Truly Scrumptious Baby: My complete feeding and weaning plan for 6 months and beyond. Holly Willoughby
Honey
Honey can contain spores, which can lead to infant botulism. Although the disease is fairly rare, it can be fatal, so it’s best to leave honey out of your baby’s diet for the first year. And try to limit your child’s consumption of it after that. Honey might seem like a natural, healthy sweetener, but it has the same effect as sugar.
Caffeine
Be mindful that caffeine isn’t just in tea and coffee – it’s found in chocolate and also in some drinks made with sugar substitutes, so be careful to limit those. Too much caffeine can cause hyperactivity in children – not to mention anxiety, tummy problems and lack of sleep. No child – or parent, for that matter – needs that!
GETTING READY TO START
STOCKING THE WEANING KITCHEN
There are only a handful of fresh ingredients that I’d advise getting when you’re preparing to embark on weaning. Plain full-fat live yoghurt, butter, cream cheese and hard cheese are really useful and have a slightly longer shelf life, but other than that, I’d urge you NOT to go out and buy every ingredient under the sun. Your baby can’t possibly consume loads of fresh fruit and veg before it goes off, so unless you have a big family who will pick up the consumption slack, don’t go overboard initially. Think of it rather like that enormous list your best friend gave you when you were pregnant, with a million and one things you supposedly need to buy for your baby’s arrival. Remember, when your little one finally arrived, how many of those items were completely unnecessary, or you didn’t need them until a bit further down the line.
STORE-CUPBOARD BASICS
Dry ingredients, on the other hand, are really useful to have in your cupboards from the off. It makes planning meals and batch cooking so much easier. If you have the space in your kitchen, you can bulk-buy these because they’ll definitely get used and it’s so much more cost effective.
Rice, Dried pasta, Couscous, Quinoa, Rolled porridge oats, Dried lentils, Tinned tomatoes, Tinned sweetcorn, Tinned tuna and Tinned beans
FREEZER
A freezer is not a complete necessity – if you don’t have one, it doesn’t take too long to cook and whizz up fresh meals – but it really can make life a whole lot easier in the weaning kitchen. Having a freezer is a real bonus, especially when it comes to making batches of food for your baby, allowing you to store them safely in individual portions to defrost as and when she needs a meal. Where you can freeze a recipe in this book, it is labelled ‘suitable for freezing’, and this applies to most of the purées and many of the other dishes that are suitable for serving to your baby with the rest of the family when she’s a bit older.
Making space in the freezer
At some point – particularly if you are going down the classic purées route – you will need to set aside some freezer space for your lovingly made, single-ingredient purées. The key is to label everything. I keep a marker pen and a pack of labels on top of the freezer to mark up the date the food went in – and what it is! You’d be surprised how everything looks the same when frozen. I shouldn’t out my mum, but she’s served up an apple pie thinking it was a chicken pie on more than one occasion.
Silicone ice-cube trays/freezer bags
I’ve found that the best and most convenient way to store baby purées/mashes in an easily accessible way is to make up large batches of different individual vegetable and fruit purées, spoon them into ice-cube trays, cover with cling film and then freeze. As soon as it’s frozen, pop the cubes of purée out into a freezer bag and add a label with the type of food and the date of freezing.
Once you’ve done a few different types of individual purée, and your baby is ready to move on from single-ingredient purées, you can defrost two or three and mix them together. By doing this, your baby is getting a variety of flavours and you’re not having to start from scratch every day. One day she might have sweet potato and carrot. The next carrot and apple. If you count each cube as 20ml/3/4fl oz in size, you can work out how many cubes to defrost according and there’s minimal waste (compared with a shop-bought pouch that, once you open it, has to go in the bin if your baby can’t finish it).
How long to keep things
If you do have a freezer and you’re anything like me, it will be jam-packed full of foods you shove in and keep forgetting to use up! Anything containing meat can be stored in the freezer for a pretty long time and still be safe to eat, but the quality will deteriorate so it’s best to eat it within 3–6 months. Remember, you should never refreeze raw meat or fish that has already been defrosted. You can safely refreeze meat that has been defrosted and cooked, and you can also do this with fish, though I find it changes the texture so I don’t recommend it.
FOOD-STORAGE SAFETY
Once you’ve got going with weaning and stocked your freezer with batches of purée, there are a few more rules to follow to keep your little one safe from an upset tummy or worse.
Make sure you don’t reheat any purées more than once after defrosting.
If you’ve made a purée and put it straight into the fridge, that’s fine, but make sure it’s in a pot with a lid or covered with cling film, and it absolutely has to be used within 24 hours from when you made it.
Frustrating though this might be, if you’ve only managed to dip the spoon into a bowl of purée a couple of times, and it’s been in your baby’s mouth – but she’s not interested – don’t keep it. Saliva transfer from your baby’s mouth to the spoon, then to the purée, will have contaminated the food so it’s just not safe to keep. Sorry!
As a precautionary measure during weaning, I don’t recommend keeping or freezing leftover cooked rice as it’s important to be incredibly careful when reheating it, due to the slight risk of food poisoning. Cooked rice should not be allowed to sit at room temperature for any length of time for the same reason.
GENERAL HYGIENE IN THE KITCHEN
You’ll be used to keeping everything clean since the arrival of your little one, especially if you feel like you’ve spent more time with your sterilizer in the last six months than with friends and family! But, just in case, here’s a quick checklist:
Wash hands and dry with a clean tea towel. If you use one you’ve had lying around the kitchen for ages, there’s literally no point in having washed your hands in the first place.
Wipe down your kitchen work space with disinfectant every time you use it.
Make sure all weaning equipment has been washed in hot soapy water/put through the dishwasher/sterilized, though you don’t have to sterilize anything other than bottles after six months.
COOKING EQUIPMENT
As with fresh ingredients, there is really no need to go mad when it comes to stocking up on cooking equipment. You’ll find you most likely can get by on what you have already. I had one of those purée cooker gadgets to which you add food and water, push a button, and it steams and purées in about 15 minutes. It was great, and they’ve probably come on a lot since I bought mine, but considering how quickly your baby will move on from super-smooth purées, I think it’s a lot of money to spend for the short amount of time you use it. Here are a few things that I wouldn’t be without, though.
Food processor/blender
You’ll need some sort of food processor or blender to make purées for your baby in the early months, though again, there’s no need to spend a huge amount of money as this stage is relatively short, and you’ll soon be on to mashing. That said, unless you’re going to be making quite big batches of purée with a view to stocking up the freezer, a mini food processor or blender is the best size for the small amounts of each ingredient you’re going to cook and whizz up. You can otherwise pick up a hand blender relatively cheaply and