Don't Feed the Monkey!

The advantage of being a stay-at-home mum (which, to all intents and purposes I am, at the moment) is that you - theoretically - have time.  Gallons of time.  Oodles of time.  A plethora of seconds, and indeed, sometimes minutes!

Anyway, like a good mum, I have decided to put some of this precious extra time into food.  You know, nutritous, home-cooked, so full of whole-meal flour it's indistinguishable from horse chaff.  Each thing I make, I present to the Monkey with a small fanfare, and await his reaction. They are something like as follows:

lasagna (special low-salt variety, with formula bechamel): frantic arm-waving to fend off incoming spoon.  Upon distraction (a sudden loud shriek from mother tends to result in freezing and open-mouthed gormless expression), spoonful of food was watered down with large amount of drool, and extruded.  Baby 1, Mum 0

fruity muffins (no sugar, LOTS of fruit):  I actually thought these were quite tasty, plenty of grated apple and currants meant they were really sweet enough.  But apparently far too moist.  Poked about with finger for 10 minutes, then tossed overbard. Baby 2, Mum 0


apple-oat biscuits:  I can't blame him with these. They turned out soft, rather than crunchy (as I'd hoped), and tasted far too mealy and oaty to me. And they bounced nicely.  Baby 3, Mum 0

banana bread: First part of my attempt to make rusks - thought I'd leave some of the original loaf un-rusked to see if he'd take to it.  He took it, and experimented with its aerodynamic properties.  Baby 4, Mum 0

banana bread rusks: Second part of the rusk experiment. Slices of banana bread dried till hard and crisp.  Again, pretty tasty as far as I'm concerned, but probably a reasonably full set of teeth required for proper consumption.  To his credit, he did actually attempt to gnaw the edge of a piece before deciding I was playing a practical joke with him, and ... yup, you  guessed it.  Baby 5, Mum 0

pumpkin & cheese scones:  Given up on sweet snacks, thought maybe his tastes ran to the savoury.  He likes cheese.  He eats pumpkin without too much of a fight.  He loves bread... so, I thought I might be in with a chance, here.  They turned out a luminous orange - like something scraped off the bottom of one of the Chernobyl reactors.  He spent a large amount of time dissecting a scone into its component crumbs, sending each crumb sailing into carpet oblivion - although, given the colour of the carpet, and the colour of the crumbs, not nearly oblivion enough for his mother.  Baby 6, Mum 0

Tomorrow, we're feeding him McDonald's!