baby food, revisited

Our trusty blender is getting a work out these days thanks to Small One’s appetite, and don’t even get me started on his consumption of natural yoghurt. My son’s favourite food is without a doubt natural yoghurt. I don’t keep track of how much he eats, but after the general feeling that I was picking up lots of tubs of yoghurt on a regular basis, I  payed attention last week. He ate almost one kilogram of yoghurt. That’s just over two pounds. It was a bit overwhelming, and I sincerely hope that this is going to be good for him. Send me an email if you think otherwise. I’m serious.

When I last wrote about baby food, we were still doing basic purees, and I had not introduced any meat into Small One’s diet. What followed was a weekend fever that knocked out his appetite, and all he ate for about two weeks after that was fruit puree out of a jar. So we went the bought baby food route for a while, and it was great. That was also during the time of Papa’s death and funeral with some travel involved for all of us, and it made life that much easier to feed Small One bought baby food. It also gave me lots of jars to use for our baby food at home.

When we were home and settled, I finally bought Superfoods for Babies by Annabel Karmel, and that’s where I got the bulk of my meat recipes from. The first one we tried was a braised beef one with onions, garlic, beef, sweet potato, carrots, water, bay leaf and parsley, cooked on the stove for over an hour. It was so delicious, I wanted to eat it.

Now I’ve started making Small One unsalted versions of our food and also supplementing with some baby food that’s just for him. For example, I made a taco soup for us a few weeks ago, and before I added the salt, I took some out, pureed it, and he loved it. The chicken dish in the photo was also eaten by Husband and I – I pan fried the chicken, took it out, then sauteed onions and garlic, added mushrooms to it and put some white wine in, then I added the chicken back and let it cook for a while. At the end I put in a two blocks of frozen spinach. After a minute in the blender, it was lunch for a few days. He was a fan. (We were, too.)

He nurses four times a day, and I’ve started giving him some water. Here’s what his meals look like most of the time:

• Breakfast      Super porridge + greens + fruit    The porridge sounds complicated, but is so so so easy to make. I take a cup of brown rice, a cup of quinoa, two tablespoons of amaranth and a 1/4 or 1/2 cup of lentils and grind it in the blender for a minute. Then I add two to four tablespoons of brown millet flour to it, mix it all together in an IKEA jar and put away. To make the porridge, I boil water on the stove and add 1/2 a cup of the mixture to it and cook for about 10 minutes. The taste is great, except for the one time when I used brown (puy?) lentils instead of the red lentils. That was not so great. The greens has been a mix of asparagus and peas for the last little while, but that will change to probably broccoli, spinach and peas as asparagus goes out of season. Avocado is usually thrown in there, and he has just started egg yolks in the morning as well.
• Lunch        Meat puree + fruit      I was giving him yoghurt for his lunch meal until I realized that combining calcium and iron will inhibit his body’s ability to absorb the iron, but vitamin C enhances iron absorption, so I try to give him a fruit puree that is high in vitamin C with his meat (right now it’s strawberries and blueberries). I’ve made him some meat purees now that have Sri Lankan curry powder in it with a tomato sauce base, so it’s a bit like a tame beef curry. His meat purees usually have two or three veggies in it.
• Dinner      Super porridge + veggie  + yoghurt  Right now he’s been eating a tame dhal that I made with onions, curry leaves, a bit of curry powder, lentils, zucchini and coconut milk.

As previously mentioned, natural yoghurt is basically his favourite thing. I think I could get him to eat anything if it was covered in natural yoghurt. He has not rejected any food completely, but he definitely shows a preference for his meat dishes and fruit purees. Small One usually happily eats half of his meal, and the second half requires a bit of entertainment.

He has started eating wholewheat pasta as a finger food, and I will probably switch his dinner carbs from the porridge to regular carbs like brown rice, wholewheat pasta, cous cous, quinoa and whatever else we are eating.

I want to get to the point – sooner rather than later – where all of us are eating the same food, and also hopefully start introducing him to the nuts and seeds group of foods in the next month.

Babies are unpredictable, and I am still unconvinced that he likes his food because he genuinely likes his food (because, honestly, what is so tasty about natural yoghurt? Or does lactose turn into liquid sugar in their mouths?). I suspect that a lot of it is texture and colour related. So that’s the baby food update for now. We’ll see what happens next.

mushiness

I breastfed Small One exclusively until he was six months, and the day of his six-month birthday, Husband went to Ikea to buy a high chair. The next day, we put him in it and gave him a bit of banana. I would do things very differently in the future. A high chair is a new thing for a little baby as are utensils. (Of course it would help if we had utensils. His first spoon was one of those plastic contraptions that come free with grocery store salads. You know the ones that fold with a spoon on one end and a fork on the other? Good job, Mom.) I think it would have been better to put him in the high chair for a few days before starting solids, just for a few minutes, to give him the feel for it.

A friend asked me to write a bit more about how we have gone about feeding Small One after she read my last post about baby food. To say that I am some sort of baby food expert or a nutrition expert or a baby and children expert would all be gross exaggerations. The only thing I am an expert at is quizzing people I know and like about how they do things and then forming an opinion of my own based on that.

I would say that my attitude toward food, for Small One and for us, is a cobbling together of different opinions of knowledgeable friends, my own research and personal intuition. Organic is best but when it’s not cheap, we skip it. Whole grains are best, but when I need fluffy, white jasmine rice, I eat it. Processed sugar has no real health benefits so baby will have none of it. The jury is out if his parents will comply with the same rules. We make our own food, but I buy baby food when necessary for travel and outings. Baby gets no junk food. Again, we’ll see about his parents. Lots of veggies and fruits for all, very little meat products and dairy.

It is also worth mentioning that I only have one baby, and he’s only eight months. I have not been doing this for very long, but I am rarely shy about sharing my opinions. Feel free to laugh at my optimism if you have multiple children.

Most Important

I needed to have a plan, a philosophy or some type of “guiding” material and attitude about how I was going to do things. I do not survive well when I don’t have boundaries, and a friend gave me a book that is becoming a loose philosophy for Husband and I as we feed Small One and maybe even future children.

The book is Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron. She is a mom, not a nutritionist or a medical specialist, and her book is in serious need of an editor and photographer. To say it was difficult to get through it and understand what she was trying to say is an understatement, but once I got there, I liked what I found. What this book lacks are good recipes for babies. There are lots of recipes for toddlers, but for babies it only has a list of what fruits and veggies to try out but not a lot of combinations. A friend of mine who has a baby the same age as Small One recommends Annabel Karmel’s book Superfoods for Babies. And seriously, my friend’s baby eats amazing food. She also put me on to the Wholesome Baby food website that has good information and recipes.

Other than that, our general attitude to all things baby has been “Start the way you want to finish,” so we try to teach him table manners now, and the food he eats are hopefully setting a foundation for healthy eating patterns in the future. At the very least, this is the only time in his life where I really do get to determine what he eats, grandparents permitting, and intend to fill his little body with as many wonderful things as I can.

Food Thoughts

We had two factors that affected the way we fed Small One at the beginning.

I read about Baby Led Weaning, and was a huge fan of it in theory, so I wanted to try out some of its principles, meaning giving Small One pieces of fruit and veggies to hold and eat. He feeds himself. It’s got to be a win, win situation, right? Nope. I underestimated my huge patience issues. I could not handle sitting there watching him hold a banana and squish it in his hand. Could. Not. Handle. It. The mess drove me crazy. I kept wiping off the tray and wiping off his hands. Then I started wondering if I was going to give him a complex about cleanliness. Then I felt horribly guilty. Then I decided I couldn’t do baby-led weaning.

So I started pureeing like a mad woman, and Small One started eating his fruits and veggies that way. He had bananas, avocados, pears, carrots, sweet potatoes, peas, potatoes, apple, what I thought was a parsnip (It was actually a white radish. Good job, Mom). I didn’t want to give him rice cereal because I wanted to make my own wholegrain porridge (more on that later).

Factor two was that we were traveling with him to Australia a few weeks after he started solids, and I didn’t want to make food while I was there. I did not want to get into the full program of where we were going with solids only to have to change it up, so I kept it simple. We only gave him pureed or mashed fruits and veggies: In Australia I bought baby food with zero sugar in it, and I think we added sweet corn, pumpkin and zucchini to his food choices there. Some of the packages I bought had some mixed rice in with it.

Doesn’t that look yummy? Just kidding. Baby food is about as unappetizing as you can get. That’s Small One’s brown rice porridge. I use this machine – I have no idea what it is (found it in Husband’s flat, and I think it’s one of his former flatmate’s), and sometimes I use the blender. Today for lunch he had brown rice porridge with pureed broccoli and peas and yoghurt. There is no way I would touch that for lunch myself, but he seemed to like it. I think he is a big fan of broccoli because of the texture.

It has only been in the past few weeks that I have been able to do the food program with Small One that is based on the Super Baby Food book. Here is the basic breakdown of his meals:

Breakast – Breastfeed + super porridge (brown rice, or brown rice and millet, or brown rice, quinoa and millet, etc.) + avocado and/or fruit. Once Small One is a few months older some things get added to the porridge – ground lentils and/or ground beans plus possibly some nutritional yeast.

Lunch - Breastfeed + small portion of super porridge + yoghurt + veggie and/or fruit

Dinner - Breastfeed + super porridge + veggie and/or fruit

I don’t have a heavy-duty grinder and haven’t tried the blender yet for grinding brown rice into flour. Yesterday was the first time that I made the brown rice and ground up the cooked brown rice. I kept adding water until I got the consistency I wanted. It worked perfectly well, and I don’t think I will try grinding grains in the future but will just stick with this method.

Eventually the super porridge for lunch and dinner will be replaced with other whole grain foods (pastas, breads, grains, etc.), and I’m now introducing new fruits and veggies to him every two days. My guess is that I will give him pureed meat soon, but hopefully he will eat what we eat – red meat once a week, white meat once a week, eggs and veggies. But I will probably need to have his iron levels checked or supplement with iron drops.

I give him finger foods as snacks in between meals, and those usually consist of soft fruit and veg and rice crackers. He ate half a kiwi last night and had a steamed bean for his snack while we ate lunch.

There you have it. Baby food from our corner of the world. Who knows what will be happening a month from now, but I am still hoping that our little baby will be a happy, healthy adventurous little eater.

baby food

Small One’s diet for the first six months of his life was simple. It was my diet. Minus a few weeks at the beginning when pizza didn’t agree with him, he has been easy to please. Thank God he wasn’t a picky eater.

Food really is a huge part of how we develop as human beings. I’m not even referring to the very literal way in which we grow physically because of the food we put in our bodies. The experiences surrounding the food experience is a crucial part of how we grow, from the emotional closeness of breastfeeding to the boundaries of a high chair to learning how to pick up a rice cracker and put it in the mouth.

Small One spends about half of his awake time in my arms or in a high chair, and it is where he is learning about manners, boundaries, tastes and mommy’s strong dislike for mess. Here’s hoping I don’t scar him permanently by the way I keep wiping messes off the tray, his face and hands.

So what does Small One eat? He started with bananas. He wasn’t a big fan. Avocados were next, and he was a bit more tolerant. The big hit was carrots. He loves carrots. Now he eats everything I have put in front of him so far – peas, broccoli, apple, pear, sweet potato, potato, parsnip, beans, sweet corn, melon (new today), pumpkin, spinach, and brown rice, quinoa and millet cereal. He loves bananas now. Here’s hoping we will be able to tackle many new foods in the next weeks.