Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All Good Things ...

August 8, 2009. Over twelve years ago, I started blogging with this simple post . I didn't really have a great reason for starting the blog, other than I wanted to try it out. I wanted to try writing and putting it where others could read it. I don't know, it just seemed like a new adventure to try. Along the way, there have been all sorts of posts and all sorts of life events, but through it all, I kept writing. It just became a part of what I do at some point. It wasn't a matter of whether I was going to write a blog post, it was a matter of when. The Mild Wife has described it as a "writing practice," and it was one of the reasons why I kept writing. Honestly, it's good practice, and it gives me an opportunity to hone my craft. I'm no professional author, but we all have to write stuff in our everyday lives. Why not give yourself reps to get better at it? However, I think it's time for that practice to change. My weekly anecdotes sure kept me amused...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...
1 comment
Read more