Super Porridge (and other not so super adventures in food preparation)

I have a confession, I have a secret desire for the ability to magically create food out of thin air with the snap of my finger.  I don't really like to prepare food, I seldom like how it turns out. 

We started making Super Porridge, which is a recipe from the book Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron. 

I really like this book.  It has great recipes.  I wouldn't say that it is the most well organized book I've ever read, but it has a lot of wonderful recipes and information about making healthy foods for your baby.  In addition, it has information about how to prepare almost any vegetable or fruit that you can imagine.  For example, I have never eaten swiss chard or beet greens before, but I looked up how to prepare them in her book.  I ate it for dinner and then put it in the food processor to make little frozen cubes for the baby. 

So, let me now get to the super porridge part of the story...super porridge is basically a bunch of whole grains that you grind up in your blender or food processor.  Really, Super Porridge starts out as homemade rice cereal.  As your baby ages, you can add other grains and it becomes more the consistency of oatmeal.  

We've made super porridge three times.  We ground a large batch of grains and keep it in the fridge.  We use the dry powder to make porrige every few days.  We keep prepared porridge in the fridge and use it up over 2-3 days. 

Our first batch was too grainy.  We started with oatmeal, millet, and bulgar.  I already had prepared rice cereal, so I just planned to combine it with our mixture.  We also added lentils to the mix to add a little more protein to the mixture.  Our first attempt at porridge, basically didn't soak up the water.  We had to dump in about 1/2 cup of Organice Gerber Rice Cereal to the mix. 

The results were much better for the second attempt.  We put the ground grain in the food processor again to make the grain particles smaller.  I also bought long grain brown rice from the bulk aisle at Whole Foods and added more rice to our ground grains.  What I've learned is that super porridge is really an experiment every time you make it or serve it:)