Fun with Food

I've been having fun with food lately, especially because Jeremiah is old enough to eat almost everything we eat. So, if dinner is something he can have, we leave out the salt and any spiciness until the end.
Coconut:
This past weekend we received 3 free coconuts. Now, I must shamefully admit that before I lived in the D.R., I thought that coconuts grew on the palm trees as we find them in the store. After all, this is how most cartoons display coconuts. But no, that would be too easy. Instead, they are literally the "nut" or seed of the plant. So, you have to first cut through the outer part of the plant to get to the brown nut that we find in the stores. To get to the nut, Daniel went at the three cocos with the machete. As he finished each, I tried to scoop out the flesh. After I finished this, I put the coco in my mini food chopper and grated it. I saved some for later use, and I used the rest of it to make coco milk. We haven't actually used either (they're in the freezer). If anyone has any good recipes that use freshly grated coco, I would appreciate it if you could send them this way!

Daniel attacking the coco

Post-coconut scraping

After grating the coconut

Chicken Cacciatore:
On Monday night (date night) I made chicken cacciatore in the crock-pot. I've recently been finding more uses for my crock-pot and it was great to have the meal ready when Daniel came home, without taking away time from him being home. The chicken turned out wonderfully. We also sent some with Jeremiah to his sitter. She envied his supper. :)

It didn't look this brown in reality...

I even used our fun napkin rings for the first time! (we got them at our wedding)

Grilled Pizza:
Last night dinner was a throw-together pizza. We had some pizza dough in the freezer, so we decided to grill a pizza. The toppings included: pepperoni, bell peppers, jalapenos, anchovies, olives, avocado, and cheese. Jeremiah just had the avocado, bell peppers, and cheese. Except we started it so late that I had to throw something else together for his dinner. He had the pizza for lunch today. :)

And of course, it's not complete without some pictures of Jer...

Sorry these are rotated, for some reason the blogger changed them and I don't feel like figuring out how to make them upload properly. :)

This is what Jeremiah does while I'm working in the kitchen:

He seems to be very attached to the beef cubes...