Make sure to watch the VERY end of this one. Hilarious!

Here’s the recipe for Avocado Shakes. Enjoy and Happy 4th of July!

Now that Chloe is 3 months old, I’m getting prepared for my second go-round of baby feeding. Introducing solid food to your baby is such a special, beautiful and fun time for both parents and children, but when you have to feed infants on the run it can be tough. When Chloe was born, a friend gave us a box full of Boon products and I can’t wait to start using them.

Boon’s Squirt spoon is so cool. You fill it up with your homemade baby food and off you go. The easy to fill bulb holds 3 oz. of food, a perfect amount for new eaters. All you do is squeeze to dispense the food onto the spoon, one bite at a time. No glass jars and spoons floating around your purse. Another bonus is that it’s BPA, phthalate and PVC free.

Now that I’m feeding two and I’m carrying around twice the load, this will make life a lot easier!

When Chloe was born, a friend sent us a gorgeous cheese plate with all types of incredible cheeses and fresh French baguettes. The two of us couldn’t possibly go through all of that cheese and bread on our own, so I refrigerated the cheese and cut the bread into cubes to dry out for another use (I’m way too frugal for my own good!). I hate waste. For example, I hate when I have to buy a loaf of bread and only wind up using half, so I have to come up with recipes that I can use before the bread goes bad. Recipes like blueberry cream cheese french toast are a perfect use for day old bread.

Blueberries are in season now and one of Kenya’s new obsessions is cream cheese, so I decided to put it all together for this delicious breakfast recipe. Even better, you can prepare the dish up to 24 hours in advance, refrigerate, then pop it in the oven when you’re ready to bake it for a elegant but easy morning treat.

When I pulled this out of the oven, my family’s eyes lit up! Also it made me happy to be using ingredients that otherwise would have gone to waste.

After making summer fruit salad, we were left with the halves of 3 different melons. So, we cut them up and put them in the fridge to munch on throughout the week, but still, that’s a lot of melon. Always trying to come up with exciting uses for any leftovers, I decided to make….melon juice.

Cantaloupe, watermelon and honeydew all have huge water contents which contribute to their bulk in size, so they’re a good source of fluids and perfect for making juices. A friend of ours gave us a Magic Bullet blender, so Kenya decided he needed to try it out and do the cooking! First he had to make a juice for himself, then one for me and then, of course, he needed to drink both of them!

And that, is the benefit to a lot of leftovers: at least I still had enough melon to make another one just for me!

At this time of year especially, I can’t wait to get out of bed on Sunday mornings. Just the thought of the farmer’s market and all of the amazing new fruit in season gets me so excited (it also makes me feel like a huge nerd, but it’s what floats my boat)!

We’re very lucky to have so much diversity in our fruits and vegetables in southern California. Melons have just started popping up at different vendors at our market and the ones I’ve sampled are incredible. What’s available is not just your basic cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon (though you will find all of those in abundance), but there are numerous different varieties that smell and taste like heaven: Crenshaws, French, Galias, Casabas and more. Every time we’re at the market, we are so wowed by the succulent samples being given out, that we end up buying several types because we can’t make our minds up.

Melons are packed with vitamins such as beta carotene, potassium, vitamin C and A, so they’re a really nutritious snack for kids.

I can just sit with a spoon and half a melon and be happy, but when you get home with your gorgeous melons and want to give them a little extra zip, make this gorgeous recipe and watch your family be as excited as me on a Sunday summer morning!

One of the first episodes:

For the past couple of months I have been fortunate enough to have taken part in a super secret food project and I’m so excited to be able to finally share it with you!

Good Bite is a new internet show produced by Deca TV, the company that brought you Momversation. Good Bite approached a group of food bloggers to contribute video and share simple and delicious recipes. We bloggers share our ideas in “round table” discussions on all sorts of topics from easy holiday recipes to cooking for a crowd. There tends to be something for everyone in each episode and I really love my new blogger buddies!

For a while I hesitated giving Kenya salad. Salad just seems like something you shouldn’t serve a two year old. I mean, what could be less exciting for a kid to have put in front of him than a plate of lettuce? I think I was also concerned that it would either be too difficult for him to chew certain raw vegetables or that he simply wouldn’t enjoy some of the ingredients I put into my favorite salads.

Boy was I wrong! And when you really stop to think about it, why wouldn’t kids love salads? When made right, salads are visually appealing, full of fresh flavors, able to be topped with all kinds of different dressings and easily tailored to each individual in your family’s likes and dislikes.

This strawberry spinach salad is not only delicious, it’s packed with nutrients. There’s protein in the almonds, tons of iron in the spinach, vitamin C in the strawberries and the poppy seeds are a good source of calcium. It’s also a really colorful dish that is naturally sweet, so I think it looks appealing and tastes great to a young discriminating palate. Honestly, there’s nothing cuter to me than watching my two year old munching away and asking for “more salad”! But then again, I’m his mother!

I’ve got a little story to go along with today’s recipe — which isn’t really a recipe, more of a feature — but I felt like it made sense to post this today:

I was at the park recently with Kenya, playing and giving him dinner (yes, in spite of the choking risk, I do my fair share of chasing Kenya around during dinner time. It’s either that and being armed with the Heimlich Maneuver or he goes to bed hungry). We were hanging out with a bunch of neighborhood dads and their kids and one of the things I was feeding Kenya was some steamed okra. This is how the conversation went:

Dad A: What’s that green stuff?
Me: It’s okra.
Dad A: What’s okra?
Dad B: It’s a vegetable that people eat in the south. It’s really slimy.

At this point a gorgeous little girl with wide eyes walked up, staring at me and Kenya as to say “can I have some?”

Me (to the little girl): Would you like some?
Dad A: She won’t like it.
Me (to Dad A): Can I offer her some?
Dad A: I’m telling you she won’t like it, but ok!

The girl’s dad was right. She didn’t like it….she loved it! The little girl ate not one, not two, but six pieces of okra. I’ve given okra to several other kids with great success and Kenya, well, he could eat it by the pound. The moral of the story is that just because you don’t know or like a food doesn’t mean your kids won’t. Kids tend to be much more open minded then we give them credit for when we don’t impose our dislikes on them. When you offer a meal to your child, try putting a veggie or fruit that you wouldn’t expect them to enjoy and see what happens. Don’t say anything or draw attention to it. Let them discover it for themselves. You just might be surprised!

Corn is just starting to show up at our local farmer’s markets, so I decided to buy a few sweet ears this weekend to make a super-simple salad full Kenya’s favorite ingredients. I love preparing this delicious dish for several reasons: it’s a complete vegetarian protein because of the beans and corn, the mixture of colors and textures are appealing to a little one’s eyes and it’s easy on the wallet.

If you need a last minute pot luck dish this summer that’s easy to prepare and that adults as well as kids will love, give it a shot!