Juliettables

With the boys all back in school and a moment to devote my efforts to something other than direct interaction with them, I have been contemplating trying to broaden my recipe repertoire for Juliette.  Her diet is most easily administered in fresh fruit and vegetables, all natural hot dogs (groan) and roasted chicken.  I have an oat muffin mix, an oat pancake mix, and a coconut cookie recipe, which, along with plain potato chips, are the only non-natural foods she can consume.  I am bored by looking at her plate of grapes or sliced apples, or roast potatoes or carrots, bananas and applesauce.  I long to give her a little of the food excitement the rest of us experience.  Luckily she is too young and too inexperienced with food to know the difference yet.

Paleo recipes daunt me; so many unusual and unknown ingredients.  I hesitate to put these unusual things on my shopping list, as a cook who likes to decide a menu based on what I've got stocked.  Recipes and grocery lists feel like a straight-jacket to me, stifling food creativity.  My problem is that these unusual foods are unfamiliar and I don't yet have a comfort level to experiment with them, or use leftovers up in another way.  To buy an item, use a quarter of it, and toss the rest feels like a waste of money and resources.

I am also fighting four other people with taste buds that do not tend toward the more exotic flavours.  While they are always willing to try something once, but often genuinely don't like these recipes.  I am reluctant to force a diet change, and yet find the idea of preparing two complete meal exhausting and frankly unmanageable.

I do hope that in this new fall season I might find some soup recipes we can enjoy (I love restaurant soups but have yet to find a store-bought or homemade recipe that I like), and venture further into vegetables beyond the carrots-potatoes-peas-beans I revert to almost exclusively.

Adventures in motherhood, especially when we are stay-at-home mothers, allow for these kinds of work projects with which to pass our days.  Hopefully as Juliette grows she will also mellow enough for this adventure to be ours...outings to farmer's markets and ambles through grocery stores to discover new things together.