Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Homecooking Adventures 6: Baby Edition

Dear All,

It's been a while since I did not play in the kitchen. Actually, since Myrtille is here, I certainly don't have the time to play around and my cooking skills are just going down. Anyway, if you are a new reader, please feel free to check my previous homecooking adventures by clicking here.

But lately, as I said in my previous post, we introduced some babyfood to Myrtille and as we like to cook our meal ourselves, we started to cook Myrtille's porridge. Several mums asked us for our method, so here it is.

First, we buy organic for her, as she is little, she does not eat much and we can still afford it. Also, organic food tastes better, today, if you buy vegetables in the market, they don't have taste... at all... or, you need to buy plenty if you want a bit of taste.

So, in the morning before leaving for work, I would take her vegetables, here some corn and potatoes, pick the corns seeds out, one by one, then, peel the potato. The night before, we would pre-soak some brown rice (following the rice's recommendations). Then, pour the rice (with the water used to soak it) and the vegetables in a double boiler and boiled for an hour so.

Once done, you obtain a kind of rice cooked with vegetable, we pour everything in a blender and turn it on:

Kitchen Wares for Baby Food

After a first pass in the blender, in today's particular case, I added some pre-cooked green vegetable (just boiled and blended them an hour ago.

Our stock of pre-cooked vegetables (choi sum and spinach):
Vegetables for 8 days

We just take one pot and pour it in the mix:
Mixed and Choi Sum Added

Once everything is mixed together, we need to pass it through a strainer:
Fully Mixed, ready to be Strainned

Here is Myrtille's today's lunch:
Tadaa...
Corns, Potatoes, Choi Sum and Brown Rice.

Here is another one:
Myrtille's Lunch
Porridge: Brown rice, cucumber, pumpkin.
Drink: Light Apple Juice.
Desert: Pear's Purée

Results: A satisfied little Tummy

That's all for today, I pray that you enjoyed it, and hope next time, I will be back again with some new plates in mind.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Spring

Spring is coming and it is quite a season here... It's hot and humid. The worse is that we are in the middle of a weird spot where very cold and dry wind can cool down the city during a week and humid and hot air can replenish the city's street the week after. It makes rain falling inside, the water condense on the cool walls making them sweat.

This is also myrtille's first spring. She is quite growing, she eats up a lot of porridge, she starts to have her own rhythm, she likes to smile at me when I am making a clown face. She loves to stand up now that she knows that she can do it, we still have to hold her, but we are patient that she will learn it at her pace. Last week end we took her out and apparently, she loves parks and green areas.

Myrtille Seating in TST Park

I started to play a lot with her and it makes me feel important to her, at least it makes her important to me. It looks like that I am building my own relationship with her, at least. Yukyin did tell me about that lately, she found that I have changed. Great! If it can make both of them live happier, then why not?

Dad and Me

On my work side, I have been promoted, that's great! Not so great is the amount of responsabilities that are induced by that promotion, being responsible for other's performance, for their future performance, interviewing people, etc... Next to it, I need to work out the IT department of my company, that's also a huge piece of work there... Put it simple, I think that everybody should grow up one day, it's just that the pace of my growth took a haste pill lately. I really need to take some rest. During my numerous interviews, I noticed one thing among fresh grads from everywhee in the world, it is the way people strives to gain ranks in a company but it is way lot more accented in Hong Kong graduates. They want to jump from position to position, from title to title, from low salary to higher and higher salaries. It's not that I am not interest in all that, but I am not sure that all of them can soak up the amount of pressure and workload that those titles require... It can just be me, after all.

Time will tell.

To open spring season, let me present a few of my last pictures.

Myrtille playing with dad at home:
 Studio Like Portrait :)
Give me that camera!!
Cool Studio like picture :)

Myrtille eating her toe:

Myrtille eating her toes

Myrtille in TST with her parents.

Family Picture

Right now, I want to purchase a new lens but I am not really sure of the usage I want to do with it yet, so we'll see later. Maybe my year's budget will go into software instead of hardware. Like buying lightroom... I am trying the beta2 and it's very quite cool, very quick photographic workflow.

Anyway, I hope that you don't mind having me posting that seldom, I still hope to do better. Please keep us in your prayers.

Jump to my flickr link on the right to see lots of latest pictures:
Valutin - View my recent photos on Flickriver