"Popeye Basil" Burger and Oven Baked French Fries

Behold: the "Popeye Basil Burger" with oven baked French fries.  My husband coined the title of this recipe last night as we were discussing, surreptitiously of course, what the secret ingredients were that I mixed into this delicious riff on a traditional hamburger.  (Our kids were, obviously, sitting at the table, blissfully enjoying their burger which had been loaded with extra ingredients that they would normally not touch with a ten foot pole.)  I started with a pound of organic, grass-fed, ground beef that I actually found last weekend at my local grocery store.  Being the queen of re-purposing that I am, I also had some bagged spinach in the refrigerator that was threatening to go totally manky on me if I didn't use it.  So, I decided to finely chop it in my little food processor, add some garlic and then add the mixture to the ground beef to "stretch" the beef, as it were.  While I was doing this, my two older children were watching TV, so I was trying to get this all done and pitch the packaging before they had a chance to come into the kitchen to investigate what I would be serving them for dinner. 

In addition to the spinach, which my younger daughter once described as making her "tongue all angry",  I also chopped up ten ounces of button mushrooms and tossed those into a skillet to brown.  Once those were done, I cooled them off a bit, tossed them into the mixing bowl with the spinach, garlic and beef; then, I added a beaten egg, bread crumbs and salt and pepper.  By this time, my younger daughter had finished her TV time and had arrived in the kitchen to check out the dinner preparations.  She looked into the bowl, where the ingredients awaited mixing and forming into the hamburger patties, said, "that looks pretty good.  What is all that green stuff?"  I fudged my answer (DUH!) with, "oh, it is some herbs and spices that I am putting into the hamburgers".  She walked away satisfied and I was left to continue my food deception for a little while longer.  

I grilled the burgers on my favorite kitchen gadget, which I may have mentioned before - the Griddler by Cuisinart - topped a few with Swiss cheese (for my husband and me - the girls don't care for Swiss or any white cheese for that matter) and popped the burgers onto toasted sandwich thins.  I served them with hand-cut (like that really matters, but burger joints are forever touting the fact that they actually cut their potatoes with a knife.  Puh-lease.), oven baked French fries, which began as russet potatoes, thinly sliced and tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper and a seasoned salt blend.  They were baked in a 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes until crisp and golden brown.  My oldest daughter pronounced, "well, at least the fries taste the same as usual."  

The burgers may not have tasted the "same as usual", but they were eaten with nary a complaint and nary a question as to what "Popeye basil" actually is.  The mushrooms were completely undetected - score one for me (or two I guess, since I got spinach and mushrooms down their throats without them gagging)!  My younger daughter even had seconds!  So, I think this recipe was a resounding success: I stretched well made beef into 8 hamburgers; I used up an item in my fridge that would have probably gone to waste otherwise; I got my kids to eat - and enjoy! - two veggies that they really dislike; and, best of all, I have an extra hamburger for me to enjoy when my son takes his mid-day nap!  Guh-guh-guh, indeed!  (That was my dialectal Popeye.....just to be clear.) 

Adventures in Baby-Feeding!

Anyone get that movie reference?  Anyone?  Alrighty then....well, as the title of the post indicates, we have officially started solid foods at our house.  My four and a half month old son has taken fairly well to moving from an all liquid diet to a diet that includes a couple of tablespoons of some kind of solid food on a daily basis.  As with our other children,  we started the baby off with a semi-liquid rice cereal (organic brown rice cereal) that he mostly spit out onto his bib - which is typical.  We fed him the cereal for four days, gradually thickening the consistency.  I can't say that he had any particular opinions (as far as infant opinions go).  I mean, would you have any strong opinions on what amounts to a pasty gruel?  Nope, I didn't think so. 

Anyway, things started to get slightly more interesting when I purchased several different packets of organic fruits and vegetables at my local grocery store.  I was a little disappointed with the selection there, but I figured that he didn't need a huge variety to begin with anyway.  I chose organic roasted apples by Sprout, a baby food company apparently co-founded by TV chef Tyler Florence.  I am not really sure why the apples needed to be roasted, but Mr. Florence seems to prefer that method of cooking baby food.  It definitely deepens the color of the pureed fruit, but I would kind of beg to differ that it enhances the "natural sweetness" of the apples.  Those suckers must have been some kind of tart when they were roasted and pureed because the final product was pretty sour.  I didn't taste them before I started spooning them into my son's mouth, so I was kind of surprised when he made a face after the first spoonful.  He continued eating them, so he must not have been completely put off by the flavor.

Our next adventure was with roasted butternut squash, also by Sprout.  This went over substantially better with the baby - he actually started opening his mouth in anticipation of the next bite of squash!  I can understand the roasting method here - the squash would have to be cooked somehow.  The flavor, in my opinion, was fairly mild, but my son seemed to really enjoy it (especially when mixed with a little rice cereal).

Since our baby food packet supply was being rapidly depleted, and since I happened to be at one of my favorite stores - Target - I decided to see if that store had anything else by way of different baby food to try.  I was so excited to see that Gerber's organic line was more complete at this store.  They had peas and prunes in the first foods, which I was pleased to see, especially because my grocery store did not have any first foods in that particular brand.  I picked up a couple of packages and was really excited to try peas with my son.  The packages sat in our pantry for a couple of days and the day that I deemed him ready to try peas, I happened to pick up the package to take a closer look at it.  The label on the front touted "now with DHA!", so I thought, "huh, I wonder if those have a higher protein content than the other brand's veggies".  I flipped it over to check the nutrition label, happened to read the ingredients and discovered that the DHA comes from adding tuna oil to the baby food.  I have two problems with this: first and foremost, we have a family history of severe anaphylactic-type allergies to fish, shellfish and nut products.  I always read ingredient labels and have always been extremely careful when it comes to feeding these potential allergens to my babies.  Obviously, he would not be able to eat the products with the tuna oil in them.  Which is ALL of Gerber's organic baby food line - even down to the fruits!  That is my second problem: adding tuna oil to fruits just offends my chef sensibilities.  Seriously.....I don't want to eat a peach cobbler studded with tuna fish, why the hell would my baby want to eat a pureed version of the same thing?!  Back to the allergen thing and more to the point: Gerber did not even have a warning label on the food, indicating that it contained fish products.  That just pissed me off. 

So, long story....long?.....I will be writing a letter to Gerber to complain about the stupid DHA.  I will also be making my own organic peas (sans tuna oil, of course).  Making my own organic baby food got me thinking about other things....like switching to cloth diapers instead of the disposables that my son rapidly outgrows.  That is a totally different blog though.  Right now, we have just mastered Sprout's Roasted Pear baby food.  Oddly enough, he did not enjoy that one very much either.  I will have to try to find another brand of fruit baby food for him to try because he may just not care for Tyler Florence's riff on fruit puree.  I don't know.  (Again, I tasted it - this time, it was less tart than the apples, but really didn't have much pear flavor.  Geez....this makes me think that I may be getting myself in for making more than just baby peas here.)  Until next time, baby (and grown up) food lovers! 

I'm Back!

Yes, that's right!  I am back....after an embarrassingly long period of time!  I know I usually start my posts by apologizing for not writing more frequently, but this time I am going to start by updating you all on what has been going on in my life and what I hope the future holds for my writing.  

First of all, we have had a lot of changes over the past year!  Part of the reason that, if you go back to my archives and read my posts from last fall, I did not want to cook or eat was that we were expecting our third baby!  It was a boy, who is now a healthy, happy (and huge) almost-four-month-old!  For the first couple of months, I was fairly nauseous and rarely, if ever, felt like cooking.  After that, I slowly regained my normal sense of taste and smell, as well as my appetite, but I did not really feel like writing about what I was doing in the kitchen.  At this point, I am ready to pick the blogging back up and ready to let all (two) of my readers in on what is cooking....if not on a daily basis, then at least on a weekly basis.  (That is my goal, anyway.  As it stands right now, I am typing as fast as I can to take advantage of my son's very short nap times.)

So, here is where the adventures begin!  I have recently come to a couple of conclusions about what I want to do with my life and with this blog.  First and foremost, I plan to continue writing about the healthy (for the most part) fare that I cook for my family.  I also plan to write about introducing new foods to my infant son, as I am really quite fascinated with how babies develop a taste for new foods.  (Side note: he will be eating organic foods; occasionally cooked by me, but most often of the packaged variety.  I am going to try my hand at veggie purees and, possibly, fruit.)  Part of my reasoning behind writing about what I fix for my family, is my passion for helping all families eat better.  I have always been a proponent of healthy eating, but I especially want to do my part to help combat obesity, particularly childhood obesity.  I plan to not only write about what my family eats, but also about how much the food cost, per serving, and how my readers can replicate my recipes.  

So, that is how it stands right now.  I am going to have to run and try to engineer a longer nap for my son. (I am trying to begin sleep training him right now and I usually have to help him fall back asleep once his first sleep cycle has run its course.)  Look for new posts often - hopefully, they will all make sense, as I continue to be a bit sleep deprived!  Until next time!