Joshua and I have decided to go another direction with Dylan and do “baby-led weaning”. This means there hasn’t been and won’t be a single puree in Dylan’s life.

Baby-led weaning (BLW) has gotten a lot more popular lately, so there’s a lot of good information available. Baby Led Weaning is a good place to start your online reading. Plus there’s a book, Baby-Led Weaning, and even a related cookbook!

Here’s an overview of the idea.

The Basics

BLW focuses on letting the baby explore real foods at ou own pace instead of baby-specific foods from an arbitrary age. The baby is given a variety of foods to choose from, drawn from the same foods the rest of the family is eating. Rather than having foods spooned into ou mouth, the baby explores the tastes, textures, chewing, and swallowing entirely at ou own pace.

When To Start

The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months old, so that’s about how long we waited with Dylan. At around 6 months, babies can grasp things and chew. Eating on their own is a great way for babies to work on these motor skills. Dylan has also just starting using a pincer grasp in order to pick up Cheerios to eat.

Of course, all babies are different. There’s no need to get started early, and some babies won’t be ready for a couple more months. Look for signs such as the baby’s ability to sit upright unsupported and the visible desire to try foods. We gave Dylan his first food a couple of weeks shy of 6 months old because he was so eager to have what we were having.

Peaceful Meals

I think of this introduction to foods as the introduction to the social aspects of meals, too. The practices I use are offshoots of the way I’m already doing things, rather than special guidelines just because there’s a baby involved.

• Relax and don’t be in a hurry. Meals are fun, relaxing, personal, and social but NOT a race, competition, or chore.
• Offer the same foods everyone else is eating at the same time.
• Offer a variety of foods, and then let your baby choose what to eat and how much.
• Give the same foods over and over, even if baby doesn’t seem to like them. Your preferences change from meal to meal, and your baby’s will, too.
• Don’t pin your hopes on a particular outcome. Set up the pleasant foundation for a meal, and then relax and let your baby do ou thing.

• Keep breastfeeding as often and as long as your baby wants.
• Don’t offer obvious choking hazards like peanuts or grapes.
• Avoid foods with added sugar and salt. The best foods at this point are whole foods, so that your baby can explore individual tastes while ensuring that those tastes are from healthy sources.
• Brace yourself for the mess! There are a lot of very sticky, dripping, squishy, crumbly meals in your future!

Trust

Baby-led weaning fits into the overall attitude I want to cultivate in my relationship with Dylan, which is about trust and letting go of control. With feeding “baby food” there is often a focus on feeding a certain number of jars at certain times of the day. BLW instead focuses on turning control over to the child.

I’m here to provide access to good foods, but all the other mealtime decisions about what goes into Dylan’s body are left up to him. I feel really good about this process, and we’re both having fun with it, too!

Dylan is getting very interested in eating. When I’m eating he carefully watches my every motion and is bothered when he can’t have whatever it is I’m having or do whatever it is I’m doing. He wants to put everything else in the world in his mouth, too, so I’m not certain that he knows something different is happening with food, but since I won’t give him any, meals are a source of bafflement and frustration for him.

The other day my friend Sara gave me the brilliant suggestion of “momsicles”, which are popsicles made from breastmilk. With older kids, you could freeze the breastmilk in an ice cube tray with a popcicle stick. But for a baby like Dylan, you can smash up frozen breastmilk and put the chunks in a mesh baby feeder.

The mesh feeders are an awesome invention! They can make great teethers by putting frozen fruit inside. You can use them to feed your baby things that would otherwise present a choking hazard, like grapes, or something with seeds like watermelon. They are terribly messy, but if you don’t mind the sticky, drippy grossness you’ll end up with, babies love sucking away on them.

Those are the two main brands of these feeders – click the photos to go to their Amazon pages. The Munchkin brand with the bright colors hinges open so it’s all one piece, which might sound like a good idea. I can tell you from experience, though, that they are a bitch to open and the mesh is harder to clean. I don’t recommend buying those at all. Get the other one – the one with the white handle and green ring. That one twists open, is easier to clean, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve owned some of these for awhile, but Dylan isn’t old enough to eat any food, yet. I had no use for them and also no way to give something to Dylan to eat when he reaches for my food. I’m so glad Sara told me about momsicles! What an adorable idea! I had some frozen breastmilk on hand and just smashed some up and turned the feeder over to Dylan. He definitely enjoyed it!

Oh, and the “All Star” on his shirt? That’s a Smash Mouth reference, not a sports reference. That’s what I’m telling myself!

I have an alternate, unpopular view of raw milk. My view is based on reading the actual stories of people (mostly children) who’ve become very seriously sickened with lifelong debilitating complications. You can read my views, should you wish, here.

I honestly hadn’t given drinking raw milk that much thought. I prefer to start with unprocessed as the default and work from there if needed/desired, rather than starting with “modern” as the default. However, I also like for my decisions to make sense and to be based in reality. Here was someone suggesting that more research was in order, and I’m usually happy to undertake research on an interesting topic, especially if it might be controversial.

I browsed around the different posts and links at My Suburban Homestead and landed on a site called Real Raw Milk Facts. This site is definitely anti-raw milk. I had to dig a little deeper in the links and references there to make sure that Real Raw Milk Facts (RRMF) was representing the facts in a way that I agreed with, and ultimately I came to agree.

Some of the claims that RRMF covers don’t really interest me. Some people might claim that raw milk cures autism or cancer or whatever, but I never believed anything like that, and those things don’t factor in at all to my decision about what milk to drink. The thing that does seem relevant to me is the safety. Here’s what I understood from the RRMF site:

• Yes, raw milk is safer today than it was in the 30s when pasteurization first became common, because refrigeration and sanitation have improved, plus some diseases like bovine tuberculosis have been nearly eliminated.

• Also, raw milk from pastured cows is likely safer than raw milk from feedlot cows. Feedlot cows have higher levels of E. coli. However, pastured cows can still have pathogens, and in recent years, many E. coli and Campylobacter outbreaks have been linked to pastured cows.

• Either way, there are still many harmful bacteria that can be in raw milk, including Brucella, Campylobacter, Listeria, Mycobacterium bovis, Salmonella, E. coli, Shigella, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pyogenes, and Yersinia enterocolitica. E. coli is scary stuff. There have been several recent cases of children almost dying from E. coli contaminated raw milk. Campylobacter is the most common outbreak-causing-pathogen found in raw milk. It usually causes a few days of fever, diarrhea, and cramps, but in rare cases can lead to paralysis.

You can, of course, get sick from all kinds of foods. One argument RRMF makes about milk is that it is created in an environment that is difficult to keep sanitary. The care of farm animals involves the management of a lot of shit, and for milk to be contaminated with fecal bacteria is not really unusual. So your fruits and veggies shouldn’t have shit on them anyway (I’m looking at YOU, bagged spinach!), and you also have the ability to wash them. Milk is pretty much expected to come in contact with shit now and then, and you can’t wash it. RRMF argues that products likely to come in contact with shit – raw beef, poultry, fish – should be cooked. For milk, “cooking” is pasteurization.

So, one question that comes to my mind is how many cases of illness are we talking about here? It’s one thing to read about scary outbreaks, but it’s another to look at the actual numbers and percentages. According to the CDC:

“Raw milk is a well-documented source of infections from Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157:H7, Campylobacter, Listeria, Mycobacterium bovis, and other pathogens. In 1938, before widespread adoption of milk pasteurization in the United States, an estimated 25% of all foodborne and waterborne outbreaks of disease were associated with milk. By 2001, the percentage of such outbreaks associated with milk was estimated at <1%. During 1998–2005, a total of 45 outbreaks of foodborne illness were reported to CDC in which unpasteurized milk (or cheese suspected to have been made from unpasteurized milk) was implicated. These outbreaks accounted for 1,007 illnesses, 104 hospitalizations, and two deaths. Because not all cases of foodborne illness are recognized and reported, the actual number of illnesses associated with unpasteurized milk likely is greater.”

The RRMF site has this to say about the CDC numbers:

“Since…only about 1-3% of the population drinks raw milk, the number of illnesses reported show that the actual risk of getting sick from drinking raw milk is tremendously higher than drinking pasteurized milk.”

If there are safety concerns with drinking raw milk (and there clearly are) then the next step in my research was to find out if there’s anything that concerns me about the pasteurization or homogenization processes.

Pasteurization is heating milk to a certain temperature for  a certain amount of time (the exact temp and time depends on which kind of pasteurization you’re talking about.) Proponents of raw milk claim that this heating destroys any beneficial components of milk, but it doesn’t look to me like this is the case. Some parts of milk are destroyed or diminished through the pasteurization process, like vitamin A, vitamin C, and some enzymes. Many things remain, as well: some vitamin A, calcium, vitamin D, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B12, iron, etc. There’s plenty of good stuff left in pasteurized milk.

I guess some people might be bothered about some of the nutrients being destroyed in the pasteurization process, but if you think of pasteurization as cooking, which is basically what it is, it makes sense to me. When we cook foods, sometimes some nutrients are diminished and sometimes other nutrients are made more available for us. It doesn’t surprise me or bother me that milk is changed by pasteurization, but I don’t think those changes are harmful to me or negate the usefulness (and yumminess) of drinking milk.

Homogenization is the process of forcing milk through small holes or tubes at high pressure to break up the fat globules. This prevents the milk from separating out into a cream layer. This doesn’t seem to have much effect on the nutrition of the milk, although it has some other effects like making the milk taste blander, yet creamier, and making it less likely to pick up other flavors from your fridge.

Homogenization doesn’t have anything to do with safety, though, so my first thought after all this research was that I’d look for pasteurized yet not homogenized milk. Unless there’s a reason for the increased complexity and technology, I prefer a simpler choice. I figured I didn’t need a special process to prevent my milk from separating. All you have to do is shake up your bottle of milk to mix it back up, and that’s easy enough to do. Plus, then we’d have cream at-the-ready when we needed it, too.

The natural grocery store near me, Earth Fare, carries a pasteurized, non-homogenized milk. Yay! The milk even comes in glass bottles that you pay a deposit on and can return. This was great news all around. Non-homogenized milk, glass bottles, and reusing the bottles over and over again. It seemed like a perfect match. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the taste. I tried several times to get used to the taste of the milk, but it was strange and I couldn’t settle into it. I could only use it on something really flavorful, like a sugary cereal. But, I like to drink milk by the glass, and I just couldn’t drink this stuff. After several bottles, I went back to my regular organic milk.

So that’s the end of my decision-making about milk. I started out drinking non-fat organic, moved to full-fat organic, considered raw, rejected raw, tried non-homogenized, rejected non-homogenized, and settled back at full-fat organic. I really thought raw milk would be the next addition of “from the farm to the table” products around here, but the safety issues with raw milk trump my desire to be “natural”.

As a side note about raw milk, just so I’m 100% clear, I think that raw milk should be legal to sell. People should be able to put what they want to into their bodies. I do not think it is the government’s job to protect people from their own bad decisions. Warning labels are fine with me, tiered “grades” of product are fine, regulating the packaging is fine. But, if people want to buy raw milk (and they clearly do) they should be allowed to do so.

How about you? What kind of milk do you drink and why?

(Photo credit: grongar)

I grew up drinking 2% milk. I was raised on the philosophy that you should drink the lowest fat milk you could tolerate since by default fewer calories were better. As an adult, when I switched to organic milk, I also switched to non-fat milk, since the organic was richer, and I liked the non-fat milk just fine. Just a few months ago, Joshua asked me why I was drinking non-fat milk. I mean, I’ve finally gotten over calorie counting and other dieting nonsense, so it didn’t make sense to him why I would drink anything other than whole milk. I really stammered for an answer that would make sense and not rely on erroneous dieting thinking. I liked the taste of lower fat milk just fine, unlike, say, non-fat cookies. So, all other things being equal, I finally settled on a stammered answer something along the lines of, “Why not?” But embedded in there is the real question I should have been asking: Between different fat levels of milk, are all other things really equal?

Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food and The Weston A. Price Foundation (which might be Pollan’s source) agree on the problems with lower fat milk:

• Milk is first separated into its various components – fat, protein, etc – and then put back together at set levels to create the different fat content milks. This means that even whole milk is a processed food, even before you get to homogenization and pasteurization.
• In order to give them the expected consistency, reduced fat and no-fat milks have dried skim milk added, but you won’t see this ingredient on the label.
• The process of making dried (powdered) skim milk causes the cholesterol to oxidize. Oxidized cholesterol causes plaque buildup in your arteries. This means that if you’re drinking low fat or non-fat milk for your heart health, you’re being completely counter-productive.

However, other sources offer up some counter-claims, such as:

(Photo by aubergene)

• The process to make dried milk does oxidize the cholesterol, and oxidized cholesterol is particularly bad for you, but nonfat milk contains almost no cholesterol in the first place, meaning it doesn’t become much of a threat.
• Writers who have called representatives of milk brands, including national, local, organic, and non-organic brands, who all say that there’s no dried milk added to their fresh milk. Some say that doing so used to be an industry standard but hasn’t been for decades.

So a couple of the big reasons offered for not drinking lower fat milk are in question. However, there are a whole host of things that do NOT seem to be in question:

• The protein, calcium, and vitamins A and D in milk require fat in order for us to absorb them.
• Milk fat is saturated fat which raises good cholesterol and is also linked to immune health and cell metabolism.
• And then there’s the simple fact that fat isn’t bad for you. There’s no real reason to avoid it.

At the end of the day, though, here’s the bottom line: whole milk is closer to a whole food. True, with all the -izations involved these days, whole milk isn’t exactly a whole food. But it’s closer, and sometimes closer is as good as we can do right now. Once I got to thinking about it, my “Why not?” question is actually the opposite of what I’d like to ask. The real question should be starting at the stuff that comes out of the cow and asking, “Why?” at each stage of alteration. For example, the primary purpose of homogenization seems to be to prevent the milk from separating. Do I really need a level of processing on my food to save me from having to shake it up? I would say no.

Anyway, the initial decision to switch to whole milk actually came pretty rapidly. After I tried to stammer out my answer, I mostly laughed it off, realized that I had no idea why I was still drinking lower fat milk, and the next time I went shopping I bought whole milk. Further research into the matter has shown me that there’s probably no particular problem with lower fat milk (compared to all of our other processed food anyway), but ultimately, lower fat milk doesn’t fit into what I want from my food, from my industries, and from my life.

A natural next step would be to switch to raw milk. I have been looking into this a little bit. I’ve found a couple of local suppliers, but I have yet to take the step to actually buy milk from them. I will certainly let you know when I do!

Update: Now you can read the follow up post: Milk Decisions – Raw Milk or Not?

Yep, that’s a pig butt hanging from my kitchen ceiling. An actual pig butt – not a Boston butt which comes from the pig’s shoulder. I’m not in charge of naming these things!

Dry cured ham is shelf stable. It could hang like that for a year with no trouble. Eventually, the quality of the meat would fade, but it would never be a health risk to eat.

In any case, on Tuesday, we decided to get ready to cook one up.

The first obstacle with dry cured ham is that it is extremely salty. It’s the saltiness that’s keeping it from rotting. So in order to make it tasty, you first have to soak it. If you buy a country ham at the store, the package may say, “Soak overnight”, but the internet assured us that overnight was not nearly enough. Three days seemed to be a more common recommendation, and everywhere said that even after 3 days it would still be pretty salty.

To prepare it for soaking, first Joshua cut off the hock:

I froze the hock for tossing into ham and beans later on. The next step was to give the ham a good scrub.

The reason for scrubbing is that during the curing process (which took 4 months for our hams) mold builds up on the outside of the ham. This is to be expected and not a problem at all, but it’s got to be scrubbed off at this point.

Next up, the ham went down into a cooler for soaking.

This ham is about 20 pounds of meat, so a cooler was the only container big enough to hold it! Some people use a bathtub, but since the ham needs to be submerged, a bathtub would be overkill on the amount of water you’d be changing out.

The water should be changed a few times a day. As the water changes happened, I noticed some changes in the meat, too. The ham/water started out smelling like salty smoke. We didn’t get the hams smoked, but they still smelled a bit smoky. As the days went on, though, it started to smell more like just meat. One day that purplish color that you can see in the photo above appeared, too, which I thought was odd, but presumably normal.

We were going to wait until Saturday to cook the ham, but we jumped the gun a tiny bit and got started Friday night.

First, it had to be cut in half:

We didn’t have a pan big enough to cook the whole thing, so it was going to have to go half and half.

There are lots of suggestions online for what to use as the cooking liquid when baking a ham, but we didn’t have most of them on hand. What we did have was a can of pineapple juice, so that’s what we used. Between the juice and some water, we got the liquid level to a couple of inches from the top of the pan.

We debated about whether to cover the pan in foil, and ended up going with yes:

While that half was in the oven, we decided to test out the half that wasn’t baking. Joshua sliced off a few pieces:

And we fried them up:

When we first got the hams, we tried some fried slices from the other two hams that the processor had sliced up. We didn’t know about having to soak country hams at that time, and WOW was it salty. So trying this one out would give us a comparison after three days of soaking. It was noticeably better, but still really, really salty. We’re going to let that second half soak for a couple more days!

We baked the first half at 350 for 10 minutes then dropped the temperature to 250 and let it cook until it got an internal temperature of about 140 degrees. I don’t remember how long that took… a little over two hours would be my guess.

Looking all brown coming out of the oven:

But still pink and juicy on the inside:

We ate a couple of big pieces, which were pretty darn salty. Then we tried some thin slices, which actually tasted better. Joshua made a sandwich, and with the bread and condiments to cut the salt, it almost tasted like “store bought” ham.

Joshua sliced the whole thing up, and we’ll probably freeze individual packs of a few slices. The little stack you see to the right in this picture is some odd-size pieces that I’ll add to the future ham and beans.

For now, the slices are just in our refrigerator. One upside to all that salt is that there’s not much risk to the ham going bad!

Joshua wants to try boiling the next half, and after that we have a whole other ham to do, so we might try some different methods. Joshua says he’s happy with the dry cure process.

I’m interested to learn about wet curing for next year and to see what that does to the taste and the saltiness. What we’ve got right now is clearly meat of a fine quality, but I don’t love the taste. Since we have 40 pounds of it, I really wish I loved the taste! I’m looking forward to trying new things with the ham and seeing what happens.

Either way, we are still having an adventure with these pigs!

I was going to make an omelet for breakfast, which seemed like the perfect thing to try on the wood burning stove, since it’s not very temperature specific. I got all my ingredients ready in the kitchen while the skillet was warming up on top of the stove.

Then I took everything in to the living room to dump it all in. Three eggs from our very own chickens, some ground sausage from our very own pigs, plus some spinach, tomato, green pepper, onion, and cheese.

There were three complications. One was that I was using cast iron instead of my usual teflon pan, so my flipping skills were challenged. I ended up with an egg scramble of some sort rather than a real omelet.

It was also super HOT in front of the stove (of course!) Standing there and minding the food was hard to do. I wonder if actual wood burning cook stoves have some factor that lessens the front heat, or if people who use those just suck it up and deal.

The third problem was that I wasn’t actually in a kitchen, which meant any food that left the approved container ended up on the carpet. It would also be nice to have a prep surface near the stove. This was to be expected, though, since this particular stove is not really meant for cooking.

Still, it was a fun experiment. The eggs tasted great, and now I can say I’ve tried cooking on our wood burning stove!

I’ve taken a lot of steps to reduce my usage of disposable products, such as switching to the Diva Cup, washcloths in the kitchen, and bathroom cloth. I like reducing my plastic use, too, and I have glass storage containers for the refrigerator instead of plastic Tupperware, and we freeze a lot of items like chili and salsa in glass jars.

There’s one thing that’s been bugging me, though, and that’s my usage of Ziploc bags and aluminum foil, which I use mainly for freezer storage. Some examples:

• Freezing the breakfast burritos I make in big batches. I wrap these in foil or cling wrap and then put a bunch in a gallon ziploc bag.

• Freezing loaves of bread. I love to have bread on hand, but it can be tough to buy or make it on the spot. Joshua will make a few loaves or I will buy some, and then we’ll freeze them. These go into aluminum foil.

Freezing is an excellent way for me to shop less often and make homemade items in bulk for future use. (The freezer is especially useful to me since I just filled it with a whole pig!) The glass jars store a lot of things really well, but there are also a lot of things that can’t fit into a glass jar. These still need to be stored in an airtight manner, though.

I do my best to save foil for future use and wash and save Ziplocs, but I’d still love to move towards eliminating them entirely.

Do any of you have ideas on how I could do this with non-disposable items or another way I could look at the situation?

Even if you know that diets don’t work and have long given up calorie counting or fat-restricting (or better yet, never even started), it’s still hard to ignore advice telling you that this food or that food is better or worse for you. Maybe it does make sense to limit HFCS in your food, for example, or maybe you’d feel better if you drank more water. Fine. I can understand tweaking your food here and there when you get new information.

Then I ran across this in a magazine the other day:

In case you can’t read it clearly, the mini-article talks about research involving produce diets high or low in antioxidants and the benefits of eating foods high in antioxidants. Then in goes on to categorize fruits and veggies into either “eat less of these” or “more of these”.

What should you supposedly be eating less of? Apples, bananas, melons, pears, white grapes, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, french beans, leeks, lettuce, potatoes, radishes, and zucchini.

Um. What. The. Fuck. Antioxidants or no antioxidants, anyone who tells you to eat fewer carrots and apples is just making shit up. You want to cut down on your soda intake or watch the baked goods? Great. Leave the fruits and veggies alone, though. Good grief.

Last week I made sun-dried tomatoes to go in my custom spice mix. I love this mix and use it on all kinds of things. My favorite is to use it liberally on fried potatoes, but I’ve been known to sprinkle it over all kinds of things. I used to just by random Italian seasoning mixes at the grocery store, but it’s even more fun to make my own. Just a mortar and pestle and a bunch of stuff thrown in, and I think it comes out super yummy.

Here’s the recipe in case you want to try yourself.

Ingredients

• Oregano – 2 tbsp
• Sun-dried tomatoes – 2 tbsp (make your own!)
• Rosemary – 1 tbsp
• Basil – 1 tbsp
• Marjoram – 1 tbsp
• Parsley – 1 tbsp
• Red pepper flakes – 1 tsp
• Black peppercorn – 1 tsp
• Kosher salt – 1 tsp

The sun-dried tomatoes don’t grind well in the mortar and pestle, so I either chop them up as small as I can get them, or just pull them apart (I’ve got great fingernails!)

Then, everything goes in the mortar and pestle and I grind away. I consider it finished when there are no more whole peppercorns.

I used to store it in a leftover empty spice jar, but I use this so much, I needed more quantity at a time, so now I’m using a leftover jelly jar.

Enjoy!