From Lisa Barnes

I see many questions and myths shared about food for babies on parenting websites and blogs.  The ones that are most alarming to me are those regarding food safety and proper food handling, and all the “my grandmother used to_______” (the ______ was something like “put Brandy in a bottle” or “put honey in the cereal”.

Babies usually triple their birth weight the first year. That’s why nutritious and safely handled food, served in an age-appropriate way, is so important.  Being aware of safe food handling practices and potential feeding dangers are the best ways to protect your family from food illnesses and accidents, while also giving your child a healthy start on development and growth. Here are a few important tips and reminders.  (of course you know the final one – that’s why you’re reading it on this blog)

1. Wash Hands. It’s important to wash your hands before preparing food or beverages, especially when feeding babies. According to a Penn State University study of mothers with infants less than 4 months old many moms said they routinely forget to wash their hands after changing baby’s diaper, and using the bathroom. Not washing hands could result in infant diarrhea from the bacteria transferred while engaging in these activities.

2. Handle Bottles Carefully. Although some babies will drink a bottle straight from the refrigerator, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) advises most babies prefer milk warmed to room temperature. Warm the bottle by holding it under a running hot-water faucet or putting it in a bowl of hot water for a few minutes. Shake well and test milk temperature to make sure it’s not too hot before feeding. Microwaves can heat unevenly. Children’s mouths and throats can be severely burned by bottles heated in the microwave.  Always discard leftover milk in bottle to reduce the growth of harmful bacteria.

3. Cow’s Milk. Avoid serving regular cow’s milk until infants are 1-year-old. Before then, infants may experience an allergic reaction, stomachache and low blood iron. When you begin serving regular cow’s milk, serve whole milk.  Do not switch to lower fat milk until the baby’s doctor recommends this change usually around age 2.

4. Mixing Cereal and Formula in the Bottle. Do not serve cereal mixed with formula from a bottle.  Many think this practice helps babies sleep better through the night, however there is no evidence of this. Plus, there is a possibility of a baby choking.

5. Hold Baby When Bottle-Feeding. Babies who are put to bed with a bottle are more likely to have cavities. This practice also increases the potential of choking.

6. Limit Juice. Serve only 100 percent juice and in small quantities so it doesn’t interfere with the infant eating other nutritious foods. AAP recommends giving juice diluted with water only to infants who are approximately 6 months or older and who can drink from a cup. AAP recommends offering no more than a TOTAL of 4 to 6 ounces of juice a day to infants. (Source: American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Nutrition)

7. Avoid Honey And Corn Syrup. Do not serve infants honey or corn syrup during the first year of life. These foods may contain botulism spores that could cause illness or death in infants.

8. Food Introductions. When introducing new foods, try only one at a time, and start with single-ingredient foods. Avoid serving mixed ingredient foods until each food has been given separately. Begin by serving about 1 to 2 tablespoons and then increase the amount as baby wants more. Wait at least 3 days before trying another new food so you can tell if there are any adverse reactions.

Iron-fortified rice cereal is usually the first food offered, as this is easily digested. It’s frequently recommended to continue fortified baby cereal through the first year of life.

Remember your baby will still be receiving the majority of nutrition from breast milk or formula during the first year.

9. Serve Solids Safely. Transfer an amount you feel baby will eat from the baby food jar to a dish. Throw away any food left uneaten in the dish. Avoid feeding directly from the baby food jar. Bacteria from a baby’s mouth can grow and multiply in the food before it is served again. Use refrigerated jarred baby foods within 1 to 2 days after opening.

Once opened, do not leave baby food solids or liquids (breast milk or formula) at room temperature for more than 2 hours. Bacteria can grow to harmful levels when food is left out longer than this.

10. Choking Hazards. Avoid serving foods that may choke an infant, such as nuts and seeds, raw carrots and celery, whole kernel corn, raisins, large chunks of meat or cheese, popcorn, chips, pretzels, grapes, whole berries, cherries, unpeeled fruits and vegetables, hard candies, pickles, hot dogs, marshmallows (regular or miniature), and peanut butter. In general, avoid foods that are round and firm, sticky and chewy or cut in large chunks.

As infants grow into toddlers, they can begin eating the foods above, if cut into small pieces. Most pediatricians advise foods should be no larger than 1/4 inch for toddlers and 1/2 inch for preschoolers.

Plus One…

Finally my continuing tip and philosophy is to serve organic.  Try to purchase organic foods for babies and children whenever possible to reduce exposure to potentially harmful pesticides and chemicals.  According to the US EPA Department of Health and Human Services, the greatest exposure to pesticides and chemicals is in a child’s first 4 years.  See my post Why Organic for Kids.
~
Image Credit: Lisa Barnes (her babies tasting their first food)
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From Dave Smith

In the music world, a mashup is defined as “a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres.”

In the Internet world, mashup is defined as a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

In the food world, other than mashing up potatoes, a recipe mashup could be defined as combining recipes, narrative, personal preferences, and local lore, ingredients and flavors into an integrated, shared experience… a synthesis of our personal relationship with food at a point in time. Examples of recipes with strong narratives and elements of a recipe mashup: Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks, and Farmgirl Susan’s In My Kitchen Garden and Farmgirl Fare. This post is also what I have in mind as a recipe mashup… throw out the tightly structured recipe approach and mash it up with some local lore, ingredients, character and personality. That’s the way many of us cook anyway… might as well have a common name for it.

So, according to someone named Barb Beck: “Most bread baked from sourdough starters is intended NOT to be very sour. If you read old cookbooks you find that people went to great length to avoid sour bread. It was some crazies in the SF Bay area that started producing not only a fine Mild sourdough loaf but also the extra sour stuff.” Sourdough itself is a mashup extraordinaire, as is organic farming.

We live about two and a half hours north of the Golden Gate Bridge in the Redwood and Vineyard country of coastal Mendocino County and, as I write, dry lightning fires are burning all around us, more dry lightning is expected this weekend, smoke grows heavier by the day, and water tankers drone overhead. No lives have been lost, only a very few structures have been lost, fire fighters from everywhere are rushing to our aid and making great progress, our family and animals are safe for now, but we’re ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice. I don’t wish to make light of serious, life-threatening situations. A dear friend lost his home to a recent Santa Cruz fire. Yet, amidst the upheavals and emergencies, life goes on and it’s my turn to post. This too shall pass.

Meanwhile, on to the recipe. I like bread sour, beer bitter, wine dry, and all of them organic and local. The “extra sourdough bread” commonly found around North California supermarkets is ok for what it is. But it is not near sour enough for my taste. Luckily, we have a local family bakery, Schat’s, that makes some truly great organic sour sourdoughs. We’re blessed to have such easy access to superb local organic beer and bread, the staffs of life.

Our all-organic recipe ingredients come from a CSA farm we’re a member of, Live Power Community Farm, our Farmer’s Market, or our Co-op. And soon we’ll have potatoes out of our garden (hopefully they’ll not come out of the ground pre-baked).

Here’s a recipe that gives lots of room for your own personalized, localized, mashed-up variations:

·Favorite wine or beer (disregard if preparing for evacuation)
·Grass-fed beef thinly sliced, or freely pastured chicken chunked (say that fast 10 times)
·Mushrooms chopped
·Shallots or onions thinly sliced
·Sour cream
·Sourdough bread, crusty and real sour
·Some sauté fat (butter or bacon grease)
·Tarragon chopped, fresh, or dried, or lightly singed and heavily smoked from the kitchen garden
·Cherry tomatoes, halved
·Potatoes cubed and boiled, or pasta noodles boiled
·Garlic chopped
·Salt, pepper, cayenne powder

Get your glass of wine or beer going. I like a good Cab, but if it’s hot in the kitchen, I’ll pour an inexpensive organic red, like Frey’s Natural Red from up the road, and have it over rocks while I cook, or a cool Organic Porter from Ukiah Brewing Company downtown.

Slice up the meat. Start the water and boil the potatoes or pasta. In a large, black skillet, sauté onions/shallots/garlic and then the shrooms in the fat and set aside.

Sauté the meat in the fat. (If using potatoes, when done, pour off the water and add them to the browning meat.) When browned, splash in some of your wine (and water if wanted) or beer and reduce heat to medium low. Toast the bread. (The sourdough toast can be on the side or, if lots of sour cream gravy, tear up and mix into the stroganoff when serving for the super sour experience.)

Add the tomatoes, shrooms, shallots/onions, and stir in the sour cream, but keep the heat real low so it doesn’t curdle. Plate the pasta, if using, and butter the toast (have you had Organic Valley’s Pasture Butter? Out of this world!!).

When serving temperature ready, add the tarragon, salt and pepper, cayenne, to taste (I usually over-spice), take a big irresponsible swig of your beverage, and serve with a responsible salad. Smashing!
~
Eating out, our favorite local restaurants: Oco Time, The Boonville Hotel, The Ukiah Brewpub, and Mi Cocina Authentic Mexican.
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See also Greg’s West Coast Cooking.
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Please mash up an organic recipe of your own, complete with local lore and links (and photos if you wish) and contact us on our About page for sending instructions. We’ll guest post a few, but no promises. Thanks.
~~
Dave Smith is author of To Be of Use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work and lives in Mendocino Country, Northern California.
Image Credit: Golden Gate Bridge © Michael Irwin | Dreamstime.com
OrganicToBe.org OrganicToGo.com
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From Jeff Cox

The apricot season is upon us—but don’t rush it. The finest-tasting apricots will arrive in the stores in mid-July. The first to appear in stores tend to be varieties bred for earliness, not flavor.

Apricots ripen on the tree—meaning that a fruit picked early will never sweeten up en route to the store or home on your kitchen counter. Instead of rushing the apricot season, think organic dried apricots from the natural or organic market. These have been picked at peak ripeness and have better apricot flavor than most early apricots. The dried fruit can be chopped and added to couscous or rice, reconstituted by simmering in water and pureed. Chefs know that apricot’s tangy richness can add zest to many dishes, like puddings and desserts. Add a squeeze of lemon juice to apricot preserves, mix well, strain, and use this syrup to glaze fruit tarts. But don’t leave out savory dishes. Apricots’ high malic acid content enlivens veal and lamb, chicken and duck. Stew fresh apricots or dried ones with braised lamb shanks.

When the good apricots are in season, make apricot preserves and find lots of ways to use them to brighten meals the rest of the year. I asked Prof. Steve Southwick at UC Davis, an apricot specialist, which varieties he thinks are best. He said, “I have many new apricots, not yet released, that are better tasting than any currently available. They will be coming along in the next few years. For the moment, you should try Royal Blenheim, Patterson, Goldbar, Goldstrike, and Rival.”

You can whiz fresh apricots in a blender and spread the mash on baking sheets to dry and make your own fruit leather. Dry the sheets in the sun, or in a low oven, until the mash turns leathery. Then carefully pull the leather off the sheet, dust it lightly with a little cornstarch, and roll it up and store it in a jar with a lid in a cool, dry place.

Apricots originated, like peaches, in China. Today there are over 2,000 varieties of apricots in that country. Like so many fruits and vegetables from that region, apricots were carried west along the ancient Silk Road, reaching Persia and the Middle East, then on to Europe, and finally across the Atlantic to the Americas. Today there are a few dozen varieties in commerce in the U.S., with Moorpark being the standard of quality along with Blenheim, aka Royal or Royal Blenheim. This latter can be recognized by the purplish-red dotting that appears on the pale yellow skin where the fruit has been exposed to the afternoon sun. The stone is free, but don’t be tempted to eat the apricot kernels inside them as many varieties contain an enzyme that produces poisonous prussic acid in the human digestive tract.

Apricots have an amazing ability to enhance and blend with other flavors, including many familiar fruits, especially citrus. Apricots and almonds are a natural match. Use the juice or puree to make fascinating sauces with liqueurs, especially citrusy ones like Grand Marnier and Cointreau. Flame your pork chop with brandy exalted with apricot juice.
~

Organic Apricot Preserves Recipe

Wait until the height of the apricot season, around mid-July, and when you find the most delicious apricots, make the preserves. It’s an out-of-this-world confection that’s perfect to spread on muffins, to glaze a ham, to use in a fruit tart, or to add a sweet tang to a pork tenderloin.

4 lbs. fresh organic apricots
5 cups sugar
8 8-ounce canning jars with tops and bands
Juice of two lemons

1. Wash and pit the apricots and slice them into coarse pieces.

2. Mix the pieces with the sugar in a large bowl and let the mixture stand for at least an hour, or better, overnight, covered, on the counter. This allows the juice to run and dissolve the sugar. Place a dinner plate in the fridge.

3. Transfer the mixture to a large saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Stir it frequently to prevent sticking. Be careful not to let it foam up and over the sides. Skim the light foamy material that will rise. Reduce heat to medium and cook until it looks like preserves, stirring frequently.

4. Boil the jars, lids, and bands in water to cover them. Take the plate from the fridge and spoon a bit of the preserves onto the plate to test consistency of the cooled preserves. When the consistency seems right, remove the pan from the heat, stir in the strained lemon juice, spoon the preserves into the jars, leaving ½-inch headroom, put on lids and bands and process according to the jar manufacturer’s instructions.

Makes eight 8-ounce jars.
~
See also Jeff’s Eat A Peach (with Organic Peach Recipes)
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Jeff Cox is author of The Organic Cook’s Bible and The Organic Food Shopper’s Guide and lives in Sonoma County, California.
Image Credit: © Jason Smith | Dreamstime.com
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From Rosalind Creasy
Edible Landscape Skills

If Johnny Appleseed were to visit present-day suburbia, he would weep. In most yards he would be likely to find not a fruit-laden apple tree, but a flowering crabapple, cherry, plum, or peach tree—none bearing fruit.

Not that many years ago, he would have had more luck. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers usually kept a fruiting apple, cherry, or peach tree in their front yards, and grew vegetables and herbs near the kitchen door. The trees not only were beautiful at blossom time, but they provided fruits to be eaten fresh and preserved for the months ahead. Some of the vegetables, too, provided pleasure to the eye as well as provender for the pantry. But their main interest was food. Beauty in a producing plant was a bonus, not a requirement

Somewhere between that era and the present we have developed an “edible complex,” that is, a resistance to including edible plants in our landscaping plans. A number of factors brought about this attitude. One of the most important was the massive shift in population from rural areas to urban centers and suburbs that began early in this century and accelerated dramatically after World War II. The trend was paralleled by the development of an efficient agricultural community, which produced inexpensive foods we would have had to work hard to grow ourselves. A rapidly developing technology, a long period in which oil was cheap and readily available, and vast expanses of fertile land all combined to make the United States the number one food-producing nation in the world. Agribusiness became so efficient that currently less than two percent of our people can produce all the food we need. In that context, what difference could a backyard apple tree possibly make?

Despite the old saying that “you can take the person out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the person,” the whole nation seemed to agree that we were well rid of the need to grow our own food. But even if we had wanted to grow some edibles—just for fun, perhaps—other developments constrained us. For example, as suburbs and subdivisions multiplied, individual families found themselves with less land and fewer opportunities to express their personal tastes through landscaping. Developers often dictated the landscaping tone for whole neighborhoods by cutting down trees and putting in lawns; “neighbor pressure” further contributed to conformity.

The impulse toward uniformity fit in well with the principles of landscaping we inherited, mainly from the formal tradition perfected in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. This style, developed for the leisure class, concerned itself almost exclusively with ornamental plants. It was expressed in manicured lawns, shaped shrubbery, and flowering ornamentals. Later, in middle- and upper-class suburbs, where yards were assumed to have no function other than a recreational or aesthetic one, food-bearing plants were relegated to the inconspicuous hobby garden. A suburbanite or city dweller with a yen for dirt daubing usually wound up trying to develop more floriferous fuchias or lusher lawns.

The result of these combined influences was a conventional style of American home landscaping that stressed large, pristine, and manicured lawns; formally trimmed ornamental shrubs and trees; and the decorative use of flowering annuals and perennials. The function of landscaping was seen as cosmetic, period! “Messlessness” became a primary objective. For example, the fruitless mulberry came into favor because, although mulberries were tasty, they were messy, and unless harvested regularly accumulated on the lawn. We even asked propagators to sacrifice fruits for the sake of bigger flowers. In response they made available numerous varieties of nonfruiting cherries, almonds, apples, plums, pears, and peaches, and even a nonproducing carob and olive.

But, you might ask, why tilt at this particular windmill? Those fruitless trees are not hurting anyone, lawns do set off our homes nicely, and flowers are among life’s greatest pleasures. Am I taking a stand against beauty? Am I advocating that we spend all our free time “putting up” or drying peaches? To these questions, I reply that as a gardener I enjoy flowers and all growing things, as a landscape designer I am a seeker after beauty, and as a homemaker I do not need any more chores. Still, the fact that most Americans are totally dependent on commercial agriculture for their food supply concerns me greatly. I consider the average citizen’s lack of involvement with the land, our most basic source of sustenance, to be one of the most destructive results of the escalating complexity and specialization of our society.

Among my other concerns are skyrocketing food prices and the possible health hazards associated with the increasing number of chemicals used in commercial food production. Finally, I am alarmed at the waste of natural resources our present practices generate. In a world where fertile soil is an endangered resource, millions of acres of our nation’s best agricultural soil are covered with ornamental shrubs and lawns. Soil can be brought into production for agriculture only at great economic and environmental cost. Why do we allow so much of what we have to remain unproductive? Furthermore, the water we use to irrigate our purely decorative landscape is finite, and the fossil fuels we use in maintaining them are nonrenewable. We are becoming aware that our wasteful ways may be having irreversible consequences.

Oil deserves special mention in this context. Few people need to be told that petroleum use is problematical in this day and age. However, the pervasive use of petroleum in home landscaping is far less obvious to most people than a crisis at the gas pump. While we are aware of its use when filling the power mower’s gas tank, it is not immediately apparent that many fertilizers are made from natural gas, and that a great majority of pesticides and herbicides are petroleum-based products. Power equipment—mowers, edgers, blowers and the like—not only use petroleum for fuel, their manufacture also utilizes great quantities of energy. Thus, for me, growing food at home became one aspect of a greater goal: making our landscaping practices more environmentally sound.

As a result of these concerns, over the last three decades my work as a professional landscaping designer, teacher, and author, and my own home gardening efforts have been aimed at finding ways to revise standard landscaping practices to meet certain primary goals. These are: to provide delicious, healthful food for the table; to curtail practices that waste water, soil, and energy; and—most important, since it provides incentive for the rest—to create beautiful, well-planned landscapes with the use of edible plants.

I have learned—despite resistance to the idea from some landscaping professionals and nursery personnel who still suffer from the “edible complex”—that it is possible to plan a yard that is both productive and beautiful. Not all food-bearing plants have been hybridized to serve commercial interests in facilitating harvesting, packing, storing, and transporting. Home growers can produce foods that are tastier, fresher, and less altered than commercially grown foods, and can preserve more of their vitamin content. Furthermore, home growers can choose to keep their land unpolluted, uncontaminated, and healthy.

Many people are already aware of the practical benefits of growing edibles, but it seemed to me that developing and promoting their decorative value was essential in order to bring them back into favor in landscaping. I don’t want to leave the impression that you trade off on appearance for taste in shifting from pure ornamentals to edible ornamentals. Nor is it merely the fruits that are decorative; the flowers, the leaves, the very shape of many edible plants please the eye long before the fruits appear. In most cases the fruits or vegetables are a bonus to a plant’s contribution to the garden’s appearance or to the plan of a yard in general. For example, I recommend specific fruiting varieties of plum, pear, peach, and apple trees that are particularly beautiful in bloom and provide sweet, juicy, sun-ripened fruit. I talk of combining flowers and selected vegetables in perennial borders; substituting edible, ornamental shrubs for barren ornamentals in foundation plantings; and using handsome nut trees for shade. In every case, both the landscaping and culinary uses of a plant are considered.

I cannot overemphasize the potential for beauty that landscaping with edibles holds, since many people still have difficulty accepting this notion. I came to understand this potential by experimenting in my own yard, in the process relearning the joys of eating fresh-picked peas, vine-ripened tomatoes, and sun-warmed apricots. I purchased dozens of different varieties of vegetables to plant in my food garden but also to interplant in my flower garden. Red cabbage with its colorful foliage, string beans with purple flowers, the many varieties of lettuce with their interesting leaf patterns, artichokes with their gray-green, fernlike foliage and magnificent blue thistles, and the heavenly purple globes of the eggplant were extremely effective in my standard flower bed.

Since my first tentative experiments, I have developed and thoroughly researched a list of ornamental edible plants that can be grown in different areas of the United States. The plants selected range from the exotic water chestnut to the familiar apple. I have also discovered some unusually attractive varieties—string beans with large, showy, white flowers; bush cucumbers with compact vines; peaches with showy, pink, double blossoms; and plum trees with delicious fruit and red foliage. I found that some standard food-growing practices—for example, staking bean vines with an odd assortment of poles or “caging” tomatoes—could be replaced by less intrusive, more aesthetically pleasing techniques. I found, too, that some edible plants were hard to manage in a landscape situation.

Edible landscaping gives you the satisfaction of assuming responsibility for at least that portion of the environment that is solely under your control. In addition you will enjoy marvelous eating, give a boost to your budget, and have a beautiful yard. Nowhere is it written: Thou shalt landscape only with barren ornamentals. If only one out of every ten United States citizens planted just two fruiting trees, the world would be richer by nearly 6 billion pounds of fruit!
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See also Gene’s The Anatomy Of A Homestead Landscape,
Edible Estates, and BountifulBackyards.com
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Rosalind Creasy is author of Rosalind Creasy’s Recipes From The Garden: 200 Exciting Recipes from the Author of the Complete Book of Edible Landscaping.
Illustrations Credit: Marcia Kier-Hawthorne
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From Jesse Cool

This is possibly the best way to eat a perfectly ripe, juicy tomato. However, the success of this dish lies entirely in the quality of the ingredients. Don’t even bother serving it unless the tomatoes you buy are as sweet as sugar. Use top-quality virgin olive oil and fresh, delicate mozzarella. They’re worth a few cents more. If you can find boconncino or small mozzarella balls, they are wonderful. If you can’t find three different kinds of basil, the sweet green variety will do just fine.

3 pounds ripe organic tomatoes (any color), at room-temperature, thickly sliced
1 medium red onion, very thinly sliced
1 cup fresh basil leaves (any combination of sweet green, purple, lemon, cinnamon, Thai or chocolate, coarsely chopped)
6 to 8 ounces good-quality fresh mozzarella, thickly sliced
1/4 to 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 to 6 tablespoons balsamic or red wine vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Sprigs of fresh basil

On a large platter, layer the tomatoes, onions and basil as you would a lasagna. Top with the mozzarella. Drizzle with oil and sprinkle with balsamic vinegar. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with sprigs of basil.

Serves 4
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See also Jesse’s Spring Vegetable Sauté Recipe
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Jesse Cool is author of Simply Organic: A Cookbook for Sustainable, Seasonal, and Local Ingredients, owner of CoolEatz Restaurants and Catering, and lives in Menlo Park, California.
Image Credit: Deborah Jones
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