Salt

To begin with, in the first month or so of blw I was super concious about salt then, when I thought through how much goes into our home-cooked food vs. how much he was actually eating, I relaxed again, the reality was that the volume of food he was eating was so small there was only so much he could actually be ingesting.

Now, as The Boy's consumption of 'real people food' increases and he's more and more able to eat exactly what we eat I'm becoming more concious of the salt content of what he's eating again.

I have to be realistic, food has salt in it, you can't make bread or cheese without it and The Boy likes both very much. I also can't control how much salt he has when we eat out, I try to make good choices for him from the menu but who knows how much salt really went into that pasta sauce or those sweetcorn fritters.

I have to concentrate on what I can control which is the food he gets at home. We make a point of not adding pure salt to anything while we're cooking it so all the salt he gets comes from cheese, stock cubes or ham etc.. that are cooked into the recipe.

I also bought two new cookbooks the BBC Good Food; 101 More Low Fat Feasts and Healthy Eats in the same series. Not that I'm sponsored by the BBC or anything but I have found them really good, they are all tested recipes and they really do turn out like the pictures (!) and the have some very tasty ways of adding flavour without adding salt.

As a saltaholic honestly, I sometimes miss the salt but I like that we have 'the salt thing' under control and I guess I like that The Boy is forcing us to be a bit more healthy!

Cherries

Go down a storm in our house!

FIGS!!!

A few of my fellow blw'ers have extolled the virtues of dried fruit, usually prunes and apricots soaked overnight to make them soft.

It's something I believed but never really got around to trying until last week when in a rare trip to the supermarket I walked past a display of 'Crazy Jack' brand organic stuff.

I picked up some figs and some apricots (found an interesting fact about dried apricots, which I'll come to later) soaked'em in some water and gave them to The Boy and now they're a staple of his diet. He thinks they're great, especially the figs and always finishes them and they're good for him too.

Win, win, win.

Now my interesting factoid about dried apricots

Apparently, they're not supposed to be orange, they're naturally brown when they dry but they add some sort of chemical to make them orange so we'll eat them. My tip of the day: buy the organic brown ones!

Speaking of Fish

DH doesn't like tinned tuna. So when he goes on a business trip I (a bit tragically, I know) look forward to a baked potato with a bit of tuna mayo and when I'm feeling exotic I throw some spring onion and sweetcorn into the mix. Oh yeah, I am just so rock'n'roll!

So DH went on a business trip a few weeks back and I made us both baked potatoes with the aforementioned rock'n'roll mix, and The Boy loved, loved, loved it. I thought the spring onions would be a step too far but he was scooping up handfuls with both hands and cramming them in his mouth just as fast as he could.

So the boy seems to like fish in all it's forms and if people could stop chucking mercury into the ocean we would have the basis of a very healthy diet here, as it is he can only have it about once a week.

Tinned sardines

Loves 'em. Who'd 'a thought it!

Recipe

Take the sardines out of the tin.

Mash.

Spread on toast.

Watch the boy lick it off the toast.

He'll also grab handfuls of mashed sardines out of the bowl and eat those if you let him.

My Boy is rich in Omega-3!

Mum-mum-mum-mum-mummeeeeeeee

His first word! :-)

Fruit Cake

We recently moved house and got a new oven - joy!!

Our previous gas oven was designed for cooking Chinese style duck with the rotisserie attachment and very little else - it had a fierce set of burners at the top and bottom and a completely arbitrary 'temperature' scale on the front. In reality it only had two temperatures very hot and cold.

My previous attempts at lovingly baking things for the family resulted everything being crispy on the outside and raw in the middle which is not an ideal state for any sort of baked goods.

Very, very excited by the new oven I dug out my mum's 1974 Dairy Cookbook and made a (if I may say it myself) fantastic fruitcake. I dropped the nuts from the recipe because of the choking hazard they present and once it had cooled I couldn't wait to offer the boy a slice.

I'm happy to report it can be added to his list of likes, he rarely drops any and mmmmm's and laughs as he works his way through his portion.

He probably doesn't neeeeeed cake at this age but it's so much fun to watch him enjoy it and much better a homemade one than something storebought, I reckon.