Refocusing....

So I've been neglecting this blog lately and I wish I could say I'll snap out of it soon but I probably won't. The business is having a slow start (which I predicted) and I have to focus my energy where it is needed. This doesn't mean I have given up, the business will still be operational and I still hope to change the way people feed their babies (and themselves). I'll continue to offer my services to anyone who is interested in either baby and toddler meals or heat and eat meals for individuals and families. I am also available for cooking classes, either in my home at $20 per person (includes the food you'll be taking home) or yours for $25 (minimum of four people) in either case you will be able to pick the theme or particular dish you'd like to learn.
The blog however, will be on a hiatus for now.
If you'd like updates on Aurora and I and our food adventures you can find us here:
First Comes Baby...
Thanks so much for your support!! Hope to be back soon!

What Aurora's been eating! 5-6mos.

 So I thought it'd be a fun idea to do some photo posts of what Aurora has been eating lately.
We've started to do some new flavors including her first combo (banana & roasted parsnip), finally found a cereal that we can agree on:
<--- Happy Baby Happy Bellies organic oatmeal... love it, it even tastes good!
We also tried our first self feeding with Baby Mum Mum organic rice rusk cookies! I also think this will be an easy way to cheat and keep track of what we have and haven't tried yet... I was going to just keep a little journal but this is much more fun! Enjoy!

Fresh organic green beans with a little oatmeal for texture

Super smooth pureed bananas topped with roasted parsnips

Oatmeal with mango puree

Peaches! Also, have I mentioned that I <3 the Vital Baby food pots?

These were so hard to find in less than a case! Had to go to Drugstore.com

Totally worth it despite the mess. She liked feeding herself and LOVED them!

                            

Yet another store bought baby food beef! (the problem, not the meat)

So I started mixing a little cereal with some of Aura's purees because she's down a bottle during the day since starting solids and I wanted to be sure that she was still getting enough iron.
Problem is, it made her a little constipated. Tried giving her an organic avocado and it helped a little but I thought I should try prunes to help things along... here's a couple pictures of Aurora and the avocado just because they're cute:

Yummy! (mama had to help with the other half!)

Somewhere along the line Aurora as decided fingers are food too...

All gone!

Washing it all down! (the front of her bib) a.k.a practicing with the sippy!

I recently discovered most dried fruit has SULFUR in it so pureeing my own was going to be tough and I was looking for a quicker fix, couldn't find my second choice which would've been Plum organics or another pouch so I broke down and got the Gerber organic which comes in little plastic tubs. The color wasn't grey like in the jars and it had DHA so I figured I'd give it a shot... even though the ingredients were a little bit of a turn off:

Gelatin... really? And is the tuna oil organic? There are other sources of DHA!

I'm also more than a little put off that they used the cheap trick of being 'certified organic' by someone other than the USDA. That doesn't hold much weight with me and I'm bummed I didn't notice before I bought it.
Anyway... the end result was not good either. The ONLY positive thing I have to say is that they did taste better than I thought they would and more like actual food than anything in a jar. But so far (10+ hours later) no evidence that they helped anything.
The worst part? Well, Aurora has always been a heavy spitter up-er if you will, but it's always milky like her formula... today however since the bottle she got after her prunes her spit up was all thick and curdled! It got progressively worse for quite awhile and she ended the night cranky which rarely happens. Now, to be fair we did have a playdate so she might've just been exhausted, but explain the spit up! It gradually got a little better after a few bottles but that first few hours was GROSS.
Soooo.... never again, to say the least.
I'm now on a hunt for un-sulphured prunes...
Home made from here on out!

Trial Expansion?

I knew when I started this business that the fresh baby food market wouldn't be immensely profitable... and definitely not right away. There are other people doing it on a much bigger scale and my goal has never been to compete with them... the idea of packaging and mass marketing something labeled as fresh and natural seems to defeat the purpose. That's just my opinion. Even with the organic foods in pouches, while definitely better than jars (because they don't need to be heated) they are still creating tons of waste! Not to mention how packaging affects the cost for the consumer. Anyway, I digress, that is a subject for a much longer post in the future.

The issue with holding true to the way I've decided to market the brand (FRESH local food, immediately frozen with the bare minimum of packaging) is that I've given myself a very small profit margin... which is fine, I'd rather preserve the integrity of the business. However my goal was to make enough to allow me to stay home full time with Aurora and that doesn't seem to be working out just yet. I wish I would've started this much earlier but I had bigger things to concentrate on.

Where does that leave me? Well, I still have a great background (and talent, if I may brag a little) with food of the adult variety. Soooo.... I'm working on a plan to expand the business to include family meals and a small scale personal chef service. I had honestly considered this all encompassing plan from the start but I didn't want to get in over my head. The expansion may be temporary... it is definitely just a trial basis for now but if I can juggle both and still have plenty of time for the baby I may continue. Having time for my little bean is really the whole point of this endeavor in the first place so everything will have to hinge on that.

I'll give more details as well as edit the Facebook page to reflect the change as soon as I plan it out a little better. Shouldn't be too long, in the meantime here's a few pictures of food for the biggest of kids:

Chickpea, tofu, tomato and fresh spinach Vindaloo over white tea and ginger infused basmati rice

Shrimp scampi with whole wheat fettucini and multigrain baguette garlic bread

Wild mushroom agnolotti and tri-color peppers with rosemary and balsamic brown butter sauce and whole wheat garlic bread

Baked wild salmon w/ lemon-thyme butter sauce, curried white asparagus and pearled barley with crimini mushrooms

Annnd....

Apple Pie with cardamom and lemon peel... Delicious!

Can't wait to get started! Wish me luck!

Kiwi!

In honor of this summer-like weather I'm mashing up some kiwi for Aura's meal today!

As I was making it I was thinking (as I'm sure some people reading this will) but wait, there's seeds in it!
Then I thought of a very true but I think often overlooked fact when it comes to baby food. Man invented the blender. What does that mean? It means that at least one baby survived without having every meal pureed and strained to death. It's like when people say you can't put spices in baby food. What do you think babies eat in India and the Carribean? I can guarantee you it isn't rice cereal.
I'm all for a healthy degree of caution when it comes to Aurora's food and with things like drinking cow's milk and undiluted fruit juice I will probably wait, and there will no honey until the fear of botulism has passed. However where most food is concerned I think experimenting within reason is fine... I'm sure Aurora will let me know if she doesn't agree. In this case the seeds are very soft and she seems to like texture so I think the kiwi will be fine. The vitamin C content alone makes it worth a shot! Won't know until we try... just waiting for her to wake up from her nap!

Birthday SMASH!!!

So I spent a few years as a commercial baker awhile back. It sucked. The hours sucked (3am-11am anyone?). The lack of creativity sucked. The people, well... sucked. However, before that job if you'd said to me "let's bake some muffins" I'd be on my way to the store for a pre-measured mix with high fructose corn syrup, tons of oils (sometimes even lard) and god knows what else in it. Now I'm on my way to the kitchen for flour and sugar. That job taught me one very valuable lesson, aside from 'you're not a morning person', baking is easy and fun and once you have your basic recipes down the possibilities are limitless. Yes, it's more science than cooking. It's chemistry, plain and simple, but pushing the limits of that science is probably my favorite part.
I've dabbled in muffins and pies, cupcakes and cookies... you name it, I've tried it. When I was pregnant my kitchen became a bakery, blame nesting or cravings or boredom but I came up with some pretty impressive stuff!
One thing I hadn't tried, but was intrigued by, was 'smash cakes'. Mini birthday cakes for your little one to dig into and destroy on their birthdays. Awesome in theory... poor in execution. Most of the ones I've seen look like glorified cupcakes and are no doubt 100% sugar and vegetable oil. They all look like flavorless processed cake mix with 'fun' frosting. Gross. Is that really the way you want to spend your kids birthday? Peeling them off the walls during their sugar high and dealing with the inevitable crash and crankiness? Do we really want the message to be "Here, shove this block of fatty sugar into your mouth while I take pictures?"
Don't get me wrong... I'm not one of those sugar-nazis. I won't deny my kid a birthday cake because I think it's unhealthy to celebrate with food. I don't. Food is amazing and vital and should be a celebration! However I DO think it's pointless and a bad message to celebrate with just any food. If you are using food to emphasize a great event... make it great food!! Aurora will have a smash cake. The plans are in my head as I write this, but the main difference is that I will know exactly what is in hers and where it came from and it'll be a REAL cake.
THIS is how I want to do "smash cakes". In my head this is an opportunity to make big beautiful artisanal cakes that look and taste amazing... only tiny:
So this is my first smash-cake experiment:

That's a standard sized cocoa can that I used for a decorating stand... should give you a pretty good idea of the scale.
This is a recipe that I've wanted to toy with for a little while. It's pretty simple and relies heavily on a chemical reaction for it to come out correctly. That being said, it's also loaded with sugar and butter. My goal was to cut both by 1/3 without destroying the end product. Now I frosted it pretty simply for two reasons... One, this little guy is for no one but me so why go nuts with decorations?

But the second and most important reason is because underneath all of that awesome (low-fat) cream cheese frosting there are not two but FOUR layers of red velvet cake!

I regret taking this picture on a red plate. It was late and I wasn't thinking properly. It matches the plate!

Here's one I took the next morning on a white plate.
The best part? I succeeded! It's 1/3 less fat and sugar than traditional red velvet but still came out red and still has that awesome cocoa and butter flavor! Win-win-win. This also opens up possibilities for red and pink cakes or even red and blue superhero cakes!
All in all a pretty big success and a pretty great dessert for the next two days!

THIS is "pea green"

So the time had come for Aurora to move on from the beige foods. We'd done rice cereal. (twice, and probably never again unless I decide to make it, that stuff is AWFUL.) We'd done mashed banana and freshly baked and pureed apples...

I decided I wanted to expose her to carrots but since she is so young, the nitrates in fresh carrots are a concern so I went to the store and found the purest version of 'baby food carrots' that I could, Earth's Best 1st carrots (ingredients: organic carrots and water) Pretty good I thought... then I tasted them.
I will always taste everything I feed Aurora. Maybe it's the chef in me but I can't expect someone to eat something that I haven't... I've even tasted her formula (also gross, but there isn't much to be done about that..) Before anyone mentions it, I wish I could've breastfed but we had SO many complications that it wasn't possible to keep at it for more than a month and a half.
Trust me, we tried.

Anyway where was I?

Carrots.
Carrots.

In.

A.

Jar.

Are...

DISGUSTING.

Even with just carrots and water, the heating and jarring destroys all the taste. They bear almost no resemblance a real carrot. Like I said, I wanted her to be exposed to them but because of her age it's not considered safe to make them at home. I gave her a few spoonfuls and she ate it but we will probably abandon the carrot idea until she is old enough for fresh ones... they were that bad.
So, on to the green veggies. While buying the carrots I took a look at what I had decided would be her next food and one of my favorites... peas. Do yourself a favor, look at some baby food peas... I mean really look at them. They are grey. Peas are green. Something is very wrong here. In fact "pea green" is pretty grey too. Well, what you see above is what organic green peas look like when they are gently steamed and pureed. They are GREEN. Peas are green. Period.
After the beige and sweet foods I was a little worried that the green veggies may not go over so well and sure enough I was greeted with this face:

BUT... after just three spoonfuls it turned into this face:

She LOVED them!!
If that's not a sign of encouragement to keep introducing new fresh flavors, I don't know what is! Avocados are next!!