Friday marks the last day of this allergen week, but I didn’t have anymore shellfish to introduce and so we skipped it.
Instead, I wanted to try out a recipe that some moms in my BLW group swear by.
The swearing is because babies need more iron in their diet after turning six months and most of us don’t want to deal with giving vitamins and rather fit the iron into babies diet.
So what do you eat with lots of iron? Meats and dark green vegetables!
And this recipe is a “hidden” vegetable one, using spinach.
So all you do is mix two eggs with one banana and add in about a quarter cup of frozen spinach.
Sorry, nothing is measured in BLW half the time and the other half it’s odd measurements when you’re not making in bulk.
I also decided to serve blackberry yogurt on the side of the pancakes.
Malina’s breakfast
With very few options, Malina went for the pancakes.
“Is this an odd color?”
She seemed to like the pancakes well enough and I can attest that they were more banana flavored than anything. If not for the color I don’t think anyone would bat an eye at them.
After she tore into her first piece for a bit and ate a few bites I offered her a spoon and let her go at the yogurt.
“I prefer spoons.”
She didn’t hate the yogurt but she preferred chewing on her spoon to eating further. I think she might be teething again but there is no sign of a third tooth on the way so who knows.
So remember, sometimes baby just wants to chew on the non edible things and that’s okay, you are doing great and you’ve got this!
Today is our fourth day trying the fish allergen. Malina hasn’t really eaten enough of any of the fish presented so far for me to rule out anything, but I had high hopes it would change today as we tried the trout cakes I mentioned yesterday.
The trout cakes utilize the same mix of ingredients as the tuna cakes except they have trout instead of tuna. This recipe is actually from one of my BLW cookbooks (—) and I altered the recipe to allow for the tuna cakes (halving all ingredients between two bowls and adding 1 egg). I also baked everything (350F for 30 minutes) instead of pan frying. I have to say though that these things have kept well in the fridge, reheated well, and taste good. Especially the trout ones.
I also served mandarin oranges today and lemon yogurt (being mindful of sugar and sodium).
Malina’s breakfast.
I think Malina might be teething again, though not as bad and hard as when she cut her last tooth. It would explain her reluctance to eat that she’s displayed recently.
I coaxed her into starting breakfast by offering her a spoon of yogurt though and she was quick to take it and chewed on the spoon between bites.
“I love you-gurt.”
She liked the lemon yogurt it seems. She ate about half of what I offered and even saved the spoon from an accidental fall all by herself.
Now that she was interested and eating she moved on to the mandarins herself.
“Mandarins are my favorite.”
She still loves those too. She chewed on them and ate the insides before discarding the pulp. I’m starting to feel like I should offer her more slices because the juices are not as filling, but I’m holding back until she’s eating more of everything on her plate.
She went through all her mandarin slices and then went back to the yogurt. Only when she’d eaten or dropped most of those did she turn her attention to the trout cakes.
Personally, I think she’s avoiding the fish on purpose. Probably because of the smell. I’m going to have to figure out another way of approaching this now that I think I know what’s going on.
“This fish is good. I only want good fish now.”
Malina was hesitant to bite into the trout cake even after she picked it up. She started to pull it apart first and smash it on her tray. But she did get curious enough to put a piece in her mouth.
Then there was a change.
She ate a bite and then put more of the cake in her mouth. She was eating it. Finally, she was actually eating fish! She then spent some time shoving pieces in her mouth, spitting out some of it, dropping other pieces, but still chewing and eating enough of it up for me to count this as a success.
Tuna, bad. Sardines, bad. Trout, good. Very good.
I’m so thrilled she ate the fish, but I’m also worried now because she has all day to have a reaction and to get through. I’m almost certain she’ll be fine though. She hasn’t had a reaction so far and breakfast is two hours behind us as I write this.
So remember, even if you have to try something over and over again to get a success, you are doing great and you’ve got this!
Week four and we are doin Fish as our allergen introduction. We love fish here, so we are both excited to share fish with Malina as well as see what preferences she has as we go along.
As you might know, cooked fish is very flaky for the most part. This makes it harder to eat for a baby like Malina who is still developing her pincer grasp. So my solution was to make fish cakes.
The rules for making any type of meatball or patty are simple. You have your meat, a breading, and a binding agent. I found a ton of recipes but they all require more prep than I had time for. So instead I improvised a recipe and got lucky that it turned out.
Today we had tuna cakes, plain goat cheese, and blackberries.
Malina’s plate.
To make the tuna cakes I drained a can of tuna, mixed in some japanese mayonnaise, and then mixed in panko until I got the right consistency.
Next, I heated a bit of olive oil in a pan and added my patties once heated. These don’t really need to be cooked as much as warmed and when they were ready after about 3 minutes per side I severed them up.
Malina took in her spread and decided to start with her tuna cake.
“Why way when I can play?”
I wish I could say it didn’t fall apart quickly, but Malina is skilled in tearing her food to bits. I also wish I could say she ate some of the tuna, but she avoided actually eating a single bite as she tore it apart and tossed pieces to Pluto.
There will be plenty of time later to try tuna again, and there are still other fish to get her to try as well. So I just accepted this one as not working and waited for Malina to try the next food.
She decided to go for the plain goat cheese.
“Creamy and just the right mix of tart and sweet.”
We are also big cheese fans here. We also haven’t found a second cheese Malina likes, so we went with the next one on our list. Goat cheese. It’s a lightly sour with hints of sweet creamy cheese. Sometimes it can be more crumbly light gets as well, but the one we got was a slightly creamier texture than cream cheese.
Malina loved it.
My bet is that the sour was her favorite part and then the consistency was next. She ate it well enough with her fingers and enjoyed it though.
Riding the success of the cheese, Malina went for her blackberries last.
Again, she enjoyed it. I cut them into quarters lengthwise and she has just a small amount of difficulty picking them up. Just not enough to stop her from enjoying the berries.
It’s unfortunate that the tuna didn’t work out but honestly just seeing her handle it and eat the rest of her breakfast was good enough for me. Like I said, there is plenty of time to try again.
So remember, even if baby doesn’t eat what they are supposed to, you are still doing great and you’ve got this!
So I hadn’t decided which of our remaining allergens to test this week before I made breakfast this morning so I decided to just make something nice with what we had on hand. Sometimes I look at our pantry and fridge and see nothing. Other times I see opportunity and get plenty of food ideas. Today was a big idea day.
Last weekend my husband made a soup that needed buttermilk as an ingredient. After he opened and used what he needed from the carton it got pushed to the back of the fridge. Luckily, I remembered it last night as I though about today and started planning for breakfast.
Buttermilk pancakes!
The recipe I decided to use is from one of my BLW apps (Annabel Karmel Recipes) that I have on my phone. But be warned, the recipes from here are in metric so you will need a scale and appropriate measuring equipment. I’ve been cooking a long time though so switching between different measuring systems I can handle.
These pancakes came out amazing too, by the way. I added about a teaspoon of vanilla extract to the batter but followed the rest of it to the ‘T’.
I also made my own mixed berry compote. I just tossed about a cup of frozen mixed berries into a sauce pan and heated on high until bubbly. Then I mashed up the berries to make a smoother texture and let it simmer on low until it thickened some. In the future I’ll probably play with this some. Add in some spices and what not to see what Malina likes, but spoiler alert: she loved the berries as is.
Then I served up some more homemade whipped cream without sugar and our leftover cucumbers from the other day. And somehow I managed to get this all done in 45 minutes.
Okay, it was planning and Eric holding Malina, but still I felt really good about this performance on my part.
Malina’s plate.
And of course the first thing she went for was the pancakes as her other hand discovered the whipped cream. She was tentative at first, since this is the softest pancake she’s had yet (crepes are in our future) but she soon discovers that it tasted good.
“We should have started with these pancakes.”
She ate at least two strips. She loved her pancakes. Pluto was also given his tribute, though most of that was the cucumber. Malina was not feeling the savory cucumber as an accompaniment and was quick to discard them and go back to her pancakes.
She did however seem interested in the berry compote and whipped cream but unable to get any. I had the idea that she’d mix the pancake pieces in it, but that’s a skill she hasn’t developed yet. So instead I gave her a spoon and she then made a huge mess as she ate it.
“Berry sauce is good. Can I have more?”
As you can see, she liked it and promptly demolished it.
I feel good about this meal though. It might look sugar heavy but the only added sugar was 20g in the batter mix and she didn’t get all of that. Then whatever natural sugars that were in the berries. So I say it’s fine.
Starting tomorrow we will he going into fish as our allergen. I am planning to do some meal prep for the week with my time this weekend as well. And I’ll try to get my master post for the resources I use together.
So remember, even if you do offer sugar to baby, you are still doing great and you’ve got this!
I did meal prep last night! Yay! I managed to set up everything for this morning and all I had to do was go put the zucchini in the oven when I got up. Easy. I guess I should tell you what I made for today though.
So I’ve heard a bunch of mamas, across several groups that I am in, say they made egg salad without mayonnaise and used avocado as the replacement. Sounded interesting and weird. Two things I can totally get behind if it works out, and did it ever. No one ever seems to provide recipes for this stuff though, so here is what I did in case anyone wants to give it a shot.
1/2 avocado, nice and ripe and diced up
2 hard boiled eggs, diced how you like it
1/2 tsp of dill
1/2 tsp of granulated garlic
You just mix everything together with a fork and you get a nice chunky consistency that tastes divine.
I will have to make this for me next time and put it on some buttered toast. Avocado toast has a new challenger in the arena of topping combinations. It would probably do amazing with some salt or lemon mixed in as well, but that is neither here or now since this is for Malina.
So the oven would have preheated when the timer for it went off (but we got up early) so I went out to toss my pan of breaded zucchini from the fridge into the oven and started it up.
Malina did her morning ritual and then we were sitting down and eating by 8 am.
So we have breaded baked zucchini, avocado egg salad, and I tossed a could slices of regular avocado on the plate just to see how she handled it. I was ready for today to be messy, but today is also bath day so I figured what ever.
Mama’s and Malina’s plates.
So the first thing Malina reaches for is the avocado. I think I actually cut the slice a little too thick for her to handle but the other slice was too thin and became insta mush. She was not impressed by the avocado unfortunately, which I’m starting to think is a texture thing as she hasn’t really been into anything ‘slimy’. Will have to consider than in the future.
Eating avocado.
The next thing she tried to mess with was the avocado egg salad. It ended up everywhere but her mouth so I brought in our trusty friend, the spoon.
With BLW they don’t seem to like utensils until Baby is older. This stems from an idea that spoon feeding is part of traditional weaning and has no place in BLW. I get the problem stemming from possible ‘over feeding’ when someone spoon feeds the baby, but I think it’s easy to avoid doing that. Something that does occasionally seem acceptable is offering a pre-loaded spoon of food. But even this method expects the spoon to just be laid on the table for baby to pick up on their own. This seems problematic to me because baby doesn’t know how to use a spoon first off, then it’s more of a weapon (dart) or mess maker (trebuchet) offered in this way, and finally I don’t want her to get frustrated while she’s eating anymore than necessary.
So I load up the spoon with our avocado mixture and hand it to her. Also, I want everyone to know that Malina has been practicing with spoons without food for almost a month now. We’ve also encouraged her to hold it and put it in her mouth a certain way. So, this was not her first time using a spoon.
Using the spoon.
I also want to take a moment to add a video clip of Malina gagging. I was already recording when this happened and between me knowing she was okay and being right there incase things turned out badly I kept recording. -At no point did Malina go into distress or was in any danger – That being said, it is important to know the difference between chocking and gagging no matter how you feed baby. It is also important to know how to properly handle both. In this case I encouraged her (because getting involved can have mixed results) and she worked it out by herself without intervention.
Malina gagged a bit on the avocado egg.
The video cuts out like that because I saved the spoon. Malina quickly went back to eating and ended up wanting the spoon again too.
The last thing she tried was the baked breaded zucchini.
A note on breading: be sure to check that whatever you are using does not have honey in it for children under 1 year of age. Honey hides in all types of things and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
So I made the Baked breaded zucchini sticks from one of my BLW cookbooks. This specific recipe was from “Baby-Led Feeding” by Jenna Helwig. It turned out pretty good, the only thing I’d do to modify it, if I make it again, would be to try and squeeze out some of the moisture from the zucchini before breading to avoid soggy sticks. Malina was not a fan of the breading however so I might not get to try that modification any time soon.
“Maybe one bite.”“One bite might be too much.”
Or maybe she ate the breading off and didn’t like the zucchini. It’s hard to know for sure since Malina isn’t talking about it.
So I can add avocado to our list of successes and I know that Malina will eat hard boiled eggs when mixed with something. I’m going to add zucchini too since she did eat some of it, but I’m going to add a note to try it another way to see how she does.
Finally, I wanted to add that Malina is usually a very happy little girl and she only makes these upset sour faces when eating and only sometimes then as well. So here are a couple smiles from today’s mess.
“Oops, did I make a mess?”
“Come here, mama. I have avocado fingers for you!”
Oh and it was messy. There was avocado EVERYWHERE. Me and the dog got scheduled for baths after avocado-geddon. That spoon came at me and pegged me in the head. And the dog got avocado dropped on him soon after.
Also, remember what I said about her practicing with the spoon? Same is true for the sippy cup. She practiced for a month to get to where she is at and it was only with encouragement and an occasional helping hand that she is able to do as well as she does.
Using the sippy cup
At the end of the day, every baby is different and capable of different things. Malina can’t roll from stomach to back for example and crawls by pushing her head around on the floor. so don’t be hard on yourself or on baby. They will get there when they get there. So remember, that you are doing great and you’ve got this!
Malina’s BLW Food Adventures 