Salving my conscience with organics

There are some foods that, while not particularly healthy (or outright not-healthy!), that I have no intention of completely banning from my house. I loved them as a kid, sometimes still eat some of them — and I see no reason why, as occasional treats, that my daughter can’t enjoy them as well. If she likes them.

Fruit snacks. Canned pasta with meatballs. Kraft mac and cheese. Popsicles. Cap’n Crunch cereal. And probably a dozen other things I’m not remembering right now.

While I don’t have any intention of letting Sly dig into the Cap’n Crunch any time soon (the occasional box that makes its way home is reserved for Mama!), I have picked up a few of the other things. And when I’m looking for conventional or convenience foods for Sly, I almost always try to see if there’s something similar but organic.

Annie’s Organics are really great for this. When Sly was getting started on finger foods, the Cinnabunnies cereal made a great snack. More recently, the bunny fruit snacks were a bit hit with Sly (and make a nice addition when we have to pack a lunch).

Today we dipped into the world of Bernie O’s — Annie’s version of Spaghetti O’s. It wasn’t a big hit with Sly (she was much more enthusiastic about the broccoli-rice-and-cheese casserole that I gave her along with the pasta) but I still appreciate having the organic option.

Daily menu: Friday

Woo-hoo, my last day of tracking the makeup of Sly’s meals. For this week, anyhow!

Breakfast: The usual oatmeal, with applesauce and cinnamon. Plus graham cracker bits smeared with cream cheese.

Lunch: I took the leftover pasta from the other day, mixed it with spaghetti sauce, and heated that up for Sly’s lunch. She also ate a passel of sweet potato fries — man, that girl looooves her sweet potato! About half the pasta she threw overboard, though. (Sigh.) The daily yogurt came at lunch today.

Dinner: A ridiculously enormous amount of broccoli, rice and cheese casserole. Plus some applesauce.

She also got a mid-afternoon treat of some Annie’s Organic fruit snacks, after I took her for a much-needed haircut and she didn’t shriek her way through it.

Thanks for putting up with food minutiae this week! I’ll do a recap and analysis soon and then get back to fun-ner things!

Daily menu: Thursday

Okay, these were today’s specials:

Breakfast: oatmeal with smooshed up blackberries. What she threw off her tray last night, Sly was fine with eating in oatmeal. Also, most of a banana.

Lunch: Leftover chicken pot pie, about a quarter of a grilled cheese sandwich, and some diced pear.

Dinner: The other half of the avocado she had for lunch the other day, plus most of a mixed fruit cup and a cup of yogurt.

Today felt like a bit of a cop-out, cooking-wise. I was exhausted and pretty much made do with whatever came to hand, especially when it got to dinner. But I do feel good that Sly ate her avocado — lots of good fats! — and avoided throwing things on the floor today.

Daily menus: Wednesday

Another day, another three meals!

Breakfast: Oatmeal with blueberry-pomegranate sauce and a handful of frozen blueberries. Plus the last of the nectarines (Sly devoured the whole thing) and some Yogurt Burst Cheerios.

Lunch: half of a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat, half an avocado, and most of a cereal bar. That was a really good lunch (in terms of her eating almost everything)!

Which is good, because dinner was pretty much a FAIL.

Dinner: I offered some diced colby-jack and blackberries while I was finishing up cooking. (Sly was begging to go in her highchair, which means she’s hungry.) But she threw all of it to the dogs. (Argh! Those berries were organic! And so juicy that they went SPLAT all over the kitchen floor. Sigh.)

Her main dinner was whole-wheat fusilli pasta (I like the Archer Farms brand from SuperTarget) mixed with olive oil and peas, and sprinkled with parmesan and parsley. She ate some of the pasta, nary a single pea, and then amused herself by hurling still more food to our dogs. I distracted her with a yogurt cup, and then dinner was over.

That very frustrating meal is still fresh in my mind, and I’m grinding my teeth a little. Gah, some days this whole food thing just completely gets the best of me. It’s really irritating to watch that food get tossed on the floor and/or go to waste.

At least I made enough pasta for her to have another partial meal of it tomorrow. And dog-toddler relations are probably at an all-time high.

Daily menus: Tuesday

Yet another day of chronicling Sly’s meals. So we started off with …

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs! (I bet you were expecting oatmeal, hmmm?) Made “dadda-style” with half-and-half and some shredded cheese. Plus most of a banana. She adores bananas and would happily wolf down down one entirely on her own — but I try to limit her intake a bit. If I don’t, her otherwise-regular-as-clockwork poops get … delayed, shall we say?

Lunch: Fish sticks (right now I’m using Van de Kamp’s sticks made from whole fillets); diced pear; corn; a cup of yogurt; and some colby-jack cheese. Sly took one or two bites from each of the four fish sticks (Sigh. I don’t get this. What makes the second half inferior to the first half?), gobbled the pear and corn, and played with the cheese.

She used to make any kind of cheese disappear like magic. Now I’m lucky if I can get her to eat a slice of American, and she seems to have completely forgotten how much she loved cheddar, colby, jack, and mozzarella. I keep offering it, but it’s kind of discouraging when all she wants to do is throw it to our two dogs.

Dinner was chicken pot pie — only this time it was “grown-up” pot pie, not the pot pie muffin she had last night. Made with peas, carrots and corn — lots more veggie than crust. She ate everything on her plate and then wanted mine, so I gave her seconds. Plus more cheese (I gave up and offered a slice of American this time; she ate it all). And another cup of yogurt.

Overall, a pretty good eating day!

Daily menus: Monday

Breakfast: oatmeal with diced nectarines and a smidge of vanilla. Big hit! (In case it’s not obvious from the fruit selection over the past few days, I bought a bag of nectarines that I’m trying to use up before they go bad.) Sly had no interest in the Yogurt Burst Cheerios or BabyBel cheese that I offered for finger foods.

Lunch: we split some macaroni and cheese (straight out of the Big Blue Box), and Sly plowed through some of the sweet potato fries I baked last night (recipe is on wholesomebabyfood.com, under their finger foods section). Also, she ate an entire apple-cinnamon cereal bar. She had a big lunch!

Dinner: a chicken pot pie muffin (recipe here), some broccoli rice and cheese casserole (recipe here) and a cup of yogurt.

I never would have thought it’d be hard to remember what your kid had for her meals, but after a day chasing around a toddler, I’m lucky if I can remember my own name!

Daily Menus: Sunday

Breakfast: oatmeal flavored with blueberry-pomegranate applesauce from Motts. Finger food: Rice Chex with peanut butter and dried cherries. Sly has eaten dried cherries in the past and loved them, but today she just wanted to feed them to me.

Late-morning snack: apple-cinnamon cereal bar, before heading off to a festival at one of our local museums.

Lunch came late today, because she wore herself out at the festival (and got a few bites of her first snow-cone and even a little cotton candy) and napped early. I offered a piece of cheese, diced nectarine bits, and half of a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat. She only ate the sandwich — but she ate the whole thing.

Dinner: Broccoli, rice & cheese casserole; half of a meatloaf muffin. (Whenever I make meatloaf for dinner, I make an extra-large batch of the mix and then cook some of it in a cooking-sprayed, foil-wrapped muffin tin. Then I freeze the meat muffins. Sixty seconds in the microwave and voila, main course!) She ate the casserole and maybe a bite or two of the meatloaf.

When I asked Sly if she wanted yogurt (which she usually answers with an emphatic nod or the sign for “please”), she shook her head no. So I took her at her word — but I also offered her usual yogurt cup about 45 minutes later, and she happily devoured it. I’d hate to have her skip that entirely, since it’s a big part of her calcium intake.

She finished up with snacking on a few of the sweet potato fries that I baked tonight. I froze the rest for later meals. And wow, two sweet potatoes make a ton of fries!

A week of daily menus: Saturday

For the next week, I’m going to try my darndest to record what Sly is served — and what she actually eats — for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile. I want to get a macro-view of her diet, plus I feel like we’re in a bit of a rut and I haven’t introduced many new things lately. After a week, it should be pretty obvious if I’m serving peas too often or whatever.

So, here we go:

Breakfast was: old-fashioned oatmeal made with half-and-half. I added a bit of banana drinkable yogurt, and some plain applesauce.

Finger foods: caramel mini-rice-cakes smeared with cream cheese. Plus she begged for some of my cinnamon-raisin bagel, which seems to have become a sort of second-breakfast for her lately!

Lunch: Some leftover breaded porkchop bits from dinner last night. I don’t think she actually ate any of this — maybe a bite?

Plus a bunch of green beans (canned, no salt added — the only canned vegetable that I use regularly. My pediatrician actually recommended them because they’re not as chewy and stringy as fresh green beans can be. And heck, it’s a green veggie she’s willing to eat! But I have to admit, these don’t taste nearly as good as the salty ones. ).

Plus, most of a grilled cheese sandwich on whole wheat.

Dinner: steamed broccoli with butter (ate a few bites), diced peach, some pieces of my pizza cut down to bite-size, and a cup of Yobaby yogurt.

Food on the Go

I tend to procrastinate with lunch-packing (along with most other things, my husband will tell you). I’m sure I could whip up something completely awesome and portable if I took the time to do it the night before (ummm … maybe!), but instead we’re talking about what I can put together in the last 30 minutes before I need to throw Sly in the car and book it.

Some of our staples are:

- a cup of Yobaby organic yogurt

- packaged individual string cheese, or a slice of American in a Ziploc baggie

- Bananas. This is about the only whole fruit I bring along, since it doesn’t really need to be sliced and is easily peeled.

- Avocado. A ripe one is easily cut and diced with a plastic knife, although sometimes I bring along a real knife (with a blade cover) if I’m going someplace that it isn’t going to get confiscated.

- Fruit cups that don’t require refrigeration. Sly particularly likes mandarin oranges, and they’re large enough that they’re easier to grasp than those slippery little peach bits.

- Cooked veggies that can be eaten cold. Peas in particular are great for this. Sly hasn’t shown much love for raw veggies yet, so no carrot sticks for us at this point.

- A cereal bar, such as NutriGrain. Great snack and meal addition, although they are awwwwfully sticky!

Every so often, I actually will plan ahead a bit and save some plain rotini from dinner, so I can dribble it with olive oil the next morning, dump it in one of the Sassy insulated feeding pots, and bring it along for lunch. (Again, a good place to mix in cooked peas or even broccoli.)

Also, I sometimes use a clean, empty, plastic baby food container to bring along a big dab of peanut butter. I always hated soggy sandwiches when I was a kid, so I keep the bread separate until I’m ready to make the sandwich. (Helllloooo, childhood food issues! Nice to see you again!)

Those are all the lunch thoughts in my head at this moment. Hopefully I’ll come up with some more at some point.

Mini-Chicken Pot Pies

Since I’m on the subject of muffins, I’ll throw in another recipe that I made for Sly’s dinner tonight.

I got this recipe from a friend as part of a collection she made for me when I got married. It makes eight mini-chicken pot pies. I’m including the original recipe, and then my modification.

Mini-Chicken Pot Pies (original)
1 (16.3-oz.) can of Pillsbury Grands refrigerated biscuits
1 (19 oz.) can of chicken noodle soup
1-2 tablespoons butter
1 tsp. dried Italian seasoning
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Heat oven to 375. Lightly spray a regular-sized muffin pan with cooking spray (you only need to spray eight of the pockets). Separate each of the eight biscuits into two layers. Place eight of the halves into the sprayed muffin cups, pressing to cover the sides and bottom.

Drain the soup, then spoon the drained soup into the biscuit-lined cups. Place the remaining biscuit halves over the soup and press gently to seal.

Spread the biscuit tops with butter, then sprinkle with the Italian seasoning, garlic powder and 1/2 tablespoon of cheese.

Bake at 375 for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Run a butter knife around the edge of the muffins to remove.

In my version, instead of the chicken soup, I use:
- approx. 1 cup of frozen mixed veggies, thawed
- 1 can cream of chicken soup (regular or low-sodium)
- 1 small can of canned chicken

I mix those together — using about 3-4 spoonfuls of the cream of chicken soup and most of the canned chicken — and use that to fill the biscuit cups.

The cooking directions are otherwise pretty much the same. Sometimes I top the muffins with the spices and cheese, other times I just leave them plain.

These are a pretty biscuit-heavy (not a lot of room for the veggie filling), but I haven’t found a satisfactory substitute that cooks up as nicely as the Grands. When I cut them up for Sly, I tend to only give her the pieces with veggies & chicken, so she doesn’t just fill up on crust.

But these still make a nice meal or even a side-dish for a toddler.