We Made It Ourselves | Sweet Cheeks Baby Food - T Magazine Blog
Rolf Hagberg Sweet Cheeks organic baby food is made with locally sourced ingredients.
In her column, We Made It Ourselves, Charlotte Druckman writes about restaurants and small businesses with interesting house-made treats.
Lately, there’s been some talk of the beautiful people (see: Abbey Lee Kershaw) and a baby-food diet. While these reports might seem suspect, anyone who has tasted Lori Karis’s Sweet Cheeks pureed sweet potatoes for “newbies” might actually consider such a regime. There’s something scarily candy-like about the orange mush; plus, you cut out chewing time.
Karis, who has spent the last 25 years in the nanny business, might strike one as a contemporary Mary Poppins. Let’s face it: a spoonful of sugar wouldn’t go over so well in most households nowadays. A magic governess would whip up organic baby grub with locally sourced ingredients, don’t you think?
The youngest of a large family, Karis discovered her knack for child tending early on; in grade school, she began taking care of her myriad nieces and nephews. At 19, when she wanted out of her small-town Wisconsin life, she realized that kids were her ticket; she’d bring up baby in exchange for room and board in a big city.
Boston was her first stop. No sooner did she land a gig than she began preparing meals for her adopted family. “I had never cooked before,” she says. “They just had the basic Betty Crocker and ‘Joy of Cooking’ books. They all ate processed foods. … They even bought frozen carrots. That would have been a luxury item in my house. We always had raw carrots in my fridge; we had a garden. … We’d ask for the polka-dot bread [Wonder] and my mom thought we were crazy. For her, it was cheaper to make her own.”
A culinary neophyte, Karis drew upon her Midwestern heritage and got cooking tips from her local Beantown butcher. Before she knew it, she was a good cook. As she moved from one family to the next, zig-zagging across the country, she honed her stove work. She’d fallen in love with the Silver Palate and the entire Moosewood collection. Her forte, it turned out, was baby food.
Eventually, she returned to her native turf so she could be closer to her kin, and found a family of five that needed her in Hudson, a town that borders Wisconsin and St. Paul, Minn. “I was back in casserole land: potluck supper, everything cooked to death.” Or so she thought. Once she discovered the nearby farmer’s market, things started to look brighter.
Since then, she has relocated to St. Paul. She not only shops at the downtown farmers’ market — the oldest in the state — but has also sold her Sweet Cheeks offerings there for the last two years. She’s doing so well that last month she retired from nannying.
Rolf Hagberg “All I do is roast them,” Karis says of the fresh fruits and vegetables she selects.
These days, she is surrounded by co-ops that are giant, full-service grocery stores stocked entirely with local products. She sells her wholesome goods at nine of them, all within 30 miles. “It’s like Mayberry, in a weird city,” she observes.
“When I get freshly picked ingredients now, I get so excited I have to cook right away.” There are beets, carrots, apples, butternut squash and sweet potatoes. (“All I do is roast them,” she says, and yet roasted sweet potatoes never tasted like this.) The latter hearken from Driftless Organics and Harmony Valley, both in Wisconsin, which has a longer growing season. For carrots, she goes to Hog’s Back, which she says has won awards for that vegetable. Organic apples are harder to find because the orchards are in a small, concentrated area, which makes it difficult to keep someone else’s spray away from your crop. Right outside Karis’s hometown, however, Hoch Orchard has found a way. And if you’ve tried the tart, flavorful roasted apples that she serves with her hearty, perfectly cooked unsweetened oatmeal, you’ll marvel at Harry Hoch’s methods.
Those oats? Like their fellow split peas, whole-wheat flour, hulled barley, quinoa and millet, they come from Minnesota’s Whole Grain Milling via Mississippi Market, the co-op where Karis does her shopping. (It’s a point of purchase for Sweet Cheeks as well.)
Infants get the puréed single vegetables, while slightly bigger tots can try the combos, which incorporate grains. As much as any of these would likely satisfy Jennifer or Reese, grown-ups aren’t apt to steal food from out of the mouth of babes. For them, Karis makes a few adult-friendly products as well. The soups are killer, especially the sweet potato red lentil. With any luck, it’ll help the medicine go down.
If you’re in Karis’s ’hood, you can find it at any of these joints. Otherwise, Karis can be contacted via e-mail for special overnight orders.
My mother-in-law ate a lot of baby food for many years, since she did in-home day care and bf was easy and convenient. Apparently it did her body good. She's still rockin' at 71! :)
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