Ellen's Eats

I'm always writing posts about what I am cooking for Matt and me to eat, so I thought I'd do a post on what I make for Ellen!

Ellen is now 18 months old, and so she can eat pretty much anything. Also thankfully she is not allergic to anything, so I don't have to worry about that when preparing her foods. She is mostly a good eater and will try most foods, but has trouble with chewy foods like meats (chicken, turkey), and crunchy veggies.

Here are a few meals that I'll make for Ellen on a regular basis:

Main dishes:
Buitoni pastas: whole wheat cheese ravioli, mushroom ravioli, cheese & chicken ravioli (found in the refrigerated section at your grocery store)
While this pasta is not super cheap, it is delicious and I tell myself mostly healthy for her. And one package lasts at least 4-5 meals worth of dinners, so at $5 a package that's not so bad! I also like that she happily eats the mushroom, and chicken filling, so at least she's getting some good protein from something that's not cheese or peanut butter!

Tacos:
Corn taco with refried beans, sweet potato, salsa, and cheese on top. Generally she won't eat the corn taco, but she picks the toppings off.

Spaghetti with meat sauce or meatballs: Ellen loves eating noodles, and I can sometimes sneak some extra veggies into the sauce that she'll eat

Home-made pizza: Ellen ate my latest gluten free pizza that I made the other night with leeks, red peppers, and peperoni. She was not a fan of the peperoni, I think it was too chewy for her, but she happily ate the rest of the pizza.

String cheese! Nothing rounds out a good meal like string cheese! Ellen loves string cheese and so if I am having trouble getting a complete meal for her, I know I can always throw in a string cheese and that will do the trick.

Veggies:
Sweet potatoes
Cooked carrots and peas
Gerber baby food veggies (peas, green beans, garden veggies)

Because Ellen really won't eat very many vegetables, I often just give her a container of Gerber veggies that she will happily eat with a spoon. I figure at least she is getting the vegetable, and eventually she'll like the veggies b/c she will like the taste. Hopefully! :) I never liked cooked carrots as a child and still abhor them as an adult, so if she decides to hate a vegetable or two I will understand! :)

Fruits:
Bananas
Apples (without the skin, it makes her choke / throw up - not pretty)
Apple sauce - she calls it "sauce" and loves to eat with a spoon
Dole Fruit cups - these are the best - tiny fruit cups with chopped pears, peaches, oranges, pineapples, or mixed. Ellen LOVES these, they are usually her dessert and she gets so excited and shoves the fruit pieces in her mouth. Once I put the whole container of oranges on her tray and thought I had bought myself at least a few minutes to do the dishes, but literally 30 seconds later I turned around and all of the oranges were gone and she was yelling for more!

And of course I always try to give her a little of what I made for Matt and me. This can be difficult because Ellen usually eats her dinner over at her friend Emma's house while she is being babysat or I am babysitting her. Basically we are never home for Ellen's dinner time Monday - Thursday. This means I need to pack her dinner at lunch-time before we go to Emma's house, and there is no way that I have made dinner by lunch-time!! So, Ellen often will get leftovers from the day before. Last week she actually ate this tofu-kale dish that I even didn't like, and at least for one day this week she liked my black bean salad that I made yesterday. Today apparently she just threw the beans into her chair. Sigh. That's another thing about trying to feed a toddler, one day a certain food like pasta will be their favorite. And the next day they will refuse to even touch it. Are they forgetting that they enjoyed it just the day before? Or are they just demanding a more exciting diet? :) (in ellen's head) "You gave me pasta yesterday woman - today I want steak!" Though really I think Ellen would not like steak - too chewy!

For breakfasts and lunches we usually have the same thing everyday - Ellen likes her routine! For breakfast she has cereal with milk (usually chex & cheerios) and sometimes a banana. For lunch she has a pb&j sandwich, yogurt, and fruit. Today after she finished her sandwich she started pointing where I usually put her yogurt on her tray and said "Yogurt! Yogurt!" That little girl knows what's next!

We don't typically give her a lot of desserts, she LOVES chocolate so if it is a special occasion, a holiday or birthday of course we give her sweets. For example on Easter I think she ate 2 mini twix and 2 reese peanut butter eggs. She was just a bit covered in chocolate but oh so happy. I hope that because we don't give her chocolate regularly she won't come to expect it or demand it in the grocery store! On Easter after she had had 4 chocolates we told her she couldn't have anymore, and any egg that she found that had chocolate, she brought it to us but we didn't open it for her. I had thought that there might be some protest, but she actually didn't seem upset at all and just accepted that there was no more chocolate to eat. She still enjoyed finding the eggs though! Next year I'll have to find some little toys to put inside as well.

I think that's about it! When Ellen was a baby I used to make all of her baby food using our blender (which I destroyed blending up a batch of carrots I think - anyone have any suggestions for a better baby food maker?) and while I kind of miss those days of getting frozen cubes of food out of the freezer for her to eat, (SO easy!) I'm also enjoying her learning to feed herself and watching her try new foods!

Happy Easter! (and best pesto-pasta EVER)

This week was another good one from the Fresh20 with possibly the best pesto I have ever had in my life. It might also have been because I have never made pesto before and was so proud about making it that made it taste so good. :)

This pesto was made with fresh basil,(totally destroyed our poor basil plant to get enough basil for the recipe) walnuts (instead of pine nuts - and much cheaper!), olive oil, garlic, parmesan cheese, and salt & pepper. All you do is put the ingredients into the blender (or probably better to make in a food processor, which I really need to get) and then blend into a delicious paste!! Toss with pasta and you have got an amazing meal.

Another night I was totally craving a burger, but unfortunately we had no frozen burgers already made, and it was too late for Matt to run to the store to get ingredients. I was about to give up hope when I realized that one of the menu items for the fresh20 last week was turkey burgers! Now a turkey burger definitely does not replace a real burger... but it was close enough. :) These turkey burgers turned out quite delicious, if anyone has watched Parks & Recreation - meat is always better - but they did the trick.

Friday we had possibly the largest salad I have ever eaten, but it was amazing. It included: spinach greens, regular greens, avocado, bell pepper, onions, and garbanzo beans. It was delicious and quite filling!!

Here is the amazing pesto dish: (with tomato salad!)


And here is the ginormous salad:


We had a great relaxing Easter - we decided to stay in town for once and I'm glad we did. This morning we woke up and went for a nice walk as a family. It was a bit chilly since it was early so Ellen was wearing a hat and mittens. She unfortunately dropped one of her mittens at the turn-around point in our walk. We didn't realize we had lost the mitten until we were almost done. So poor Matt had to essentially do the entire walk twice. Good exercise to offset all of the chocolate we have eaten! :)

For lunch some good friends of ours came over with their almost 1yr old daughter and we had a fun Easter Egg hunt! Ellen was really excited to discover that all of the eggs contained chocolate and she ate quite a few pieces and was covered in chocolate. Adorable. Easter is one of those days where it is ok to be covered in chocolate I think.

Then, we dyed Easter Eggs! Matt and I were realizing that once you have kids you get to do all of these fun things like have Easter egg hunts and dye Easter eggs. Not that we let Ellen help, we decided it would have been wayyy too messy. She can help next year. She was much more interested in playing with her plastic eggs from the easter egg hunt anyway (chocolate removed, we are not that bad of parents)

Here are a few pictures from today:
Yummy!!


Playing in the sand-box


Found an egg in her swing:


There's chocolate in here!!


Found more chocolate


Dying Eggs:


We used as many stickers as possible:


Happy Easter everyone!

The Fresh 20

This is our second week of doing a new meal planning service called "The Fresh 20." Each week I get a shopping list with 20 items to buy, a menu, and recipes for each day of the week! Most of the items on the list are "whole food" items, meaning they are fresh ingredients / non-processed food items. My grocery cart has never looked healthier! I kind of accidentally found out about this service, I was reading a blog of a friend of a friend (this is what I do at night after Ellen goes to bed... I stalk people's blogs!!) and saw this link on the side of her blog under popular posts called the Fresh 20. I read her post and decided to check it out.

What I like about the plan is that it plans the meals for me. I was doing an OK job of planning meals before this, but I never know what I want to cook. While the gluten free cookbook has been awesome, I've only really been doing one new recipe a week from it. With the fresh 20 plan I love that I can go to the grocery store ONCE a week, instead of several times to keep getting things that I forgot or hadn't planned for. Oh, and they have a gluten free menu option - so all of my meals are gluten free! Amazing. :) (they also have vegetarian and standard for anyone interested)

The catch: you have to pay them $5 / month. BUT, you get to keep all of your menus, they can be saved as pdfs, so you have them forever. For me, its worth it.

Here are a few of the dishes that I've made in the past two weeks:

Braised Chicken with Apples and Polenta


Herbed Cod, New Potatoes, and Kale



Stuffed Cabbage (Glompki!)


Pozole Soup


One more thing I love / hate about the Fresh 20 is that most of the recipes preparation right before you eat them, there is not a lot of cook-ahead stuff you can do. This is hard for me because I am usually working till 6:30 or 7 every night. I try to do the chopping before I leave for work, but there is still a good chunk of cooking that needs to be done. So... I've been leaving the ingredients and recipes for Matt to do! He's been doing a great job of starting most of them - he is actually an amazing cook so its easy for him. On the plus side this means that I'm not doing ALL of the cooking anymore!!! YAYAYAY!!

The dishes have been epic though. By the time we eat we are too exhausted to do most of the dishes... so they just sit and get more dirty for the next morning.

All in all its been totally worth it and I recommend it to anyone who wants to try something new!

In a personal update: Ellen is about to be 18 months and wow is she acting like it! She threw a huge tantrum at the vet's office today when she was not allowed to play with my keys. It was embarrassing and horrible she was so loud. She screamed all the way out to the car and only calmed down when I talked to her about her new grocery cart that she LOVES to push around our house. Hello terrible twos!!!

She has also gotten really hard to photograph lately, she usually runs away from the camera or makes some horrible face. Here she is yelling at me that she wants to get down from her spaceship:


She is really starting to talk a lot now and likes to mimic new words that we say. A few of her new words: doctor, shots (about the cat at the vet today), shopper (meaning her shopping cart), Puff (the cat), Mara (the dog, Amara), body (pointing to her belly), and butt (well pointing to her butt!) oops probably should have taught her a different word for her bottom. :)

We are not pregnant *yet* but hoping that we'll have some good news soon. I am trying so hard to be patient but I have come to realize that I am not a patient person and am in fact quite obsessive. Poor Matt. He claims he knew this about me before we got married so at least he was warned. :) If we don't get pregnant this cycle I think I'll probably go on some fertility drugs again, I'm undecided about it. (Ellen was conceived using fertility drugs so I have nothing against them, I just don't want to use them unless I have to) Hopefully I won't have to make that decision and we'll get a positive result soon! :)

Cajun Chicken and Rice

On Sunday night we finally got back from our awesome marathon of spring break travels and I did NOT feel like cooking AT ALL. I was tired, hungry, and depressed that we are not pregnant yet. I so felt like just ordering a pizza and saying to hell with it! But, I was good and instead cooked us a yummy dinner of cajun chicken and rice from my gluten free bible cookbook.

This recipe was surprisingly easy and pretty tasty! Basically you just sprinkle some salt and cajun seasoning on some chicken breasts, brown them on all sides, and then bake in the oven with chicken broth, rice, and veggies. I added green onions, red and green bell peppers, and garlic. The rice soaks up the chicken broth nicely and the chicken stays nice and juicy as it is cooked fully while being baked in the rice. The browning also helps keep the chicken from drying out and the crust on the chicken is delicious and cajun-y. :) Yum. I probably could have added in even more vegetables to be more healthy, but compared to ordering a pizza I get points for just cooking at all! :) And as a bonus, it made enough for two nights of dinners!

Here is a picture of the final result:



And here are a few pictures of our trip to Texas for spring break:

Enjoying the awesome spring weather at the park:


Very Busy


Went down the slide all by herself!


Love!


So tired!

Happy Birthday Matt - Yellow Cake with Dark Chocolate Icing

I made my first gluten free cake this past Friday for Matt's birthday - I think this is the first cake I've actually made from scratch and it turned out really well! :)
I was a little hesitant to try a bread-like recipe after the disaster gluten free pizza, but I made sure to measure all of the ingredients perfectly, and this time the batter turned out just fine.

The recipe includes gluten free all purpose flour, xanthan gum, vanilla, lots of butter (2 sticks!), sugar, and some eggs. It was pretty easy to follow except that I had to beat the butter & sugar for 8 minutes!! When you are holding an egg beater, 8 minutes goes by so so slowly. I only made it to 5 minutes and called it done. Thankfully the recipe still turned out. :)

The recipe called for me to use two round cake pans, but I was short on time and so I decided to go with the McGarity cake classic - the bundt pan. I love me a good bundt cake! It's easy to make (just pour in) and then when it's finished, you have a nice design that looks like it took more effort than it did, and as an added plus it's super easy to ice.

I also made the dark chocolate icing from scratch - I made wayyy too much which is still sitting in our fridge. :) This recipe was also pretty easy to make - another 2 sticks of butter (I just realized I went through an ENTIRE PACKAGE of butter making this cake...) confectioners sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla, semi-sweet chocolate chips, and light cream. Add all ingredients and beat together until it is light and fluffy like icing - easy peasy. :)

Here is a picture of the cake - ready for the candles to be lit!! (All 33 of them!! WOW!)


We celebrated Matt's birthday up in Eagles Mere where there was about 3 inches of snow on the ground - beautiful! We haven't gotten that much snow here this year which is fine by me, but I always love snow at Eagles Mere. It still has that beautiful white color and hasn't turned brown yet from the cars and plows. Though Amara (our dog) did her best to turn some of it yellow. :)

Matt had lots of work to do on a super important paper over the weekend so Ellen and I hung out with her super cool Aunt Lindsay and Uncle Owen. It was a really special visit for us because it was the first time that I really felt like Ellen bonded with them - I think that she's been too young up until now to really enjoy being with her Aunts and Uncles - even at Christmas and New Years she was shy around everyone. I think she is finally done with her separation anxiety (which for Ellen was separation TERROR) and is starting to get to know and enjoy the company of other adults that she doesn't see everyday. She spent a good amount of the weekend cuddled with Lindsay reading books and talking. It was the sweetest thing and made me so happy to see! :) Uncle Owen won her over by flying her in the air which she adored!

Here is Ellen about to take a hike around the lake with Uncle Owen!


While we were at Eagles Mere I started work on a new project in the nursery! The wallpaper, which was adorable and lasted forever (30 years!) was getting old and needed to be replaced. This weekend I tore down the wallpaper - which amazingly took only about 10 minutes - it was put up so well that it came down so easily. Thank goodness! I then sanded and cleaned the walls, and then Owen and Lindsay helped me prime them. Next visit I will put up an adorable animal border with hippos, elephants, cats, monkeys, etc. and above the border I am going to paint blue, and below I'm going to paint green, kind of like the sky and the grass. I think that it will look adorable and I'm really excited to finish!

Here is the room before I started:


Here are the sheep that Ellen adores, I feel kind of bad that I took them down - every time we went in that room she would yell "BAAAAAA" at them!


And here is the room without the wallpaper! I forgot to take a picture of the room after it was primed, but it looks really good.



Wow this was a long post, kudos if you made it this far! I think this is another freezer week for us, I've got a bunch of beet soup stored away and we are still trying to finish tacos I made over the weekend, hopefully I'll get to try another new GF recipe this weekend.

Gluten Free Pizza

I think this was my favorite recipe so far. WOW was it delicious. The gluten free crust was just out of this world. It turned out soft inside and crispy on the outside, and had a great flavor that really complimented the rest of the pizza and toppings. I think that the secret was in the Italian seasoning added to the dough - yum!

So while the finished product turned out amazing... getting there was a nightmare!! I decided to double the recipe and make two pizzas, and maybe this is where I went wrong, it is possible that I didn't double an ingredient or two? I swear I doubled everything but I can't be sure. The directions say to beat the flour, xanthan gum, italian seasoning, yeast, vinegar maybe, I forget the exact ingredients, until the dough forms a nice ball. I'm beating and beating and this dough is not anywhere close to resembling a "ball" of dough. Its wayyy too liquidy.

Here is a picture of what the egg beaters looked like when I was done. They should not have been dripping with dough.


The next instruction was to take the "ball" of dough and knead it on a rice floured surface. I should have stopped to think, hey, this dough is no where near being ready to knead, something went wrong! What I did instead is pour the dough, which actually had the consistency of cake batter onto a floured cutting board. The dough, which was basically in liquid form, starts creeping off the cutting board as I stupidly stick my hands into it and start trying to knead it. Kneading it was a disaster and obviously did nothing to turn this liquidy dough into a ball shape! In desperation I grabbed the bag of rice flour and started dumping large amounts of flour onto the dough, I probably added at least two cups of flour which is pretty significant and supports my theory that I forgot to double something (probably flour!) In the end after adding a ton of flour, I was able to kind of turn the dough in to a ball, at least I was able to get it into a bowl so that it could rise.

After the initial disaster fortunately the rest of the recipe went pretty smoothly. The dough rose for about 30 minutes and then I was able to split it into two pieces for my two pizzas! I baked the dough to set it for about 6 minutes, and then added tomato sauce (Cento's in the yellow can is the best, no added sugar!) cheese, tomato slices, basil, and of course pepperoni!!! It baked for about 15 minutes and was the best pizza that I've had in a long time. I really think that the Italian seasoning in the crust was the secret to a great taste!!

Here is the finished product:



Ellen helped me cook - here she is at the table - she was so good and sat there the entire time playing with a bowl and measuring spoons! She is doing great and learning new words every day - a few of her current favorites are: turtle, purple, hot tea, two, burp, beep and now she can say her friend Emma's name which is so sweet. :)




I highly recommend this pizza, so let me know if you want the recipe!! :)

Freezer Week

So its been a freezer week in the Woodruff household. I was running out of room in our deep freezer and fridge freezer so I decided it was time to take a break from cooking and eat from what we already had. I occasionally make double of whatever I'm making, so we had a good choice of yummy meals stocked away. On Monday we had beet soup, Tuesday and Wednesday turkey taco night, Thursday was meatloaf and butternut squash (which Matt ate Friday as well, I got to go out to eat at Otto's, more on that later!) and then tonight (Saturday) we had Bocca burgers and sweet potato fries. So even though we were eating from the freezer, we didn't do too badly! :)

Friday I had a girls night with a few friends, we went to visit newborn twin baby girls, and then out to dinner. The twins were so so sweet and so small, and made me miss having a newborn so much. I think when Ellen was that size I was just focused on feeding her and sleeping as much as possible, and I didn't stop to just admire how tiny and perfect she was. Its also nice to see newborns and then be able to hand them back and go out to dinner which I definitely could not do when Ellen was first born!! :)

Last weekend Matt and I spent our first night together away from Ellen! My parents came up for the weekend to watch her and we went to Hershey for a night. We stayed in this awesome B&B on a horse farm, it was amazing and so relaxing. We drove to Hershey Saturday morning, did the Chocolate Factory tour stuff, which was awesome, Matt and I (two engineers!) were actually convinced that they were making chocolate and were sad to hear after the tour/ride that it was all a simulation. I guess the talking cows should have given it away. Ellen would LOVE the tour, especially the cows, so we'll have to take her back this summer when the amusement park is open too. After the Chocolate Factory, we checked into our B&B and spent the afternoon drinking wine & beer and playing board games. The B&B had a fridge full of complimentary wine & beer - score! We then found an Italian restaurant with a gluten free menu for dinner! It was a great day.

Here are a few pictures from our weekend:

Our B&B:


Horse Farm!


Chocolate Tasting (Matt and I got our "masters" in Chocolate Tasting)


Yum!



This week I promise to try some new recipes! On the menu is gluten free pizza, and a southwestern chicken & quinoa dish, hopefully quinoa will win me over this time! :)