Cream of Spinach with Lentils over Brown Rice

Continuing with my theme of iron rich foods....what iron rich food theme would be complete without some spinach thrown in there? I was stoked to try this recipe because the other two dishes containing spinach, Little Joy Loved (scrambled eggs with steamed spinach and Vegetable Lasagna). This recipe came from wholesomebabyfood.com and southern food at about.com.

I tasted the cream of spinach and liked it too. The cream of spinach would taste great by itself too OR wholesomebabyfood.com offered an alternative of serving with Roux (which I had to google to find out what it was--basically butter and flour). If you want to make it with roux, check out the wholesomebabyfood.com site.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 pound fresh spinach (my stores were out or did not sell fresh so I used bagged spinach, sometimes you have to improvise)
• 1 tablespoons finely chopped or grated sweet onion
• 1 small clove garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt
• salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 1 teasp minced fresh basil (I did not have fresh on hand so I used dried and it worked fine)
• Cooked brown rice (cooked according to package)
• Cooked red lentils (cooked according to package)

Steps:

1. Cook brown rice according to package instructions (this usually takes 45 minutes, so I would start this first)
2. Cook red lentils according to package instructions or if there are not any, check out this website about cooking lentils
3. Wash, trim and chop spinach into fairly small pieces.
4. Place spinach in large sauce pan (spinach cooks down a lot so if your pan looks full...do not worry)
5. Stir in sweet onion and garlic.
6. Cook over medium heat covered for approximately 5-8 minutes. Be sure to shake the pan often to ensure the veggies do not get burned.
7. Drain veggies well (mine did not need to be drained, maybe the water cooked out)
8. Stir in Olive Oil and continue to cook for 3-5 minutes, continue to stir constantly (I am not good at doing anything constantly when Little Joy is awake, so just do your best)
9. Remove from heat and stir in yogurt, salt, pepper and basil.
10. While warm, mix in about 2/3 serving spinach mixture with 1/3 lentils or 1/2 and 1/2, whatever proportions you think your Little One will enjoy. I would not mix everything all together until you see how your Little One likes it.
11. Pour spinach/lentil mixture over brown rice, stir and serve warm.

Yield: 3 servings for a 12 month old good eater :)

Timing: 10 months or later; there are some strong flavors in here and lentils are best to wait to introduce until 10 months. This food does not require much chewing/grinding so if your Little One does not have many teeth, do not despair!

Storage: I would say 3-5 days in the fridge and I would not recommend freezing this particular dish.

Miscellaneous: Little Joy does not like it when things hang/dangle out of her mouth...she MUST push it all in her mouth. For example, when the stringy spinach would not make it allll the way in her mouth she was using the back of her hand to get it all in her mouth---in other words, this got a bit messy even for my tidy baby to eat.

Difficulty: 3 out of 5 simply because you have to cook three different things all at once AND i consider it difficult when I cannot freeze something because that means I have to MAKE it more often.

Epicutie Rating: Yummy in the Tummy -- see right side of page for rating descriptions

In looking back at all my ratings I notice that my epicutie loves almost everything. I promise I am not exaggerating. She gobbled up a HUGE bowl of this.

Ingredients

Step 9: All ingredients incorporated for the cream of spinach

Step 11: Getting ready to mix the spinach/lentil mixture with rice then---serve!

Checking out the new food

After one bite, signing "more"

TRYING to feed herself, but very unsuccessful with this food.

Yummy in the Tummy!

See....loved it :)