Semolina porridge

The veggie toddler is on food strike. Perhaps it is the increasing amount of teeth that seem to be sprouting in his mouth, or perhaps he is getting a cold and can't taste too well. Whatever it is, it is frustrating. Food lands on the floor, gets spit out, gets thrown. Since I feel slightly disheartened that he won't even eat his usually favourite Sweet Potato, Pea, Spinach dish, I will just add a little recipe for my own breakfast porridge. No point posting about lovely food we cooked, only to show you pictures of it on the floor.

Ever since I have traveled to Nepal many many moons ago, before the Annapurna track had roads going through it (so I am told), I have been in love with semolina porridge. It's so simple, quick and yummy.

Ingredients:
1 cup milk (almond, soya, rice - your choice)
1/4 cup of coarse semolina
Sweeten to taste with: maple syrup / brown sugar / honey
Optional: handful of: raisings / blueberries / one sliced banana / strawberries (go wild!)

Recipe:
Warm the milk, stir in the semolina until it thickens. If I am adding dried fruit I like to stir in in with the semolina so it softens and warms. If I add fresh fruit I add it at the end, once the semolina has thickened. Add an extra splash of milk if the semolina has set. Sweeten with your choice of sweetness. Enjoy!

Yumy semolina porridge with raisins and maple syrup

Veggie Rissoles

by Anna
cooked by Anna and Jaime

Boy these were yummy little things! Highly recommended.

Another recipe  taken from The complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. 

These were great. Not only did they actually turn out like the recipe suggested, they were also a fab finger food for the wee vegetarian. It actually kills me not posting the recipe....

On her website I found a veggie burger recipe which isn't all too different from the rissoles. I will try it next week.

Rissoles with salad

Language development

Dadadaaaa 

This is particularly interesting to us because currently we have three languages in our environment. It might mean that the babbling phase may be a little delayed. When I wrote in an earlier post that the Monkey isn't saying individual words yet, and in fact seems to have regressed slightly, I am aware that multilingualism is most likely the cause for this. Although of course I would prefer seeing some sort of verbal communication develop, I appreciate that it is a lot to take in.

At home we speak German and English. Our environment is Spanish speaking, which is becoming even more relevant now that our son is going to nursery two afternoons a week. This is bound to cause some confusion at some point. But we are using the One Person One Language (OPOL) approach, and I feel confident that, with time, our Monkey will work out which sounds belong to which language. 

I do find it fascinating to see that he can understand "Give this to Papa" and "Gib' es der Mama". It will be interesting to see which languages will stick. A child, so I have read, may go the way of least resistance with his language. So he may well end up speaking Spanish and English, with German being the minority language. 

Because I enjoy reading, the following books are currently spread around the house, so I can sneak in a quick read at nap time or in the evenings. Be Bilingual by Annika Bourgogne is, so far, an interesting read. She explains how it works in her family, but also references other books and research. I quite like her practical tips, and look forward to trying them out over the following years.

Another interesting book although it feels not quite as scientific as I would like, is Small Talk by Nocpla Lathey and Tracey Blake. The author is a speech therapist and draws on years worth of experience which means that there are plenty of case studies and examples. Her practical ideas on language development are really easy to integrate into the day.

I appreciate that it may not be as easy as I envision it now.... But whatever happens, our son has the amazing opportunity to be exposed to several languages and this in itself will help language acquisition even at a later stage.

If you're raising your child bilingual, let us know your thoughts and tips. It would be fantastic to hear of other families' bilingual journeys.

Vegan Daal

by Anna 
Recipe by Jaime

We eat a lot of lentils at home and now that our son is keener than ever to eat exactly what we eat, it is time to start cooking baby friendly family meals. Nice and healthy, chunky but not too chunky...

Vegan Daal

Ingredients for 4 adult size portions:

200g red lentils (soaked over night)

1 red pepper/capsicum

1 leek

1 carrot

1 can of coconut milk = 400ml

1 tsp of coconut oil

1 tsp of cumin

1 tsp of vegetable stock (dried)

1 tsp of curry powder

4 tsp tomato puree

(chunk of ginger optional)

To have with

quinoa, couscous or rice (cook according to pack instructions)

This is how it's done:

Soak 200g of red lentils over night then cook for about an hour or so with a chunk of ginger (supposed to help make lentils less gassy)

Steam: the pepper, leek and carrot (carrot takes the longest so it's worth steaming that one first) until medium oft.

Once all soft move into a pot and pour in coconut milk. Add the the cococnut oil, cumin, veg stock and curry powder and finally the red lentils. Add the tomato puree.

After cooking for about 20 mins blend on a rough blend (or a fine blend if your little one is still on purée).

We had it with mixed quinoa (white and black) and it all was received rather well. 

Where we are at

by Anna

1 year review

It was time for the one year review and I am happy to say that the Monkey passed with flying colours. Here are the measurments:

Head circumference 49cm = 96th centile (wow big head!)
Height 79cm (although he did wriggle a lot, so this might not be 100% accurate) = 89th centile
Weight 10.46kg = 75th centile

Amongst other things – development and milestones

Since we are slowly expanding the blog and won't be writing just about food any more, but also parenting topics, developmental milestones and the likes, I thought I share with you a little bit more where we are at...

Milestones are a hot topic with new parents, and there can be a lot of boasting how amazing one's child is. Some are already walking at nine months (admittedly I have seen one such child), others are (according to their parents) already using enough words to explain quantum physics. 

We all know that every child learns in its own pace. And the child that is walking early may not be too bothered about other things, and vice versa. Our monkey is definitely not a child prodigy, nor particularly fast with any of the developmental milestones. Does it bother us? No. We think he is doing just fine.

At 12 months and 2 weeks our almost-toddler's development

What he is doing (amongst others)

• stacking Ikea wooden stacking rings (started this two weeks ago)

• putting lids on things, including lipstick caps (started this at roughly 11.5 months?)

• cruising like no man's business (been doing this for a fair while, without bothering to progress to walking)

• crawls like attempting to break a world record for speediness (he dragged himself for a long long time before starting to properly crawl at 10.5 months or thereabouts)

• feeding himself more or less successfully (by which I mean, only half goes on the floor)

What he doesn't yet do (yet)

• say individual words (in fact he has regressed from mama to daaaaaaaa for everything - but since he has three languages in his environment this is probably not surprising)

• walk (although he has just three days ago attempted his first step, purely by accident, and he does enjoy pushing the high chair through our living room)

• stand freely by himself

• quite understand the very cool Bobby Car he got from his grandparents for his birthday

He loves:

• music and jumping up and down in our arms "dancing"

• "stroking" the cat

• splashing with water no matter how big or small the container

• tactility games and songs like: Wind the bobbin up, Row Row Row the boat

• playing peek a boo – it is still the most entertaining game at this point

• pointing my finger to illustrations in books for me to name them


So you see... Every child is so different. I think what is most important is to enjoy the journey. This first year has already fled by.  I am happy we are not wishing it away by wanting our Monkey to do things he isn't ready for.

Clever Baby

by Anna

Now that I titled this post "Clever Baby" I realised we didn't really have an awful lot of foresight calling this blog the Veggie baby, baby blog given that we are almost approaching toddler age... Oh well. To us he will always be our baby. And the blog is our little project, so perhaps also our baby.

Anyhow, back to clever baby business.

No need to point out that babies' brains grow at a silly rate, particularly these first few years. So how can we make sure our veggie almost-toddler gets what he needs? Omega is a substantial support for growing brain cells. Read more about it here. And who doesn't want to have a clever baby? Luckily nowadays there is a whole wide range of vegetarian products out there which we can fall back on if our foods don't have quite enough of what we need.

Vegetarian DHA oil

We started using Nordic Naturals Baby DHA oil. It's easy to administer, simply by dropping it onto a spoonful of food, or emptying the dropper onto the prepared food and mix it under. Be sure to not have the food too hot before mixing the oil in, you don't want to kill the supplement (nor the vitamins in the actual prepared food).

Luckily our Monkey is fascinated by the dropper. He seems to almost enjoy his food more when we put a few drops onto the spoon, feed him (or let him feed himself) and repeat the process until we have given him the two recommended droppers.

Admittedly we often forget. It's definitely not a daily supplement in our house. However, we feel that he gets a fair amount of DHA with linseed. Giving him the oil only every other day seems to work fine for us.

Dropper in, dropper out, dropper in, dropper out....

And given that the Monkey has beenworking out how to put the dropper back into the little bottle and how to put lids on top of little cups for a while now, we think the DHA oil is indeed a clever little addition to his food.

Playing with lids, spoons and anything else within reach

A big roar goes to....

Lion Cake

Unbelievable but true. A whole year has passed. The veggie baby is now a veggie toddler (although walking isn't quite on the horizon just yet).

To celebrate I made a cake. Our Monkey loves lions, so what better to bake than a lion cake?

Sketching a rough

I tried a couple of recipes since I didn't want to find out the night before the big day, that the recipe wasn't working. Because I had never used fondant, I had a play... Let's call it a sketch!

Easy Vanilla Cake

I finally decided on the "Easy Vanilla Cake" recipe found here on the BBC Good Food website. The cake tastes delicious and it nice and fuffy.

Ingredients are:
    •    250g pack unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
    •    250g golden caster sugar
    •    seeds scraped from 1 vanilla pod or 1 tsp vanilla paste
    •    5 large eggs, cracked into a jug
    •    85g plain flour
    •    100g full-fat Greek yogurt (I used Total)
    •    250g self-raising flour
    •    3 tbsp semi-skimmed milk

Fluffy dough

Method:

Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Grease a round, deep 20cm tin, then line the base and sides with non-stick baking paper.

Using electric beaters or a tabletop mixer, beat the butter, sugar, vanilla and ¼ tsp salt together until pale and fluffy, then pour in the eggs, one at a time, giving the mix a really good beating before adding the next. Add 1 tbsp of the plain flour if the mix starts to look slimy rather than fluffy. Beat in the yogurt.

Mix the flours; then, using a large metal spoon, fold them into the batter, followed by the milk. Spoon the mix into the tin and bake for about 35 minutes or until well risen and golden – a skewer inserted into the middle should come out clean.

Everything went nice and smoothly, I even had the monkey help me put the flour into the mixture. Sadly once transferred into the tin, and lifting off to place into the oven, the bottom of the cheap cake tin came dislodged and plonked onto the floor. Very disappointing. So I had to start from scratch. The second attempt went smoothly without any disasters.

Decorating

Once the cake had cooled down it was time to decorate. Now, I do love making a cake, but decorating it hasn't yet been a big thing for me. Partially because I personally don't want to have a ton of sugar and extra calories in/on my cake. But since this is a 1st Birthday Cake I thought: let's go to town!

decorating the Lion Cake

Ready, set, go! I had drawn a little sketch on how I wanted it to look like, and so I started rolling out the sugar fondant.

Once the yellow and white pieces of fondant were in place, I added chocolate icing for the details of the mane, eyes and mouth area.

Looking more and more like a Lion Cake

Here the final Lion Cake in all its "glory". I suppose a real cake maker would laugh at my child-like cake decoration, but I am proud as punch. Rrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrr.

1st birthday cake: Lion Cake

Happy 1st Birthday Veggie Baby!!