Butter and Baby Teeth

First, Baby Eye Candy for the grandparents. You can sort of see her teeth:



Lambie lies senseless under the table, possibly drunk on all the crackers that Miss Boo tried to feed it. Can you tell that it's easier to type when you're holding a graham cracker? And no, this picture wasn't taken on the same day as the last one, she just ends up wearing this shirt a lot.

Since she got the teeth, she's been weaning herself (which is fine with me) and has been eating more and more solid food and drinking what seems like endless sippy-cups of water. The challenge becomes, as she nurses less, to make sure she gets enough cholesterol in her diet. I know, this is counterintuitive, but kids do actually need a good bit of cholesterol until they're two years old, for nerve development. Most of this comes from whole milk, for most kids, but Miss Boo can't have milk until she hits her birthday later this month. In the meantime, we're experimenting with little dabs of butter on her carrots.

So you can see I've been thinking about butter lately. There is an absurd commercial on TV that has a 50s-style household eating dinner, and the mother brings out baked potatoes with a whole stick of butter each in them. "We didn't know much about saturated fat back then," says the voiceover, "but now there's Smartchoice" or whatever the name of the margarine that it's advertising was. I say absurd, not just in the idea that equivalent amounts of margarine would be better for you than butter, but because even in the 50s butter was expensive, and people didn't use it to that crazy extent. I have a thing for old cookbooks (surprise!) and here is a typical dinner menu from one of mine, admittedly from the 60s and not the 50s:

Hamburgers

Lima beans

Marinated Tomatoes

Custard Bread Pudding

Coffee

Mmmm, just decadent with fat, isn't it? Actually it could be quite reasonable, depending on how lean the hamburger is, whether you butter the lima beans, and how many eggs go in the bread pudding. My point is that fat has always been expensive in human history-- only recently have we become rich enough as a society to start paying extra for things which have the fat removed from them. It's kind of a funny turnaround.

Of course, if you look at it from the perspective of trying to grow some of your own food, which we experimented with this summer, it's difficult to obtain fat unless you have livestock. Sure, you can grow sunflowers and things that have oily seeds, but it takes a lot of land to grow enough to get the amount of fat you need in your diet. Just makes for interesting thinking, and it makes you grateful for the fact that you can go to the store and buy a pound of butter and a gallon of milk without having to actually handle the cow.

This is a long digression in a post in which I meant to talk about old-fashioned cooking. I am impressed when I read old cookbooks and discover how simple their menus were. It gets discouraging, on the other hand, to look at the recipies in magazines that all want you to have arugala, black cherry cordial, and pine nuts in your pantry. Old, simple menus generally call for real food, from scratch, which I have in the house. The magazine recipies generally want expensive ingredients and at least one thing that is pre-cooked-- a rotisserie chicken, a jar of alfredo sauce, or a packet of spice mix. Very frustrating, when you're trying to menu plan for a week or two AND come in under budget AND eat something other than hot dogs and canned corn.

However that may be, this post is getting long, so I think I'll save my thoughts on menu planning for next time. I've noticed that not a lot of resources have you do it my way, and I'm egotistical enough to think my way works better than "first, look at sale flyers, then, make out a menu for the week, then, go shopping." And don't worry, I don't feed my husband lima beans. Or hot dogs and canned corn.

Ciao bella,

Breanna