Advice on Making Baby Food, Please

This is a good website. It tells you how to make the food, when to introduce different foods, and also gives additional recipes.
http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com

Hello! I made all the baby food for my daughter and have started making it for my son. I found it to be easier and much tastier than the jarred food. Ruth Yarrow has a book called "super baby food". It has great step by step directions, hints and recipes. Good luck!

Try the book Super Baby Food for recipes on making your own food and ideas for when to introduce what foods. My husband actually took over doing this for our daughter and it made him feel so good to be involved with feeding since I was nursing. He would freeze it in ice cube trays and it would be ready to go when we needed it. We both work full time and it was really easy to do. With both of my babies, I warmed the food the first time I introduced it because I think it tastes better to them and they are sensitive to temperature. Gradually, they adapt and develop and tolerate cold temperatures.

The book Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron was a huge help for me.

Here's a website I liked: http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/babymenub.htm

I made a bunch of babyfood on Sundays - steamed, pureed and froze. I would then warm them in the microwave on the defrost setting. My son loved spaghetti sqaush, green beans, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, asparagus, apples, pears, and peaches.

Just put a couple cubes into little plastic bowls with lids. Your daycare should be able to put it in the microwave for about 10 seconds before feeding him. We did this for our son and it worked great.

Hi R.!
Check out www.wholesomebabyfood.com - it has really been a great guide for me when making baby food. Also, it might be worth it to invest in Kidco freezer trays as well as the Kidco electric food mill (you can order these on line ... just Google "Kidco"). I ended up buying 10 freezer trays so I can make large batches. I found that they work better than ice cube trays because they are covered and therefore more easily stackable. Good luck - I love making food for my little daughter!! It's more work, but I feel it's definitely worth it. By the way... very cool about leading a deaf church within your church!

I second Lisa. www.wholesomebabyfoods.com. It tells you the stages (4-6 months etc.) and first foods and directions on how to prepare. My daughter is 5 months and the website has been so helpful. Oh yeah, it also tells which foods should be bought organc due to soil nitrates and which not to bother buying in organic.Also tells about forbidden food and allergies. It's completely free.
Take care and have fun!
My daughter always gives the sourest face when I've introduced something new. She loves bananas now though.

Kudos to you for wanting the best nutrition for your baby! You might be interested in baby led weaning, which doesn't require or recommend the spoon-feeding of purees and working baby through the baby food "stages." I did the homemade baby food/stages thing with my oldest and then baby led with my daughter. On top of being less labor intensive, I felt like the baby led approach was a lot more gradual and natural and honored her individual readiness for solids more.

I should add I didn't know at the time there was a name for what I was doing. I just knew I wanted to wait until she initiated an interest in solids on her own because I felt like I started my son too early. I also had started learning about how baby cereal may not be the best first food.

Here's a introduction to baby led weaning from youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVBdMDl4RXo

Hi R.,

I have a 4 1/2 old daughter. I asked the same question a few weeks back. See this link for more helpful information that others have given me!
"Giving homemade baby food a thought..."

I haven't started solids other than cereal. We're going to start freezing next week so that we can start around Thanksgiving. Hope this helps!

A good place to start is getting one of the Magic Bullets to puree the food. I bought one for our daughter and it was wonderful. I would just go with the warm foods, he's still pretty young so you have plenty of time to worry about room temp foods. Once you've gone through all the basic foods to watch for allergies you can start pureeing whatever you cook for dinner.

Hi! I have a great website I use, its www.wholesomebabyfood.com. It has so much information! My daughter is 6 1/2 months and she just started solids, this website has been extremely helpful. Good luck!

Good for you for wanting to get a head start and for taking charge of your son's nutrition :O) I find it very satisfying to feed my daughter a balanced and varied diet of home made food rather than buying expensive jars with all that wasteful packaging. The book "Super Baby Food" and wholesomebabyfood.com have been invaluable to me in making food for my daughter. They're both very informative. The best thing to do is get him eating as wide a variety of food as you can so he gets the best nutrition and is less likely to become a picky eater from early on. The book and the website will let you know what foods are safe to introduce and when. We bought the Kidco Babysteps freezer trays and feeding dishes which made it very simple. Don't bother with a special food mill, your regular blender will be best. As far as temperatures are concerned, I would just go with whatever he will accept at the time. You could try the food cold and then heat it if he won't take it. He'll eventually take cooler foods. Good luck!

I made all my daughters food & the book that really started me off was "First Meals" I think the author was Annabel Karmel---really gave me some great ideas & then I went from there--she is a great eater at 3 yrs old now & I am expecting my second & will do the same for him/her (?)It really is not very hard & it is great to know what is exactly in your childs food. When I ran into some problems, I googled for my answers & got a lot of great recipes too! When you want to puree meat---was my biggest struggle, with the internet, I found out, it just has to be cold upon pureeing---of course I was cooking & pureeing immediately & it was real gritty---thats an important one that I learned thru google & I did not puree meat for long, I realized my daughter loved any meat cut very very small that was bbq'd (go figure) & I would make purees etc with food I was making for my husband & I. It works out real well after a while--try the book, I am sure you will like it!

I just wanted to add my two cents to the wonderful advice you have already received. I also have the Super Baby Foods book by Ruth Yaron, but I found that to be almost too much information to take in. It is a great resource, but it may be more than you are looking for. I really like the book by Annabel Karamel; Top 100 Baby Purees. It is simple and gives good instructions. Also, I use regular old ice cube trays covered with Glad's Press and Seal wrap for freezing my food. (The trays stack just fine.) This is cheaper than the "baby food" trays and I have almost twenty for when I do multiple batches or several foods at once. Once frozen I place the cubes into ziplock freezer bags. (The ones with the easy zipper work the best and last the longest.) As for warming the food up, if he likes his food warm go with it. He will probably out grow that eventually. I use my microwaves defrost setting to thaw the cubes without making the food way too hot. (We did find a trick to cool it down quickly if does get a little too hot and there is a hugery baby waiting; pop in an ice cube until it is cool enough.) Hope you find the baby food making to be enjoyable and rewarding, I know I do.

I never used baby food. I would mash soft foods first (bananas) and go from there. Sometimes I would combine things like peas and pears if peas weren't a fit and wean off the pears. I bought a small food chopper and they ate whatever we did. Worked great!