Bringing up Gourmandito

Food is such a bonding experience for everyone. Young, old, no matter where in the world you are, food seems to constantly be the center to which everyone gathers and create memories. Why would we deprive little babies of the same experiences?

Since Mads turned 4 months and was able to hold her head up steadily, she's been eating solids. And by solids, I really mean pulverized liquid concoctions. To ease her into the idea of swallowing something more substantial than the consistency of milk, I started with the Stage 1 baby food jars. The notion of spoon feeding was also super foreign so we started slowly with some rice cereal just to see how she'd do.

A couple gags and weird looks later, luckily Mads embraced the spoon like a champ and soon started chowing down jars of liquid vegetables like a pro. I started getting excited buying her all sorts of baby food varieties with enticing pictures on the front until one day when I fed her mashed peas and she gave me this weird "Really mom? You really want me to eat this?" look and it dawned on me that I never bothered tasting her food. How am I to feed my child something that I didn't even want to taste? So I took one nibble of the mashed pea liquid and made exactly the same face at her. That was the last time peas were in the picture.

Since then, I've taken to making her own baby food which afforded me much greater freedom in ingredient mixing and I actually trusted what she was eating and how it was made. I began experimenting with two vegetable ingredients and slowly worked my way through a repertoire of colorful veggies California had to offer.

Steaming her lunch for the week

At 5 months, our ped gave us the go-ahead for some more various proteins so fish came in the picture. It was baked tilapia (farmed fresh water - lowest mercury content) then baked salmon. Then came all sorts of combinations but I followed my own simple guidelines to making baby food:

• Vegetables take the lead, always. Organic only and washed thoroughly.
• If protein, tender healthy lean bits only.
• Never salt.
• Steam most of the veggies to retain nutrients (boiling loses a lot of the nutrients in the water that you throw out). Stir fry or bake as necessary.
• Don't be afraid to flavor with garlic, nuts, or non-salt or sugar based herbs. I've done shallots, basil, chives, rosemary. (Nuts is a personal call. Talk to your ped)
• Don't mix fruit into the meal. Fruit is for desserts.

I have two equipment pieces I use - the Vitamix and the Immersion Blender. Vitamix is great for very very fine, smooth foods great for the younger times when she cannot handle swallowing textures. Immersion blender is great for when she got older and more able to handle coarser textures. 

Quinoa, asparagus, and beef

We've purposely held back on giving her any fruits as it is commonly known that babies love sweet things (breastmilk is really sweet) and if you start them on fruits for solids, they have a harder time accepting non-sweet foods. So only once Mads became comfortable with various baby food flavors, none of which contained fruit, then we started giving her fruit as a dessert at the end of the meal. I would cut up various types of fruit bits (or halve the blueberries) and put them into a silicon feeder so she can learn to feed herself.

What has been surprising is that Mads now will eat anything we give her. I mean anything. Even if she doesn't really like it, she won't refuse. But she hasn't shown extra interest in very sweet things. If fruits are too sweet sometimes she'll only nibble a bit and be done with it.

As a working mom, making my own baby food has been quite an interesting maneuvering of logistics. I wanted to be the one to grocery shop, prep, cook, and store. I wanted to keep her food fresh and exciting and not make too big of a batch that she'll end up having the same thing over and over forever. But I also only had a small window to operate 'heavy machinery' aka the Vitamix without waking her up so efficient use of my time was key.
It's been a fun and exciting journey and can't wait to keep introducing her to more and more flavors.