We gave Babybear some Heinz baked beans tonight with cheese and toast (what's not to like, you'd think) but actually she wasn't that fussed for them. I must say it did occur to me as I was eating mine that they did taste very salty.
So I haven't actually made these before but I've had the recipe for ages. What was holding me up, you ask? Why, the molasses… I've searched high and low, from health food shop to supermarket for it to no avail. However, some Christian soul has finally put me out of my misery and told me that treacle (which I have in the damned cupboard) is the same thing. Durrrr.
Anyway, Franny's recipe and her comments are below. Apparently they are very tasty. I'm not 100% sure about the bean soaking bit as I am rarely that organised so I reserve the right to used tinned haricots.
8 oz haricot beans
1 lb toms, skinned and deseeded (I used tinned and it is ok if maybe a little runny)
2 tbsp tomato puree
2 tbsp molasses
2 tsp mustard powder
3/4 pint hot stock (that's three quarters, not 3 or 4 )
Soak
beans overnight in large bowl covered with cold water. Drain well, put
in sauce pan and cover with cold water by at least 2 ins. Bring to
boil, skim surface, cover pan and cook at rolling boil for 30 mins.
Drain well. Preheat oven to GM 2. Put beans in large casserole and stir
in all remaining ingredients. Mix well. Cover casserole and cook for
2.5 hours. Stir gently and cook for another 35 mins or until tender and
sauce thickened. (normally takes up to 4 hours to get really tender and
not too runny IME).
Freezes well and is popular with dads as well as
children. I normally cook at least double and freeze lots. It has been
pointed out to me that with having to cook them for so long, and with
baked beans being so cheap, that it is probably cheaper to buy them,
but I would far rather have this sort with no salt and no artificial
sweeteners. I think baked beans are a truly healthy food but the tinned
sort normally have a lot of rubbish added. These are easy to make and also
make the house smell lovely.
Franny's Home-made Baked Beans
People around us and their definition of choking
This post is really more of a rant than a fact or experience or anything useful like that. My current bugbear is the use over-use of the work 'choking'. Relatives are always saying Boomer is 'choking!'.
Choking to me is a severe restriction or blockage of the airways resulting in no air getting in, NOT a slight gulp/sneeze/snivel. She can be quite happily eating bits of food, without even any gagging and people around her are convinced she’s choking. Are there subtleties to the word choking that I am unaware of?
Plus they do that annoying baby ventriloquism to express their views… “Oh she’s saying Mummy, why can’t I have a bit of strawberry tart?”. No, she’s not, she’s trying to eat a paper napkin. And nor would she like a bit of sugar on her fruit to sweeten it up, while we're about it.
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Nappies and their contents (click if you dare…)
This is at the top of my mind because last night we had pasta with chorizo, tomato sauce and borlotti beans (well, Babybear didn't have the chorizo, to be fair) and those beans turned up in her nappy pretty much untouched this morning.
Obviously her poo has changed a good bit since the first carrot-y nappies, but the differences are not consistent. Sometimes it's yellow, sometimes darker towards brown, sometimes green…(look I know I'm coming off a bit Gillian McKeith here but you clicked on the link, you knew for sure I'd be talking about jobbies).
Anyway, I suppose I'm saying that after about three weeks of BLW, Babybear appeared to be digesting more of her food, as her poo became less milk-fed and runny so I assumed that in time her poo would, erm, toughen up.
However, she's 9-and-a-half months old now and we can still identify most of the food she's eatenafter it's passed through her digestive system. Things like breads, soft fruits and potatoes disappear for the most part, but grapes seem to pass through untouched, as do mushrooms, beans, lentils and I still see tell-tale orangey flecks of carrot and little bits of broccoli. Thing is, we'll never know what she would have been like if we had been feeding her puree…
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Bread and Butter
For all that I do like cooking more complex meals, doing Baby Led Weaning with Babybear has re-introduced me to the simple pleasure of a slice of bread with a decidedly generous slathering of butter. (Hey, Babybear needs her fats, doesn't she?) As it happens I buy an unsalted butter and if possible organic as I once read an article on how they make spreads and those room temperature butters and it turned my stomach.
Certainly if you are just starting baby led weaning, the advice would be to toast the bread so that it doesn't go all claggy and get stuck in the roof of their mouths, but once the babies get better at eating (you'll know when) then I cannot recommend a good old slice of B'n'B too highly.
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Wagamama’s Chicken Ramen and Edamame… oh yes…
Now come on, this is impressive…
Went to Wagamama, where they have dinky little highchairs pre-attached to the tables in the children's section and ordered some Chilli Chicken Ramen (chilli, salty soup, chicken and noodles – didn't 100% think that through, if I'm honest) while my dining companions ordered some Chicken Itame (a noodley coconut-y soup) and some of that mad breaded Chicken Katsuo curry with rice.
To keep us from falling off our perches with city centre-induced exhaustion, we also ordered some edamame (soy beans) and asked for the salt on the side. Well, I can't tell you how much Babybear enjoyed those little beans, but if I explain that she was operating a two-handed approach whereby she was picking up her next bean before the first one was fully chewed then you begin to get the idea.
The edamame comes in a little bowl and looks for all the world like mangetout in which the peas have been allowed to grow fat. You don't eat the pods, you just pop the beans out into your mouth and chew them. Delicious, but dangerous for a baby so it was up to me to pop them into my mouth and burst them with my teeth so that they would fall apart more easily. She really loved them, so I'm now desperate to see if I can get some to keep in the freezer as that is one healthy snack, my friends. (I hardly need add that they made it through her entire digestive system with barely a dent.)
When the main courses arrived, Babybear was happy to eat slices of chicken from my meal (I had sooked the soup off first but it still had some kick), some beansprouts, bok choi, fistfuls of rice and she had great fun eating the flat rice noodles from the coconut soup.
And what joy for us, we got to eat our meals while they were still hot, hot, hot, with minimal interruption from a baby who was tickled pink to be playing with new tastes and textures. (Well, until her two new top teeth started hurting again and we made a hasty exit – but we got a good hour in there, which can't be bad.)
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Moomin's Allergy-friendly Chickpea Burgers and Potato Scones
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.
