Apricot Trial

Last Thursday I walked into the health food co-op and saw a gigantic display of Apricots. They had just gotten them in, and told me they should continue to receive them for the next couple of months.

Apricots are on my short list of foods to trial next for Zac, and I’d been wondering where I was going to get some.

The kids and I came home with 12 pounds  of apricots that day!

At dinner, Darrel and I were chatting about the cauliflower trial and came to the conclusion that it was going extremely well; well enough to call it a safe food and move on!

So we cleaned and sliced an apricot to give to the boys for dessert.

They didn’t really like it. I swear I don’t understand these kiddos! Rejecting strawberries, maple syrup, and now apricots?! Really, Zac?

Finally Darrel noticed that Zac was trying to eat it, but the peel seemed to give him a hard time. So I peeled that apricot for Zac.

Have you ever peeled an apricot? It’s a pain in the butt.  Not impossible, just not nearly as easy as peeling, say, an apple.

But, he liked that much better! That night he ate ¼ of an apricot.

The next day, he ate another ¼ of an apricot. We couldn’t get him to eat any more.

Saturday Darrel made a “kitchen sink” version of the quinoa drops that were made of egg, quinoa, goat milk, cauliflower, banana, and apricot. (Why yes, they WERE so moist they almost didn’t set up, why do you ask?)

He got so excited about Zac having so many foods that he went a little overboard. Zac’s not a fan of particularly moist baked goods, so we had a bit of a hard time getting him to eat them. At the end of the day, he had only eaten half the batch. Normally he’ll eat at least one whole tray of quinoa anything,  so this was not encouraging.

On top of that, he pooped a LOT on Saturday; far more than normal for him. And by his second poop, he had a bright red allergy ring and was screaming and thrashing when I tried to wipe his heinie.

The last poop of the night had a good sized lump of mucous in it.

More discouragement.

Darrel and I sat down to decide what to do. Pull the apricot or keep going? Is it a reaction, or just his body adjusting to a new, more acidic food? Are the 2 year molars fighting to come in finally causing confusing trial symptoms for him beyond the ear pressure?

In the end, there are just too many things it could be that are not FPIES to warrant pulling a food trial. We decided to keep going, and watch carefully.

Saturday night Zac woke up every two hours all night long. It’s been a while since he did that! I was a zombie yesterday!

Sunday Darrel made a less moist batch of quinoa drops with apricot for Zac. By dinner time, he’d only eaten about half the tray, but he only pooped once and it was better than the day before, plus he was in fine spirits.

Also, Darrel noticed that Zac is chewing on everything again, much like he was when he was first teething. Goodness knows what kind of accidental trace he picked up in the last few days from that, and it certainly is a sign that teething is making itself a nuisance in our food trials!

So, we wait and see. I’d really like to continue our “Safe Food Streak” with another success. Let’s hope his strange signs are anything BUT FPIES.

Other than the food trial, this weekend was really for Food Procurement and Preservation.

We had to do another goat milk run on Friday, and this time Darrel finally got to come with us. While he drove, I made multiple phone calls to local You-Pick-It Blueberry places to find one that was organic. I finally found one – about another 30 minutes further away than the goat milk place! Oh, well. At least we won’t have to go often, right?

We hit the Farmer’s Market again on Saturday morning and came home with 75 more heads of cauliflower. (I’m still a bit amazed by the cauliflower purchasing we do.)

Jed and Zac have just fallen in love with the Farmer’s Market! The rest of the weekend, Jed would occasionally tell us he wanted to go back to the Farmer’s Market to play with puppy dogs and see the water (the fountain on the square). I love that they love it there, and I have to share a little video of them dancing and jumping to a singer at the market. It’s too cute!

Once we had collected as much fresh food as possible, the rest of our time was spent trying to preserve it.

Apricots are, apparently, not a very long-shelf-lifed fruit. In order to not waste that whole 12 pounds of apricots, I went online to read how to preserve apricots for year round use.

Good news: apricots are very adaptable and can be canned, dehydrated, or frozen.
Bad news: every recipe or tutorial I found used citric acid or lemon juice to prevent discoloration during any of those methods of preservation.

We don’t have any lemon juice or citric acid to use for Zac.

I finally just decided we would somehow survive with slightly discolored apricots, as long as they were edible otherwise.

The boys didn’t finish the apricot on Saturday, so I put the slices in the freezer to see if Zac would like them more as a frozen treat.

He didn’t, but you know what? It didn’t really discolor at all that I could see!

Still, odds are good that most of the time I’ll want to use apricots pureed into something, so I decided to simply puree as much apricot as I could and store it in Ziploc bags in the freezer.

Preserving apricot was the least of my worries; after all, we don’t even know if apricot is going to be a safe food yet! I just didn’t want 12 pounds to go bad before we figured out the answer to that question!

The rest of the weekend we spent preserving cauliflower.

I’m a little staggered at the amount of work that goes into preserving the harvest. It’s not hard work, it’s just…time consuming and mind numbing.

By the time Sunday night came around, Darrel and I had preserved somewhere in the ball park of 168 cups of cauliflower, or just under 38 pounds of cauliflower for Zac in our freezer.

And we aren’t done yet. There’s still almost 60 heads that need attention in our kitchen.

Figuring that each head of cauliflower is roughly around 4 cups chopped and frozen, that’s only the equivalent of 42 heads of cauliflower we’ve preserved; adding the stuff still sitting in bags in our kitchen, we’ll have roughly 104 heads, or about 85 pounds, or 416 cups (however you want to measure it).

That sounds like an obscene amount of cauliflower, right? Not really, though.

We’re going to buy and process more.

Since right now Zac only has 6 safe foods, he eats a lot of each one of them (except pork, which we ration). Yes, he’s finding new safe foods, but at an average of one per month. By next summer, we’ll be lucky to have 18-22 safe foods for Zac to eat!

So he will probably eat a whole bunch of cauliflower this year. I’m working on the assumption that I’ll need about 10 cups of cauliflower per week for Zac.

And let’s not forget that this is the cauliflower that *I* will need to eat on my TED. So if I want to add cauliflower to my diet, I have to grab it now and freeze it to use the rest of the year.

Which means we need another oh, 230 or so heads of cauliflower for me and Zac to eat for the next year. (I think.)

I think Darrel and I are going to hate the sight of cauliflower by the time we get done freezing all of this.

On the plus side, it will be SO EASY to use cauliflower in my kitchen the rest of the year: just rip open a bag and ta-da! It’s ready to go!

Anyone know how much acreage you need to grow approximately 350 heads of cauliflower? Just curious…

(And if anyone spots any glaring problems with my math in this, feel free to point it out. I think I mentioned a mind-numbing weekend and a baby who woke me up every two hours. I may have this wrong somewhere.)

So, how was your weekend? Do your kids just love the Farmer’s Market, too?