The Dish On Our Food

This is one of those comprehensive posts I've been meaning to write so I can link it to the sidebar for frequently asked questions. If you're a regular here, it'll be stuff you know for the most part. I do get questions from time to time though from parents of infants as they grow. It's all in the contract, but you forget that stuff as the months go by. This way it's all in one spot.

We are on a state-funded child care food program, so we have guidelines to follow for that. They come out four times a year to monitor us and make sure we serve vitamin A rich foods three times a week, vitamin C every day, enough milk and water, all that good stuff. The paper you have to sign every October is to renew on that.

Here's the basic gist of what we do:

Infants: we will provide the general store brand milk-based or soy-based formula. If your baby is on a specialized formula like nutramigen or you just want to bring a certain name brand, you are responsible for that. And of course if you're pumping you can bring breast milk. From 0-7 months a "meal" is satisfied by just a bottle. We aren't required to document any kind of cereal or solid food until 8 months. Most babies do start eating that stuff here before that, and we begin feeding those things on prompting from parents. Some kids have nothing but breast milk till six months, and some are eating full bowls of cereal and fruit at four months. We follow your lead on that and feed your baby what you want them to have, when you and/or your pediatrician are ready.

As far as baby food goes- usually I buy beech-nut stage 2. I haven't found that stage 1 is really necessary for us. The jars are smaller, which is helpful to avoid waste if you just have one baby at home. When we're feeding multiple infants and dividing jars, the bigger ones work better. I don't like the brands that come in plastic tubs as well, which is why I say beech nut. They're one of the few that still come in glass jars. Sometimes I get on a kick and make baby food to freeze, but I haven't done that in awhile. When I do, I make a ton of several kinds so that I can do the sneaky chef thing and hide veggie puree in the big kid food as well as having some for babies.

Older infants: from 8-12 months a "meal" is characterized by a bottle, iron-fortified cereal (we always serve rice due to allergy possibility), and a fruit or vegetable. During this age period the kids will sit in chairs near the big kids during mealtimes and begin to eat table food as well. Since the food program doesn't require any baby food at all past the first birthday, we work on trying to get them ready for textures and tastes. They'll usually be able to eat more breakfast foods first- waffles, cereal, cut-up fruits, pancakes, hash browns, things like that. If we're serving oatmeal, yogurt, or something like soup or stew for lunch, then we'll spoon feed them. Otherwise we just put it on the tray and let them explore. We do put bibs on them, but food is such an interesting sensory experience that it still ends up everywhere. They get messy. :)

For scheduling purposes, we do try to serve infant meals at consistent times from day to day, but sometimes it just isn't possible. They sleep differently and therefore the times when they're hungry is sometimes different too. This age group is the hardest to keep on a schedule because of the fact that they need to be individually fed. There are days when a late feeding can mess up the time that you wanted to eat dinner, if they're not hungry for you then. We apologize in advance for that- we do the best we can in a group setting!

After 12 months the food program considers them big kids and they can eat all table food, all the time. For breakfast I am required to serve a whole grain carb, a fruit/veg, and milk. For lunch, a protein, a whole grain carb, two fruit/veg, and milk. Snacks need to consist of two items from two different food groups. We also have water available to drink at all meals. We're only allowed to do sugary stuff once a week, and I really only offer that on birthdays. It's become a fun tradition for the kids- they know we'll bake cupcakes together on birthday mornings.

My kids and I have been diagnosed with celiac disease. It's not an allergy- it's an auto-immune disorder so we'll never grow out of it. We are strictly gluten-free and it's just not worth it to me to serve gluten to the daycare kids, even though it would be cheaper to do. Twenty parts per million can make us sick, and with little kids around the risk is too high. We've learned to work with it pretty well and the kids for the most part really enjoy my cooking. I like the fact that we can advertise as being able to cater to special needs diets and allergies too. Because of the severity and strictness of the celiac diet, I know about cross-contamination and careful avoidance. If your child is allergic to something else, we can work around it. I've had pretty extensive experience with anaphylactic tree nut, peanut, dairy, and egg allergies as well. Also, Anna is dairy free so we make a lot of things with no dairy.  Sometimes we do almond milk, or else rice milk if we have kiddos with nut issues.

Due to all this, I really would prefer that you didn't bring your child (over 12 months) their own special food. It's one thing for infant formula or homemade baby food that I can freeze- that stuff is easy to deal with. But when it's goldfish crackers or pop tarts, or even something homemade and super healthy and fabulous, it's difficult sometimes to keep a mobile kid completely away from everyone else while they eat. We try to eat at the table family style and I hate to ostracize anyone. If the kind of food we serve doesn't work for you, I can work with you to see what we could change, or else maybe we're just not a good match for your family. That's why there are so many great daycares out there. :)

I cook hot food a majority of the time. Sometimes we'll do stuff like cold cuts and veggies for lunch, or cold cereal and fruit for breakfast. More often though we do homemade soups and stews and casseroles for lunch, and stuff like homemade pancakes, waffles, fruit crisp, or breakfast casseroles. I don't have the luxury of just ripping open a box most times, and if I do, it really doesn't taste that good. (Yesterday I made pancakes for breakfast using gluten-free Bisquick and almost all the kids threw it out. My homemade ones are much tastier!)

Here's a sample big-kid menu:

Breakfast:
hash-brown muffins with eggs and veggies: I use this recipe (I love pinterest!) and scramble the eggs and put in chopped veggies. I've been calling them "nest-eggs" to distinguish them from our other casseroles.

Lunch:
Chicken and rice soup, apple slices, and milk.

Snack:
GF pretzels, red bell pepper slices

My philosophy of food is that I will cook meals as healthy and tasty as I can make them. My job is to offer a variety of foods at appropriate times. The child's job is to decide whether or not they're hungry, if they want to eat the meal, and how many helpings. I don't short-order cook for kids who don't like what I'm serving. I explain to them that the next meal is several hours away and that they might get hungry if they don't choose to eat their food. But it's the child's choice. I don't think they will starve if they don't eat, and I'm not going to offer a bunch of empty calorie snacks in between meals just because they turned up their nose at the veggies. Besides, gluten free snacks are hideously expensive. Many reasons why I just don't do it.

I also don't serve juice. When Duchess was three and she had her first trip to the dentist, he commented that he could tell we never gave her juice. He said it's just as bad for kids' teeth as soda. Between that, the sugary calories, and the recent arsenic business, not to mention the fact that I would go broke trying to serve as much juice as this many kids would be willing to drink, I just don't do it. They get milk at meals, they get water in between. Every now and then we have a tea party and I make decaf white tea and we get all hoity-toity. Sometimes I make whole fruit smoothies. (love my blendtec!) But no juice.

And there you have it. Please understand that the purpose of this post is just to lay out what we choose to do, so that you can see if it matches what you want for your child. I am not trying to say that you are wrong or bad if your kid drinks juice at home, or if you cook their favorite thing every night in addition to whatever you're eating, or just whatever. No judgment here at all. There are many, many good ways to raise a child, and tons of different paths that all lead to productive members of adult society. My grandmother used to say, "you raise your kids to suit yourself", and that's totally true. Different things suit different people and if you do something else, that doesn't mean it isn't a valid choice.

Feasting

Here we are, very serious about our mashed potato jobs:


Tarzan and O'Malley took charge of the washing and drying. Duchess and I peeled and chopped.

Silvermist scooped them all up and put them in the pot.

Aurora ran the water. (I was beginning to run out of jobs at that point, but she thought she was the bee's knees so it worked out fine.)

And then we ate tons of lovely food! I survived! Poor Kanga has bronchitis and had to stay home, but Mrs. Potts helped out and I did more of the cooking last night than I ordinarily would have, rather than letting the kids help. They like it a lot, but they are SO SLOW. :)

I forgot to take pictures while everybody was here. That makes me sad. But it was a little busy. I said 11:30, and it was closer to noon by the time I had everything on the table. I think it went well though! Some people were asking about various menu items, so here's what I have links to:

the Pioneer Woman's mashed potatoes I put much less butter than it called for.
cornbread dressing
Ellie Krieger's cucumber salad
candy apple pie

We also had smoked turkey breast, sauteed green beans, and a lime jello salad that my family always makes for holidays. Real coca-cola is the key to that- all I had in the house was diet coke and so it separated into layers. Still tasty though. And I have to say, I'm kinda proud of myself that with the exception of the graham cracker crust on the pie, the entire dinner was gluten free AND soy free. (not dairy free though. I live for cream cheese dishes on holidays. My record is 8 blocks in one meal, spread throughout various dishes. I think only 3 this time. Maybe 4.)


Copper was trying really hard to get to Mater's lunch. But he had already eaten most of it. Plus it's not so sanitary to just let them all feed off the one tray. :) So I put Copper in a chair of his own and gave him some mashed potatoes.


I love the look on his face. Okay. I have successfully hunted and trapped my food. It is squishy. What the heck do I do with it now?

His answer? Finger paint awhile, then throw it on the floor. Don't think he ate one bite. But he had fun. And also ended up with potatoes in his eyebrows. Nice.

Thanksgiving Countdown

Menu is set! I'll have a signup sheet for ingredients in the living room today, just because people are asking what they can bring. Don't feel like you have to though- I know this week is going to cost more at the grocery store and I plan accordingly. :) It's something I just like to do every year. But help is nice too, if you want. I'm good with it either way.

People were also asking why I start so early and what on earth I'm doing with the kids all that time for weeks ahead. Their attention spans aren't so long for most things and I don't want to overdo it, but they're perfectly happy to work on something everyday for fifteen minutes and then it takes us a month to get it done. For example? Turkey place mats with leaf feathers for all the guests.

After this day, I realized it was somewhere between lunacy and suicide to set that many of them loose with Mod Podge at the same time. I'm still cleaning up sticky. So, one at a time now, we go outside to choose leaves from the neighbor's yard and then come in to stick them to the paper turkeys. After all the kids have made one for themselves and for the babies, then we go with round two, and three, and sometimes four, to make sure that attending family members can have a place mat too. They're turning out cute and I'm going to laminate them all. You'll get to take them home after the feast is done.

So that takes a long time.

Then, as I mentioned before, for a week or so we were looking through grocery circulars and cookbooks and Pinterest at different recipes, and reading books about Thanksgiving to give them ideas about traditional foods. We get on all kinds of tangents explaining what various vegetables are, and what they taste like, and if they have gluten and I can or can't cook them.

Now that the menu is done, we'll do things like put graham crackers in ziploc bags for them to beat into crumbs with plastic hammers. They'll beat happily for twenty minutes, I'll have to transfer the pieces into new bags two or three times as they rip through them, and when they're done? We have ONE tiny step of the candy apple pie done. So I put the crumbs away and we do another step later on. Takes awhile.

The day we do the mashed potatoes, every kid who wants to help has his own job. I've got somebody at the sink washing potatoes and one with a towel to dry. For awhile I had to be the peeler, but now that's Duchess. Yay third grader! Then I chop them, and somebody else puts them in the pot. After they cook then we have mashers and mixers and butter people... it's a huge affair and takes all morning.

And then we take days off to do important motor skills work like hammer golf tees into a big pumpkin.

They hammered for almost two hours over the course of the day. Then I pulled all the tees out and they started over. Fun times.

Getting Ready For Christmas

First of all, you know I love Mary P. She writes some of the BEST child care posts. I want to be her when I grow up. :) This post about giving and Santa and the holidays is fabulous, I think. Check it out.

Next: we baked our first batch of Christmas cookies today. Attendance is down this week due to sickness and maybe it's cowardly, but I prefer baking when not everybody is here. :) We'll do it again several times when there are different combinations of kids here so they all get to help. They're getting pretty decent at taking turns and standing in line, but they get really squirrelly if there are too many and they have to wait a "long time".


Stitch has been cracking me up through this whole process. She stirred and poured and took her turn, and then went and buckled herself in a chair. "Tray on! I ready! Eat cookie!" I keep telling her it's not time for cookies, that we're going to have lunch first, and they're too hot, but she is not dissuaded from the idea that if she just sits there long enough, cookies will come her way.


We made the cookies off the back of the candy cane flavored Hershey kisses bag, with a few allergy modifications. Usually I make my own flour blend or use one of the ones from my favorite cookbook, but I've had this bag of Bob's Red Mill all purpose gluten free baking mix in the cabinet and it needed to be used. To be honest, I didn't have high hopes for it. It's got garbanzo bean flour and fava bean flour in it. I was worried the cookies would taste like hummus or something. Plus I can't get over the Silence of the Lambs reference about eating the guy's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. I want to make that weird slurpy noise he makes every time I think of fava beans.

Yes, I am a strange individual. But some things just stick with ya, more than you wish they would, ya know?

Here. Look at Silvermist being cute and helping, to get that other image out of your head.

Anyway. Happily, they do not taste like hummus, or anything else unsavory. The mint kisses help a lot. It's still not my favorite cookie flour but I bet it might be good for thickening sauces or something like that.

Now I have to go make lunch quickly before their heads explode from lack of cookie!

Play Dough

Did you know Play-Doh has gluten? We can't use it here. Most of the time we substitute Moon Sand instead, since everyone enjoys that too. Some days it's fun to make playdough we can all use though. Here's the recipe I use:

gluten free play dough

It works well for mushing and playing, but I found out from sad experience that it does NOT bake well. With regular play doh you can fire it in the oven to make little statues. This stuff oozes and cooks and looks very yucky. But sometimes your first grader has to take a sad oozy elephant for her school sculpture, because we have no other options. :)

Lunch

I fixed a new recipe for lunch today and it was almost universally a great success. Flik said he didn't like it, but I'm pretty sure that's because he refused to taste it. Lilo also was not impressed. But all the others ate multiple bowls- O'Malley, Boo, Sully, Roo, Stitch, Bianca, Aurora, and newbie Pixie girl I have no name for LOVED it. I love when that happens. So I thought I'd share the recipe~ it's Chicken and Wild Rice soup and we ate the entire pot. Which was huge, even though I left out a couple ingredients. I didn't have any pimiento, although I did throw in a bit of red bell pepper, and no almonds, red onions, or turmeric. But still. Really tasty. Adding it to the repertoire.

Pajama Camping

It is hot. Really darn hot. And I don't know what kind of fierce insect has taken up residence around here, but even when I coat the kids with bug spray, they all get bitten to pieces and break into sweat the *instant* we set foot into the backyard. I heard it was supposed to be 108 today. We are staying IN.

So we decided it would be pajama day!

As the planning last night and this morning went on, it sort of morphed into a camping day which just happened to take place in our pajamas. That totally works for me. We put blankets and pillows all over the floor and they built a pretend campfire and we sat around and told stories for awhile. They wanted me to tell a scary one. Do I look crazy? Why would I frighten them? So I told them this one. They thought it was really dumb. Good. :) You act it out all dramatic and use scary voices and then when it's a pink jellybean... Duchess was all, really? Really Mom? that's IT?!

Then they decided we should make s'mores. I had none of the key ingredients, but I have been wanting to try a recipe I got for gluten free graham crackers, so we spent another big chunk of the morning baking a pan of homemade graham crackers. I am in equal parts amazed at my Betty Crocker-ness and disgusted at its necessity. They turned out pretty decently for a first attempt, although next time I think I need to roll them out thinner.


Cute New Boy (who I'm thinking of calling either Flik or Remy~ any thoughts on that?) was running a little late this morning because he got to spend the night with Grandma, and so he showed up in the midst of all this and she offered to go buy us marshmallows and hershey bars. WOO HOO! Thanks! :) Kanga and I have sampled the finished product and it is mighty tasty. We're waiting on everybody to wake up from their naps so we can serve the kiddos.

I was trying to think of what a good camping lunch would be, and I remembered those foil packet dinners we used to put in the fire when I was a girl scout. We always called them "girl scout specials" although I think they were actually boy scout specials first. I googled and hit the jackpot on a list of tons of them. I think we'll definitely have to try some of the others, especially the chocolate marshmallow banana one. We made the hobo pouches for lunch today and they were a pretty good success. I like that they can be tailored to each person- we made them one by one and they got to tell me which veggies they wanted in it. I had hamburger in each one, and then choices of peas, corn, carrots, mix veggies, mushroom, and onion. Ariel loved the meat and would have eaten double what I made her, and O'Malley picked out all his veggies and left the meat. Silly children.

Here's Sebastian's, ready to go into the oven:

And just for future reference, they took 45 minutes to bake, which I was not really expecting for some reason. By the time Simba's was done, he was totally gone. I don't think he got even one bite before he fell asleep in his chair!


After all that, it was after 2:00 before the last kid went to sleep, so I don't know if we'll have time for any camping art. I'm guessing we'll get through s'mores right before pickup, so you can take your kids home all full of sugar.

You're welcome. :)

But seriously, this has been a REALLY fun day so far. I just wish it was Friday, because a lot of times we do special things on Friday, and so it feels like it is. I think tomorrow we're going to call it Silly Hat Day and make sticker crowns and foam visors and dance around in our hats. We can't have Friday be a letdown!

Eating a camping lunch in our jammies is fun!!

Thanksgiving Prep

Tomorrow we're hosting a feast. Belle will be here, since kindergarten is off for the week, and I think Tinkerbell may pop in also. All the parents are invited for lunch and we're working hard to get things ready. The mashed potatoes are done and tucked safely into the fridge, and everybody has pronounced them tasty. I stuck a bite in Ariel's mouth when she wasn't paying attention and she went, "EEEWW I don't like... hey this is yummy!" See, you gotta try things.

Everyone old enough to help did some measuring and mashing. They all had great fun.





Aurora acting as Quality Control Manager in Supervisory Capacity:

Next we're baking cornbread for dressing and chocolate cake for cakeballs. YUM.

Gluten Free Daycare...

O'Malley and I have both just been diagnosed with celiac disease. This means we have a gluten intolerance and can't eat wheat, rye, oats, or barley. I'm going to have to make some changes in the way I feed the kids, and I'd like some parental help-

Please don't send your kids with food. I've got plenty of stuff here for them to eat, so please make them keep their crackers in the car. I'll be glad to start making gluten-free cakes for birthdays so we don't have to worry about making a mess. It's just much easier all the way around if we stay gf. O'Malley is too little to understand a mixed kitchen.

I'll be doing way more cooking from scratch, and things will be a little different while I experiment with recipes. There are still lots of things we can eat though.