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

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. 

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!!

A long two weeks

Being ill isn't fun at the best of times. Let alone when you're only eleven months old and can't really say what's wrong. A tough tummy bug meant flat out food refusal. Milk was all that may or may not be accepted.

But after various doctors visits, and different meds, there seems to be an improvement.

The Monkey is still taking probiotic drops (will add a section in links and resources with names and photos soon) and we have also ordered some further probiotics for longterm usage. Hopefully his gut flora can soon be flourishing again and keep him a healthy little thing.

At the height of his tummy bug the only thing he did like eating were these: Mogli Pizza Sticks. Strictly speaking they are probably only from 12+ months, but we were happy for him to munch on anything at all.

organic pizza sticks

Weightloss

The last weighing at the doctors showed that he had lost weight. Only 270grams, but given that the last weighing had been a month prior (and therefor he would have weighed a fair amount more already) it probably added up to a good half kilo. Not good. He is down to the 63rd percentile.

Fattening the baby

Whenever we can we mix some avocado under or add extra baby rice / millet etc under his yoghurt. At the moment we go by: 'anything goes' and he gets what he wants. Luckily we still count some greens to what he does eat.

Mixed berries and yoghurt

On the road to recovery

With the Monkey getting better he is also starting to get his appetite back. What a happy sight! After lots of listless lying around on the floor it is great seeing our veggie baby back to goofing around with his plate.

We made scrambled tofu. Although I had a recipe I just went freestyle with the amounts. I knew he wouldn't eat a whole portion so just made it a rough size: some silken tofu (squeeze the water out as much as you can). Some green asparagus tips (ours were from frozen), a pinch of turmeric (meant to be anti inflammatory), a teeeeny bit of salt, olive oil, and (although this makes an otherwise vegan recipe vegetarian) a dollop of cream cheese. You can add whatever else feels nice: onion, perhaps a little bit of leek...

What a relief when he ate. And eat he did. He messed, he played, it went into his mouth, it got chewed and swallowed.

the veggie baby is BACK!

Let's hope we are now on the road to recovery and can get back to cooking.

We are extending the blog

Having a sick child made us think about lots of things, from food to co-sleeping to general child rearing questions. Plus a few of my friends are currently pregnant with their first child and don't quite know how to start easing into the topic of having a family. They asked for advice on what worked for us and what didn't. And although we are very aware that child rearing is a hugely personal journey,and unsolicited advice is the most annoying thing that comes with having children, if anything we have learned can be helpful then we are happy to share.

So, we may start using this blog to share more of our experiences, more of which products we found useful (from probiotics to good nappy creams), which books we have read (nutrition but also about babies and general tips) and so on.

Veggie week

A busy baby week...

We've had a busy baby week - doesn't every parent? Scheduling all those extra cooking sessions really is a labour of love - but then, isn't all of parenting?

This week our monkey enjoyed a variety of dishes. Some went down better than others.

 

Hummus

We left the chickpeas soak for aaages, as in over 24hrs, so they were nice and soft for blending. Luckily we have a kick butt juicer which doesn't just juice but can also blend. Hummus definitely didn't make it to the favourite list (yet). A bit of rice cake helped get it down easier and we ended up mixing it under some avocado the next day when it was lunchtime.

Recipe was taken from Baby & Child Vegetarian Recipes by Carol Timperley

Moshed chick peas

Hummus with rice cake

Baby Tapas

The following day we hadn't cooked a new meal for lunchtime so decided on some quick 'tapas'. White bread with some unsalted butter, avocado blended with pear (with lots left over for the next day) and a strip of cheese to munch on. We covered plant protein with the chick peas, animal protein with the cheese and that healthy fat for growth with the avocado dip. Pear added extra vitamins. Yum.

The veggie baby enjoyed the various textures – as did the cat who took a good sniff at whatever landed on the floor

Cauliflower with cheese sauce

This is a really easy recipe. Basically you make a roo (bit of melted butter, few spoons of flower mixed in until it's a nice "lump"), add around 170ml of milk and stir until it's a nice white sauce. Add some grated cheese and add to whatever steamed or cooked veg you've made. We used cauliflower but have also added this to potato, courgette, broccoli or mixed veg. Blend it for a really smooth consistency or use a potato masher for a bit more texture.

Cauliflower with cheese

This is an absolute favourite with the monkey. He kept asking for more and more. In fact he didn't leave much over to put aside for another day. Success.

Quinoa pasta with Napolitana sauce

A friend of ours had just returned from Cypress where her family is from. She brought back some olive oil which her grandmother had made (in fact, our friend had helped hand-pick the olives the previous year). This felt like the perfect dish to add that extra special splash of olive oil.

This is another recipe taken from Annabel Karmel's book (see resources or previous posts). Quick and easy to cook, it was a dish we all ate together by quadrupling the original recipe. A glimpse to what it will be like going back to cooking just the one family dish. We like it.

The only thing we didn't take into account was that the pasata had added sugar in it. In future we will make our own or find "plain" pasata.

Chopping carrot, onion, garlic... our friend's hand made olive oil and the family table. We had to cut down the quinoa spaghetti a bit for easier eating. 

Farmer's market

A morning's trip to the farmer's market... got to stock up for the veggie baby!

Lovely produce at the farmers market: fresh, local and mostly organic.

Zingy lemon, bright orange, vibrant red....

This is us, baby!

Hi and welcome to 'Veggie baby, baby!'

We are two vegetarians (10+ years) in our mid-thirties who, 8 months ago, had a baby boy. As soon as the weaning stage began we were faced with the challenge of providing nutritious food for our baby that contains all he needs for growing into a strong and healthy child. Not an easy task it seems...


What about that all important B12? Those omega oils? Iron? Didn't we read something about Zinc? A balanced veggie baby diet would require dedication, study and planning ahead.

This blog then is our (largely photographic) veggie baby journey journal, documenting what we cook, how it goes down, the meal plans we follow and what we learn along the way.

So, here we go baby!