Toddler Recipe, coming up!
The challenge of feeding a family with healthy and yet delicious food is really turning out to be my favorite pastime. Bradley is a great chef and makes the most amazing meals--last night was a veggie noodle stir fry to die for. I'm going for ease and speed most of the time though (Iddle wrangling being what it is...). I think we have hit on a winner with this one and I wanted to share it.
I have pieced this together from the emails I wrote to a couple of friends about this recipe I tried today. It was a great success as far as Charlie Mac (and his parents) were concerned and pretty easy too!
This morning:we were trying to think of ways to get veggies into Charlie Mac without always just dicing them and thought we'd make ravioli (thanks, Good Eats!)--that's just a bit ambitious for our schedule though, so yesterday we came up with the idea of using biscuit dough to make little pouches (again, thanks, Alton!) of different combos. He can pick them up and the bread will soak up any juices (less mess--yay!), plus when he's older I thought it might be something fun we could do together. I'm trying mashed sweet potato with cream cheese today.
After lunch: OK--the first batch I've made using "dinner rolls" from a tube.
I cut them in half (with scissors, forget trying to cut dough with a knife) and then opened them up from the cut side.
Put in a 1/2 - a whole teaspoon of filling (you really could use anything here, I used the sweet tater/philly combo) in the middle and pinch the edges shut in a taco shape. Eyeball the amount of filling to go with the size of your circle of dough so that you can get the edges together cleanly. This keeps it from popping open while they bake. But even if they do pop open, it's no biggie.
Grease the baking sheet even though the tube says not to because I didn't and they stuck a bit. Bake for 9-10 minutes at 400 or at whatever temp the tube says to.
Voila!
I am going to look up some dough recipes because I just don't like giving him flour that isn't whole grain and I'm thinking that the dough would be easier to work with because I could just roll out little balls of it into circles instead of trying to re-train tube dough.
Dough Recipe I found:I bet that you could buy something like this frozen from a big grocery store like Central Market or another premium one, but for home made, I'm thinking that this one would be a good one. The tube dough worked really well though.
http://www.evitamins.com/healthnotes.asp?ContentID=2788003Just a little while ago:Charlie Mac really loved them--he "mmmmed" his way through three for lunch and then three more for supper. He ran all over the place with them and I haven't found any sweet potato on anything yet! (Yes, we do try to sit down for most meals, but today was insane...call it "recipe research...")
I didn't bake them all, but sprayed several with a little Pam (I would recommend not stacking them and using olive oil if you have to though---God only knows what Pam is doing to us) and stacked them in a bowl covered with saran in the fridge. I popped a refrigerated batch in for supper while the oven was still preheating and baked for 10 minutes. I think they were even better than the first ones.
I'm freezing the ones I have left and will test them in a couple of days to see how they hold up to the big chill. We could be onto something here! Hot Pockets, watch out, mama pockets are here to stay! (waka waka)
Looking to the future of pocket food...I am going to work more on these trying out the pizza dough and the freezing and maybe "painting" on them with food coloring (organic of course :-)). These would be great for me and Brad when we are on the go as well!
I also think I am going to get a ravioli maker and then poor Charlie Mac may never learn to use utensils.(...kidding Daddy!) But I am getting a ravioli maker--look at all the options!
http://www.kasbahouse.com/villawareonline/cavatelliandraviolimakers.asp
Or, I could just toss it over to the other side....
OK, OK, when's Daddy getting home?
