making baby food.

My 7 month old despises Gerber baby food. I don't know what to make him? any experienced mother's with kids around the same age or older got any tips. I have the cute baby food processor just need some help with recipes.
Thanks
in advance!

I made home made baby food with both of my girls. I did a lot of simple roasting. Sweet potatoes, Winter Squash, pumpkin. With other vegetables I'd just steam them. Then I would puree them, thin them with some water, freeze them in ice cube trays (each cube is about a one ounce portion) pop them out repack into freezer bags and be sure to date and label them.

For fruits, when my kids were about 6-8 months, I usually would mash up fresh fruit or run it through a ricer and just have enough to use up for that particular day.

Nam wrote:My 7 month old despises Gerber baby food. I don't know what to make him? any experienced mother's with kids around the same age or older got any tips. I have the cute baby food processor just need some help with recipes. Thanks in advance!

You can blenderize foods to your heart's content. I spent the weekend doing that for an elderly family member who is having trouble chewing.

However, back from my days in a hospital kitchen, I do remember that there are several items to avoid as they can be harmful to the child. However, the only one that I can immediately remember is raw honey.

You can puree just about anything -- they make these little hand grinders for babyfood, which we'd take to restaurants.
Any recently-cooked veggie looks and tastes better than the jarred crap. And don't get me started on the potted meats.
By the time we got busier in our lives when Thing2 was born, we would occasionally use jarred fruits or veggies, but never the meats. Just disgusting.

Thing1 was quite fond of spinach mixed with canned tuna (we called it spoonafish) for the first couple years of his life. But chicken breasts, hamburger, all are easily ground up. Mix a veggie in with it, and it will usually go down well.

I also have a 7 month old and I've been making most of his food (haven't made any meats yet). I've used both frozen and fresh fruits and veggies. I just use my immersion blender to puree everything. Also canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix) works really well and doesn't need any cooking. A website that's pretty helpful is http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/ it gives some good ideas on the progression of solids. So far I've had good luck with mango, peas, green beans, squash, pumpkin, peaches, applesauce. It's really easy and fun to open the freezer and see a rainbow of baby food cubes to choose from. Next is meats! I received a book by this author as a gift and she has some good recipe ideas as well. http://www.annabelkarmel.com/

I second ek's recommendation of Annabel Karmel. I have her book Superfoods for Babies and Children and make many of the recipes for my daughter. She also has a book dedicated to purees for babies.

http://www.amazon.com/Superfoods-Babies ... B00150GH92

http://www.amazon.com/Top-100-Baby-Pure ... 743289579/

If you're in a hurry and aren't particular about fresh foods, I used to purchase cans of salt-free vegetables - green beans, carrots, and peas worked particularly well, and just dump the entire thing in the blender; you can control the texture by adding water as needed. Check the labels first, but salt-free canned foods typically contain no other ingredients except the food and water. These then went into ice-cube trays in the freezer, and then ziploc bags. Once your baby is able to chew a little bit, they can eat the canned veggies straight, as they're soft enough to eat if cut in small pieces or mashed a bit with a fork. Of course, no reason to avoid fresh, just that the cooking is done for you with canned - and they actually taste like peas, beans, and carrots, to boot. If you're looking for single-serve foods that you can carry with you, you can usually get fruit purees in single-serve cups (applesauce, etc) which are, again, free of additives - just read the labels carefully. Some foods, like Avocados, require no work other than cutting them open and maybe mashing a bit with the spoon you're using to feed the baby.

Another cheat of mine that I've mentioned before is the frozen cooked squash puree available in bricks in the frozen veggie section. Typically, this contains only frozen butternut squash - Sparky lived on the stuff, it was the first food we introduced and his favorite for the first year. Again, just cut the block into serving-sized pieces.

The jarred baby foods offer a good lead as to which things are appropriate: you'll note that there aren't citrus fruits or berries (can cause diaper rash) or aromatics (no onions and garlic) or nuts, and are typically single foods.

If you're worried about BPA, I would stay away from canned vegetables and use frozen instead.

fabulous information THANKS- I regret however spooning nasty Gerber baby meats at all into his little mouth.

I love the idea of taking the blender to the restaurant too cool!

Take Care!

Another really easy food is to cook a sweet potato in the microwave and mash. There was a stage in my kids' early lives when their complexions took on an orange tinge from all the sweet potato, squash, and carrots they ate.

By the way, there are small 8-12 oz canning style jars that can be hooked up to your favorite blender that are more convenient than the usual size blending jar. If you are making baby food, it would be a lot easier to do.

Everybody keeps talking about blenders, and hauling them around, take a look at this list of items on Google Shopping

Just a plastic mini food mill with a steel disc, all together fits pretty easily in a diaper bag.

A basic baby food book is "Feed Me I'm Yours" by Vicki Lanski

It discusses the most basic ways to cook baby food up through toddler food. The addition I have at home is 18 years old but the Bananna bread and orange dreamcycles are still favorites in my house.

I use to gag trying to feed my son those gerber meats so I began to make my own. I would make a batch and freeze it in ice cube trays for nice small baby size portions.

Best of luck

I read in one of the baby books that banana, mango and avocado were among the very few "raw" foods that you could feed a baby. Starting at about 6 months, I began mashing up banana and feeding it to my son. He also liked the mango that I ran through the foodmill. My other ventures into babyfood making were kind of hit or miss. I tried to steam broccoli and run it through the food mill, but he didn't like it too much. I think that it was the texture.

Luckily, my son developed a mouth full of teeth at an early age, so my baby food days were actually quite short.

The most surprising and best baby food that I made for him was when I took the leftover roasted parsnips and turnips that we made for Easter dinner and ran them through the food mill. For some reason, the texture was almost creamy, and the puree was naturally sweet. I don't think that I added anything (like butter) to it, as I was quite paranoid at the time. He loved it! I froze a few ice cubes of it and fed it to him here and there for the next few weeks.

I did the steam/puree/ice cube tray thing as well. Beets were popular in addition to those mentioned.

My mom, however, won the "best grandma" crown by frequently making chicken soup and then giving me the gedempte (overcooked?!) to blend with the carrots in the soup. Mmm, it even seemed palatable to me.