"Baby Chum" Recipe

I had decided to pick some assorted u-pick greens from my CSA farm (free to all share members,) to try them out on the baby. That week's offerings were Rainbow Chard and kale. Who can resist those pretty colors? Especially when I didn't have to find a way to make them palatable to myself!

We'd also got some plums, and were under doctor's orders to feed her more "P is for Poopies" fruits (plums, prunes, peaches, pears, and aPricots.)

Heh heh heh.

"Baby Chum"

Ingredients:

Rainbow Chard

Plums, pitted

Optional: lemon or lime juice

Directions:

Step 1: Rinse chard (or wash, if not organic) and chop while wet. Do not drain or shake dry. Greens in general should cling to enough water for microwave steaming. You can chop the stems finer, to help them cook more thoroughly.

Step 2: On High, microwave wet chard, covered, for 7 minutes per pound. Optional: Microwave chopped plums (covered) 2-3 minutes on High. Baby can eat them raw, but it may help make them sweeter.

Step 3: Combine chard and pitted plums. Squirt in some citrus juice, if desired, to cut the greens taste (for this little, I would just add a squirt or two. For a larger batch, roughly half a lime or lemon's worth.) Puree in blender, food processor, or with an immersion blender.

I used my new Boon Mush. It's a manual chopper, so my arms usually wear out long before her food is pureed as fine as the store-bought stuff. Or even the food processor-ed stuff. But she's been doing great with chunkier foods lately, so this is a less-room-taken-up-in-the-dishwasher way to make smaller batches of food. The lid is kind of hard to get off sometimes, for no particular reason, and my puree gets all up in all the cracks, which is annoying. But it's fun (as long as I'm only using it every so often,) and will be a great tool for eating out, so I can chop restaurant food up into Baby-sized chunky-mush for her!

At first the chunks slowed her down. Plus it was a little tart. I forgot to add citrus juice to cut the green flavor too. I found that by adding some sweeter store-bought puree to it (in a 2 or 3 parts Chum to 1 part sweeter fruit puree ratio,) it helped counteract the tartness, as well as diluted the chunkiness. Then she'd wolf it down. She also enjoyed when I added a dash of cinnamon.