First Foods

Welcome to Cooking with Georgia, an adventure in raising a sassy, compassionate girl who (I hope, hope, hope) will love to eat good food and possibly cook it, too. You’ll find (I hope, hope, hope) some good recipes for your kids and the rest of the family, be inspired to explore local farms and food, and think more deeply about issues and topics, probably all food related, that perhaps you have only given a cursory glance. Probably I will make you mad at some point, because I prize being thought provoking over being nice.

All parents want their children to have a better life than they, themselves, had. In the great cosmic sense, I want that for my daughter; but specifically I want her to be a better eater. I have the lofty goal of my daughter eating lots of fruits and vegetables, a chicken nugget never passing her lips and I’d like her to develop a healthy disdain for box macaroni and cheese. She will never, ever eat a cake from a box. Not on my watch.

My goals stem from concern over the current obesity rate in the United States and are inspired by the other f-word – French -- parenting, thanks to reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bebe” shortly before Georgia was born.

Nearly 36 percent of U.S. adults and almost 17 percent of children are currently obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control. To paint an even gloomier picture, a recent study by the Trust for American’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation predicts that unless something drastically changes in the American diet and lifestyle, the U.S. will see obesity rates averaging 50 percent by 2030. For the first time, children are expected to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents and kids are being diagnosed with diabetes and other diseases that had been the provenance of old age.

I also am intrigued by the idea that children can eat a variety of foods, not kidded up (or would that be down?) and can behave like civilized human beings in a restaurant.

Let me just say up front, this journey is not about judging other mothers and their choices. Everyone has to make parenting (and eating) decisions according to their own values, free time, budget, interest, goals, etc. Although, if you are putting soda in the bottle and feeding your baby cheese doodles, I am totally going to judge you for that. I am fortunate to have lots of free time and the ability to buy organic produce for my daughter, plus I have a passion and obsession for food – mostly baking, but a girl cannot live on biscuits alone; at least not without becoming a statistic in the obesity epidemic.

But I digress … at eight months old, Georgia has eaten things I hadn’t even heard of until recently – thanks to the odd assortment from our CSA box. She loved ground cherry marmalade, for example. I am making all of Georgia’s baby food, mostly from the ingredients in our CSA box, but supplemented from organic produce as necessary.

As a first foray into this blog, I will simply list the things that Georgia has eaten in her first two-plus months of trying real food.

• Avocado
• Beets
• Apples
• Pears
• Figs
• Roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes with blue cheese
• Cottage cheese
• Plain yogurt
• Bagel and vegetable cream cheese
• Scone with dried cherries
• Butternut squash
• Whole wheat macaroni with roasted squash puree in place of the cheese
• Herbed goat cheese
• Black beans with cumin and quinoa
• Roasted kuri squash
• Split pea soup
• Curried red lentil soup with brown rice
• Lentil pilaf with dates and coconut
• Pumpkin custard made with egg yolk, coconut milk and spices (no sugar)
• Fish
• Plums
• Mango
• Carrot, mango, apple puree
• Beets 
• Pasta with tomato sauce
• Chocolate pudding (I know! But it was just one bite.)
• Peaches
• Banana
• Kale, potato, parmesan puree
• Spinach
• Zucchini
• Carrots
• Carrots and zucchini together
• Mushrooms
• Peanut butter
• Scrambled egg yolk
• Cauliflower
• Apple cake sweetened with roasted pear puree and apples on top
• Baby cereal – mixed grain with apple and sweet potatoes rather than rice given the recent reports on arsenic levels in rice
• Yams
• Sweet potato

It is possible all of this will backfire and Georgia, despite her varied baby diet, will emerge into toddlerhood insisting on only beige food. I don’t know. This is a journey. An adventure. A real-life experiment and I hope you come along with us to see how it all turns out.