Rainbow Soup

 December 2010. Toby 25 months.

I got this idea from a colour book Toby had about food. 

Everyone is always saying to 'eat your colours' so I figured, why not have them all in one place??

Rainbow Soup

Red: Peppers

Orange: Carrots, peppers

Yellow: Corn

Green: Peas

Blue: Potatoes

Purple: Cabbage
Black: Ground pepper
White: Mushrooms, garlic

All stewed in homemade chicken broth.

Blue potatoes are hard to come by, and the reason we had them was because we grew them. I'm not actually sure if grocery stores carry them at all. I also don't know what else to used for 'blue'.

Next time I would not use purple cabbage, or I would cook it separately and add it later because it dyes the water purple, which made the other colours muted.

But it was sure delicious! And healthy!

Happy Eating!!

Second Birthday

November 2010. Toby 24 months.

At his first birthday we had a nice roast and potatoes, because it would be a nice meal for us with some things for Toby to pick at. But since his year had been filled with introductions to a bajillion more foods I wanted to make something he would actually love.
He will eat mostly anything, but there are still things he's less fond of. Beef and Chicken, for example, he likes the taste of but sometimes finds hard to chew.
What he will always eat though, no matter the mood, is rice, tofu stir-fry, and sushi.
How many other two-year-olds can say they had that for their birthday dinner??

Over the summer we has experimented a lot with different sushi fillings and had come up with two amazing rolls.
#1: Shredded carrot, cucumber, basil leaves, chives
#2: Sauteed mushrooms, red pepper, green beans

So good.

So for Toby's second birthday we had sushi and a tofu stir-fry consisting of PC herbed tofu, baby carrots, peas, baby corn and black olives.

And then to top it all off, a tractor cake.

The cake recipe I used is from The Gluten Free Gourmet and is as follows:

Fruit Cocktail Torte

1 cup gluten free flour mix

1 cup sugar (I used brown sugar, or half a cup of honey instead)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 eggs (I used egg replacer)

One 17oz can of fruit cocktail

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 325F

In large mixing bowl, sift together flour, sugar, salt and baking soda (If replacing sugar with honey, DON'T add it here. Mix with egg before adding)
Add the beaten eggs, fruit cocktail (juice included), and vanilla.
Stir well until blended. Pour batter into greased 9x9 pan.

Bake 1 hour.
(I had to cover with tin foil about 3/4 of the way through to keep top from burning, but it takes the full hour for the middle to cook)

For the tractor cake I made a 'grass' icing with icing sugar, lactose-free margerine, vanilla and green food colouring. For 'snow' I used shredded coconut. For the number 2 I used crumbled gingerbread cookies that I had saved in the freezer form a few months before.

Owwwwm nom nom nom

Happy Eating!!

Fresh from the Garden

August-September 2010. Toby 20 months.

When harvest time came at our house, I knew Toby would be excited to see what was growing all summer, but I wasn't prepared for how much he would choose to eat raw from the garden.

It started when we were getting corn from a local farm and the owner handed Toby a raw corn cob that they had picked about half an hour earlier. He looked at me with an unsure expression so I took a bite and handed it back. He took a bite and proceeded to suck on it the whole way home.

Then he discovered that if he pulls on these leafy green things that he's been told to not step on all summer, there are in fact carrots on the end, 

and that mom thinks this is pretty cool and makes us wash the dirt off, and then we can just, like, eat outside.

 And beans you don't even have to wash, you just, like, yank them from the vine and eat them.

And did you know that these leafy things taste AWESOME? After being told to not eat leaves for almost two years, this is insanity.

We like: Spearmint, 

 basil, 

and even lemon balm.

 And peppers are basically apples, but within reach.

Silly Chaos, cats don't eat peppers. Go away.

Happy eating!