Pardon me

I was looking for a cute photo of Owen and Claire to go with this post, but they're all on the camera right now and I'm too lazy to find the camera cord and download them. So, you'll have to have the story without any visuals. Sorry.
 

Owen burps and looks around slyly.
Owen: Pardon you Claire. 

Me: Why pardon Claire?
Owen: Because she burped.
Me: Uh, Owen I’m pretty sure that was you.

I think it's hilarious that he has figured out that something like this is funny. It boggles the mind, really. I guess he picked this up from one of the other kids at daycare, but who knows...

Leftover makeover

I suppose this isn't any more of a makeover of a leftover than it is an easy dish to make with a rotisserie chicken, but I seem to always make this when there's leftover roast (or grilled) chicken in the fridge, so there you go.

Basically, this is a Waldorf salad with chicken and some dried fruit added. Although I made it with leftover grilled chicken in the pictures here, it's a great fall meal with leftover roast chicken (I make mine more or less like this Ina Garten recipe, but don't add the carrot, onion and fennel to the bottom of the roasting pan and usually just make roasted vegetables separately). I've never tried this on Owen, but if you're planning to make it for toddlers, be careful about the nuts, as they can be a choking hazard. Slivered almonds would probably be OK, but I'd steer clear of big chunks of walnuts or pecans!

This is pretty good for something that takes all of about 5 minutes to throw together. It's even better with oven-baked sweet potato fries sprinkled with smoked paprika (my new favorite spice - yum). Since these photos came from a summer version, back when I didn't want to turn the oven on, we had it with broccoli slaw (I make it with half broccoli and half cauliflower) and tomato/cucumber salad, which is simply sliced or chopped cucumber, tomato and red onion dressed with equal amounts of extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar and some salt and pepper.

Not sure this is the most appetizing photo, but I promise it tastes good!

  
"Waldorf" chicken salad 

Salad:

Leftover chicken – grilled, roasted, whatever. In this case I used the meat from 1 thigh and 2 legs

1 small apple, diced (I used a Gala)

2 stalks celery, chopped

Handful raisins (about 1/4 c), or golden raisins, or dried cranberries – any dried fruit really

Handful chopped nuts (also about 1/4 c), this time I used flaked almonds, but I usually use walnuts. Pecans would also be nice, but they're (sadly) harder to come by in London 

Dressing:

Mayo, about 1/4 c for this amount of “stuff”

Plain yogurt, also about 1/4 c

Wholegrain mustard, about 2 teaspoons (but depends on how “mustardy” you want it)

Salt and pepper to taste

Few leaves of fresh thyme, optional (I often add this when I have some left from my roast chicken); parsley would be good too I'm sure

Mix salad ingredients together in a bowl. Just throw all the dressing ingredients on top and mix well - no sense in dirtying another bowl in my opinion! Add a bit more mayo or yogurt if it seems too dry. Serve on (or with) bread of your choosing. I typically use pita, but that's just me.

Blackberry lime galette

This is woefully out of date, and I don't even have any pictures of it, but it goes with my last food-related post, so I just wanted to finish it up and be done with it. For what it's worth, I'm sure this galette could easily be made more seasonal - apple and orange anyone?

When I made the tomato and goat's cheese tart I figured there was a chance I’d have leftover tart dough, so bought berries to be prepared. I chose blackberries simply because they were on sale and looked nice. I'd love to say I picked them myself or even that they came from our Farmers' Market, but no, these were straight from Tesco. Oh well. I was trying to figure out what I could add to them to give the pie that something extra and saw a lime in the fridge. I was sure I’d seen that combination somewhere. Sure enough, I had but not in a pie. According to Google, blackberries seem to go well with lime in a pie situation, but most use them on top of a key lime pie/lime tart sort of thing, or part of cheesecake. I figured there was nothing to lose by trying a bit of lime zest and juice with the berries, and sure enough I was right.

Blackberry lime galette
I used another blackberry galette recipe for guidance on amounts of sugar and cornstarch, and the dough as already mentioned was from the David Lebovitz tomato and goat's cheese tart recipe.

Leftover tart dough (this was about 11-12 inches in diameter when rolled out)
Just under 1 1/2 cups blackberries
Zest of 1/2 lime
Juice of 1/4 lime
1 1/2 Tablespoons sugar (I like mine quit tart; if you’re into sweeter things, go for more)
2 teaspoons cornstarch (I read a few things on using cornstarch vs flour for thickening, and got the sense that, when it comes to pies cornstarch is better. If you prefer flour, supposedly you need to use twice as much.)
milk (or egg wash; I really hate wasting an egg for this purpose though)
Raw/demerara sugar (about 1/2 Tablespoon)

Roll out your dough so that it's roughly 1/8-1/4 inch thick. You're going for rustic, so no need to make a perfect circle. Transfer to a baking sheet lined with a Silpat mat (or if you don't have one, I am sure parchment or just spraying the sheet with cooking spray would be fine). Gently mix blackberries, lime juice and zest, 1 1/2 T sugar and cornstarch and pile onto the middle of the dough, leaving about a 1 inch border. Fold the edges of the dough over the filling, brush exposed dough with milk (or egg wash) and sprinkle with demerara sugar. Bake at 175 C (350 F) for about 30 min, or until the crust is golden.

Word of warning: steamed lime juice is apparently bad on the eyes – be careful when opening the oven the first time!!

What's going on

For those of you dying to know what I've been up to, and why I haven't posted anything recently, let's just say that having two kids under 3 is exhausting. And I've still got Owen in daycare 3 days a week! I don't know how full-time stay-at-home moms do it.

Anyway, here are a few pictures to show you what we've been doing lately.

Pureeing, and more pureeing...

...because this baby LOVES to eat!

 And just a few more for fun...

I have another now completely unseasonal food post 99.9% ready. Look for it sometime later today or tomorrow.

Lights out!

The other day, Owen says to me out of the blue when we were talking about going to the park, "When we leave we need to turn the lights off."

Huh. Good for him, and I guess he's paying more attention to our actions than I realize. The rest of our conversation went something like the following. Note: It's not all that easy to explain the concepts of energy/electricity and saving it to an almost-3-year-old!

A solid adventure

My Claire-Bear is 5 1/2 months now, and last week she got her first taste of "solid" food. She was sitting on my lap at dinner and kept lunging at my plate, which contained some roasted sweet potato. I figured sweet potato is a pretty traditional early food, so why not? I cut off the outside to get rid of the salt, pepper and oil, and let her have a go at it. Aside from my worries that she could get a piece off and choke on it, it seemed harmless enough. She loved it so much that we decided then and there to give her a bowl of baby rice cereal mixed with breastmilk, and she's been loving that for the past week. Tomorrow we're going to try carrots. Exciting adventures (and a lot more work for me) ahead!

I know the current guidelines say that you shouldn't give anything but breastmilk (or formula) for the first 6 months, so I was kind of on the fence about introducing any food "early". Interestingly, although they said the same thing two years ago when Owen was a baby, I was more or less asked by a health professional (our health visitor) "why haven't you started given him any solids yet?" when he was about 5 1/2 months. Claire was really just over 5 months, but she definitely seems to have all the signs that she's ready, and she's taken to the food really well, with one exception (**TMI baby poop discussion warning**): she hasn't managed to poop in nearly 2 weeks. This isn't really anything new for her, as she's gone ages without pooping previously, but of course I'm now worried that it was too early, rice wasn't the best first food, etc. etc. Anyway, we're off to the doctor this afternoon and will see what he says. Hopefully I don't get too much of a scolding for having already started her on solids.

A brief note if there is anyone out there reading this who hasn't weaned a baby yet and someday might. I really wanted to keep her to all breastmilk (no formula) for as long as possible, but I have found that baby rice does really weird things in breastmilk that it doesn't do in formula. Basically, it turns completely liquid, so that what starts out as a bowl of cereal with a good thickness for an infant turns into something so thin you can't spoon it. So you end up adding more and more cereal. I have no idea why breast milk does this and formula doesn't. Enzymes? Anyone happen to know the answer to this?

Home sweet home

Oh, right. I meant to tell everyone I was taking a bit of a holiday (a whole MONTH in good ol' Tejas). Thing is, I thought I'd be able to do some blogging from my parents' house in Texas, but it turns out that even with grandparents around, having both Owen and Claire all day every day is more work than it is having Claire at home by myself. Thank God for those 3 days a week Owen goes to nursery when we're in London! On top of that, my parents' internet went out a few days after we arrived and it took Verizon TEN DAYS to come out and fix it. They blamed all the new university students back in town, but I'm not buying it.

Anyway, we are back, but I'm not promising anything in the way of exciting content for a while (or ever, ha!). I have a thousand things that need doing here (sorry my internet friends, but having reliable hot water and a working clothes dryer, and buying winter coats for the kids - yes, already - are higher priority than you), and we're still fighting some residual jet lag or insomnia or something with Owen. Oh, and I'm pretty sure Claire isn't going to be a sleeping ball of cute much longer - this child has started demanding attention, and seriously wants to move. C'est la vie.