Gourmet Palate

I've long been meaning to write about Sadie's increasingly bizarre mealtime habits for awhile now, but it always seems like a task too daunting to undertake.

Now I'm finally ready to launch into it, but first, VOX BLOGGING PLATFORM, would you please stop taunting me by advertising for Diapers.com in the sidebar while I'm trying to write my update? How did you know that I am really in need of both an Ergo AND a crate of Earth's Best formula, yet can afford neither one? When did I start pining for ergonomically forgiving baby carriers AND organic high-end formula? How did my life come to this?

Okay, so, the long and short of it is that mealtimes used to be fairly non-eventful, and now trying to pack three meals into the baby has become a focal point of my life.

For one thing, for whatever reason, Sadie has begun carrying on a love/hate relationship with her highchair. She loves to pull on the buckles that fasten her in, but hates the act of actually BEING fastened in. She'll scream with anger when I snap the tray into place, pounding on the plastic like a prisoner rattling a tin cup across the bars of his cell. Then she'll begin to heave herself violently back and forth, with so much force that she is capable of actually MOVING THE CHAIR ACROSS THE ROOM in this manner. She accompanies the rocking with indignant yelling.

The only way of dealing with this is to distract her with finger food. Sadie has only in the past month discovered the ability to pick up food with her hands, and this is currently both a delight and a frustration. She can pick up a piece of cheese or a Cheerio with no problem, and sometimes she succeeds in putting it in her mouth, but more often it slides off one cheek onto the floor (where the dogs make an immediate lunge for it), or it winds up stuck to the back of her own hand, where she can no longer see it. Either way, this failure infuriates her and she starts up again with the yelling and heaving.

At some point, when she's sufficiently absorbed in stabbing at Cheerios, I'll approach her with a bowl of actual food. She's usually pretty good at letting me spoon it into her mouth -- assuming, of course, that what I'm feeding her is to her liking.

Her tastes are getting pickier, you see. She used to love oatmeal mixed with fruit puree every morning, but now it bores her and she ignores the spoon when she sees it coming at her. When she does finally accept it, she chews with the greatest amount of ennui she can muster. Even a spoonful of yogurt, her favorite food in all the world, doesn't do much to spice it up.

What she wants is variety and excitement in her meals, and it's all I can do to keep up with her. Pureed avocado and banana are no longer acceptable, but mashed with a fork is okay because she can scoop the food up and play with it. More ends up being flung to the floor and rubbed into her hair than winds up in her mouth. Pureed vegetables of any other kind are decidedly NOT okay. Meat is barely tolerated, accompanied by much coughing and protest.

In an increasingly desperate attempt to get her to eat homemade food -- and more determined than ever not to resort to jars except in emergency situations -- I've branched out into some trial-and-error baby food recipes. With some, we've had great success; with others, not so much. The three ice cube trays full of mashed potato, peas and carrots sit sad and untouched in the back of our freezer, since potato is apparently the devil, waiting for the morning when I'm hungover enough to throw the whole shebang into a frying pan and turn it into poor man's hashbrowns.

Here are a couple of recipes that have actually worked:

• Wheaty Meaty Stew: credit Scott for coming up with this dish's catchy title. (And thank goodness Sadie likes it, because it would really make me sad not to be able to say "Wheaty Meaty Stew" several times a day.) This could also be called Everything But The Kitchen Sink Stew, because it contains ground beef, rice, spinach, squash, celery, carrots and about a million other things, all cooked together and run through the food processor. The result is a toxic sludge with tiny orange chunks floating in it that Sadie thinks is utterly delicious.
• Turkey Apple Stew: I took a bunch of cooked chopped apples and pureed sweet potato, and added them to ground turkey and some rice. Sadie was good with this one until she accidentally inhaled a mouthful into her windpipe. She's a little more cautious about it now.
• Cheesy Turkey Pasta: That's what WholesomeBabyFood calls this dish, but I tend to think of it as Turkey Vomit, because when you combine cottage cheese and ground turkey and steep the whole thing in chicken broth, guess what it looks like? It also contains pastina, which is a kind of pasta that resembles coarse sand, and a dash of garlic powder and dried basil for good measure. The whole thing looks so disgusting I can't bring myself to sample it, but so far it's been a huge hit.

And so it goes. I understand now more than ever why people give up on this whole baby food making thing and turn to jarred food -- it's so much easier to simply buy a jar labeled "lentil chicken pasta stars" than to cook up a batch yourself. And I don't know honestly how much money we're saving by doing this -- organic food isn't cheap, and sometimes when I see baby food at Ralph's being advertised for $4.00 for 5 cans, I wonder wistfully if it wouldn't just make more sense to start jarring it. Yet at the end of the day, I love making food for Sadie. It's a therapeutic activity that makes me feel good  -- and there are few things more satisfying than serving her a homemade concoction, then seeing her face as she processes the new taste and then opened her mouth wide for more.