Tag Archives: rice

306/365. the power of a positive school lunch program to form social norms.

306/365. the power of a positive school lunch program to form social norms.

for as long as i can remember, odin’s favorite meal has been beans and rice and cheese and kale. and i think it’s not just because it’s covered in three types of yummy dairy ( cheese, sour cream and butter ). and it’s certainly not because of its association with The Dog Food Burrito Incident 🙂

rather, i think it shows the power of early experiences of a good meal combined with fond memories of friends, as it was a frequent lunch dish at the local walforf school. all the kids loved the hot meal made from scratch with organic ingredients by Jim The Cook.

don’t get me wrong, mac and cheese and pizza are still on his top five list but i think his love of beans and rice and cheese and kale with last a long time.

the Dog Food Burrito Incident.

the Dog Food Burrito Incident. I.

and it came to pass that it was my night on dinner duty and i was under a clear directive to use leftovers in the fridge in whatever concoction i could concoct. an easy enough task since we had just had black beans and rice topped with cheese and a side of kale the night before. i thought, i’ll just mix them all together with a bit of garlic, fold into a tortilla shell, cover with cheese and heat in the oven for a bit for a quick and easy burrito!

as i quickly grabbed ingredients, i notice some leftover refried beans in a container, so gave it a quick smell test, noted that it didn’t smell rotten, but also didn’t really smell like refried beans either. it had a vaguely familiar smell. one that i couldn’t quite place. but i was on a mission to keep on the dinner making schedule and brushed aside any nagging thoughts that something might be amiss.

the Dog Food Burrito Incident. II.

after 15 or 20 minutes in a 350°F oven the burritos emerged piping hot and covered in melted cheesy goodness and we started to eat them. straight away, odin refused to take more than one bite. too much garlic ( this is a common dinner issue. i keep thinking i can sneak it almost never works and i’m denial about possibly living without garlic for the next 10 years ).

kris ate half a burrito before declaring that they had too much garlic.

i, happily, devoured several ( with corn torillas in keeping with my mostly gluten free lifestyle ) while proclaiming they Most Certainly Did Not Contain Too Much Garlic. no sirree, they did not!

the next morning, while getting ready odin ready for school i noticed there was another container of refried beans in the fridge with just a small amount gone.

huh? someone just had to have a small bite of refried beans for breakfast? ever so slowly it dawned on me as i raced out the door to yell down to kris and odin as they walked down the street towards school.

the Dog Food Burrito Incident. III.

“HEY, KRIS, SAY WHAT’S IN THAT CONTAINER IN THE FRIDGE THAT LOOKS LIKE REFRIED BEANS?”

if i only could have taken a picture of her face as she turned around and slowly registered the real meaning of my question.

“WHAT?! NOOOOOOOO! TELL ME YOU DIDN’T!”

and that’s when i remembered that, unusually, we have soft dog food in the house to smother in the antibiotics pushkin has to choke down to help treat his latest lyme disease flare up.

i don’t think odin is going to let me forget the Dog Food Burrito Incident. ever.

the eric update – day 94: waiting patiently. too much rice.

day 94: curled hand with creases

hey, today was pretty boring, in a good way. we just sat around waiting for tommorrow when we’ll hopefully have a much better idea as to when eric will get a the “o.k.” to go home. he didn’t have any alarms and seemed to continue to recover from his recent severe episodes of reflux.

day 94: a nose, an eye, a hand and an ear.

i’m not sure we’ll get much sleep tonight as we ponder whether he’ll be coming home in a day or two or three or six or ten. and with not much by way of “excitement” ( in a good way ), i fill the time by taking macro shots of my son 🙂

day 94: moussed hair

kris has given him another bath and put cream in his hair and on his hair to help prevent a condition known as cradle cap. the cream makes it appear as if we’ve moussed his hair.

day 94: measured

i guess it’s a good thing that the recent big news is that we’ve discovered that we’ve been adding too much rice to his feedings to control his reflux. yesterday we discovered that we were adding twice as much pulverized rice to his milk than he needed which is nice to know since the solid food in his diet is making him a little gassy. hopefully less rice will mean that he’ll have less gastrointestinal troubles.

for the record, if your adding pulverized rice to milk you only need 3/4 of teaspoon per 45 cc’s of milk. previously we were adding 1.5 teaspoons per 45 cc’s which is correct only if you’re using rice that isn’t pulverized.

you really do learn something new everyday in the nicu.

the eric update – day 89: a little nissen clarity. goodbye gassy barley, hello rice.

day 89: YAFG

tonight we finally received some clarity from a nurse as to why the neonatologists and surgeons are so seriously considering eric to be a candidate for g-tube and nissen surgery, despite the fact that he seems to have stabilized and isn’t showing any obvious signs of abnormal discomfort during feedings. his upper GI series showed that he he begins to reflux at around 10-15 cc’s ( which isn’t a lot when you consider that his entire feeding is 45 cc’s ) and babies that begin to reflux at such low volumes get immediately put on the short list for being candidates for the surgery, since it’s often their experience that babies who begin to reflux at such low volumes eventually need the surgery and procrastinating just leads to esophageal damage.

so, it looks like we may need to balance the doctor’s recommendations against the growing number of negative opinions we’ve received from parents who have had children that have had the surgery. indeed, our nurse tonight who clarified why he was a candidate told us that she had three (!) children who had the surgery done and she wouldn’t recommend it unless it was absolutely, positively necessary and all other options had been exhausted.

day 89: rice feeding

speaking of exhausing all options, while the barley we’ve been adding to eric’s feedings has been working well to control his reflux by thickening the food and helping to keep it in his stomach, it seems to be giving his “gas”. and when he grunts trying to relieve himself of the gassy feeling, he pushes the milk out of his stomach and through his nose, which is pretty much defeating the purpose. so we decided to replace the barley with pulverized rice on the hopes that it would be a little more gentle on his digestive system. apparently there was some debate amongst the nurses as to whether or not the pulverized rice would simply dissolve in the milk; some of the nurses thought that barley should only be used for breastmilk and rice for formula, but others thought that was nonsense. it’s funny to see how much debate there can be over relatively simple things, little less the much bigger issues. in the end, the rice seemed to stay suspended in the breastmilk just as easily as the barley.

day 89: swirls and curls

i think i’ve mentioned this before, but against the recommendation of the “back to sleep” advocates, we like to put eric on his stomach to sleep because he seems to enjoy it so much. micropreemies are at greater risk for “sudden infant death syndrome” when sleeping on their stomachs but we break the rules as long as we know that someone is always nearby to watch him closely.

when he’s on his stomach, it’s much easier to just what a head of hair he’s developing. it’s a little tough to tell from the picture but he’s got quite a “swirls” coming and maybe a few curls.