BABY FOOD

I have been asked by so many friends on how to puree baby food that I thought I start my own baby food blog and print it here. There is only so many e-mails I can sent out repeating the same procedures over and over again. LOL. With this I could just point them the way. This blog also let me have a record of Ashley’s diet and favourite dish of the week. Besides, Kimberly’s old food journal is getting rather dog-eared from all the thumbing through my looking for food variety for Ashley. If I am so inclined to have a 3rd baby (which I very much so doubt, darling husband) this will come in useful.

SIMPLE PUREE

Puree, as most of you have by now know to be oh-so-easy, is really oh-so-easy. All you need is a blender and some ice cube trays to freeze them in. Tupperware sells covered ice cube trays, which is ideal for freezing and/or storing baby purees. And, oh, some freezer safe ziplock bag for storing the frozen food for convenience or when you ran out of trays.

You probably like to introduce fruits and vegetables. I start off with Pear because Ashley doesn’t favour apple much in her first few months. She also had pumpkin, sweet potatoes, papaya, banana, avocado and carrot at the same time. Although I started carrot and other root vegetables slightly later just in case there is an issue on nitrates.

To puree fruit, simply peel fruits, core them. For vegetables, simply peel vegetables and sliced them julienne. Then place on a metal plate over a wok with a cover to steam (or a steamer if you prefers) until soft. Use a pot with cover if you don’t have a wok cover.

Then simply blend the cooked fruits and veges with the juice which has seeped out during steaming process. For carrots and other nitrate vegetables like potatoes and sweet potatoes, I discard the juice in the first few months. Then spoon into ice cube trays and freeze. Tupperware sells ice cube trays with covers. When frozen, take out cubes and store in freezer safe ziplock bags and label them with the date. Use fruits and vegetables within 3 months. Mine normally last only about a month.

If you store an assortment of potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, sweet potatoes and chicken puree, your baby could have chicken casserole any time you wish. Add apple, pear and wintermelon puree, your baby could have a fruit salad anytime she wishes. However, I normally do combination of meals by adding a cube of fruit to her savouries.

If you are going to cook rice porridge and doesn’t fancy standing over the basin peeling fruits or vegetables and washing up after that, you could just simply pluck a cube or two out of the freezer and leave in the slow cooker to heat up about 10 minutes before you feed your baby.

If you don’t fancy cooking at all, simply heat up a cube of apple and a cube of carrot and add rice cereal, oat or milk to them.

It seems much easier for me to just rinse rice and leave them in the slow cooker without the additional chore of peeling and washing up.

In case you are wondering how fresh frozen food are, you probably want to do a search on the search engine and you probably would find that most frozen food are as fresh as the day it is cooked if stored and frozen properly. In fact, I would say it is fresher than wilting vegetables, exposed half cut fruits stored in the refrigerator and leftovers vegetables from the night before.



That's wintermelon in the right bottom tray, carrot puree above it. On the left is a tray of sweet potato and the 2 trays on top in light pink are the chicken purees. You should ideally puree the chicken tight and breast as these contained the most iron and protein.

My mother in law find it easy to just dump a cube in the hot porridge or thaw it in the microwave before adding cereal to it for baby.