Baby Led Weaning

Moomin is avoiding dairy and wheat, amongst other things, for her daughter Minky, a fact that forces her to be a bit more inventive when it comes to BLW cooking, I am glad to say. Luckily, she is pretty generous with her findings and we all benefit from her investigations.
Seriously, though, my pal was showing me the other day how difficult it is to exclude dairy. You wouldn't believe it, there is milk powder in jars of organic ratatouille…

Recipe for chickpea burgers:
Whizz together 1 tin of chickpeas, 110g gram
flour, 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp coriander, 4 spring onions, 4 garlic cloves and a bit
of water. Shape a bit into a patty and fry on each side for five mins. Makes
about 8, so I freeze the leftovers (7!) and they're good for taking out with us.
I slice them in half lengthways so Minky can get a good grip on them. My husband
reckons they're a bit bland but they do have a pleasant texture.

As I
mentioned, we have a very allergic-y family (name a food group, I'll find someone
that can't have it). I'm avoiding wheat, dairy, citrus, fish, berries, nuts. It
does make life a bit more difficult. However, we are doing okay at finding
alternatives. Have got some recipes for corn tortillas, buckwheat pancakes,
onion bhajis and potato scones. I've only tried potato scones so far and they're
good if you want to get away from the normal potato wedges, boiled potatoes
etc…

Recipe for potato scones:
255g mashed potato, 1tsp baking
powder, 55g rice flour, 1/2 tsp salt (eeek – I guess you could leave this out). Mix together, roll into a ball and
roll out into a 5mm thick circle. I cut bits out of it with a pastry cutter and
then fried until brown. You can add butter and milk to the mashed potato if
you're normal.

I am normal and I love potato scones, so I will go mad and add both. In sunny Scotland, home of the tattie scone, though, what we do is use plain flour (if we aren't avoiding wheat) and rather than using pastry cutters you can just roll out a thin circle of dough on a floured surface to fit the size of a small frying pan. Making sure that there was a good shoogle of flour on the circle I would then dry-fry it, as this makes the trademark dark brown spots appear on the potato scone and they add to the flavour (and they then look spookily like the ones you buy in the shops). Plus, I'm thinking that if you dry-fry them they might keep better. Technically, tattie scones are an excellent way of using up leftover mashed potato but it's academic in our house as such a thing rarely occurs.

And I reckon that some salt sprinkled on mummy and daddy's chickpea burgers will sort out the blandness issue. Gram flour is, of course, just chickpea flour and readily available from Asian stores. Thanks for the recipes, Moomin.

Related Posts:

• Jenn's Pecan Lentil Burgers
• Siobhan’s Salmon-Flaked Mash
• Bunny's Studenty Toasty Pizza
• Spanish Omelette (with peas, because everything Babybear eats Must Contain Peas)
• Fiona's Fillable Finger Food Patties