Up until now, you have not had a lot of options as to what to
feed your baby....basically just breast milk or formula. You probably
made these choice based on what was convenient for you and most healthy
(and agreed with) your baby. Now that your baby is approaching the six
month mark, you should start to introduce solids. It may sound daunting
but it is highly recommended to make your own baby food using a baby
food processor so we could ensure the food our baby was getting was 100%
natural and wholesome. This helps ease their entry into the world of
solids.
We decided to purchase a baby food processor and did not
regret our decision. I made baby food out of squash from my parent's
garden, from frozen peas, from store-bought apples, pretty much anything
we could get our hands on that would be healthy for the baby.
One
of our favorite foods that we introduced to our baby was avocados
because they are one of those foods you can basically live on (if you
were stranded on a desert island) so we figured they were providing a
lot of great nutrients to our baby (and because our doctor recommended
them.)
To prepare the baby food in the baby food processor there
are a few steps depending on the food. Avocados are the easiest foods to
prepare as long as they are ripe. Simply peal the avocado with a spoon,
place the meat of the avocado into the body of the processor, add a
little bit of formula or breast milk and blend. It is ready to be spoon
fed to your child. Pretty easy!
Fruits like apples or mangoes or
vegetables like potatoes will need to be pealed before placing them in
the processor. A simple hand peeler should do the trick and prepare you
for the next step of steaming or blending.
Harder fruits and
vegetables like squash and apples may need to be cooked for a duration
and that is why we purchased the Baeba Babycook so you can cook the
fruit or vegetable and then use the same container and device to blend
it. It actually makes it very easy and makes it possible to turn an
entire banana squash (huge) into dozens of pods of frozen baby food.
Another
favorite once our daughter was a little older was chili. Using an old
family recipe for some wonderful chili and then blending it for our
daughter created a meal that both parents and babies can enjoy, although
the baby version is blended. After awhile you can really start to take
the food that you are eating and blend it down to a consistency that the
babies can tolerate with chunks of food no larger than the size of the
tip of their thumb to avoid choking. This greatly simplifies making
dinner and also gets your baby used to eating the foods that adults do!
When
making an excess of baby food, we liked to freeze the excess into ice
cube trays (we also like the kind from Beaba) and then place the baby
food-slices into freezer bags to be used for months to come. This
allowed us to have baby food on hand at all times which was very
convenient and it also gave us food to take to babysitters and daycare
which we felt very comfortable was safe and healthy for our baby. Once
it is time to feed the baby the frozen food, take care to put the
food-sicle into a glass dish before placing it into the microwave. Glass
dishes are better than plastic dishes in the microwave simply because
plastic can be melted at a certain temperature so to avoid having any
plastic particles melting into your baby food and causing harm to the
baby, definitely reheat with glass. Another recommendation is to
purchase spoons that turn white if the reheated food is too hot so that
you always know if the temperature is going to be cool enough not to
harm your baby's delicate mouth.
It really is amazing how easy a
baby food processor makes it to make your own homemade baby food. I
recommend giving it a try for your little bouncy bundle of
almost-solid-food-eating joy!
Good luck!
Alecia Hoobing is an Internet Marketer, Mom and Adventurer. She
loves to run, cycle, travel, read and go on adventures with her husband
and four-month old daughter. Her latest project, besides her daughter is
to educate parents on how easy it can be to make their own baby food
using a baby food processor [http://www.babyfoodprocessor.org]. Check
out her blog and story
[http://www.babyfoodprocessor.org/tools-and-utensils/the-baby-food-processor-journey].
0 comments:
Post a Comment