A sick Monkey Or Lucky after all

Oh no!

The time has come that every first time parent dreads: Our child is ill. What do we do?

The Monkey has had a cold for a while, which seemed to be clearing off and hasn't been a big deal. However, there was a tiny bit of bloody wee in his nappy, indicating a urine infection. Sadly the first hospital we went to didn't do a thorough job and sent us home, more or less along the lines of: all is well. Unfortunately the long wait of three hours next to a teenager with a tummy bug who was throwing up in the waiting area was going to come back to bite us in the butt. Or was it?

All wasn't well as became apparent roughly one and a half days later when the veggie baby started vomiting in the night. I shall not go into detail of the long drive and long night we had following his being unwell. The long and short of it is that he has some sort of bug which causes vomiting and diarrhoea. However, had the Monkey not got this bug, we wouldn't have gone to a (different) hospital where he was not only treated for his bug, but also diagnosed the urine infection, which was missed at the last hospital and could have caused a lot of damage if left untreated as the bacteria can travel up into the renal area and affect the kidneys. Lucky after all! Yes, I am trying to look on the bright side.

Now what?

A course of seven days worth of antibiotics is now making its way through the veggie baby's gut flora. Sure, it has to be that way to get rid of the urine infection. But it means we need to do everything we can to build up his gut bacteria again. After all a healthy intestine often is key to good overall health.

Millions of bacteria

We will be adding half a probiotic capsule to his breakfast (in addition to lots of live yoghurt) and his dinner to keep the damage under control. When we have researched some more into which probiotics might be particularly good I will write a little post about that. For now we are keeping our fingers crossed that the tummy bug passes, that the antibiotic does the trick, and that our efforts of keeping our baby healthy will be successful.

Starting the day the night before

... or so it seems, since we had to prep this brekkie in the evening.

Cold fruit porridge

This is actually a breakfast I make for myself with various different fruit and fruit juices. The rolled oats have to be soaked in apple juice (we freshly juiced this for him, what a lucky little baby he is) over night for the fruit porridge to be nice and soft. I grate some apple into it, and add small pieces of soft pear into it. For myself I often use sultanas (or raisins), but banana is also a really nice option. Make it your own by experimenting! For some extra sweetness a tiny splash of maple syrup was added. 

Although we had soaked it over night, our little monkey wasn't too sure about having to still do a fair amount of chewing with those four teeth of his and those gummy gums. Because he has been teething and not eating all that well, we chose the way of least resistance to get the calories into him without too much fuss: add yoghurt and blend. 

Green power stuff

Broccoli leek pea soup

Nice one, another one for the whole family.

Ingredients are:
Broccoli, leek, pea, little bit of celery, potato, half a teaspoon veggie stock and we added black quiona for extra substance.

Recipe from 330 Vegetarian Recipes for Health


Some nutritional fact
Broccoli for example is full of good stuff: Broccoli is very low in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Vitamin B6, Folate, Potassium and Manganese. It also contains a good source of Protein, Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol), Thiamin, Riboflavin, Pantothenic Acid, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus and Selenium. These food facts are for raw broccoli. To keep as many vitamins as possible slow cook only, and don't boil.
Taken from here.

Do you know the muffin man?

Although we do like cooking, personally I also like making life a little bit easier when possible. So when I was asked to bring something for a party to go on the buffet I wanted to make something that would double up as snack for the Monkey.

Taken from the BBC Good Food website I took some liberties with the recipe...

• 175g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• ½ tsp allspice
• 50ml milk
• 1 egg, beaten with a fork
• 100ml vegetable oil
• 1 leek, finely chopped
• 75g cheddar, finely grated 

I used quite a bit of additional feta (fake feta as it was made with cow's milk) as well as gruyere cheese. I also added more milk and more oil because the dough was really thick (which may have been due to the limited choice of flour we have available here on the Canary Islands).

Mix dry ingredients first, then the oil and milk, and lastly add cheese. Put mix into muffin tray and bake for 20-25min at 180 degree Celsius. Recipe can be found in full here. 

Leek and cheese muffins

The muffins turned out well and were enjoyed by large and small. The Veggie Baby particularly enjoyed ripping the muffin to shreds. Thumbs up - these will be repeated.

10KG OF PURE GORGEOUSNESS

It is official. Our veggie baby is thriving. At the 10 month check up our baby weighed in at a solid 10kg spread over 76cm.

Because he was born in the UK we go by the UK centile system:
Height: 88th centile / 76cm
Weight: 79th centile / 10kg
Head circumference: 68th centile / 46cm

Yay to us and yay to our good little eater.

The pediatricion recommended a supplement of B12 from 12 months onwards. She was pleased with the health of our chunky monkey.

More yummy breakfasts

Just a couple of breakfasts:

The ever popular avocado+ dish. Avocado with mango or other mixed fruits. Fresh or from frozen. I added half a weetabix and some yogurt. The weetabix needed a bit of soaking through before the veggie baby enjoyed eating this breakfast.

Mixed fruit and yogurt also remains high on the favourite list.

It's been a while that I stopped breastfeeding, however, we had frozen a supply of breast milk which we now occasionally use for bog-standard baby rice breakfast.

You  may have noticed that some of these photos have two spoons in them. It is now impossible to feed our baby unless he has his own spoon to catapult food with. He does sometimes manage to get half a spoonful into his mouth and seems proud as punch. Happy days.

Fala-fail

Well. Here is a bit of a mishap recipe. Taken from the Baby and Child Vegetarian Recipes... Boy this one took some effort...

We soaked the dried chickpeas for 24h, cooked them for an hour, then blended them. However it quickly became obvious that they were too watery and too smooth... This happened although we had not strayed from the recipe!

Frying them just didn't work.

Trying to rescue the already more than time consuming falafel balls...
• More flour was added (which J didn't want to do)
• Fridge to cool the mixture down, to see whether this might help form shaped falafel balls - nope!
• Quinoa for more substance

In the end rather than trying to shape a ball, which only ran out of the hands, Jaime put the mix into a greased tray into the oven. These worked out better although they didn't quite look like classic falafels. The taste however, was really lovely.

A mint, cucumber and yogurt dip helped them go down rather well. Admittedly the majority was eaten by us, rather than the monkey. But he massively enjoyed the dipping aspect this food.

 

Unfortunately we didn't take a proper photo with the dip. So this will have to suffice. When we try falafel balls again we will go with a different recipe, and see whether we can find a jar of chick peas that doesn't have too many conservatives in it. If you've got a fail proof recipe please post it in the comments.

Chewy

Two course breakfast

For breakfast our veggie baby got served his first "real" oats. As in, not baby rice type oats. But grown up oats. Soaked in hot water, a spoon of formula powder and some blended mango. The monkey surprisingly enough didn't mind the chewing too much and had a good amount of the porridge.

After the porridge we gave him a portion of white bread with almond nut butter.

White bread – Yes, it is refined, but apparently too much fiber isn't good. I intend to add making my own white bread to my already busy day but haven't yet found the right flour, believe it or not where we live there is just one type.

Nut butter – Nut butters are safe from six months onwards (unless there is a family history of allergies). We waited a little longer into the weaning stage and a few weeks ago we started with almond butter. It's full of good stuff: healthy fat, magnesium and manganese. Nuts are also a good source of protein.

Rolled oats – Source of selenium and manganese

Mango –  Vitamin B6, A & D

Bead with nut butter and mango oats porridge

Farmer's market and local veg shopping

A new week ahead, a new lot of veggies needed. First a trip to the farmer's market (we've already shown you photos of what it looks like in an earlier post) and then a trip to a local "fruteria".

The farmer's market was lovely as always: busy, full of colours and lovely smells, old and young locals selling their fresh and mostly organic produce. The monkey was slightly fidgety and suspected that he could do with a snack. I picked a nice juicy not too big tomato for him and went to pay for it. The lady looked at the tomato, at me, then at the monkey and didn't want payment. In fact she reached over to a box of black tomatoes and gave us two: "Try these, they are a different variety". I had a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

So, off we went, the monkey tucking into his red tomato and we finished our shopping. Next thing you know the tomato was gone. Nope, it hadn't fallen down, or got mushed into the baby carrier. It had gotten eaten in its entity. Nice one, veggie baby!

Today for lunch it was the risotto again and as a warm up the monkey got his first black tomato. Like the tomato the other week, this one was devoured in one messy sitting. Onto a winner.

Fresh produce and messy black tomato munching