All posts filed under: Basics

Know Your Tomatoes: Perfect Low Acid Sauce

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I was going to start this post with some affirmation like ‘I love tomato sauce’ but that is basically redundant. Who doesn’t like tomato sauce?  Practically every culture under the sun has found a way to take tomatoes and make a delicious and velvety sauce.  When weaning our little ones, one can almost be sure that tomato sauce is the perfect vehicle to get us from liquid to solid.  Start with just the tomato sauce and slowly add rice, peas, macaroni…you get the idea.  I’ve heard of mothers ‘hiding’ other vegetables inside a tomato sauce.  News flash: your kids know there are vegetables in there but the trade off is worth it because everyone loves tomato sauce. Sadly there is always a catch.  In this case the catch is citric acid and salt.  Habnabit! What are those things doing in an unsuspecting can of tomatoes? Well, it turns out that tomatoes are already a high acid food but they don’t can that well without the addition of MORE acid. Once the tomato canneries ADD acid, well, …

Baby Weaning Basics: An Introduction

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You are probably a sophisticated eater. Doubtful? Let’s take this mini-quiz I just made up on the spot. It’s based on what I see most of my friends have in their pantry. You can mark yourself according to how many you have but let’s just say that if you have any of these ingredients or if even know what they are, you are probably falling in the sophisticated territory.  Do you have: Dried spices Chilies: fresh, frozen or pastie Hot sauce Any vinegar that isn’t white (red wine, white wine, balsamic) Any grain that isn’t rice (quinoa, bulgar, couscous) See where I am going with this? I bet it was pretty hard to scale back when it came time to weaning your baby and family cooking?  In our house, the idea that spice was not going to be front and center was something we all mourned for awhile.  I love things hot and so does my husband.  It has certainly been an adjustment.  I prefer to think of this change as an adjustment.  Taking spice out …

Simple, Clean and Fast Chicken Broth

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Obviously we can’t serve our little ones chicken soup from the can, from the cube or from the carton. Obviously. How did our pantries stoop to such low levels that we can’t use…soup. (see what I did there).  Salt, a natural preservative is the culprit here and frankly, very few people are healthy enough to endure the amount of salt and sodium found in a can of condensed soup.  Not my dad with high blood pressure.  Not my anemic sister and certainly not my little munchkin. That being said, I’m really not the type to sit around skimming junk off the top of a boiling cauldron of chickens that are meeting a rubbery end.  Ironically I always find this method, the old fashioned way of boiling fresh chicken to the ends of the earth and back, well, tasteless.  What a conundrum. My solution is to boil chicken that has already been roasted and enjoyed.  I boil the bones and the results are delish.  It is a much faster system and while it may not yield …