf and reboxing some gardenburgers, I was able to accommodate them.

You can barely spot them in amongst the chaos of my freezer. Can you find the vodka??

After they were rock-hard, I popped the little nuggets out of their trays (easy, thanks to the silicone) into some freezer Zippies, labeled and dated them, and felt really good about the wealth of sweet potato baby food taking up precious booze space in my freezer.


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O (Inexpensive) Christmas Tree

Last December, the Mister and I were not feeling very festive. Or very flush, as I had just been laid off. So we almost didn't put up a tree. Too expensive, too much of a hassle, too... cheerful. But as the early days of December went by, I realized it's important to make the effort, and the cheer would follow. I was sure I could find a way to do it on the cheap - I had the time.

I remembered my mom telling how her dad used to take her and my Uncle Mike to Chubby and Tubby on Aurora for their Christmas tree when she was a little girl. My Grandpa: a very frugal guy, but also a big fan of Christmas, its associated festivity, and, wisely, keeping my Grandmother happy. And Grandma loved Christmas.

My mom remembers that there were two piles of trees: the one dollar pile and the five dollar pile. I'm sure you can guess which pile they chose from.

Even though Chubby and Tubby is no more, I knew they still sold Christmas trees in a nursery a bit north of their original location, so off I went up Aurora Avenue to tackle the tree.

It was a Christmas miracle! Okay, so nothing like the birth of Jesus or anything, not even close in fact, but I was really impressed. A friendly gentlemen patiently held the trees up for my scrutiny, and factoring in my Christmas Tree Rules of Thumb (Number One: it must be taller than me. Luckily I'm only five-two. Number Two: must have a nice, straight top for the star, since that's what everyone looks at), found me the perfect Noble Fir.

Usually that kind of tree is expensive, but at Chubby and Tubby they're $25 with tax (Doug Firs and Spruces are even less). They put it in the back of my car for me and I was on my way, thinking, 'that wasn't so bad. That was cake.'

In disbelief, I fully expected it to drop every one of its needles in a massive avalanche of prickly green the moment I stood it up in the living room. But it remained fresh and resplendant through the end of December, which is more than I can report about some of the $65-plus trees I recall from days of Christmas Past.

I went again this year to get a Chubby and Tubby tree, and everyone who visits Ellie Bluebell's house can't quite believe it's a $25 tree. Christmas cheer on the cheap!

Chubby & Tubby Christmas Trees
17212 Aurora Ave N, Seattle 98133
http://www.yelp.com/biz/chubby-and-tubby-christmas-trees-seattle