Feeding Frenzy
At six months old, our son Drake refused rice cereal, veggies AND fruit, presaging the years since of picky eating. Twice I tried to make my own baby food. Twice he refused it, and I was stuck with veggie puree and tons of dishes. Forget it, I thought. He can eat out of jars.
When baby Guppy was waking frequently in the night after four months, I offered him a tiny amount of rice cereal. He slurped it down. This is going great, I thought. Then he was up with gas all night. I tried again after six months. He became constipated. So I mixed in a little prune juice, which caused gas. What to feed him, then? I unearthed my two baby food cookbooks, Mommy Made and Daddy Too by Martha and David Kimmel, and First Foods by Annabel Karmel.
Both books say cooking for kids is easy. As I found before, it’s not the cooking that’s hard, it’s the cleanup. The Karmel book is particularly bad for dirty-dish intensive recipes. While it’s pretty with lots of glossy photos, the more I spend time with it, the more I dislike it. Page 35 shows 12 panels of brightly colored infant purees. But they repeat three of the photos twice, identifying them as different foods, e.g., the same photo for carrots and sweet potato. Additionally, the Karmel book does not give details on what foods to introduce when. It simply recommends avoiding common allergens early.
The Kimmel book give details on what to introduce and when, but it’s not clear that the recommendations are from the American Academy of Pediatrics. And the website in the book is no longer owned by the authors. The Kimmel book swears that fresh baby food is far superior to jarred. I’m not completely convinced, especially because even conventional baby food doesn’t contain additives these days, and there are at least three readily available organic brands to choose among. Yet once again, I’ve been swayed into cooking my own baby food. I baked sweet potatoes and bananas, and steamed peaches and pears. Then I pureed them, and froze them in tablespoon dollops. I was reminded that sweet potatoes should be riced or put through a food mill; putting them in the food processor makes them gluey, which the Kimmel book doesn’t caution against. Guppy is mostly rewarding my efforts by being a good eater, but he doesn’t seem to mind the jarred stuff, either. And we’re still having bouts of tummy trouble.