Cheese Quesadillas Revisited

What seems like forever ago, when Grace was first starting to eat solid foods, she started eating cheese quesadillas (is saying "cheese quesadilla" redundant or is it making it clear that there isn't anything else in the quesadilla besides cheese?) like they were going out of style. Gobbled them down like she hadn't been fed in days. At some point, she got tired of them, but I kept making them, mostly due to the convenience of only having to sprinkle cheese on a tortilla and heat it on the stove for a few minutes. She'd eat them, but rather than take bites, she'd pull off one side of tortilla and eat the cheese off of the other side. I moved on to other foods for her, but sometimes I would make a quesadilla for myself that had leftover chicken or pork in it. If she took some of my quesadilla, she'd take out the meat and eat the cheese, as usual.

A few weeks ago, I made chicken quesadillas for dinner, not thinking that Grace would eat any since she'd had dinner earlier. She proceeded to eat over half of a chicken quesadilla, taking bites of the whole thing, chicken, cheese and tortilla all in one bite. Since then, I've offered to make quesadillas for her for lunch. Some days she wants one and will eat it rather than dissect out the cheese. I feel like this says something about something, but I'm not quite sure what. I'm pretty sure it doesn't say anything about my parenting or anything that I'm doing, but perhaps something about her taste in food or something.

Relaxed lunch time with milk, fruit and cheese quesadilla.

This Week in the CSA Box: Week 1

Way back in January or so, we signed up for a CSA with Landisdale Farm, sharing a full share with Andrew's parents. It seemed like fresh, local produce would be forever away, but here we are with our first week's box of yummy-looking veggies (and cherries, yay!). Week 1's box included fennel, parsley, scallions, garlic scapes, lettuce and cherries. Monday, I made roasted chicken with fennel, carrots and celery from Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". Pretty boring, but we'll probably just use the lettuce in a salad. I'm thinking of grilling the garlic scapes (we only have 3, so we can't do anything too exciting). I'll probably end up shoving the cherries into my cherry-loving mouth.

Week 1 of CSA blogging is kind of sad, but I'll try to remember to take pictures of the veggies and foods I make with them in the coming weeks. I'm looking forward to being forced to use more veggies in our meals, as I know that we need to include them but I'm too good at avoiding them. Yay CSA!

Putting the theory into practice

Remember how I wrote about the food division of responsibility and how I wanted to help Grace make her own food choices? Well, today that intention was put into practice. We were talking about what to have for breakfast, and she pointed to the cookies and said "cookie, cookie" all cute like. I told her that we could have a cookie at lunch or at dinner, but we'd have something different for breakfast. She had been talking all morning about peaches and grapes, so I was able to distract her from the cookies with those and she was happy.

Baking with Baby

Our new neighbors brought us some cupcakes last week, so I figured we should bake them something. (Can't return an empty tupperware, right?) I have this bad habit of browsing foodgawker and opening a million tabs of recipes that look yummy, then getting mad that having so many tabs open makes Safari get cranky, then save the tabs in a folder of bookmarks for later never to think of them again. I figured I might as well use one of those recipes to make something potentially yummy for our neighbors. I ended up making this recipe for sunflower butter cookies with chocolate covered sunflower seeds. They're kind of like peanut butter cookies in texture, kind of crumbly rather than cake-like (but that might be due to the ingredient snafu where I had to coax the brown sugar into moistness).
Grace didn't really do much except get impatient when it took forever to get anything done (especially during the aforementioned ingredient snafu). Then I put her up on my shoulders, she played with my hair and everything was fine. Probably if things had gone more smoothly, I would have thought to have her stir the dry ingredients or dump things into the mixer, but that's what next time is for.

Meat-eater baby

While we were on vacation (about which I definitely have a post or two brewing in my mind), Grace decided that she really likes chicken. She'd eaten it a few times before, but on vacation, she ate it for a few meals as her actual meal, as opposed to a bite or two in addition to eating every french fry in sight. (She also ate fries with ketchup for the first time, but dipping things in ketchup isn't her new favorite thing, and ketchup isn't meat, so we'll save that for later.)
She'd always been a fan of sausage, but most other meats hadn't really interested her for whatever reason (unfamiliar taste, that it requires more chewing than other foods, who knows?). This past week, she's eaten pork chop and steak. It was quite interesting hearing her say "more, more, more" when I was half expecting her to avoid eating it altogether.

Better late than never.

Last week, Grace ate two foods that I'd offered a bunch of times but she'd always rejected: oatmeal and gnocchi. I always offer her a taste of foods even when she's rejected them before, because tastes change and you never know. I had kind of given up on oatmeal, though, since I eat it for breakfast almost every weekday morning and she never showed any interest.
Not so last week, though. She pointed at my oatmeal (which we encourage her to do to communicate rather than the ear-splitting shrieking that she does sometimes) and I thought she was pointing at every other thing on the table (sippy, puffs, fruit, etc.) before I finally realized she wanted some oatmeal. She ate four or five big bites. I was definitely surprised. The same thing happened with the gnocchi, though she had had less exposure to them since I don't cook them that often.
These two experiences encourage me to keep offering her foods that she's rejected because you never know when she'll start liking something. I don't have any expectations that she'll eat mass quantities, though. If she doesn't like or want something, I won't force her to eat it.