C MONSTER NEW FOOD GUIDE

One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to get C Monster to eat fruits and vegetables. To make it less arbitrary to him when I say "you can not have more bread until you eat vegetables", I decided to make him an interactive food guide.   I used the canadian food guide as my example. They have a section where one can create a personal food guide.  I used this to determine how much food a 4-year-old boy should be eating. 

For the interactive guide I just drew and coloured a chart on a piece of paper and then printed pictures of the food groups off the internet.  I cut each one out and attached a magnet to each. Voila: a food guide simple enough a 4-year-old gets it.

The house rules for the food guide are:

• No dessert until all other categories are filled up.
• Once you are done your bread products, that is it for that category.
• Once you have filled up all 4 food group categories, you get a sticker.

Home-Made Yogurt

One of the thing I've been doing in the Excalibur dehydrator is home-made yogurt. It's pretty simple, tasty (when I don't make a mistake), easy to make with limited ingredients, and I know what's in it.

I start with a pot and 1L of milk (usually one bag of whole milk), and most of the time I add some milk powder (1/4 cup or more, optional), which results in firmer yogurt. Whisk thoroughly, then heat:


Heat that up to 180ºF and either let it start cooling immediately or hold it at that temperature for a little while, say twenty minutes. Some recipes seem to feel this helps convert the milk proteins to make them suitable for yogurt, although I don't find it makes a huge difference.

Let it cool down to 115ºF. Take a ladle-full out, mix in one of these:

• a package of yogurt bacterial culture


• a few tablespoons of commercial yogurt with active culture


• a few tablespoons of your previous batch of homemade yogurt

I usually start with the bacterial culture, do three or four batches in a row using one batch of yogurt to start the next, and then go back to the commercial culture. Some recipes recommend that you avoid using your own culture too many times in a row in case you end up accidentally culturing something else along the way, something that you don't want to be eating in quantity. I'm not convinced that's totally necessary, but commercial cultures aren't terribly expensive, so I don't mind going this route.

Whisk the mixture thoroughly, then return it to the pot and whisk the mixture into the milk thoroughly, then distribute into jars:


This is a reasonable time to add a little sugar, honey, maple, vanilla, if you like. Don't go overboard, you can always add more sweetener later if you like. Put the jars in the dehydrator at 115ºF for four hours to let the culture do its work:


Check on them, if they don't seem firm enough, or you decide you want a very tangy yogurt, you can let it sit another couple of hours in the dehydrator. It won't be at its firmest yet, and there may be some whey at the top. That's ok:


Cap and chill the cans in the fridge, for a while, perhaps overnight. It'll firm up further, as well as cool down:


At this point it's at it's firmest, and is "set" yogurt. If you want to mix in some additional sweetener here you can. If there's whey, you can pour it off or stir it in. If you mix it at this stage it becomes "stirred" yogurt, which many people prefer:


If you want, you can put your yogurt in a cheesecloth or coffee filter overnight to drain some of the whey out, at which point it will become Greek-style yogurt.

Finally, eat, or feed to your children:

How to make glue...

How To Make Glue

When I was a kid we pretty much never bought glue my mom or memere would make it for us,  they used to just mix a bit of water with flour and that was it.  I wanted to find a recipe that I could make ahead of time and store.

Today I whiped up a batch; here is the recipe.

1/2 cup white flour
1 tablespoon white sugar
1 cup water


Mix all the ingredients until smooth with a whisk; then heat on low siring until desired consistency is reached.  Pour into an airtight container. 

This will make white glue that will dry transparent.  For the little ones that have a hard time understanding where the glue is you can add a few tablespoons of sparkles or some food coloring to make a more fun version of glue.  The sparkles or color help the little ones understand where the glue is on the page; also when they decide to use the glue as paint all is not lost you still have a work of art.

I will let you know if it goes bad before we go threw all of it...

Now That we Have Glue

C Monster spent parts of the day working on a mobile.  I collect various pieces from the recycling and we painted them green this morning.  Using the last bits of our store bought paint - so I guess I will be trying some paint recipes soon.  After they were dried C Monster and Grandma used the sparkly glue to attaches various ornamentation.  Once everything is dry we will turn it into a mobile for his room.

Looking Forward To

To my parents arriving - I think I said this before but I am really looking forward to it.