Introducing food to babies
What and when to feed your baby is a very individual process that has to suit both parent and baby, and more often than not will be dictated by your baby’s preferences anyway. Having just negotiated and explored the world of food with my baby I wanted to share some thoughts, recipes and ideas. For all babies it is advised to avoid dairy and gluten for the first year, which suits perfectly a healthy whole food diet. It is recommended to exclusively breastfeed your baby for the first six months and then start to introduce solids, however all babies are different. My baby boy, Archer, was really interested in food by 14 or 15 weeks, so not even four months, making a goldfish mouth whenever he saw us eating which was highly amusing! He then became really hungry; waking for feeds every hour and a half in the night when he had been sleeping much better!! So I read the signs, and although I was exclusively breastfeeding, started to give him solids around 16 weeks. The WHO guidelines state that no solids should be given before 16 weeks, breast or bottle-fed, as babies digestive systems aren’t developed enough to cope.
Introducing solids is a really gradual process, which will start with maybe one spoonful a day trying out different tastes and textures, there are loads of good books for specific plans. I used Patrick Holford’s ‘Optimum Nutrition Before During and After Pregnancy’.
What you introduce when is usually based on how easy it is for your baby to digest and how likely they are to develop an allergy. I loosely followed the Optimum Nutrition book as I like their take on it, but at the end of the day I found that instinct overrules. So I’ve written below some of what is suggested as guidelines and what I did.
First tastes (4-6 months):I
t’s best to steam where possible then purée everything, as your baby wont be able to handle chunks yet.
• Vegetables; except potato, aubergine, tomato and peppers
• Fruit, except citrus
• Beans and pulses
• Rice, quinoa, millet and buckwheat
• Fish preferably organic or deep sea.
I started just trying one spoonful at tea time for the first few days, then introduced a second spoonful at lunchtime and by the third or fourth weeks a spoonful at breakfast time. To start with its best to introduce solids halfway through a milk feed, as then your baby won’t be desperately hungry and unstressed. For example give all of one breast then a spoonful of puréed carrot then the other breast. For the very first taste I gave banana as I wanted to give him something live to eat, and I just chewed it up, spat it out and fed it to him Russian Grandma style! To soften food you can use either some of the water from the steamed veg or breast milk.
After this gradual introduction and tasting process you can go on to combine to start providing a balanced diet. This is what I find the most fun, coming up with little mini-meals, a lot of the time you can do this just by taking out some of your dinner and then blending it. However it’s very important to avoid salt and sugar for babies diet. Other things to avoid are strong spices, processed food or snacks, wheat based foods and small items such as raisins as they can pose a choking hazard.
After 9 months (or when your baby has been taking solids for a few months as) you can introduce:
• Oats, corn and rye.
• Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and aubergine.
• Soya.
Then after 12 months:
• Citrus.
• Wheat.
• Nuts and seeds.
To jazz things up a bit I started to add in little bits of onion or garlic to the steaming veg, or some chopped parsley. I’ve used organic as much as possible, especially fresh veg from the garden. A really handy thing for making baby meals is buying rice, quinoa or buckwheat flakes, which are available in Organico shop. You can then very easily cook them up into a porridge and mix in the veg or fruit and then you don’t need to blend. I think of quinoa as a wonder food, it’s a complete protein so super good for you as well as being a healthy carb. I mix quinoa flakes in with oats to make porridge in the morning, for both Archer and me. Now I find there are a lot of our meals that I can save a bit for Archer, and add extra seasoning for us afterwards, like ratatouille, lentil soup or even curry.
Baby meal combinations:
Cannelinni bean, butternut squash, carrot, garlic, parsley and spinach.
Red lentil, tomato, carrot, red pepper and rice.
Potato, kale, parsley and avocado, add the avocado in raw to the steamed veg to make it creamy.
Asparagus, buckwheat and broccoli.
Pumpkin, quinoa, chickpea and onion.
Courgette, mung bean, carrot and rice
Parsnip, pumpkin, cauliflower and quinoa.
Passata, parsley, white bean and pasta.
Salmon, potato, spinach and goat milk formula
Pumpkin, lemon sole, kale and garlic
Finger foods are great once your baby is ready for them. It was a little scary giving him his first rice cake as he hadn’t quite got his head around swallowing yet, but after a bit of sucking he soon got the idea. (*Never leave your baby unattended with finger foods*)
Good ones to try are rice cakes, dried apricots, dried mango, spelt bread, banana, kiwi fruit, apple, steamed carrot sticks.
On the whole it seems to be recommended to aim for your baby to be eating everything you eat by the time they are a year old. By this stage they may only be having milk first thing in the morning and last thing at night and then water with their three meals.
Ready made baby food.
There are a lot of baby foods available that are really good and easy to use. All organic ranges tend to be gluten, dairy and sugar and salt free, though you may need to check this for specific age ranges. Although they’ll never be as good as home made food, jars are really handy for when you don’t have enough time or get caught out somewhere. You can always add to them as well to bulk out home cooked food.
Ellas Kitchen range are really handy for on the go as you can spoon out what you need, and as your baby gets bigger they can learn to suck out of the packet. They are also handy for older children as they do a fruit smoothie range that are really yummy.
Hipp do a good variety of meals, puddings and purées.
Plum Baby are another handy squeezy pack range that have some more unusual combinations which babies seem to love!
Organix do a wide range in baby snacks, from the apple flavoured rice cakes to baby biscuits and baby ‘crisps’.
Feeding your baby, toddler or child should always be a fun and relaxed experience, where you are introducing your child to food in a positive way for life!
Happy feeding!!
- All the products and ingredients mentioned are available in Organico shop –
March 17th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Thanks for this great article Jess! I found your recipes very inspiring and they came along at just the right time as Lucy was getting bored with the same old mush every day!Hannah