Dutch Baby & a Baby Story

So it’s been a little while since I’ve shared what I’ve been cooking in this little nook of the Internet. Well you see my friends, I’ve gone and gotten myself knocked up and boy did that throw me for a loop…

Yes, yes, I’m pregnant, errr we’re pregnant (no wait, I’m pregnant since I’m the one doing all the work, he just had all the fun). We’re totally thrilled…and shocked at how confident we are in our abilities that we think we can actually raise a human…to adulthood. I guess we’ve raised our sweet little dog since he was 6 weeks old and he’s still alive so it must be the same thing with a kid…right???

The thing with pregnancy is that it gives you 9 whole months to prepare. I had imagined that my pregnancy would be a time of cooking the most nourishing foods for myself and happily batch cooking freezer meals so that our little family was ready for when the new baby came. Well I can already hear all you women who have been pregnant before snickering through the fiberoptic internet waves. I know, I know, who was I kidding? Pregnancy is hard.  It seems that when you’re cooking up a baby, you have very little energy (or desire) to actually cook up any food. In fact, I had no desire to enter into the kitchen at all. And I was regularly annoyed at the disgusting sights and sounds emanating from M’s cooking in our kitchen-“you’re making eggs for breakfast?!—ewwww”, “you’re eating a perfectly seared steak for dinner?-gross” “is that onions frying in butter that I’m smelling—who invented such a vile thing?” Let’s just say that those first four months of pregnancy was a tough time for both of us. In point form, this pretty much sums up how I felt between pregnancy weeks 5-16, a time I’ve endearingly coined “The Crap Time”:

I didn’t eat vegetables, meat or well protein in general.
I thought greens were nasty.
Garlic was foul.
Onions were evil.
Bone broth was too hot and fatty to even look at, let alone eat.
If it wasn’t cold, I didn’t want to eat or drink it. 

But paleo is all about focusing on what you can eat, what you do like. So allow me to share the foods that got the green light:
Pizza, gluten free or not.
Bread and butter.
Anything that was not cooked by me or prepared in my house b/c it stank so bad.
Basically anything that was beige was a gastronomical delight.
I had pancakes for dinner for a week straight. I highly recommend these grain free pancakes.
I even purchased and regularly ate Crispix cereal. #notpaleo

Honestly ppl, I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

To prevent scurvy, I ate oranges, apples and berries. Watermelon was delicious when so few things tasted edible. I threw 10.2 blueberries on my cereal every morning for good measure.

Oh and I smelled bad too. As if the hormones weren’t wreaking enough havoc on my appetite, they also literally made me wreak. So there I was barefoot and pregnant, smelling bad, gnawing on a piece of dry toast. 

It was a very, very dark time

Thankfully it’s over now, sometime around 16 weeks, I kind of started liking food again. I’m back in the kitchen acting like my old self now. I’m still proud of myself for mustering up some edibles for you to enjoy on the blog: here, here and here. But I’m much prouder of the recipe I have to share with you today. It’s strawberry season and every year during Wimbledon, I make a strawberry breakfast to honour these lovely red globes of sweetness. The Dutch baby is actually an American invention and I like to think of it as a lazy pancake. You make the dough in one bowl and then you pour it into one skillet. It’s baked in the oven so you don’t have to fuss about flipping individual pancakes and keeping them warm, blah, blah, blah. There’s no sugar in the batter so you can douse it with maple syrup. Served alongside fresh fruit, it’s a dessert. Served alongside eggs, sausage and some sliced tomatoes, it’s the perfect sweet and savoury breakfast.

Enjoy, and I promise to be back with more culinary tales, peppered with pregnancy lore as well.