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Baby Food Dinner

 As I've mentioned a few times lately, we've adjusted the way we cook during the pandemic. To a certain degree, this feels inevitable. After all, lots of things have changed for us during this time, from the way we interact with family members to how long I exercise on work days. In that context, it's not really surprising that we've also had to adjust something that we have to do three times per day.

The biggest adjustment has been the ingredients that we get. For a while, we couldn't rely on getting fresh ingredients from the store, so we cooked a lot of canned and non-perishable items. This was basically the period of time that the Mild Wife and I refer back to as "struggle meals" because we ate a lot more rice and beans during that time. We know full well things could have gone a lot worse so we're very grateful to have gotten through that okay, but it still denoted a noticeable change in our cooking and meals.

At this point, though, many of those things have been normalized. So even though we don't have to cook beans, we still do sometimes. There were some pretty good recipes that came out of that period of time, and we're not about to turn our backs on delicious food just because we didn't originally cook that way.

One of those recipes was a black bean soup. As you can probably guess, it involves cooking black beans in our beloved Instant Pot until they are a nice soup. We do mash and saute them a bit as well, which helps get the right consistency and add a bit of flavor, respectively. In either case, we break out our black bean soup now and again.

The last time we did this, the Mild Wife and I also decided to have some crushed pineapples for dessert. At some point, the Mild Wife noted that the meal was not only healthy, but also vegan. It hadn't even occurred to me that this might be the case, and I hadn't found anything odd about the meal. It was just a tasty soup, and the fact that there was no meat or cheese in it was almost incidental. Vegetable forward, indeed.

However, the realization that I'd basically had mashed/pureed vegetables for dinner and mashed fruits for dessert brought about a thought: this is how babies eat. Their meals might not involve the portion sizes or flavors that mine did, but it was conceptually similar. Think about it: a baby might get pureed carrots as the main part of their meal, and it's not uncommon to pair that with apple sauce or some other type of mashed-up fruit. Sure, they'll often get a bottle of milk to go with it, but the bulk of the meal is basically vegetables and fruit.

That's pretty much exactly what I had for dinner. When I realized this, I mentioned it to the Mild Wife, and we both cracked up about the make-up of our meal. The funniest thing, though, is that that's not going to stop us in the least. We are absolutely going to have this soup again at some point, and at some point or another, we will have some more fruit as dessert. I guarantee you this is not the last baby food dinner at the Mild Home.

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