Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Bubba Grub

Bubba is 8 1/2 months old now, and that means it's high time we started to introduce meats into his diet. I was not really sure how to go about this, because the idea of pureed meats made me gag to tell the truth. I was at the grocery store and noticed teeny jars of strained meat on the shelf, tucked among the pretty colored jars of fruits and veggies.



Um, one word. EW!!!! I knew that nothing I could make would look THAT bad, right? Lindsay had mentioned this book on her blog:


(this is the new, expanded version)

and said it had some really great recipes for baby food, so I decided to get myself a copy. The only problem was, me being me, I didn't remember the exact title of the book when I went to the bookstore, and I ended up getting this one instead:



It's still good. There are some great recipes in there. I'm not gonna lie though, I still want the first one. It had MORE recipes. I think that between the two I'll definitely be set as far as baby and toddler cooking goes. I actually tried the first recipe a few weeks ago, and Bubba liked it, so I quadrupled it tonight so that I could make myself a freezer stash. I also took pictures so that if you're reading this, and you have a baby who is eating foods at this stage, and you are so inclined, you can make it too. Just remember, this recipe is QUADRUPLED!!!

Ground turkey, Squash, and Tomatoes
Adapted from First Meals and More by Annabel Karmel

Take a medium sized butternut squash, peel it, and cut it into a tiny dice. The book says to grate it, but um... I hate grating stuff. I fear for my knuckles! You're also going to need a can of diced tomatoes (the book says fresh but I'm lazy) and a package of ground turkey. Mine is 1.25 lbs, but a pound would work just as well, I think. The author said to use ground beef, but ground beef grosses me out. Well, except in burgers, and then I need someone else to make them. Yuckola.

Yeah, I'm weird.

Place a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a frying pan. Add your ground turkey and cook until it's browned.

Add your finely diced squash:

And the tomatoes. I used organic squash and tomatoes, but I'm too cheap to buy organic turkey. I'm telling myself that two out of three isn't bad!

Stupid ugly, ghetto apartment stove. I dream of gas burners and stainless steel. One day I'll have them! In the meantime, I'll just deal with cream colored enamel and electric coil elements. BLAH.

Oh yeah, saute that mixture for 5-7 minutes, or until the squash starts to get soft.

Add two cups filtered water

And bring to a boil.

Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for ten minutes.


It will pretty much look the same when you take off the lid as it did when you put on the lid, except the squash won't be as opaque. Turn off the heat and let it cool in the pan for about 10 - 15 minutes.

After it's cooled, take an immersion blender and puree it right in the pan.

You can also put it into a regular jar blender if you don't have an immersion blender. If you're making baby food often though, I highly recommend getting one. They're SO much easier to clean up after than a regular blender!

I'm not gonna lie to you - the resulting mixture looks pretty damn nasty. It just doesn't look quite as nasty as the stuff in the jars, that's all. Also, I know that I made it and there aren't any weird additives or chemicals, since I used mostly organic ingredients. I spooned it into one of these:that my mother in law sent me. I like it because it has a lid (no fighting with plastic wrap!) and the compartments are a bit larger than the ones in the silicone tray I use for fruits and veggies. With those, I like the smaller portions because we usually blend a few things together (such as strawberries and bananas or blueberries and mangoes) where with this recipe, it will be used on it's own so I don't need to break it into smaller portions. Make sense?

I put what didn't fit into this tray into a container in the fridge. Then after the first batch was frozen, I transferred them into a Ziploc bag and froze what was in the fridge.

So there you go! Baby chow!

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About Sawyer at 3:56 AM 3 comments

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

On to the next thing

Now that Bubba has mastered rolling over in both directions, he's decided that it's time to move on to the next thing. I'll tell you, this child wants to sit upright BAD. For a couple of weeks now, any time he finds himself in a reclining position (the bath, my arms, the feeding table) he will start straining to sit up. It looks like he's doing little baby crunches or something. The past few days he's discovered that if I give him my finger, he can use it to pull himself into a more upright position.



I'm thinking I'm go to need to get off my behind here soon and either buy or make a shopping cart cover for him. I found a pattern for one, but it looks waaaaay hard. I guess we'll have to see how ambitious I am here in the coming weeks. There are just too dang many nasty, germy people in this world who sneeze and cough in their hands and then touch everything without a thought to go without one. Yuck. I barely like touching them! I'm so glad that lately there are more stores with bins of wipes outside for the handles, and I also carry hand sanitizer and travel packets of antibacterial Wet Ones for those occasions.

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About Sawyer at 2:32 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 6, 2008

Making do

There are a lot of things that I always thought I'd be able to do when I finally got around to having a baby. Things people take for granted. For instance, having a baby shower. I don't want one to get presents, necessarily, but you know, it's part of the whole experience that I'm going to miss out on. It makes me terribly sad if I think about it too long, and I've cried about it more than a few times, but what can I do? So I deal.

The other thing that has come up that is kinda bumming me out is the whole issue of decorating a nursery. We currently live in a two bedroom apartment, which was fine for just the two of us, but when you start to think about adding a baby and all of the paraphernalia that comes with... well, it's just not enough room! We were thinking of moving, and maybe even looking into buying a house finally, now that the market is in our favor. At the very least, we could rent a place, somewhere with an extra bedroom just for the baby.

Then, I found out our lease isn't up until November 30. That's right, a full month after he is due. That would mean if we were to move, we would have to do it with a one month old in tow. I'd still be in that six week post partum period where you're supposed to be taking it easy-ish too.

There is NO WAY.

Also, if we were to move then, I wouldn't be able to prepare for him at all, as I'd just have to take everything right back down again a few weeks later. What's the point in doing that?

So, we're just going to have to make do. It sucks, but that's life, right? So here's the plan:

Like I said before, we have a two bedroom apartment. Right now, the larger bedroom (the master with the attached bath) is my scrapbook room. We sleep in the smaller room, since that's all we do in there. I'd rather have the space to spread out in the room I actually spend time in, you know?

We're going to swap the rooms. The smaller front room will be the scraproom, and the master will be back to it's original intended purpose. Our bed will be in one side, and the baby will be in the opposite side. I'll have to paint the room back to white from the bright apple green it is now, of course. I do plan on painting just the one wall where the crib will go a light blue though. It will be more convenient to have Sawyer in the room with me anyway, rather than down a hall, now that I think of it.

We also figured that since we're moving everything around, it's a great time to clean the carpets! We've lived here three years, and while I've done it before, they're pretty much due. Right now, I'm sitting on my bed in the middle of the living room. Everything has been moved from the bedroom in here, the carpet has been shampooed (we rented a Rug Doctor) and it is currently drying. In the morning we'll begin the task of moving the scrapbook room to it's new home before tackling the carpets in there. When those dry, we'll have to paint and then move the bedroom stuff in there. I might just move it in there and paint next weekend though, because that's a lot of work for one weekend!

Since I'm sitting out here waiting for the carpet to dry, I decided to make a little mockup of what the one wall in the bedroom will look like. It's really a total hackjob, but it's a good idea of what it will look like when I am done... I hope!

Yeah, I'm a nerd. This is to scale. I measured the wall, and used the dimensions for the different items we've picked out from their various websites. Most furniture photos on the web seem to be taken at an angle, so I made good use of my Transform tools in Photoshop. There was a lot of cut and paste and deleting bits and pasting bits... like I said, total hack job to keep me busy this Friday night!

I'm much to picky to like an entire collection from any one place, so this is my bits and pieces nursery. The wall paper border, lamp, and mobile are from one collection, the sheets and rug are Pottery Barn Kids, the crib is from Babies R Us, the side table is Ikea... you get the idea. I'm not doing crib bumpers, because of the suffocation danger. It's not worth it to me to spend the money on a decoration we can't even use!

I want to put up a white chair rail just above the crib height, and then top that with the wall paper border. I hung two of the maternity pics up there too, since we're wearing the colors from our color scheme. The little sheep in the crib plays "comforting womb sounds" and white noise.

The place where I'm stumped is on what to hang over the crib. I think it looks kinda nekkid right now. It can't be anything big, or heavy, in case it falls. I thought about a paper banner with his name, but I can't think of how to do it so it doesn't come out girly. I'm on the fence about wooden letters - what if they fall? I'm open to suggestions!

I went to the doctor today. Sawyer is moving right along, growing nicely. His heartbeat was 150 bpm, and my uterus is up to my belly button right now. That means that my internal organs are all shoved up above that point. This week, I started getting mild heartburn and nausea. I finally decided to suck it up and go buy some Tums. I hate Tums. I got three different flavors to see which is the least foul. They taste like crap, but at least they did what they were supposed to do I guess.

Off to check my carpet!

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About Sawyer at 10:53 PM 0 comments

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Need.


I think I need to make a drop down on the sidebar for Baby Crap I Like. There's just too much out there to remember!!! Isn't this cover cute, in a bad ass kinda way?

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About Sawyer at 1:49 PM 0 comments

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