Make your own baby food
So often in my efforts to learn new kitchen tricks, I end up with recipes that require kitchen twine, exotic citrus and six different electric outlets. Not to mention every pot and pan I own.
Enter my new niece, Olivia, and suddenly I have a need for kid-friendly, easy and straightforward recipes. I didn't know much about the art of making baby food, with the exception of a little-known fact that Pedialyte is an excellent hangover helper.
Making your own baby food has replaced knitting in the mommy craze and is much easier, faster and cheaper than stocking up on expensive yarns, learning intricate designs and wearing ill-fitting beanies. Homemade baby food yields rich results for both parent and child.
As a baby, you get delicious nutritious foods that retain a higher percentage of their original vitamin and nutrient content. As a parent, you can retain control over the sourcing of fruits and vegetables organic, heirloom and local. You can create blends tailored to your child edamame/swiss chard or rutabaga/apple. And mostly, you get the satisfaction of knowing you are doing everything in your power to give your child the tools for becoming a good eater, providing an early introduction to foods that can give him or her the best start in life.
No one wants to raise a whiny, picky eater addicted to processed foods like Velveeta cheese dip and Happy Meals. The trick, I learned from new poppa Tim Cecy of Aptos, is
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to sneak as many vegetables as possible into the foods kids like to eat. "You wouldn't believe how many carrots, spinach leaves and broccoli florets my wife can slip into meatballs beneath marinara sauce with pasta. It's unbelievable!"
Oh the trickery.
Hide and seek Mommy
"Baby Ryan thinks macaroni and cheese is supposed to be green because I always puree broccoli and fold it into the cheese sauce."
Stacy Cecy, of Aptos, has become a master of pairing nutrient-dense vegetables with comfort foods like mac 'n' cheese and spaghetti. In the last 20 months, since her daughter Ryan was born, she has kept a detailed wall calendar and habitually marked down each and every new vegetable or fruit she fed her daughter.
Her pediatrician recommended she give her daughter a week before trying a new food, so her little body could adjust to the new ones. It also helps with determining if there are any allergies to certain foods.
"You get so stressed as a new mom, just thinking about what to feed your kid. We'd go to the farmers market and buy fresh, tasty veggies and fruits. And I try to incorporate organic, as much as our budget will allow," says Cecy as she deftly stirs a pot of whole-wheat pasta.
Some of Ryan's favorite foods turned out to be the simplest of ingredients. She loves sweet potatoes roast at 325 degrees for 25 minutes or until soft and mash with a fork, creamed avocado and a hearty blend of whipped cottage cheese,
yogurt and bananas.
Cecy references the bestseller "Super Baby Food" by Ruth Yaron; it was recommended by her mommy peers and friends. The book teaches you everything from making your own yogurt to cooking any vegetable under the sun. One lesson from the book is to incorporate fresh foods into your own diet as well as that of your child. Cecy agrees. Ryan tried asparagus for the first time the night before, straight from her mom's plate.
As I left the Cecy's house, little Ryan had a face full of spaghetti sauce and was holding her two favorite "poons" spoons as she crammed in more pasta. Blissfully unaware her mother had secretly fed her mushrooms, broccoli, onions and flax seed.
So fresh and so clean
Babies and toddlers need more attention and care when it comes to their diets. Their immune systems, central nervous systems and bodies are smaller and more delicate. They need a rainbow of nutrient- and vitamin-rich foods such as orange carrots, garnet beets, milky potatoes, sunbeam bananas and jolly green spinach.
Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Laura Dern and Brooke Shields have gotten into the mix by teaming up with Healthy Child, Healthy World www.healthychild.org and creating recipes, tips and advice for ways to incorporate the Green! Organic! Clean! Fresh! mantra into children's lives.
Myra Goodman of Earthbound Farm in Carmel recommends feeding your children the freshest, most delicious-tasting fruits and vegetables you can find. Her theory makes sense, if kids are fed tasteless apples, they won't much like them later in life.
The home maven
Cecilia Marsh recently gave birth to a new daughter, Amanda, and she laughingly told me she was so glad her pediatrician had advised her to make her own baby food with her first child, Joseph. She knows the tricks now.
Making your own baby food, she says, is cost-effective, more nutritious and environmentally friendly. You can get approximately 10 servings from a single sweet potato. Marsh just freezes her extra servings in baby trays from Babies R' Us.
She is also well-versed in healthy snacks. She starts by mixing whatever fruit she has on hand, bananas or pineapples with yogurt and installs it into ice cube trays for little snacks.
Homemade baby food is "more nutritious because it's natural," she says. There aren't any preservatives or additives. Just steamed, mashed or creamed fruit and vegetables -- without additives like salt or sugar. Marsh is a little tentative with some things, like butternut squash "where would I even start," she wondered aloud. But she's a seasoned pro with avocados and bananas. She simply mashes them down to a paste.
And she recommends not trying too hard to re-create the silky smooth texture of the store-bought stuff. Cecilia uses a simple fork to reduce broccoli to bite size increments. She truly believes her son is a better, less-picky eater because he was accustomed to all sorts of sizes, shapes, textures and flavors as an infant. He's more at ease at the table now as a toddler, and she says he has developed a great palate.
Kid-friendly combinations
Marsh likes to push food boundaries and open new doors for Joseph. One of his favorite things to eat are her fish tacos. She layers everything grilled fish, lettuce, tomato, cheese and rice onto tortillas and lets her son go to town. This way he gets used to seafood in a friendly way, surrounded by foods he knows such as lettuce and cheese. For her newborn, she'll eventually introduce mashed up complementary flavors and textures. Working bananas and peaches or potatoes and broccoli together, to team up vitamins and flavors.
Yummy tummies
From 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Aug. 6 at Deluxe Foods of Aptos you can meet a mom with a mission. Sarah Fischer started Yummy Tummy Organics www.yummytummyorganics.com from a renovated kitchen on her property in Watsonville. She had two good reasons for starting a fresh, local, organic baby food company -- Taylor is 3 and Emma is 2.
Fischer had been making baby food all her daughters' lives she has an older daughter who is 13 and she wanted to share what she was doing in the kitchen with other moms who might not have the time or luxury of making their own baby food.
Several times a week, Fischer cranks up the music in her country kitchen and she and the girls have "dance time." Meanwhile carrots, yams, pears, apples and green beans will be in various stages of being washed, cored, steamed and pureed. The creamy foods are loaded into large jars that offer 5-8 servings and delivered to stores countywide Deluxe, Staff of Life, New Leaf, Seascape Market, Cornucopia of Carmel.
"It's been very hard to achieve with this little company. But I am so dedicated to fresh food for babies," says Fischer as little Emma runs gaily by with a fistful of wildflowers from outside the kitchen.
Yams have proven to be the most popular of all her fruits and vegetables. She buys her produce from certified organic, Coast Produce. All her products are found in the refrigerated section and have a shelf life of two weeks. Everything is constantly rotated so you can be sure the food you are feeding your baby is fresh. And I have to agree -- the yams are pretty tasty!
Melissa Schilling is a wine & cheese consultant with Praise Cheeses and Pass the Wine, an educational entity www.praisecheeses.net. You can find her this fall at Cabrillo College teaching culinary art sensory development classes.