So Much Going On.....

I guess it is just getting to be that time of year....you know, right before the holidays, when everything goes to hell in a hand-basket?  I have been crazy busy the past week or so.....I restarted my cake business and it has been booming!  That is great news, but it has not allowed me time to write and I really intended to blog at least once a week.  Ah, well.  What are you going to do, right?  Anyway, we have had a lot of stuff going on, in addition to all of my cakes.  The baby has been trying new foods right and left and has moved to eating three meals a day.  We are working on texture with him right now, which he is not particularly fond of, but I think it will come in time.  As far as "real human food", as my five year old calls it, goes, he has tried potatoes, scrambled eggs and mashed bananas.  The eggs were moderately successful, but he tried really hard to gag himself on both the potatoes and the bananas.  It was not a pretty sight. We have been moving through the second foods pretty rapidly as he has also increased the amount that he eats at any given meal.  Right now, he seems to be enjoying the green vegetables the most (usually an odd combination of green veg and fruit, actually), but he has also shown an affinity for the pumpkin and banana combo, as well as a lovely pinkish bananas, beets and blueberries that he tried yesterday and today.  I plan to get him some teething biscuits at the store in the next couple of days and hopefully, we can start giving him food from the table pretty soon as well.

Probably the most interesting thing I cooked in the past couple of weeks was our German dinner a week or so ago.  I did a roasted pork tenderloin, served with red cabbage and sauteed spaetzle and mushrooms.  The spaetzle was by far the most interesting thing on the table, particularly because we grew the mushrooms!  My sister gave my husband a "grow your own mushrooms" kit for his birthday and we decided to try it out.  Lo and behold, we successfully grew about 1/2  pound of oyster mushrooms!  I harvested them, cleaned them and sauteed them with the spaetzle for a twist on our "normal" spaetzle combo of onions, mushrooms and swiss cheese.  Yum.  I missed the cheese in the revised dish, but it was still pretty delicious.  The mushrooms added a nice earthy quality and, since I did actually saute them in the drippings from the pork tenderloin, which I seared before roasting it in the oven, they picked up quite a bit of the pork flavor as well.  In any case, it was pretty tasty, which makes me more than a little disappointed that we have not had any success (yet) growing mushrooms again from the kit.  (You are supposed to be able to grow between 2 and 4 crops of mushrooms.  We are only on our second.)  The weather changed recently, bringing colder temps, so that might have something to do with it.  Ah well, maybe we will still get some more delicious mushrooms that I can play with in another dish.  Until next time, folks!  Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!