Baking Bonanza

I've had the baking bug the last couple of days. Maybe it's because I won't be able to bake Christmas cookies here like I do every year, but I wanted to bake some lovely things for Thanksgiving at The Reservation next week. So yesterday I made the dough for my Grandma's famous feather bed rolls; and today I made her pumpkin roll and some yummy ginger pumpkin pomegranate muffins. The muffins come from a wonderful recipe in The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook. The original recipe is for blueberry-yogurt muffins, but I improvised a little:

Yield: 1 dozen

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup orange juice
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 (8 oz) carton vanilla low-fat yogurt
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries, thawed

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Lightly spoon flour into measuring cups. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl; make a well in center of mixture. Combine orange juice, oil, vanilla, yogurt, and egg; add to dry ingredients, stirring just until moist. Gently fold in blueberries.
3. Spoon batter into 12 muffin cups coated with cooking spray; sprinkle 1 tbsp sugar evenly over muffins. Bake at 400 degrees for 18 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove muffins from pans immediately, and place muffins on a wire rack.

I have had wonderful success with this recipe using blueberries, except I usually use blueberry yogurt instead of vanilla because I'm more likely to have that on hand. Also, I find that tossing the berries in a tablespoon or two of flour before mixing them into the batter helps them to keep their shape and prevents them from sinking in the batter while the muffins bake.

Today, I substituted canned pumpkin (left over from my pumpkin roll) for the yogurt, pomegranate arils for the blueberries, and added 1/2 tsp of ginger. I think they turned out very well, and it cements this as one of my favorite recipes.

Friday Soup

So it's late - well, late for me, which is after 10pm these days. I remember staying up later on Friday nights, knowing that there would be some extra sleep coming to me on Saturday morning. But Squiggles doesn't care what day it is, or that the weekend is for relaxing. We're up at 6:30 and that's that. So I guess it's not such a surprise that I have a hard time staying up past 10:30 anymore.


Yeah, it's late and I've had a long day and I've got a migraine that's been hanging on since this morning. And I haven't blogged yet today. So this will be a Friday soup post - "cream of walk-in" as Chef would say. Bits o' randomness to tie up loose ends and clear everything out at the end of the week. Maybe it will catch on.

More oatmeal today - another 2 tbsp. Squiggles really seems to like it, so I am encouraged. Of course this is making the diapers messier, but we're learning to roll with the punches. I think we may start introducing veggies over the Thanksgiving week.

Dinner at The Pub last night was excellent. Good beer, good scotch, good food, and, best of all, good company. I will make the suggestion, though, that if you go to a restaurant called "The Pub", please order pub food. Don't expect a place trying to be close to an authentic British pub to have killer salads. That said, we loved the Shepherd's Pie and Fish and Chips (well, Chef had Crisps instead of Chips). We also all determined that our new favorite beer is Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale.

Squiggles is in the process of dropping a feeding (4, down from 5), and moving to two long naps instead of three shorter ones. This has not been the smoothest transition. Tonight he had a meltdown around 6pm. I finally got him to doze off around 6:30, and 25 minutes later he had finished his power nap. Maybe the oatmeal will help him with all of this.

This weekend should be nice - Chef is away for the weekend, Sarah and I (and Squigs, of course) are going shopping tomorrow, and I'll probably start working on getting the house in order on Sunday. There should be plenty of time to blog, though I'm starting to wonder how and when I'll be able to blog while we're in Florida for our big Thanksgiving vacation. Oh, well, I have 7 days to figure it out. Right now it's time for sleep-sleeps.

Fiberful

I started back up with the cereal again today. Chef picked up some infant oatmeal at the grocery yesterday, so this afternoon I gave it a go while I was home at lunch. I say lunch, but it's really more like 2:30 in the afternoon because Squiggles eats around 11am and again around 3pm. Sometimes I come home for the earlier feeding, sometimes for the later one. Today was the later one. Don't worry, I have a snack at work so I don't starve - we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?

The oatmeal mixes up a little runnier than the rice cereal did. Or maybe I was a little heavy-handed with the breast milk; who knows. It smells different, too. Heartier, I guess. And it's more of a tan color. I was hoping Squiggles wouldn't pick up on the differences.

Guess what? He must not have, because he loved the oatmeal! He kept opening his mouth and looking at me and kicking his little feet. If I waited too long between bites (because I was talking with my mother-in-law while I was feeding him), he would let out with his little howler monkey imitation. He put down almost two tbsp. of the stuff. Woo-hoo!

Today's success gives me hope for the cereal feedings, though I'll reserve final judgment until we find out how this affects his sleep.

On an adult note (but not the x-rated kind!), Chef and I are going out with my friend Sarah and her husband tonight while they are in town. We're going to try out a new restaurant, The Pub, that we heard about last year while we were at the Dayton Ale Fest (we got to talk with the owner). I'm excited to see Sarah and have some grownup conversation and (hopefully) yummy food. And beer.

Not Quite Ready

Welcome to NaBloPoMo day, um, 2? Day 6? Curses for not starting on Nov. 1!

Here's an update on the cereal experience: it's on hold for the time being. Yes, that's right, I haven't fed Squiggles his rice cereal now for about a week. Why? Well, it certainly isn't because he wasn't getting used to it.


Not only was he getting used to eating cereal, it seemed he was even enjoying it. I had decreased the amount of milk so that it was less of a liquid consistency. We even made it up to 1 1/2 tbsp of cereal mixed with the same amount of milk, and he was eating almost all of that.

What made me stop feeding him the cereal was how it was affecting his sleeping pattern. Isn't starting babies on solid food supposed to help sleep through the night better? Well, not us. Squiggles had been sleeping just fine through the night, but after a few days of cereal feedings, he started waking up during the night. More than once per night. And it was getting harder and harder to put him down at night. We'd get him to sleep, and, as soon as we'd lower him into his crib, he'd wake up. And scream. It was not fun. Chef and I were at a loss as to what to do, so I suggested we stop feeding Squiggles the cereal. That was the only explanation; we hadn't started him on any other new routines lately.

Squiggles is sleeping just fine through the night now. The first couple of nights, we had a hard time getting him to go down - he'd wake up about an hour or so after we put him down - but now he's back to sleeping around 9 hours through the night. I'm not sure what really happened; maybe he was getting too much gas because of the cereal? Rice is supposed to be very gentle and benign for baby digestive systems. I shared this experience with a friend of mine who said that her daughter had problems with rice cereal, too, and that they had better success with oatmeal because of the higher fiber content.

So I will get Squiggles some oatmeal and we will try again. Maybe I'll even try a different time of day - late morning or early afternoon as opposed to the evening. But I'm in no hurry. He's gaining weight (18.5 lbs!) and sleeping through the night and isn't even six months old yet, so I don't see any need to rush this whole transition to solids. Plus there's that tiny part of me that doesn't want to him to grow up.

First Bites

Yesterday, we decided to feed Squiggles his first bites of cereal. Why? Well, he hasn't been napping very well for the past few days, and there have been a few instances where he'll still want to nurse after a feeding but doesn't really eat anything - he just kind of hangs out there. Granted, these things may all be attributed to teething (we saw white gums on top yesterday!), but we decided to try cereal and see if that either helps him or shocks him into napping and eating better.

So after lunch, my MIL and I went to Target to get the "supplies" while Chef and my FIL picked up our new La-Z-Boy chair (muy comfortable!). First, I picked up a big, honkin' box of Gerber rice cereal. I say honkin', but I think it's really only 16oz. That's still a lot of rice cereal, especially considering that we'll only mix up a tbsp or so at a time for the little guy. Still, I had a coupon for $2 off a $2 Gerber baby food purchase and the 8oz box wasn't quite $2 and I'm proving that I'm frugal.



While I'm on the cereal subject, Target had a sign on the shelf stating that the Gerber Organic cereals had been recalled due to "potential choking risk". I'm not sure how one could choke on extremely runny cereal, but it seems some of the cereal clumps do not fully dissolve in liquid, thus causing the choking risk. Be aware, be safe!

The next feeding must-have were some spoons. Squiggles' Great Aunt B gave him a beautiful sterling silver loop handle spoon, but I think I'll let him play with it once we get the hang of this whole feeding thing a little more. I ended up getting a package of Gerber infant spoons. Long, slim handle; small, flat spoon covered in different colors of silicone. Very nice.



So, the big moment. We made sure to have the camcorder set up so we could capture this moment for posterity. I ceremoniously measured out one tbsp of cereal into a small stoneware ramekin. I carefully poured in a few tbsp of warmed breast milk (I thought of using milk straight from the tap, if you know what I mean, but the image of me hovering over and aiming into the ramekin made me giggle too much - and, yes, I realize that wouldn't be the best way of doing that). I lovingly stirred the concoction. With camera running, we cooed and encouraged and told Squiggles what a big boy he was. And then came the first bite. He accepted the bit of cereal on the tip of his special spoon and promptly looked over at Chef as if to say, "You're letting her DO this to me?" Or, as my MIL said this morning, "Come on, you're a chef, can't you make this taste any better?" So hilarious! We tried a few more bites, but eventually, Squiggles' disgust moved from his face to his hand, and he began to bat at the spoon every time I brought it near his mouth. All of this was followed by a hearty nursing session.

We will be trying again this evening, of course, because we know it will take some time for him to get used to this. I will try to post a snippet of the video from last night and/or a picture from tonight's trial.