Lots of questions today ladies...sorry
We just started feeding and making baby food for our 5 month old. We started with avocados for 4 days then moved on to sweet potato lastnight. She is doing great!!!
We are using a small Cuisinart mini prep food processer and I have 2 Beaba food trays for freezing.
Can anyone off helpful tips or tricks? What to try and at what age? We are so new at this! Thank you!!! I also have the Baby and Toddler cookbook from Williams Sonoma...
3rd reccomendation for the wholesombabyfood.com site!!! :)
It has the nutritional info (and reccomended age for introduction) for each individual fruit and veggie, along with info on dairy, meats, and other protiens. It also has sample menus for different age groups to use as a guideline, recipes, and even a FAQ portion.
I tried apples, carrots, melons, bananas... He loves them! Make sure she likes them by themselves (and has no allergies) before mixing them with other fruits and such.
I got the baby bullet and it comes with all sorts of different recipes!
When I made baby food for my kids I referred to a website called www.wholesomebabyfood.com, it has all kinds of helpful charts that tell you what foods to introduce and when along with some good recipes.
I posted a similar question about a month ago and got some great advice. Here is the link: http://www.mamapedia.com/questions/4291979521982332929
We have done avacado (her fave by far!), sweet potato, pears (be sure to blend really well-mine came out too lumpy/gritty and they made her gag), green beans (loves-I pushed these through a mesh strainer after blending), butternut squash (makes a really nice, smooth baby food) and prunes (this was the one thing I have store bought-to help constipation). I have frozen slices of avacado, and suprisingly, they thaw out just fine and she doesn't seem to notice a difference between fresh/frozen. I have been transferring the frozen pureed stuff from ice cube trays into labeled freezer bags. One thing I have noticed is that for my daughter, the ice cube size is too much of some things, so in the future I think I will make them slightly smaller portions. Good luck!
I used the wholesomebabyfood website too.
One of my son's favorite first foods was yellow squash and zuchinni. I'd make them separate. Cook them in water and a dash of salt on the stove. Blended them in the cuisinart mini food prep. They'd be pretty liquidy, so I'd add rice cereal to thicken it up.
I used snack sized ziplock bags to store in the freezer. One snack sized bag would be a couple of meals.
Come the fall, you can find a lot of different pumpkins and squashes to cook (bake) in the oven. My son loved the variety.
Sweet potato vs. Yams: My MIL says that the yams are sweeter (ie, better). Hard to tell a difference while in the produce section, except often yams are redder than sweet potatoes. Once I baked 3 at the same time. I did notice that the redder one was sweeter when I tasted the cooked product. Much tastier than the other, which I assume was a sweet potato.
Don't remember the age, but we were feeding my son pureed black beans before he was one year old. Cooked the beans , put in the cuisinart chopper, added some olive oil and salt. Sometimes I'd add cooked rice to the chopper. Sometimes some grilled chicken breast. Sometimes all three - rice, beans, and chicken.
I second the site wholsesombabyfood.com. It was a great resource! I always made a lot and then froze them in ziplock bags so that I wasn't making food every week. I tried to do it once a month b/c it usually took me about 2 days to steam, puree and freeze. Of course bananas and avocados are the easiest right out of the peel! Also, you can keep the purees in the fridge for a day or two if you run out of time or space in the freezer!
