Day 20 – Breakfast

Almost through another week! Soon we will be starting week 4 and then I’ll have to make the compilation summary post for Malina’s first month. We’ve also successfully introduced four (Eggs, Dairy, Wheat, and Soy) of the eight major allergens and kept them in rotation for continued exposure. Honestly, I’m getting kinda exhausted but the excitement is keeping me going as well as how well Malina has been doing with this.

She’s the real MPV of this whole thing as I just document and dispense anecdotes and observations.

Despite all of that though, today’s breakfast is a bit bare bones and does not have any soy present.

It’s not the best excuse but I haven’t had the chance to do the meal prep I’ve wanted. For more than just Malina too. Does anyone else ever buy a bunch of stuff to make a specific recipe and then not use some of it for one reason or another?

No? It can’t just be me.

Well, I had big plans to make greek meatballs and homemade taziki last week. I bought everything. I checked the recipe multiple times and somehow missed the part where it takes 3 hours to make taziki.

Oops.

So we had the meatballs and I had several ingredients that went unused.

Skipping to today, I didn’t know what I was going to make Malina. I had zero plans as I opened the fridge. Oven preheating and water starting to boil so I had options when I was ready.

Then I saw them. The cucumbers and fresh dill. I have good experiences mixing these two, from back when I’d make cucumber sandwiches for my tea parties as a kid and later with my sister as adults. British Tea is an interesting thing that I wish we had in the states, but then again it makes it kinda unique and special to do it occasionally here and there, but I digress.

I’ve never cooked a cucumber before outside of stir frys and I didn’t feel like doing anything heavy with it. I looked to the dill again and made up my mind. Baked cucumber with dill it was.

So I cut the cucumber into small pinky wedges after peeling it and cutting out the seeds (mixed into about why you can’t give that to baby, so I’m erring in the side of the unknown) and tossed half of them with dill before tossing them in the oven for twenty minutes. In the mean time I tried to figure out the rest of our meal.

The thought of sandwiches did not leave me though so I turned to the deli drawer and pulled out roast beef (nitrate free) and considered my cheeses. We have four right now and all I could think of was cream cheese which we had none of. I settled for the cottage cheese, hoping Malina liked it more this second time.

So I prepared everything and soon we had breakfast ready.

Cucumber is a fruit/vegetable. Not based on its actual classification but on how our culture views it. Kinda like tomatoes. Personally, cucumbers have always tasted like a watery melon somewhere between a honeydew and watermelon to me, just less sweet and flavorful. So it actually being a fruit isn’t a big deal to me. Today though I served it two ways, with and without dill, and so I’m counting it as both.

Malina didn’t care though as she reached for her plate as I sat it down for her. The first thing she grabbed was the roast beef.

This was Malina’s first time with beef but not her first time with meat. Don’t know why it surprised me but she’s definitely a little carnivore as she loved this. She picked up slice after slice chewing and sucking on them. It makes me excited to give her more meat in the future, I love meat.

By the end of breakfast she’d demolished the strips and when I looked at what was left and accounted for what I’d seen fall to Pluto she definitely ate at least one of not two strips.

The next thing she went for though was the cottage cheese. I had planned to offer her a spoon but she took matters into her own hands, literally.

Again I was surprised as she ate a couple handfuls of the cottage cheese. Done was the grimace at its sourness and the spitting of dislike. Malina actually ate some and liked it.

So when she went for the cucumbers inevitability I figured she’d probably not care for them with having done well with everything else.

But I was wrong. She obviously preferred the ones with dill. Chewing and removing the seasoning as she took bites and gummed it.

For the record, the baked cucumber was crisp on the outside and watery on the inside. The dill ones were savory and the plain ones were sweet. So who knew? I’ll have to play around with this in the future but for now I am both impressed and happy it turned out. Also, I want to say how much of a champion Malina has been the last couple days with her eating. This whole thing could have been harder or easier based off of her and I’m happy she’s been going easy on me so far.

So remember, even when winging it, you are doing great and you’ve got this!

-Erica