Emberlie
has now been enjoying the world of solid food for about three months.
It has been a real highlight to get to introduce her to new flavors and
textures and to watch her responses to to these experiences.
Her first solid was the traditional rice cereal and milk and involved a lot of funny faces (Thanks Meemaw for providing the video - despite the laughing!). From that point, Jon and I have been making Emberlie's baby food and we've tried many exciting new flavors, many from the book "The Baby and Toddler Cookbook: Fresh, Homemade Foods for a Healthy Start" by Karen Ansel (Thanks Uncle Brandon and Auntie Amanda!). I recommend this book as it does a really nice job providing a timeline for introducing foods, as well as provides ways to take a simple recipe and add different ingredients (or spices) to change it up.
Making
baby food requires a lot steaming, roasting, blending (via the Magic
Bullet) and freezing during a weekend. An hour or two of work will make
food for a few weeks. I use silicon ice cube trays to freeze the food,
which provides easy serving of about 2 tablespoons. In a recent food making session, I learned how to make veggie broth (carrots, leeks, yams and potatoes), pureed the veggies for one meal and use the broth to make another meal of brown rice and lentils for some protein. And the while the extra yams and potatoes were being roasted for adult dinner, asparagus was steamed and pureed for a final green vegetable!
All in all, the delicious food is good for Emberlie and saves money and packaging. The only challenge I've had so far is pureed meat. Emberlie didn't really seem to like pureed chicken or turkey. Mixing it with applesauce or a veggie seems to help. She seems to really like to eat so she must be a Malcos/Heyer hybrid!
