When I think of conventional baby food, mushy, gummy, easy to swallow textures comes to mind. You can pretty much put anything in a blender nowadays and make baby food, but my challenge was to make adult food that don’t need to go through a blender to be baby friendly. 

One of my go to recipes on a Sunday is some type of pasta with sauce… I would start the sauce mid afternoon and let it simmer until it was time to eat. Bolognese sauce came to mind because you can use ground meat cooked down with tomatoes and finely diced vegetables, very baby friendly. Pasta, on the other hand, is not so baby friendly unless you cut the pasta. When I was searching for recipes on foodandwine.com, I came across a polenta recipe and Bingo! Baby friendly pasta.

Another good thing about pasta dishes is that you can cook them ahead of time, and make a big batch and freeze it for later. Time saving recipes are a life saver when you don’t have time to cook during the week. 

The cooking process is pretty straightforward for the Bolognese sauce: brown some meat, add vegetables and broth, and simmer. I used veal and pre made Italian sausage from the grocery store. I think it’s important to brown your meat until a brown crust forms on the bottom of the pot… This means all liquid has been cooked off and the little bits of meat that’s stuck to the bottom of the pot will act as major flavoring agents when you add broth and scrape them off. By no means burn your meat, but cook it around medium heat until most if not all water dissipates. 

 
For the vegetables I added celery, onion, carrots, and garlic, finely diced. You can use a food processor for this. Scrape the bottom of the pan to release some of the crusty goodness from the meats. When cooking down the vegetables, you want to creat the same type of crust on the bottom of the  pan like with the meat. After adding the liquids, be sure to scrape the pan well so all the brown stuff gets cooked into the sauce. 

I left my sauce simmering until thick, but it really depends on your personal preference..as long as you keep the sauce on simmer it’s almost impossible to over cook it. If it’s too thin cook it longer, if it’s too thick add more broth or water. This recipe worked for me because I started it while my son took his afternoon nap and once he woke up the sauce was already simmering so it was very low maintenance.  

As for the polenta, I followed very basic instructions on cooking it while whisking ( I didn’t sift my polenta before cooking it which is why it looks lumpy in the photo).  I made double the recipe, and used the left overs to make pre packed meals for my son.

 
After the polenta gets to the right consistency ( approximately 25-30 mins on medium heat with constant whisking), I played for our dinner and poured the rest into a baking dish.  

As it cools the polenta will harden and make it easy to cut into equivalent portions.  

 I divided up the polenta and the Bolognese sauce into little 2oz containers, labeled them, and put them in the freezer.

So how did my son like the polenta with Bolognese sauce? He was unsure about it for the first couple times he tried it, but as he gets use to solids he likes it a lot now.  It does take multiple tries but I learned that you just have to keep trying and not get discouraged if babies don’t like it at first. 

 
Adapted from the recipe below:http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/polenta-with-meat-sauce

WordPress tells me that it has been 727 days since my last post. So much has changed in 727 days: I started a new job, traveled a bunch, and had a baby. Although I stopped blogging about food during these 727 days, I continue to eat, cook, and obsess about food. 

Originally the purpose of my blog was about my experiences and learnings cooking different recipes ( none which are original). While this was fulfilling for a time, I got lazy with the upkeep of the blog as life got busier. 

Since becoming a mother, I’ve found myself obsessing over my son’s eating habits: how much should he be eating, what should he be eating, why isn’t he eating. My son is a healthy and happy 10-month-old, but eating has definitely been a challenge due to recent bouts of thrush and random baby illnesses ( cold, ear infection,etc). Only recently have we had any success with starting solid food. 

Since food and cooking is something I enjoy immensely, I aspired to influence my son as much as possible on the art and joy of dining. I had all these ambitions to make gourmet baby foods for my son when he starts on solids, but so far I’ve been remiss. As both my husband and I work full time with no family in town, it has been a challenge to find time to cook just for the two of us let alone being able to eat together as a family. I caved and bought some of those jarred and prepackaged baby foods, but after tasting them, I knew I was not going to feed my son something I wouldn’t eat my self. 

So on the eve of 2016, I’m making a New Years resolution to start cooking adult and baby friendly dinners. This would require a lot of planning ahead, scheduling, and diligence to stick to it. While I know it will be challenging, I am looking forward to sharing one of my most loved interests with my son.    

I’m always suspicious of Americanized Asian food. For the most part they are deep fried, over seasoned approximations of Asian food at best, and tasteless mush of unrecognizable ingredients at worst. Of course Americanized Asian food has its benefits: Orange Chicken from Panda Express is my husband’s go-to hangover food.

I found this Thai chicken recipe from Andrew Zimmern, known for Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods shows and immediately wondered if this was an Americanized knockoff recipe. First of all the name of the dish is suspicious: “Sweet and Sour Bangkok Style Chicken”. Sounds like a dish from your local hole in the wall Chinese/Thai delivery place. Looking at the grocery list, it includes Ketchup as one of the main ingredient for the sauce, another red flag. I did some research online and found a photo of a dish titled “Bangkok Chicken” which looked most like the Zimmern recipe from the Thai restaurant Bangkok Crossing in Detroit Michigan. Through further research on Yelp on Bangkok Crossing, I found that it was indeed a dish that ‘tasted like sweet and sour Chicken”.

Now Zimmern claims that he had this dish in Thailand, and got the recipe directly from the street vendor. Perhaps he fell off the wagon and ended up at Bangkok Crossing in Detroit during a particularly good bender. Either way I was intrigued to test this dish out… worst case I learn a hangover recipe for times when Mark and I are too tired to get take out from Panda Express.

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Hi All! Long time no see. I got a WordPress notification the other day and realized that it’s been SEVEN months since I’ve updated this blog!! During this time, I was caught up with work, found a new job, and cooked a lot of good food. Time flies when you are having fun, so here is a recipe that I enjoyed making recently. Read the rest of this entry »