Love through the stomach...

Dinner time snacks

Valerie — Mon, 26 May 2014 20:24:18 +0000

I try to feed Cupcake what we eat. Either she gets some pieces from our plate, or I make her ‘pappa’ with the same ingredients.
Sometimes that’s not an option though, and in order to have her join us at the dinner table, I’ll get her some snack type foods so she can eat with us.

Today we ate shoarma – definitely not baby appropriate food – and she had already eaten eggplant and bell pepper pappa at daycare, so just a snack was perfectly fine.

Baby appropriate snacks

Cupcake ate rice cakes, pieces of cucumber, brie (again – she loves the stuff!) and a maïsboogie (puffed organic corn).
When.she was finished with all this she wabted more, more, more, so she got a chunk of wholegrain bread which she gobbled up as well. Hungry baby!

Brie appetizer

Valerie — Sun, 25 May 2014 16:57:48 +0000

Being 7 months old does not mean you have to eat mush in this household. Sure, we make more fluid dinners for Cupcake as well, but as a little snack while mommy is cooking, brie is great too.

Eating brie

I chose an organic French brie, made from pasteurized milk. She gobbled it up super quick and wanted seconds.

Lamb and peppers

Valerie — Thu, 22 May 2014 16:44:34 +0000

In the 2+ years that I haven’t posted, things sure have changed. For a while I cooked and baked less. Recently I started cooking differently mostly.
Still fresh and home-made, just quick, quick, quick for the adults, and more elaborate for our newest little gourmet.

Our daughter was born in October of 2013 and has started enjoying solid food. We do a combination of various styles of weaning. Baby Led Weaning (or the Rapley method) is one of the things we do, giving her whole chunks of veggies, often off our plates, to learn to eat.

Another style I love is the Italian ‘pappe’. A fairly liquid form of baby food, made fresh with meat, veggies and cream of rice/corn/tapioca/wheat, in a broth base.

Our little cupcake loves it all. Eating is super fun!

Below you see today’s lunch, Red bell peppers, and lamb in vegetable broth with a mixture of cream of various wheats and cream of corn and tapioca. To flavor it and help digestion we added a tiny bit of parmesan cheese and obviously some extra virgin olive oil. Despite (or thanks to?) the strong flavor of the bell peppers, Cupcake gobbled it right up!

Making sausage

Valerie — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:32:36 +0000

Frying up some home-made sausages.

I decided I needed to try to make my own sausages. My wonderful, wonderful butcher has some great sausages, but really, I wanted to give it a try. To add my own flavors, make my own combinations. It was one of those things I felt the need to try at least once.

Add seasoning before grinding, to make it easier to mix all flavors after grinding

Like many of the foods I feel the need to make, this – yet again – proved to be well worth the little bit of extra work.

The sausage casings needs to be washed before use

It doesn’t mean that I stop buy sausages from my butcher. But it does mean that along with the sausages, I might buy some random, cheaper cuts of meat and some pork intestines as well.

Grind the meat at a setting you like. Do you want chunky sausage, or really fine?

Making sausages is fun. It really is. It’s easy too and the finished product is tasty. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Mix and knead the ground meat to make sure all the flavors are well-distributed

Now the pictures you see here and the recipe that follows are a simple pork sausage with some French herbs. But as with most home-made foods, the key is to use your own imagination. To make combinations you think might be tasty. Have fun with it. I sure did!

The sausage stuffer.

There are a few things to take into consideration when making sausages.

You place the entire length of casing over the stuffer, then pull it off as you fill.

First: Make sure that you have a way to get the meat into the casing. A sausage stuffer attachment for a stand mixer is awesome, but any type of funnel should work.

Pull the casing off the stuffer as it's being filled.

Second: Any good butcher makes some of his own sausages. He’ll be able to sell you some casings.

Keep filling the casing into one giant sausage.

Third: Fat equals flavor and moisture. Completely lean sausage will taste terrible, so don’t shy away from fat.

Twist the casing to create individual sausage links.

Pork sausages with french herbs

Author: Valerie

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients

about 350 grams of lean pork
about 150 grams of fatty pork (pork belly)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a generous amount of herbes de provence
salt and pepper to taste
1 pork intestine (or other type of sausage casing)

Instructions

Cut the pork in 1 inch cubes, dice the onion and cut up the garlic, place all in a bowl with a generous amount of herbes de provence and salt and pepper to taste.
Grind the meat together the herbs in a meat grinder. Knead the ground meat to make sure all seasoning and meats are well combined. Add onions and garlic before or after grinding, depending on whether you like larger pieces of onion in there or not.
Wash the sausage casing and place it on a sausage stuffer. Tie a knot on the end of the casing.
Push the meat mixture down the sausage stuffer while moving the casing along with the meat stuffing to create one long sausage.
Once all the meat is inside the casing, twist the sausage at your preferred length to make individual sausage links, then cut off the excess sausage casing.
Cook the sausage like you would do with a store-bought sausage. You can also freeze them.

Notes

You can vary endlessly with the types of seasoning and filling you use. Just make sure you do use a generous amount of fatty meat, so the sausage doesn’t dry out when you cook it.

A bowl of home-made sausage links.

Either you like bacon…

Valerie — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:51:57 +0000

… or you’re wrong.

Yumm

(And for those of you who don’t eat pork. There’s a reason they invented turkey bacon.)

Happy spring you all!