Food, glorious food!

Pregnancy has provided ample and wonderful incentives to eat well (not to mention often).

Now, in fairness, Bryan and I have always been big fans of food.  In fact, we love all things to do with it:  growing it, gathering it, preparing it, eating it.  But, admittedly, bouts of inertia occasionally stifle our culinary creativity, and, moreover, what might sound like a simple adjustment to eating for two was actually, at least initially, fraught with challenges like nausea, smell aversions, a less spacious stomach, and a general sense of exhaustion.

Thankfully, Bryan and I have pulled ourselves out of our first-trimester funk just in time for Baby to start enjoying some of the foods we eat, too.  That's right; little Archimedes now has working taste buds, and--unlikely as it may sound--studies indicate that what we eat from now on can substantially affect Archie's preferences later on.   (This explains, for instance, why Indian babies enjoy spicy foods though American babies tend not to.)  And that means we now have still more incentive to eat well.

Vendors selling sweets in the Strip

Fortunately, Pittsburgh provides plentiful opportunities to put good food on one's plate.  And our budding spring is making access to those opportunities easier (and more and more rewarding).  A couple Saturdays ago, for instance, Bryan and I made a morning jaunt to our incredible Strip District--our hands down favorite local destination for fresh and fun comestibles--to pick up ingredients for a couple of meals we'd planned for the week.  The Strip is a must-see destination for anyone planning a trip the 'Burgh, by the way.  This crowded avenue of local markets and street vendors is not only a superb place to shop but also a spectacular venue for people-watching, lunch-eating, coffee-sipping, and chocolate-tasting, among other things.

Our trip to the Strip, this time at least, was focused mostly on ingredient-gathering, and we did well:  eggplant and zucchini, cod and tilapia, scrumptious bricks of cheese, and roasted nuts for snacking were just a few of the items that came home with us.  Over the following week, we used our varied acquisitions to delight our baby's new sensitivity to taste--and hopefully begin to develop that sophisticated palate so important to the Goehrig-Brown household!  Here is just a small sampling of what we made:

Roasted vegetable lasagna with homemade wheat noodles and sauce

Veggie and sausage pizza with Bryan's hand-kneaded crust

Enchiladas in green chile sauce, breaded cod with beans and scalloped potatoes, and alfredo with spinach, shrimp, and homemade fettucini also made the week's menu.  Yum!

In the spring, we look forward to supplementing our Strip shopping trips with deliveries from our local farm share--as well as with herbs and berries and maybe a few veggies from what we hope will be a growing garden.  With any luck, by this time next year, when Archie is ready to eat solid foods, he or she will already have developed the tastes of a refined (yet adventurous) gourmet!  And, regardless, we're certainly enjoying ourselves in the meantime.  Bon appeitit, everyone!