Baby food is a crazy market saturated with way over-priced or poor quality products I would not feed to my dog, let alone my child. Organic foods are important for adults but essential for babies. I believe it is completely unnecessary to expose a new biological system to the vast cocktail of antibiotics, hormones, pesticides and genetically altered foods most of us ingest regularly.
And real baby food is super simple to make!
You will want a blender on a stick and a ricer (a hand food press, with all the little holes) is handy.
Foods to choose. At first you need foods that are easy on the digestive system and also puree well.
Brown rice is easily digested; simply cook in a rice cooker, (don't have one? Go get one. They are cheap and no other technique can compete with its ease or consistency) and puree with water. Use a glass jar with a mouth wide enough for your stick blender. Mix this with puree vegetable and wow! You made baby food!
Some good vegetables to start with are steamed (better than boiling because it leaves more nutrients) carrots or peas. Set up your steamer and cook carrots just until tender all the way through, don't leave them there to die for an hour. Frozen peas take two minutes. Slow roasted yams, squashes and sweet potato are great. Roast in skins in 300F oven for about 2 hours or until super soft all the way through. Cut squash in half, remove seeds and bake cut side down with a cup of water in the pan to prevent burning. Use a baking sheet for yams and sweet potato so they don't leak sugars all over your oven. Roasting at the low temperature of 300F give the starches enough time to caramelize, becoming deliciously sweet before the outside burns.
Taro root is one of the most easily digested starches but very tricky to find organic.
Peel and core some apples. Put them in a pot with juice of an orange or splash of water. Put a lid on the pot. Put the pot on the stove and turn it to low. Come back in an hour. Apple sauce.
Nightshades are a large group of plants containing, among many others, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. These are all relatively new additions to our diet and were considered poisonous for many years. They are rich in alkaloids, especially when green, that can be harmful to the body. In the '70s pregnant women were urged to wear gloves when peeling potatoes out of concern for the high levels of solanine, a steroid alkaloid with paralytic effects, found in green potato skin! This is no longer such a concern but it is recommended to avoid nightshades for at least a year, if not much longer, especially in larger portions. If your kid does not want to eat tomatoes and eggplant that is fine! They could be one of the many people who cannot properly process nightshades!
Other nightshades include tobacco, mandrake and balladonna, also known as deadly nightshade
Cruciferous vegetables can cause bloating and should be moderated. These include cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, kale, kohlrabi and turnip. As a portion of the meal they are fine, but even some breast feeding mothers need to avoid these. Test and see, some are more sensitive than others.
Smoothies are great too but don't use juice unless you made it yourself. Most juice has loads of sugar added to it, even ones that say no added sugar. What they do is reduce the juice to a super sweet powder, basically fructose, and add that. Not what your baby needs if they plan on napping.
Try banana, blueberry, pear, a touch of kale and coconut water. Delicious.
