How Do You Make Organic Baby Food

Benefits of Making your Own Homemade Baby Food
by Bridget Mwape

Making your own homemade baby food will ensure that what your child is eating is fresh, nutritious and free of additives.

By making your own baby food, you'll be saving money. Also, you will have total control over what is put into your baby's food.

You can therefore take the extra steps to ensure that only high quality foods are selected and used.

You will be able to feed your baby according to his or her needs because you will know what foods are best suited for your baby from experience.

Making your own baby food also ensures that your baby is exposed to a greater variety of tastes and textures. This will help your baby when making the transition to table foods and also help him or her develop healthy eating habits.

See http://www.baby-shop.org.uk/guide/ for a collection of articles on babies and toddlers.

Baby Food Preparation Tips

1. As babies are susceptible to digestive upsets, always work with clean hands and use clean cooking utensils, preparation surfaces, pots and pans etc., when making home made baby food.

Prepare foods immediately upon removing them from the refrigerator and freeze immediately after cooking any foods you want to store.

2. Steaming vegetables is the best method of preparation. This softens them, makes them easier to chew, and preserves more of the vitamins and minerals than boiling.

A steamer basket is cheap and by cooking fruits and vegetables in it, you'll be sure of keeping the nutrients in the food, instead of in the cooking water.

3. To puree your foods, you can use a fork, a food mill or blender. A blender quickly purees almost anything into the finest consistency. When your baby first starts on solids, you'll be pureeing things to a very fine consistency and, as baby gets a little older, you will make foods a little coarser.

You may wish to buy a food mill which comes in large and small sizes. It is very handy and inexpensive. The food mill strains most cooked foods to a very smooth consistency, although meats can be a problem as they will have a coarser texture.

Remember all the tools you need to make baby food are probably already in your kitchen.

4. You can prepare large amounts of foods at once and freeze them. Take your prepared foods and plop by spoonfuls onto a baking sheet. Freeze the plops right away and then take them off the sheet when they are frozen and put them into plastic bags.

You can also freeze the food in plastic "pop out" ice cube trays. Small tupperware jars with lids serve the same purpose and stack easily. Label and date the packages rotate them putting the most recently frozen foods behind the previously frozen ones.

Frozen baby foods can be stored for up to two months.

5. When you take frozen foods out for baby, warm the food in a cup placed in a saucepan of boiling water with a lid on. If you use a microwave to thaw or warm baby food, be sure to stir the food well to avoid hot pockets.

...... How Do You Make Organic Baby Food continued at Organic Baby Baby Foods

Further reading

Living an organic lifestyle

More organic food articles

About the Author

Copyright © 2005, Bridget Mwape writes for the Baby Shop UK: http://www.baby-shop.org.uk/ which features baby information including articles and discounts on baby products, gifts and advice from other parents. This article may be republished as long as all the above links are active and clickable.

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