Iron Chef Hawaii

Ive been making lots of new food stuffs lately. Last week, as I said earlier, I tried many Filipino foods with mixed and disastrous results. Well, this weekend I made bandae-bandae and it was great! Banana lumpias - so easy, even I cant screw it up. I might post the how-to for that later this week if I run out of stuff to talk about.

I made croquettes last night out of white fish (pollock?) and potatoes.

Today I have been making stuff for the baby. I like this website, recommended by fellow blogging mom friend Abbie, it has lots of info on making baby food. Although, Ive never been one for baby food "recipes" because who wants to measure? just steam it and puree it and combine it at will!

I like their information on homemade cereals. I have seen several different options for how to cook homemade cereals for infants and I think a combo works well for me. I like the convenience of grinding the grains down and then just cooking them for 15 min (rather than soaking them overnight, cooking them for an hour and straining out the fibrous parts). I throw a small square of kombu (a type of seaweed) in with the cereal when I cook them, adding some needed minerals.

It doesnt bother me that the cereals arent fortified, they are whole grains (just the way nature intended) and breast milk provides more than enough nutrition. I think the only thing that is really a concern is iron and I feed him lots of leafy greens and I always take my iron supplements so Im sure he gets more than enough from his food and breast milk. I actually like the idea of giving him foods that havent been overly processed (been refined and then enriched).

I ground up some brown rice, pearled barley and made some oatmeal today so we are all set for the next week or two!

Today I also made some teething biscuits out of barley flour, rice cereal, and apple juice. I dont know how they will turn out. I should have greased the baking sheet I cooked them on since they all got stuck! I might have made them too thick but the dough was so sticky that I had to pipe it out of a plastic bag rather than roll & cut! I tried to bake them at 250 forever so they would be really crusty like zwieback toast.

Ikaika has been so so fussy and horrible for the last two days. I think hes teething again. Its been really crappy, but luckily its also been very out of character for him. He just wants to be held or talked to or anything but he can not entertain himself to save his little life. Im actually only able to write this because hes sleeping!