Is your baby about to start solid foods? Are you thinking of making your own baby food?

When you make baby’s first foods, you can save money and reduce waste. You also can choose more nutritious options. Fresh foods are typically more nutritious than canned, and you can purchase organic food to prepare for baby if you wish. You can also avoid unwholesome ingredients that show up in commercial baby food.

Making baby food doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. In fact, the easiest and cheapest way is the best way!

The easy way to making your own baby food:
1. Don’t bother with buying one of those baby food grinders. They’re hard to clean and too much hassle.

2. If you wait until your baby is 6 months old to start solids, you can almost always just mash with a fork to the desired consistency. If you’re breastfeeding, you can even wait until baby’s “pincer grasp” is developed and offer him small finger foods like peas, bits of grated apple, and the like. The pincer grasp is developed when baby can pinch small objects (like those bits of carpet fluff or food on the kitchen floor!) inbetween his thumb and first finger. In fact, if you have a family tendency towards food allergy, waiting longer to start solids may be preferable. No matter what baby’s age, always offer one food at a time and wait several days to watch for signs of allergy before offering another. Take it slow.

3. Start with fresh single ingredient foods like:
Banana
Steamed carrot, turnip, potato, yam
Avocado
Ripe pear, peach, melon, plum
Cooked squash
Grated apple- raw or steamed
Peas
Well cooked beans
Hard cooked egg yolks (avoid the whites until 1 year)

Some of these foods could be served raw. Others are lightly steamed (steaming retains more nutrients than canning), to make them softer for baby.

4. It’s not necessary to make a big deal of preparing baby’s food. If you want to take a lot of time blending food and freezing them in ice cube trays, you could certainly do that. But I’m all for the easy approach!

Although you do want to avoid giving baby salt and sugar (and spices that may upset the tummy), you can usually just take an ingredient from your own menu and “make” baby’s dinner.

For instance, if you’re steaming veggies to serve at dinner, take a tablespoon of them out of the pan before you add butter and salt. Put this in baby’s plate and mash away. Voila! Instant baby food with no extra work. Or take a bit of beef from your roast and mash mash mash until it’s very soft.

Even when you’re at a restaurant, you can either bring an apple with you and “grate” it finely with a spoon at your table, or bring along a banana or other portable food. Any restaurant with a salad bar would have cooked beans or avocado. Or give baby a bit of your baked potato (before you add the goodies on top).

Life with a new baby is challenging enough. Keep starting solids simple!

About the Author:
Carrie Lauth publishes a free newsletter for Moms doing things the natural way. Get your copy plus free subscriber goodies at: http://www.natural-moms.com/natural_mom_newsletter.html.

Your baby will like the sweet juicy flavor and the challenge of picking these up will help develop her fine motor skills. These are super easy to make and great for any meal or as a snack!

Directions:
1. Wash, peel and core one to two golden delicious apples.

2. Cut the apples into slices about ¼ inch thick.

3. Place the slices of apples in plastic bag and sprinkle a dash of cinnamon over the apples slices. Close the bag and shake it up so the cinnamon is distributed evenly over all of the slices.

4. Place the slices in a microwave safe dish and cook them in the microwave on HIGH for 3 minutes. Let them stand for 5 minutes. They are done if a fork slides into them easily. Cool completely before serving.

Storage: Lasts four to five days in the refrigerator or up to two months in the freezer.

Age to introduce: About 9 months

Fun apple facts
Apples are everywhere: Apples are the most varied food on the planet. There are more than 7,500 varieties of apples grown in the world. The average American eats 19.6 pounds of apples a year — that is about one per week!

Upper crust
In early America, when times were tough, cooks often had to scrimp on ingredients. Apple pie was a favorite dish, but to save on lard and flour, only a bottom crust was made. More affluent households could afford both an upper and a lower crust, so those families became known as “the upper crust.”

The Big Apple
This nickname for one of our nation’s greatest cities, New York, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when jazz jived in clubs across the country. The clubs of New York City were the favorite hotspots jazz greats like Charlie Parker. Manhattan soon became known for having “lots of apples on the tree” — that is, lots of places to play jazz.

Apple site-ings
To learn more about apples, find recipes, and fun for kids, check out these web sites.

Apples and More (www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/apples)

New York Apple Association (www.nyapplecountry.com/index.htm)

US Apple Association (www.usapple.org)

Washington State Apples Association (www.bestapples.com/index.html)

About the Authors:
Cheryl Tallman and Joan Ahlers are sisters, the mothers of five children, and founders of Fresh Baby (www.FreshBaby.com). Raised by parents who love fresh foods and entertaining, their mom, a gourmet cook, ensured that they were well-equipped with extraordinary skills in the kitchen. Both with long track records of business success, they decided to combine their skills in the kitchen with their knowledge of healthy foods and children to create Fresh Baby. Cheryl and Joan put a modern twist on the conventional wisdom that when you make it yourself, you know it’s better. Their goal at Fresh Baby is to make the task of raising a healthy eater a little bit easier for all parents. Fresh Baby’s breastfeeding accessories and baby food making supplies provide parents with practical knowledge and innovative tools to support them in introducing their children to great tasting, all-natural foods – easily and conveniently. Visit them online at www.FreshBaby.com and subscribe to their Fresh Ideas newsletter to get monthly ideas, tips and activities for developing your family’s healthy eating habits!