Baby food

So, folks, it’s been a while between drinks over here at the blog, the usual reasons (baby, winter, general slackness!), and also because I have been taking far more photos of my baby than my garden! 

Winter has not been kind to my garden or my enthusiasm for gardening – as I reported last time, I planted a couple of new crops, which never went anywhere, and then it got colder, and darker, and I preferred to nap when my baby napped rather than struggle with difficult crops! So, the garden is not up to much – the society garlic, kale, avocado plant and chives still continue cheerily, but everything else isn’t up to much – when spring arrives, so will my enthusiasm! Also, having a crawling baby who puts everything in her mouth is hard to garden with, especially on the cold hard cobblestones in our backyard – I don’t think having her start to walk will make it easier to garden during the day when she and I are home alone, but as the evenings lengthen, I can hopefully attend more to my garden while my husband attends to her 😊

   
   
However, despite my gardening hiatus, my cooking and freezing has continued unabated! My pressure cooker gets a regular workout, as it is definitely cosy warming stew-style dinner weather! I follow some recipes when I have the ingredients or the interest, but my go-to dinner is:

– sauté some onions and garlic, 

– brown the meat (some type of shank or stewing meat, usually red meat rather than chicken, as I haven’t tried to coordinate veggies and chicken yet), 

– then put whatever veggies are on hand with some stock, some herbs, some tinned tomatoes and the meat back in

– cook for about half an hour on high pressure. 

It makes enough for us to have for dinner a couple of nights in a row, and then a few meals for the baby too!

I find that even though I’m currently home on maternity leave, having a small human who depends on you for everything, ie food, entertainment, sleep and waste disposal, doesn’t leave much time for creating gourmet meals from scratch every night! I also prefer to nap when she naps or do other things rather than always making dinner then, so find double up meals such as in the pressure cooker invaluable, especially as they often taste even better the next day when the flavours have developed!

So, baby food – Abby is almost 10 months old now, and we started giving her solid foods around 5 1/2 months. We initially started with veggie purées, sweet potato, carrot, pumpkin, then added some fruits, apple, pear and banana, and avocado. Once she got used to it, and went up to 3 meals a day, then we started on meats and finger food such as steamed veggies, fruit, cheese and bread.

It took me a while to get comfortable with her feeding herself, as I was worried about choking, and when they gag, it can be quite scary! But she’s a great little eater, and certainly enjoys feeding herself, so we do a mix of mashed foods and finger foods nowadays for most meals.

The freezer is your best friend when it comes to baby food, because you can make larger batches and then freeze, so there’s always something on hand! I freeze her food in these little silicone icecube trays, the ones I use are Heinz, the bottoms are easy to pop out, which makes it easy to then put the little cubes in plastic bags or containers in the freezer, and then use the trays again for more food! 

  
What does she eat? Well, I’ll do a few posts breaking these up, and try and take more photos so it’s more interesting!

We try and make a mix of carbs, protein and healthy fats for each meal, and portion sizes are still something that I find a bit confusing. For breakfast, it depends on who is feeding her (my husband and I, neither of us morning people, take it in turns to get up with her around 7am and look after her in the morning).

If it’s me, I make extra porridge from my own serving and she has that with some fruit and Greek yogurt. If it’s my husband, Weetbix (the kids ones with less salt, there are mixed messages about salt before the age of 1, so we try and reduce it or avoid it), still with fruit and Greek yogurt. To save time and effort, when I make my own stewed fruit for my breakfast at the start of the week, I mash a bit up for her and then freeze it in the trays so there are easily accessible little cubes for us both! As it’s currently winter, and I try to eat seasonally with fruit, it’s pears, rhubarb and apples, and some prunes in hers to keep her regular! Also, to save money and effort, I have started making her yogurt in the EasiYo maker – to try and delay a love affair with sugar (I still struggle with mine!), we give her Greek yogurt rather than sweetened, and so far so good, she’s happy to eat it mixed with things in breakfast, or mixed with fruit later in the day as a dessert! So I make a batch of plain, then also separate some out and mix with fruit to use for other meals!

Sometimes she’s super keen on breakfast, sometimes she’s not – as breastmilk is still supposed to be a major component of her nutrition til age 1,  I give her a breastfeed first thing if I’m up, so she’s not then as hungry for breakfast til a bit later, whereas we switch it up if my husband is up. She is also becoming very independent and keen on feeding herself, which I’ll talk more about with the other meals, so I’m trying to think of nutritious breakfast finger food – we did pancakes the other day, which weren’t the greatest success, because I foolishly decided to make a big batch at the same time as trying to feed her, which meant I was distracted and she was frustrated, especially as I put the fruit purée on them, making them hard to grasp for her! I have frozen them and given them to her plain as part of breakfast and had much more success, which is good – that’s a tip I have learnt about baby feeding, if at first you don’t succeed, try again at a different time before ditching all your hard-cooked food!

  
Obligatory cute baby photo –  this is her eating breakfast a couple of months ago.

 So, suggestions for finger food breakfasts? What should I put on toast at that time of day?