Baby Blogging Interlude: Birthday Brunch Edition

It's been a while since this site left the confines of the food universe and engaged in some unabashed baby blogging (nearly a year since the last post, in fact), but Anya just celebrated her first birthday this past weekend, so we're due for an update.

What's Anya up to now? She's crawling, pulling herself up, and walking with assistance and along furniture. She lets out a definitive "mow" when asked, "what does a cat say?" and makes a fine improvisation of her father's belch (bad table manners, daddy), and she is currently obsessed with "Old MacDonald." She has also been sucked into the vortex of Teletubbies and Boohbah, though her favorite part of each show seem to be the opening credit sequences, which go on forever.

We started experimenting with solid foods at around six months, beginning with baby food and various forms of mush (rice cereal, oatmeal, etc.), but we've slowly introduced the foods we eat, and before long, she's begun to develop her own tiny palate.

She's pretty open to trying to eat anything she can eat with her own hands (she's particularly keen on picking up a morsel fo food, putting it in her mouth, then removing it and looking at it at arms length before putting it back in her mouth to eat.

Herewith, in no particular order, are some of random highlights from the hit list of her solid food successes:

• Peking duck
• Cheerios
• String cheese
• Edamame
• Avocado
• Black beans
• Rice
• Chicken paillard
• Pasta
• Yogurt
• Pork milanese
• Straccetti (con la Rughetta)
• Broccoli
• Quesadilla

There's the occasional failure: chicken in green curry didn't go over too well (too spicy), and we haven't tried giving her banana since she threw up half of one on the terrace of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But, she's pretty much game for anything. And now that she's turned one, the world of whole eggs (white and yolk) and cow's milk is open to her.

We celebrated Anya's birthday with a brunch for our family and friends -- we ordered pastries and bagels and I made two kinds of crostini -- savory egg salad and sweet raspberries with mascarpone and honey.

The egg salad recipe comes from the cafe at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where the eggs are bound together with creme fraiche rather than mayonnaise. The raspberry crostini are a miniaturized version of the tartines I wrote about previously on this site.

Below, a month-by-month portrait of Anya over the course of her first year.

Happy Birthday!