Adventures in Food

Acorn is certainly not a typical kid when it comes to eating by any stretch of the imagination. We are feeding tube free....but we also still feed him a high-calorie prescription formula to supplement what he eats to get enough calories. He doesn't eat candy. He eats raw tomatoes and cucumbers. He eats onions (raw, sauteed, or deep fried). He eats steamed or lightly cooked carrots and bell peppers. He eats soft breads, tortillas, and most flat breads. He eats mac & cheese. At daycare, he eats grilled cheese sandwiches and blackberries, and sometimes mostacholi.We're hoping he'll try cake this year for his birthday, but not holding our breath - it'll have to be without frosting, and I'll make cake to get a texture he's more likely to handle than the typical store-bought cake.

However, life goes on and the rest of us still need to eat a more well-rounded diet. We're talking about making some major changes here, beyond our already mostly box-free pantry (namely, we're looking at getting a much larger freezer, and cooking more "quick" things and freezing them, along with more prep work up front, to try to cut out the majority of the nights we eat out).

We already get a box of fruits and veggies delivered every week.  We love the company that does it, largely because of how much shopping time it saves us - in fact, we were in one of their videos a while back. We do supplement this from time to time, depending on our interests and what's been in the box the last few weeks, but with this box, we eat very little canned or frozen produce, unless we've canned or frozen it ourselves. I like eating real food - ingredients I can pronounce.

As I mentioned recently, one of our new things is to have fresh sprouts on hand.

The creepy look of just sprouting alfalfa

A jar full of alfalfa sprouts

French Lentils, Just getting started

So far we've done alfalfa and red clover, and today we started lentils. I've been less than thrilled with the red clover - it didn't all sprout at the same time, so we had some with green leaves, and some that had just barely sprouted and some that hadn't sprouted at all. The alfalfa completely filled the jar, as you can see in the center photo above.

There are 24 bags, 4 oz each, for us to work our way through in the course of sampling. At a teaspoon every 4-8 days, it's going to take us a loooong time to get through them all once, much less emptying every bag.

More recipes and food thoughts to come over the coming weeks....