Baby bites

Some of my cooking skills are now going to making baby food for the littlest human in the house. I am absolutely no expert on baby nutrition, but I would like to think that I am at this point at least in the 90th percentile of well-informedness about baby food and nutrition among the group of baby mommies. So the recipes I'm making for Benjamin are based off of carefully pondering over the labels on commerical baby food, reading and re-reading all the literature that magically appears in one's mailbox once one has a baby in Sweden (from Nestlé, Semper, and other baby food companies, as well as from the pediatric clinic and the Swedish food administration), as well as some pretty good websites about baby food and nutrition.

One thing that I've noticed is that recommendations about what babies can and can't eat are even less universal than recommendations about what a pregnant woman can eat.

We're told that a breast-milk only diet until 6 months of age is best, but that it's okay to start giving some solids at 4 months if you choose to. I believe that most BVC (pediatric) nurses in Sweden say the 6-month thing because social services requires them to say so, and it's a shame that they have to feel conflicted when they feel a specific baby needs something more (as Benjamin did). However, I have a super BVC nurse who is very supportive of the super-fast food track Bennie has been on since I finally waved the white flag at 5 months. He was barely gaining any weight and was very displeased and impatient every time we nursed. Once we started him on solids, he sucked down everything we put in front of him. Already now at 7 months he's eating sandwiches and even biting and chewing bananas with a relative minimum of help. I'm sure some nursing or baby experts would hit the roof, but Benjamin has never once choked, never vomited from not being able to handle bigger bits of food (as I've seen other babies do), had most foods, especially common allergens, introduced one at a time, has never refused anything that we've given him, and is now following his weight curve very nicely. He still breast feeds on a schedule that works for us, and most importantly, he's so happy most of the time that we're starting to suspect that someone has spiked his toys with baby-nip.

The list of no-no foods we get from the pediatric nurses here in Sweden seems to be more relaxed than most; before they're a year old, the babies are not supposed to have veggies like spinach or beets (nitrates are hard on a baby's kidneys), excess salt (also kidneys), or honey (spores that can produce botulism). They also suggest we avoid sugar, nuts, and milk as a drink, but for far less "dangerous" reasons -- avoiding bad habits, avoiding choking, and avoiding replacing iron-rich foods and formula with milk, in that order. Aside from those things, everything else is pretty much A-OK from 6 months, as long as it's a reasonable consistency and the diet is varied. I've seen plenty of sites from other countries that say carrots and blueberries are a no-no until 1 year of age, despite the fact that they're sold as 4-month foods here, and I have Australian friends who have made spinach curry for their babies (which means I know, knowing these women, that no doctor has forbidden spinach for their babies). And of course, all the other moms my age here were subject to completely different recommendations when they were babies -- they ate spinach, were started on sugary juices are solids at the age of 6 weeks or something crazy, etc.

The point is, sometimes they seem to be talking out of their asses. Or at the very least, the recommendations might actually have about as much meaning as a swimmer shaving his legs. My son might or might not have a marginally larger chance at perfect health because I follow the prevailing recommendations where I live and don't feed him spinach, but perhaps the fact that he eats blueberries and carrots will cancel it out, who knows.

One site I've used a lot, at least for inspiration or comparison, is Wholesomebabyfood.com. It's run by a mom who has studied nutrition and fed all of her kids, including a set of twins, on homemade baby food. The site contains recipes for everything from single-ingredients purées to whole meals and finger foods for older babies, nutritional facts about different foods, information about storing and freezing, and even things like introducing cups and straws. The age recommendations for introducing different foods are also a bit more on the conservative side, but the plus side is that the site explains why they think a certain food might not be appropriate before 8 or 10 months -- and therefore it's easier to decide if you think it will work for your baby earlier or not.

The following recipes are perhaps not perfectly balanced for baby nutrition, but I do think I've done a pretty good job anyway. I make them fairly chunky, so by typical recommendations these foods might not be right for most babies before 8 months or even later. My baby food is also very thick (as in, not watery), as Benjamin is very particular about this as well (he's like the anti-baby...) so for other babies you might need to add extra water or formula and therefore these recipes would make more portions. Peas and tomatoes can also be tough on small tummies, the former because of the skins and the later because of the acid, but Benjamin hasn't had a huge problem with either. Milk, wheat (as in the pasta, couscous or flour) and fish are among the 8 most common allergens, so you want to be extra careful to first introduce them alone for 4 or 5 days (that is, make sure fish or wheat or dairy is the only new food the baby eats that week). But anyway... here they are:

Cod Casserole
2 dl rice
400 g cod or other white fish
600 g green peas
1 T canola oil
1 T flour
2 dl whole milk
dill

Cook the rice as directed. Boil the cod and peas until the cod is thoroughly cooked and the peas are soft. Purée the cod and peas -- and if you feel you need to, the rice -- until they are the desired consistency. Mix the oil and flour in a saucepan; add milk and simmer for a couple minutes until the sauce has thickened a bit. Add a bit of dill. Mix everything together to make a pretty green mush! This ought to be 8 full baby meals -- that is, the amount of food you'd find in a store-bought jar.

Baby Thanksgiving
400 g chicken (I used frozen thighs; make sure you get the type without salt added)
500 g sweet potato, cut up into cubes
500 g frozen green beans (not canned; that has salt)
1 T canola oil
1 T flour
2 dl milk
sage, rosemary, thyme

Pretty much the same as the last one, just with a different kind of meat and veggies! I boiled the sweet potatoes for about 20 minutes, adding the chicken after 5 minutes and the beans after 10 or so. You want it all cooked through and soft anyway. Then it was into the mixer to purée it all. The sauce is the same as well -- mix the oil and flour and then add the milk and simmer until thickened -- but this time I added some sage, rosemary and thyme instead of dill. Mix it all together, this time you get orange goop instead of bright green. And this is also 8 portions.

Lasagna
350 g couscous or crushed pasta
2 T canola oil
250 g zucchini
250 g mushrooms
500 g canned crushed tomatoes (or perhaps tomato sauce if you find it without added salt)
2 T flour
6 dl milk
50 g shredded cheese
basil, oregano, parsley, garlic powder

Cook the pasta as directed. Grate the zucchini and mushrooms on a cheese grater. Cook zucchini and mushrooms in the oil in a big pot until they're very soft. Add the tomatoes and pasta. Add spices. If needed, purée the pasta mixture in your mixer, but it might not be necessary. In another pot, milk the flour with a little bit of the milk until smooth. Add the rest of the milk and simmer for a few minutes. Add the cheese, whisking constantly so it melts without sticking to the bottom or lumping. Mix the cheese sauce and pasta mixture. This one is probably about 12 full-meal portions for baby. I actually thought it tasted pretty good myself, or at least would have with salt!

A note about the lasagna: it contains no meat, is a bit on the low side as far as protein goes, and I don't believe it contains a good source of iron. So it's not the kind of thing a baby should be eating every day, as protein and iron are big deals for baby. But I'm sure it's okay as part of a large variety of foods and meals.

Freezing
I put together a collection of small tupperwares (okay, fine, small plastic food storage containers) so that I can freeze up Bennie's food in portion sizes. You want tupperwares that hold at least 200 ml, but preferably not so much bigger than that, and that have pretty flexible sides. Glop the baby food into them portion by portion, and then when they're frozen they can be popped out (perhaps after letting them sit with their bottoms in cold water for a short while) and stored in freezer bags. It means I get away with making baby food once a week instead of hecticly trying to cook and mash and purée and whatever at every meal. The point with being able to pop them out of the tupperwares is so that you don't have to use up all the baby food before you can freeze more.

I heat Bennie's food in the microwave, as I don't believe the hype about it destroying nutrients and turning babies into cyclops, but you can thaw it out in the fridge as well.

Freezing single-ingredient baby food in ice cube trays also worked really well at the beginning, before Bennie was eating more complete meals. The Wholesomebabyfood.com site has very good info about freezing.

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So, uh. Do my mood swings between political rants and housewifey baby food recipes seem too violent for you? No? Glad to hear it!

Did you bring enough for everyone to share?

In our last episode, we eluded to our disgust with many Swedes' definition of "democracy".

Today's vocabulary word is "rich". And while we're at it, "poor". And "divide". And... well, either way, as often is the case, this post includes math (or perhaps lack thereof?).

Background info for non-Swedies: Sweden has been more or less run by socialist governments for most of the last century. Since the 2006 election, however, we have had a "conservative" government. If you're an American, IMMEDIATELY shift your idea of "conservative" to somewhere around the vicinity of Al Gore and Barack Obama for the remainder of this discussion.

Here you have an article that outs itself right from the start with its headline -- which is unfortunately very hard to translate properly: "More rich child-families". That is, of all the families in Sweden that have kids, they're saying more of them are rich now. (Well, fine, go ahead, YOU try to translate "Fler rika barnfamiiljer" and have the meaning come out right. Not so cocky now, are you?)

The immediate problem is how you define "rich". Is it going to be like the "rikemansskatt," the "rich man's tax" that means people with an income over a certain point pay not just municipial but also state taxes here -- and which is paid by something like half of the working population?

Yes, I do, in fact, believe there's a similar definition of "rich" being bandied around here. If you dig deep into the article (that is, read it), you'll find that the number of children living in what the article is calling "rich" families has increased from 18% to 30% since 2006.

Awesome, 30% of all families in Sweden are rich! Oh wait, it's not awesome, because rich people are evil. Boooo, 30% of all families in Sweden are evil!

But I digress... I think.

How have they defined rich? They have an index where a score of 1.0 means just being able to afford everything you need. "Rich" is what you are, then, if your family has a score of 2.0. I'm going to guess that, by that definition, my little family is "rich".

What I'm trying to say here is: I reject any definition of rich under which the label is slapped on me for being able to make a mortgage payment and feed my cats; I reject any definition of rich that encompasses 30% of the population. That is, of course, unless the other 70% are eating garbage from the dumpster. If we were talking about the world population, then I know that I am (rich, that is) and that they are (33% surviving on less than $2 a day, that is). But we're not. We're talking about Sweden, and so you have to wonder what definition of "poor" is going to be thrown up to match the wide-berthed definition of "rich".

The "poor" families in the article have a quotient of less than 1.0; they are, in other words, unable to afford the package that has been defined as the "basic standard". The article, sadly, fails to give a statistic matching the "30% are rich". However, they do say two things that at least help us to extrapolate: number 1, the percent of kids living in poor families hasn't changed since 2006. Number two, the Swedish region of Skåne has the highest percentage of kids living in poor families, and there it is 9.3%; the lowest is apparently in Jönköping, where the percentage is 3.5%.

This is the point at which all of my fellow aware Americans raise an eyebrow at how awesome it must be to have a country where well over 3 times as many kids are rich than are poor, and only then using a very mild definition of poor by global standards.

Well then, here comes my pissed-offedness: how is this information viewed, in talking-point form? "Divide widens," says one headline, and this blog links the article as evidence that the conservatives are "consciously creating a 'hungry' lower class of uneducated, sick and unemployed (who just need to 'lift themselves by their bootstraps') which can then be exploited and help to drive down wages."*

I cannot agree that these statistics are evidence of any gap having widened. When I asked a left-wing friend of mine "which is better, some people having grade A health care and some people having grade B, or everyone having grade C?" he actually answered me that it would be better if everyone had grade C -- and I don't think his view is uncommon, consciously or unconsciously, among Swedish socialists. But even I can agree that there is a "divide" in the former, A vs. B, situation (I just don't think that that divide is automatically a bad thing). But seriously, I do not see how an upwards shift in the poorkids-averagekids-richkids scale is by any definition a "widened divide". If it used to be the case that 50% of the population earned $10,000 a year and the other 50% earned $20,000, but this year the ratio is 40-60, does that constitute a "bigger divide"? I'm sorry, I'm just not grasping the math.

But for me, the best part is this: as I said in the opening of my rant, the conservatives have been in charge since the 2006 election. Those of you with your SAT glasses on will have noticed that that's also the year being examed in the article -- the increase in "rich" kids and the non-change in number of "poor" kids is since 2006. So if these however-many-but-less-than-9.3% of Swedish kids who are poor were created as a class by any set of public policies... well, whose were they, then? I'll even speculate that it's quite a feather in the current government's hat that the lower group hasn't increased in size given the current economic climate.

I really am at a loss for words about how a person's political viewpoint can allow them to believe that we live in a WORSE world if the average child's family resources has gone up without the lowest income group increasing in size. I will never understand the world view that sees it as an automatically and indepedently bad thing that life has improved for someone. The Robin Hood rhetoric is perfectly acceptable for me when we're talking American-top-1%-rich and American-Mommy-sells-crack poor, but as for this stuff I'll just continue to be amazed at our ability to whine about being possibly the most privileged 9 million people on the planet.


*Original: Man skapar medvetet en ”hungrig” underklass av lågutbildade, sjuka och arbetslösa (som bara behöver ”ta sig i kragen”) för att sedan kunna utnyttjas och hjälpa till att driva ned lönerna.

How do you say "oxymoron" in Swedish?

I don't affiliate myself with a specific political party in Sweden. I am pretty solidly sure which side I'm on when the parties are organized into two blocs, but the bloc I side with contains 4 parties and I am on pretty good terms with all of them.

The one that calls themselves the Liberals, though, is the Swedish Folkpartiet. I was a member of their youth and student organization when I studied here. They say that almost all Swedish teachers are Folkpartister. However, I don't find their recent shenanigans to be all that Liberal. As much as I, as a teacher with an American background, support their ideas about a slightly more strict Swedish school system where attendance, homework, behavior and performance actually matter and are documented, I don't see what those things have to do with Liberalism with a capital L. Even less so do I understand why so many ideas about making immigrants take Swedish tests or sign a contract promising that they won't break any laws etc. has to do with a more negative-freedom-based type of political ideal.

That's why I'm glad to see today that Folkpartiet has voted down an obligatory "citizenship course" for immigrants as part of their integration program. Since I come from a country where one must pass a test in the English language and in civics in order to become naturalized, and I don't feel either of those is a bad idea, I can't say I would protest against such a program in Sweden, either. Especially since, theoretically, Sweden does, or ought to, provide training in both to all immigrants, whether they are seeking citizenship or not. But speaking the working language of your environment and knowing how the country is run and how you can vote -- these are good things for anyone who has planted themselves and their families in a new place.

An obligatory course in "Swedish values" is, however, bullkaka. I'm really rather sick of hearing the word "democracy" thrown around in this country, both inside and outside of a school context, without any sense that anyone knows what it means. Suggesting that all people who come here from another country need a chance to "reflect on the values they grew up with" and how they might not match those of the Swedish culture is not only a poor attempt at subtlety, but is also something that meshes rather poorly with the democratic ideal of freedom of opinion. Even our Minister of Intregration Nyamko Sabuni, who I generally have a lot of respect for, makes it clear how silly the idea is without perhaps meaning to: "Sabuni also said that Sweden is in a class by itself, when you compare values with those of other countries, for example that self-actualization comes before family."* What does she mean by that? Is this one of the Swedish values she thinks needs to be impressed upon immigrants to Sweden? Aside from making it clear that we're not just talking about a helpful civics course here, her choice of which Swedish "value" to use as an example makes you wonder if we really would even want everyone to think the way we do.

It's a good thing I'm already a Swedish citizen, and that the only thing I had to prove in order to become one is that I had 1500 Swedish kronor I felt like spending. If I somehow had had to promise to stick out from the crowd as little as possible or drink snaps at Midsommar or watch Donald Duck on Christmas or whatever the hell else is integral to this mystical and very unique class of values that Swedes have, I'd have been fucked.

*Original: Sabuni uppgav också att Sverige hamnar alldeles ensam på utkanten, när man jämför värderingar med andra länder, till exempel att självförverkligande går före familjen.

Professor Baby Longsleeps

Every time Benjamin takes a nap that's longer than 30 minutes, I feel like I've won a prize.

That is all.