Good Baby Food Recipes for Ages 8 months and Up

Here are some that have gotten an especially positive response from our little one and are healthy. All of these can be eaten by adults as well as baby. I’ll update as I find additional good recipes.

Ratatouille – great mixture of vegetables, especially in late summer when all are in season. Nice combination of spices. Puree this up for a great baby meal.

Borshch – this is a great recipe, bringing in some meat as well as late-season fresh veggies. Puree it, fill a bunch of bottles and stick them in the freezer to have meals on hand whenever needed.

Sauteed Chicken with Cherry Tomatoes – the cherry tomatoes and shallots give it sweetness, lots of protein from the chicken. A great meal for the family as well, so this one goes a long way. From The Oprah Magazine Cookbook, pg. 115

Ingredients:
3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
6 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 1.5 pounds) or chicken thighs
4 garlic cloves, smashed and coarsely chopped
6 shallots, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 pints cherry or grape tomatoes, rinsed and drained
1 tsp. dried oregano
¾ cup dry white wine
salt
freshly ground pepper
1 pound spinach angel hair pasta, cooked according to package directions


Instructions:
-In a 12-inch skillet, a Dutch oven, or a lidded casserole, heat oil over medium-high heat.
-Add half the chicken and cook until golden brown, about 6 minutes total, turning midway through cooking time.
-Remove with tongs and brown remaining chicken breasts.
-Set aside.
-Reduce heat to medium.
-Add garlic and shallots and sauté until fragrant, about 15 seconds.
-Add cherry tomatoes, oregano, white wine, ½ tsp. salt and ¼ tsp. pepper, and sauté until wine reduces by a third, about 4 minutes, shaking the pan from time to time.
-Return chicken to pan, cover, and simmer until chicken is cooked through and no longer pink, 5-7 minutes.
-Adjust seasoning to taste.
-Serve chicken over angel-hair pasta.

Good recipe

Yay! I finally made something that used my abundance of produce and turned out well. This borsht recipe is great. It uses in-season tomatoes (I substituted fresh for canned), onions, beets, pepper and carrots, has some meat (which I’ve been lacking lately in the attempt to use my veggies) and a great taste. I’ll be pureeing some of this for baby, who could also use the meat and will hopefully appreciate a different soup on the menu!

Please, you must like the minestrone!

So, after preparing 13 large bottles full of minestrone for baby, he makes some seriously offended faces upon being fed. He did eventually eat some, especially when we alternated the soup with a mixture of cantaloupe and grapes. However, we weren’t going to get through 13 bottles easily this way.

When the babysitter tried it, she liked it, so I sent her home with two large containers. And I still had a giant bowl left. When I tried it, it seemed to have a sour taste. I don’t know why my cooking isn’t turning out lately. I go through all the effort to prepare something only to pawn it off on others. It might be a new recipe source that is not reliable. Or maybe it’s a mistake to count a clove of the large, organic garlic I get at the farm as a standard clove (it’s probably more like 2 or 3).

I did realize the soup I’d pureed for River turned out pretty chunky. Maybe, just maybe, the texture, not the taste, bothered him. So I took what was left and pureed it well, filling another 6 bottles. Nineteen bottles now in the fridge. I really, really hope he likes it.

Today my husband gave him lunch. I asked how River ate.

“He really liked the big bottle of orange stuff,” he said.

“The soup?”

“I guess so.”

“Yay!” He likes minestrone after all.

Drowning in Vegetables

I am so drowning in vegetables that I don’t know what to do. I made a giant pot of minestrone. It didn’t turn out as well as I’d like. But it’s chock full of vegetables and nutrients, so would make good baby food. I blended up a bunch last night and filled THIRTEEN 8-ounce bottles with soup to freeze. And I STILL have a bunch in the fridge. I sure hope River likes it because he is going to be eating minestrone very frequently in the coming days and weeks.

Even after the minestrone, I have a bunch of vegetables I need to use quickly and the freezer is beginning to overflow. Ratatouille is next on the menu. Help!!!

Summer Recipes for Baby

Do you have lots of summer produce? Wondering what to make for baby? Here are a couple of ideas that have worked successfully for us:

· Sautee beet greens with olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper and a little red pepper. Boil and peel the beets. Then blend the beets and the greens together

· Blended cantaloupe and blueberries

· Blueberries, peaches and strawberries blended together. If you freeze the extras, you’ll have an easy dessert on hand.

· Squash with sweet potatoes and fresh basil

· Broccoli with lemon pepper. If baby isn’t too excited by this, mixing with carrots or sweet potatoes should help.

· Carrots with ginger

· Blueberries with peach and strawberries

· Cantaloupe with blueberries

This one doesn’t come from local produce, but we copied the idea from a friend and both of our babies love it:
Avocado with banana

As for meat (chicken and beef) we’re finding it works better in small quantities (such as a casserole with some chicken in it) rather than trying to blend up chicken with something else. The texture is too stringy if it’s largely meat.

An Easy Guide to Homemade Baby Food

If you prefer to feed your baby fresh food but are concerned it will be a lot of work, here are a few tips to make it easy.

1. Get yourself a few silicone ice cube trays and silicone muffin pans. The silicone makes the food very easy to remove. The ice cube tray is a good portion size early on (and makes it easy to mix – ie. 5 cubes of sweet potatoes with 3 cubes of green beans to sneak in the greens) and then the muffin size becomes a better portion later. The muffin pans are also great when blending up entrees. You’ll have a bunch of complete meals on hand for baby. You can get these on ebay, in local kitchen stores, or in department stores, Target, etc.

2. Get yourself a small food processor or blender

3. Have a box of large zip-locs on hand.

If you have the three things above, you are ready.

Start out with individual vegetables or fruits. We always added a spice (carrots with ginger, sweet potatoes with cinnamon, green beans with basil, broccoli with lemon pepper etc.) so that baby would get used to a variety of flavors.

To make your first batch, peel the vegetable, boil until it’s soft, blend or puree and add spice (if desired). Fill the silicone tray and put the tray into a Ziploc bag. Close tightly. When the cubes are frozen, press them out into the Zip-loc. Remove air from Zip-loc and close tightly. The cubes don’t take up much space in the freezer and you can remove as needed. This method avoids the problem of freezer burn.

It’s easiest to do this in quantity. It takes the same amount of work to boil and blend five sweet potatoes as it does to do one, but five will last a lot longer. We found that making food 2-3 times a week (a different vegetable each time) was sufficient in the first month or two.

Blending the cubes as the baby is ready is a good way to introduce mixtures. They are also helpful in getting baby accustomed to tastes that aren’t a hit right off the bat. For us, green beans didn’t go over so well. So our babysitter found that River liked them if she mixed 5 sweet potato cubes to three green beans cubes. Each day she reduced it, 4 to 3, 3 to 3, until he was able to eat green beans.

Just over a month into solids, we realized our baby was eating everything with gusto and we stopped being so methodical about introducing one thing per day. We began to give him whatever we were eating, though we avoid giving him sugars and white carbohydrates.

I made a soup with turkey, black-eyed peas and collard greens. Before adding the salt, I blended up a portion, put it into bottles in the freezer, and we had several meals on hand. If the soups needs thickening, we add baby cereal. We’ve given him a kale, chicken, tomato and corn tortilla casserole blended into muffin-size portions, wheat pasta with pesto, a squash and corn soup, a rustic cabbage soup. We blend fresh fruit with tofu for dessert.

I don’t know whether it’s genetics or early encouragement to try a wide variety of foods, but River will eat anything – including lemons and spring onions. Since daddy is a very picky eater we’ve been especially diligent about trying to help him develop a taste for healthy foods.

The combination of preparing staples to freeze 2-3 times a week and blending up whatever I’m eating as additional meals during the week hasn’t been too onerous. It probably would be a bit easier to feed him organic baby food from jars. But he wouldn’t get the spices, the variety, and the exposure to the typical foods that I eat on a daily basis and that I’d expect him to eat eventually. It’s been easy to get him used to those foods early on so that we eat together from the beginning (I’m hoping to avoid making separate kid meals). And since my husband usually isn’t interested in the healthy things I prepare, it’s been wonderful to be able to share them with a baby!