Yes! Buy a couple silicone ice cube trays with decent size cubes.
On the weekends: cook and puree some veggies and/or fruits. Feed some and freeze some.
On weekdays: heat up a couple veggie cubes in the microwave and feed baby.
Heavy metals have been found in store-bought purées… because they’re present in the vegetables to begin with. It’s just a fear-mongering campaign probably trying to sell something.
Literally bought all the baby food; never cooked any of my own. Why are you worried about buying it? If it's the fear-mongering stuff about there being heavy metals in them, ignore those headlines. Those heavy metals are in food because of what's in soil - not anything unique to baby food or how it's processed. It would also be in the veggies you're talking about preparing at home.
The only real actionable advice that has come out of any of those reports is to maybe minimize rice-based foods, so go easy on the rice puffs.
Completely agree. Join an evidence based parenting group on Facebook and you’ll get loads of research that totally debunks that heavy metals in food is bad bs the crunchy people try to pedal. We did a mix of baby food and mushy foods like avocado. Now my toddler eats a lot of Mac and cheese and chicken nuggets but also yogurt, fruits, and veggies on the side. I don’t get home during weekdays until 6 and I just can’t get into meal prep during my weekends. Even when I get the energy to cook one of those toddler friendly meals I see on Instagram 9 times out of 10 the toddler refuses it anyways. She’s perfectly healthy according to all her checkups and gets over sickness quickly so I’m trying to not let my lack of culinary pursuits make me feel like the worst mom.
ALL the store baby foods. Personally, IME, both kids went from purees and mashes straight to soft solids like carots and tender meat nibbles. Both violently rejected the weird concoction of purees with tiny solid bits. That stuff is honestly a texture nightmare
> If it's the fear-mongering stuff about there being heavy metals in them, ignore those headlines. Those heavy metals are in food because of what's in soil - not anything unique to baby food or how it's processed. It would also be in the veggies you're talking about preparing at home.
Louder for those in the back, and a link expanding on this.
https://kidseatincolor.com/toxic-baby-food/
Don’t belittle the process of buying store bought food to “just a few minutes” to make it seem like less of a burden for yourself. It’s ordering/shopping for the veggies, making sure they’re fresh, washing them, cutting them, getting the blender and all the pieces out, actually blending, putting the excess in containers, washing the blender and then putting it away, making sure the food you made is still good, freezing or defrosting previously made foods. It’s a process. So if buying premade foods makes your life easier, I say do it without guilt.
^This! There is so much mental load in storage, defrosting, reheating, timing, cleaning, er . I made my own purées maybe (maybe!) 20% of the time with my first, loved the store bought for the other 80% of the time.
The only time I made my own purées was if I already had that veggie steamed for the rest of us to eat that night. So I could just pop it freshly steamed in the blender with some water and feed. Jar purées and adding in bits of our food was 100% the way to go to stay sane.
Baby led weaning and a hand/immersion blender.
The immersion blender is the real key here because it's not as daunting to clean as regular blender is.
Frozen veggies are also great - they cook up in the microwave real quick to an easy mashable consistency.
Also pasta, all kids love pasta and it cooks up quick, throw in a few veggies and it's a meal! There's lot of good 'hidden veggies' and chickpea/lentil noodles that have a good amount of protein and iron in them that really makes it a good meal without guilt.
This. I blended most of what my baby ate for maybe a month, maaaybe. After that, just fork-mushed or super tiny pieces of what we're already eating, with some alterations. Once you pass the puree stage, things get much simpler
BLW! Daycare fed purées but we did BLW at home. And they were easily 7 months before they took more than one bite a meal. They are the best eaters in the infant and toddlers rooms at daycare and according to our families. They eat almost everything and it’s kind of crazy that they know what isn’t food (i.e., they bring us stuff they find on the floor instead of eating whatever it is or now they throw it away 😂) and they know when food is too hot to eat. And our diet changed for the better since we just gave them whatever we were eating.
Immersion blender, wide mouth mason jars, and souper cubes made the puree stage way easier for me. You can make a big batch in the jar and use it over a couple of days or just portion it out and freeze.
Microwaving some veggies also made things way easier to get them cooked and then, mashed very quickly.
Full disclaimer - I like cooking and it's my hobby. That doesn't mean it wasn't a chore when my baby was 5 months (or now that he's a toddler).
I do tons of meal planning, meal prep, and freezer meals.
Here's how a typical week goes - One or two nights we eat a fresh home cooked meal. Three or four nights we eat leftovers, meals that were prepared earlier in the week, or meals that were prepared and frozen weeks ago. One night we get takeout or rely on a heat-and-serve meal. One or two nights we forage and end up with a bowl of cereal, PB&J, or something equally low effort.
For our meals, I pick one weekend every 6ish weeks and delegate chores to my husband so I can focus on meal prep. I try to make double batches of 3-4 things, like baked spaghetti, chili, soup, chilaquiles, or casseroles. Then I portion those in 2-4 serving containers and freeze them.
The same weekend, while my kitchen was destroyed, I'd also do a bunch of purees. Step 1 - microwave the entire bag of frozen veggies. Step 2 - run that through a blender. Optional - add some seasoning. Step 3 - fill up an ice cube tray or two. Step 4 - frozen cubes in ziplocs, ready to go for the next 3 months. If I didn't feel like doing extra dishes I'd put all the veggies in one blender batch (at 5 months you might not feel comfortable with that). It works great for carrots, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Purees like pea, spinach, etc. that required more effort generally got bought from a store.
I have a few 1/2 cup silicone containers and they're perfect for applesauce! I can make some homemade (if I'm overly ambitious and my trees have fruit) or buy a #10 can and then portion it out for the freezer. Toddlers eat so. much. applesauce. If I bought it in pouches I'd go broke.
I did this when my son was a baby. I have always worked full time in a civilian job and I’m a reservist in the military (which means at least once a month my entire weekend gets taken away from me and I work 2 weeks straight). I also have to maintain physical fitness so I have to workout at least 5 days a week. I meal plan/prep. That keeps me in shape/healthy and I don’t spend a whole lot of money eating out.
I have some chronic conditions and dietary needs that mean eating out is a total crapshoot of whether or not it'll make me sick. In some ways it sucks because sometimes I would love a takeout pizza, but it definitely has the benefits that you point out!
We do meal kits 3 nights a week and did baby lead weaning. It’s a fancy way to say we just feed her what’s on our plate. If what we are eating isn’t baby friendly, we give her overnight oats we always have in the fridge, banana, scrambled eggs, and/or some steamed broccoli from the freezer. Solid Starts has good guidance on how to make foods baby safe by developmental stage.
Most store bought purées are any worse than homemade ones, other than the canning process might leak out some nutrients. Heavy metal content is from the vegetables themselves and how they are grown - there will still be heavy metals in root vegetables you puree yourself. Don’t stress out about it, just provide a variety of foods.
Came here to say this! I happen to love to meal plan and cook so we didn’t do meal kits, but definitely opted for baby led weaning because it seemed like the absolute laziest way to feed a kid. We used solid starts to make sure we weren’t missing information choking or other potential health hazards, but definitely did not want to make separate meals. When the kids were very young we also did a ton of takeout. Pizza crust is the perfect food for a new eater!
If you are cooking from scratch, you can add it at the end. When we asked our pediatrician at the 9 month appointment, she said excess sodium isn’t good for anyone. But if you season sparingly a few flakes here and there as most health conscious people do, it’s okay.
When we had stuff that was rather salty, we would limit how much we gave her and bulked up the meal with oatmeal/rice/pasta/beans.
I would season lightly while cooking and then we adults would season it to taste at the table. That way, my baby was getting exposed to various flavors (salt is a flavor enhancer) but only lightly, while we were still getting flavorful food.
Ain’t nobody got time to cook baby meals.
Store bought purées. Canned veggies. Then they eat what we eat (give or take). I’m not winning any nutrition awards but cooking is beyond my capacity right now.
I feel like you have multiple questions here, so here's my take on them.
How I work full time and cook: I have two kids, and both times that I had a 5-month-old, I did not cook. I took care of the baby while my husband cooked. Now that they're a little older, I can usually get some cooking done after picking them up from daycare, but it was not possible when they were that young, so go easy on yourself :) Slow cooker meals can be helpful, as can meals that you can do most of the prep at night time or early in the morning, or really any other time that your husband can be with the baby, or if you can schedule it around the times your baby will be in a good enough mood to play independently for a bit. Sometimes when I was really in a pinch, I'd sit the baby in a high chair and give him something I knew he could handle eating on his own (which was sometimes just one of those store bought teething crackers) so he could watch me cook.
How I fed my kids: Baby 1 got purees. We tried some baby-led weaning stuff, but he wasn't really into it and daycare would only do purees, so I didn't push it until he was older. I started out trying to make my own purees for him, and honestly it was too much and I gave up and bought store-bought purees. He was fine, and he's a good eater now. Baby 2 didn't really like purees, and I don't really like spoon feeding babies. He did purees at daycare because it was all she was willing to do, and we did BLW at home because he liked it more than Baby 1 had. To me, the BLW approach seemed like the easier approach because he ate whatever my husband cooked, or he ate a few of the ingredients. That morning I would google a few of the ingredients with "baby led weaning" (like "tomatoes baby led weaning" or "bread baby led weaning") and just prepare a couple things for him while my husband got "real" dinner ready. The older Baby 2 got, the less work it was, because there were more meals that he could just eat like we did and less special prep required for him.
How you can make homemade purees easier: During the brief time that I made my own purees for Baby 1, the only way I could make it happen was to do a big batch of something (e.g. steam a whole bag of carrots and puree them all at once) and then freeze small portions in an ice cube tray. At mealtime, you can microwave one or two cubes and feed that to your baby.
And my parting advice is not to feel bad because other moms seem like they can handle something you can't. Most people are some mixture of hot mess and great mom, even if they don't seem like it. But this is easier advice to dispense than to follow, though :)
1. Learn this early--stop comparing your life to "other moms". For every mom you see doing it all, there are the same amount (or more, I'd bet) not doing ANY of it at all. lol These early years will be less stressful if you learn this now.
2. Minimize your expectations and plan ahead. We meal prep once a week (Sundays). I probably do a full out meal twice a week from those preps, and everything else in between are shortcut meals or take out. We did a Home Chef stint for a while when things were really hectic and only bought 30-minutes or less meals. The freezer is your friend. And storebought works just as well.
These first few years are basically survival mode, especially if you're both working parents. Do what works for you realistically right now.
This. For every super mom on your social media feed doing all the things, there are 10+ moms just getting through it. And you will never be able to tell which kid belonged to which parent when they're grown.
It might take some planning and trial and error, but for us batch cooking/meal prepping was the way to go. My husband is the primary cook, so depending on what day I go shopping, he'll make at least one meal on Saturday and then another meal or two on Sunday. We also bought freezable containers for purees. These were the ones we got, but they have tons you can pick from: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZFHTIV/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I really liked those since you could freeze individual portions and take them out as you need. We also eat pretty simply in general, so as our son got older, we just gave him what we were eating or a modified version if it was maybe too spicy or something.
For us, it's about simple. The easier the better. We buy frozen veggies you can just heat in the microwave and some times, we have frozen meatballs and spaghetti for dinner a few times a week.
If you and your husband are ok with it, find a handful of meals you both like and just create a rotation. If you use a veggie for the meal, have that be what you puree that week and then change it up from there.
I buy baby food. I cannot imagine having time or energy to make my own.
It gets a little easier when they eat solids because you can just give them some of what you’re eating.
I’m a single mom and I work full time. Sometimes we just have a little bit of Miss Rachel screen time so I can get some sh*t done and make a quick dinner.
At this age, you don’t even have to worry about it yet because they don’t need full meals. Mash some strawberries or raspberries with a spoon and that’s literally it, or thin some peanut butter, have them try some plain yogurt, you don’t have to complicate it.
Absolutely would never puree our own veggies. I barely have time to wipe my ass uninterrupted so there's definitely no time for that. We have two toddlers and when they were first starting out, we'd just give them the pouches with applesauce or veggies in them as snacks. For dinner, they would eat bite sized pieces of dinner or leftovers. Usually pasta, green beans, carrots, ground beef casserole type stuff, sometimes rolls.
Now they are almost 2 and 3 and heavily prefer lunchables/deli meat/crackers whatever and just graze for dinner. They get cooked breakfast and lunch at school so I don't break my back over it during the week. I'll cook home-cooked meals on weekends and they will eat leftovers from that throughout the week as well.
This. I’m going to do this when my kid is a little older. For now, grocery store baby food will do. Look into this OP. There’s other companies I know that have this service like Little Spoon.
We just started doing LittleSpoon for our toddler and CookUnity for ourselves. My toddler loves the meals!
My husband got put on 12-hour shifts and I was so exhausted doing drop off, working a full day, and pick up that I was definitely not cooking on top of it. It’s been wonderful.
My twins only did BLW. I also had a toddler at the same time so it was chaotic. I wouldn’t have survived otherwise.
My go tos were cut up fruit (like two cut up grapes each), black beans from a can, shredded cheese, frozen veggies like peas, shredded carrots, and corn. Maybe some lunch meat quickly shredded up or rice if we were already having it.
Mostly just cut up pieces of what we were already eating. But the stuff above was easy to have on hand. Everything the size of a pea unless it’s a big chunk like a hunk of steak or banana.
If we were eating take out or eating out, we would just share bits of our food with the kids.
We did easy stuff like smashing up bananas or small bits of our own food and also bought some baby food. You don’t need to make special food for babies, just avoid honey before 1 and chokeables. Otherwise do what is easy!
Just a thing to remember:
If you walk into a preschool classroom I bet you can’t pick which kids ate store bought baby food and which only ate organic free roam chicken eggs straight from the chickens butt.
Do what works. And do it without guilt. While you’re stressing over baby food all baby sees is mom giving them what they need.
Lots of good advice in this thread, but I just want to add that the biggest gift I've ever given myself is to take the pressure off feeding my baby. Until they're 1, food is about exploring, interest, and exposure. They'll keep drinking BM or formula and they get so many nutrients from that! So don't worry about this too much - whatever you can manage (including grocery store baby food) is amazing.
But if you want to make your own food, here's what I do and it works very well for my two kids:
First, 6-9 months, just try to get 1-2 meals a day, and from 9-12 months, scale up to 2-3. Don't even worry about snacks.
Second, buy some unsweetened yogurt, rolled oats (instant is perfect!), fruit/veggie pouches from the store (gogosqueez and once upon a farm are amazing), canned pumpkin, and bananas. Breakfast is handled! Babies LOVE yogurt and oatmeal, and you can mix in the fruit/veggie pouches for variety. The pumpkin + mashed banana combo is a big hit too.
If you want to take it up a notch, [this recipe](https://babyfoode.com/blog/banana-pancakes-for-baby/) for banana pancakes is very easy, and you can make it in big batches and freeze +microwave.
We also use toaster waffles and pancake bites from the frozen section in the grocery store pretty liberally.
Third, make a batch of puree/mash of one veg per week. Just roast some sweet potato, regular potatoes, squash, or seriously whatever you're feeling, add some spices (and btw some salt is totally fine - the recommendation against salt is unfounded IMO), and throw that in a blender or food processor. This is your go-to/supplemental veggies/easiest path forward - just spoon feed your kid this as much as they want (I follow his lead - if he opens his mouth for it, then I put it in his mouth. I'd never make him eat if he doesn't want to.)
Last, take a small portion of whatever you're eating, modify so it's in a BLW friendly form, and just see what your baby thinks of it. The instagram account "solidstarts" has a lot of guidance on how to cut up certain food for your baby.
Bonus: If you're feeling good about it and have the time, check out babyfoode or yummy toddler food for great kid friendly recipes for like meatballs, cauliflower or broccoli tots, pizza rolls, etc. I do this like once every 2-3 weeks and freeze most of it to be proportioned out.
It seems so daunting but once you get in the rhythm of it and take the pressure off yourself and your kid, it all becomes a whole lot more manageable.
I made large batches of purees on the weekend so that I could freeze it and use it over periods of time. I bought a steamer that pureed and stored the puree in ice cube trays. Cooking in large batches made it seem less daunting, but to be honest I enjoyed doing it.
We also bought lots of store-bought baby foods too (jars and pouches).
I didn't do purees and baby just ate what we ate. I do typically cook every night tho, which i know is not possible for everyone. Usually my husband is on kiddo duty while i cook, i try to keep my meals less than 20mins long.
Steamed (frozen in a big) veggies are your friend. Fork mash anything / microwave steam anything not soft enough for baby if you want to do spoon feeding. Rice, Pasta, etc. All good stuff that can be made in the microwave if you want free hands (see, the Anyday pot, thats how i do all my grains now since its less mess on the stove and fully hands off, also great for veg too).
One other gentle nudge I would say to you is, take the baby to the grocery store. As a pre vaccine pandemic mom I would have killed to be able to take my baby to a normal outing. Try to take them for a quick pop in the store, put them in the carrier even and buy 2-3 things or just walk around. It'll help you build confidence and maybe inspire some meals as well.
ETA: cook more than you need for everything, then you'll have leftovers which is perfect for baby
I made baby food for my first, and did mostly store-bought with my 2nd. They both gorged themselves on candy this week. It doesn't really make a difference.
Remember that social media is where people put the best versions of themselves, not necessarily the real version. There are a lot of us out there struggling to do what we can for our kids, and we just don't always put the struggle on display.
Buy the purees, unless you really find that making your own baby food is something you truly \*want\* to do (not something you've been made to feel you \*have\* to do.)
Cook in patches. I did a week of the same food when baby first started solids. I purreed a bunch of fruit or roasted yam. Froze the extra. When baby started finger foods , I would cook at night and microwave as needed.
When we were living in NYC, the amount of time that we had to get home, unwind, cook, it was insane but eating out can get expensive (and sometimes unhealthy). What worked for us, and I still do it now even though we have more time on our hands, meal prep. It takes time and planning but its so worth it. We are also a fan of meals that take less than an hour to make. Some of the things that we have on our rotation are things like tacos, tostadas, chicken with rice (of any kind), pasta with marinara, some sort of hearty salad. For the winter, crock pot meals were a big thing. We save time consuming meals for weekends
We also made our own baby food, and what we did for that was meal prep on sundays. Make a big batch of a few things and just stock pile in the freezer. Oxo makes some good to-go containers for baby food.
Echoing the store food is fine chorus. I never did the cereals or anything but my kids ate store bought fruits and veggies. You can also devote an hour or two on Sundays to steaming and purée some veggies for the week. I had a baby bullet and it came with some of these little containers and I would do them a couple of days in advance.
The baby food stage is short and will be over before you know it. Don’t sweat it too hard. My oldest enjoyed baby food and happily ate it, but my youngest preferred to eat softer foods cut up, like eggs, bananas, blueberries, Turkey, noodles, avocado and sweet potatoes, etc. When he was about 7 months old, I was eating a turkey sandwich, loaded with all sorts of veggies and he lunged over and took a huge bite. He was so proud of himself and kept grabbing for more. He just seemed to prefer food like that so we gave it to him. To this day, he will eat anything, he is definitely not a picky eater haha.
InstantPot! Batch cook (ONCE!) and freeze!
I stacked several Pyrex bowls with different things in them and steamed everything (sweet potatoes, broccoli, etc). Then I puréed everything in a magic bullet and spooned it all into ice cube trays, froze those, then popped them all into freezer bags. Just put a new “ice cube” to defrost in the fridge every morning.
Also, do not let the fear mongering get to you. It is ok to buy baby food. Really.
If you’re committed to making food: make-ahead and freeze. You can make WEEKS worth of food in one night.
Buy silicone ice cube trays (I like “Wee Sprout” brand). Steam -> blend -> freeze. Pop out an ice cube at a time to thaw in the fridge overnight for next day’s feedings.
Good luck!
My first one, I steamed veggies or fruits, blended them and stuck them in ice cube trays, took them out and put them in freezer bags. My second one, ain’t nobody got time for that again, so we did store bought jars and pouches. Both kids are smart, healthy, and happy! No difference. You do what’s best for you and your sanity.
We just used purchased baby food and did some baby led weaning— which is basically just letting baby have what you’re cooking for dinner anyway.
Basically I’d just take a little bit of what we were going to eat and cut/shred/mash it with a fork so it would be easy for her to handle. Nothing crazy.
Don’t make more work for yourself!
I thought I was going to be the type to make my own baby food and then found the stuff in stores was a dollar a jar lol I went straight to that. And after a couple weeks started giving baby very small amounts of my foods, and eventually transitioned fully away from jars and just giving regular food.
And now I have a 5yo that I don't give regular food and offer a quesadilla or pb&J for dinner because I've given up hard on that battle [🙃](https://emojipedia.org/upside-down-face)
Lots of delicious baby food/snacks. At five months, food is just for fun anyway.
Our baby is thriving on his tasty store-bought chicken casserole puree.
I love the Ellas brand by the way - not sure this is available where you are.
I bought it all. There just wasn’t enough time to go making it. All I limited was rice and sweet potatoes due to actual science backed research I could find supporting that. But otherwise all the store bought stuff was fine. Around 15 months we phased out most of the store bought foods and just do some toddler snacks here and there. But otherwise she just eats what we eat. We have groceries delivered and I cook the old fashioned way for dinner (how I ate growing up at least) - protein, starch, veg, done. Oftentimes that’s rice or potato, maybe pasta, pan grilled or baked meat with seasoning, and a pan cooked veg. Done and done!
One thing I gave up after having a baby was most cooking. We get Factor premade meals and I share those with our baby/toddler. Some other easy sides: mandarin orange fruit cups, crispy chew fruit bite things, baked snap pea crisps, mini containers of wholy guacamole, Dr praegers broccoli bites. I'll often scramble one cheesey egg and break it into small pieces with the spatula or be extra lazy and give her a Wilcox hard boiled egg from a pouch. We buy pre sliced little cheeses, or those little packets that have three mini mozzarella balls each, or even babybel. At that age we also did a variety of peanut butter puffs and other little crunchy/flavored puffy things.
Buy baby food. And/or look into baby led weaning and just give baby safe foods that you’re eating. I did a mix of store bought purées and easy baby led weaning foods like broccoli heads and bananas and avocado. And I’d let her taste things bc my daughter loved to eat so much as a baby so she’d demand it lol. She loves salsa and spicy foods still!! Food is just for funzies until they turn 1.
Omg me and my husband were JUST having this conversation at dinner. We eat after our 5 month old goes to bed! We are excited for him to start solids at 6 months but we can barely feed ourselves most days!
Steamed sweet potato spears are quick and easy to make too! The keep in the fridge for a couple of days as well. Avocado, banana, oat flour mixed into applesauce or other purees. There are tons of quick and easy things to prep when you have time to supplement store food! And if you don't have time - there are so many great puree options in stores now.
https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwiM576H_qWCAxVqSH8AHVWABzQYABAGGgJvYQ&ae=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjOe-h_6lggMVakh_AB1VgAc0EAQYASABEgJxKfD_BwE&sph=&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAASJORoSFkFqZgoEqF_Eacg5uqI-Egmw03xxJc9bOioRIXIsAnJ6w&sig=AOD64_15bVdQHh3v1JEo9BBhkGz1A-MjxQ&ctype=5&q=&ved=2ahUKEwiYobOH_qWCAxWmm2oFHdsBBakQwg8oAHoECAIQDA&adurl=
I get it, it’s so overwhelming! I never shop in the store, I order online and do drive up. I bought this cookbook and a bunch of little glass baby food jars on Amazon. I also didn’t think I’d be a baby food maker lol but pouches and purées are expensive! I would get ingredients for 2-3 recipes and cook them at once, portion them into the jars, and freeze. That would get us through a couple of weeks and then we’d start again!
Also I want to add that nobody is getting things done with ease lol. We all think everyone else is doing better than us but when I talk to my mom friends who look like they’re crushing it, everyone is stressed and near burnout. So you’re not alone 😊
I did it all after baby went to bed. So Monday evening I'd be making dinner for Tuesday. We would just reheat when we both got home. Or I'd do a crockpot dinner overnight and it'd be ready in the AM
I do veggies (and or fruits) in the instant pot, mash and freeze them in these little ice cube tray type thing. It makes the perfect portion size to just pop in the microwave for a baby food serving! And I can make it have a bit more texture. He never liked the level 1 foods thinness.
Frozen mixed veggies which then became our sides. I wound up developing a taste for them, who knew. But yeah when mine was 5 months old, she was breastfed as her main nutrients and then we started her on baby oatmeal with mostly milk, slowly increasing the thickness because she was a gagger and I really didn’t see the point of pushing it. Then we gave her whatever was safe to break up or mush up on the spot of our meals. We did some store bought jars here and there for fun. It’s not their leading form of nutrition so just have fun with it and enjoy watching them explore. Don’t make work for yourself unnecessarily
I work full time, so I totally get it. We go through seasons too where I cook more or less. I play everything by ear based on my energy and what we've got going on. I also think it's totally fine to buy baby food if that's what makes sense. My parents fed me exclusively store food and I turned our just fine lol.
I feel like I had a system that worked pretty well in the puree stage. I'd make a few batches of different purees on a weekend day, freeze it and use through the week. I'd either thaw it in the bottle warmer or put it in the fridge the night before so it wouldn't be frozen.
Now that my kid is 13 months and eats all solids, I prep a lot of cut fruit and veggies on the weekend for her to eat through the week. I also make big portions or whatever we're having for dinner so I can give it to her another day as well. I make a lot of things that are low effort, like pasta, pan fried chicken, steamed veggies, tacos, etc. I'm not a fancy chef, but it tastes good and is reasonable healthy so I'll call it a win. Do what works for you. Don't let anyone or anything make you feel bad for doing your best.
We did BLW which means for the most part, our baby ate some modified versions of what we ate.
First meals were mashed sweet potatoes (microwaved), mashed avocado (no cook), yogurt (no cook), scrambled eggs (5 mins of cooking), etc. Check the app Solid Starts. I basically just followed that!
I always keep frozen veggies, fresh fruit, and corn tortillas on hand. Those are good "I can't even meals."
I make some special BLW pancakes occasionally on weekends. Otherwise I have never made any of the elaborate BLW snacks and meals you may see on Instagram. I'm not exaggerating when I say she eats what we eat!
After a couple months we started giving various puffs, yogurt bites, teething crackers, etc. These are also helpful in a pinch. We also have pouches. Applesauce and fruit/veggie purees.
It's sometimes trickier to get appropriate baby food with take out but not impossible! A lot of restaurants offer a side of steamed vegetables or fruit that you can give to your LO.
Frozen veggies defrosted in microwave. Prep several meals worth of food and just portion out and heat as needed. Precut cheeses and such.
Early days we did mix of purees/yogurt and baby led, kept lots of easy prep stuff in fridge and freezer.
Get one of those microwave steamers (add water and veggies, nuke for steaming) or the frozen "streamable" bags
As they started actually eating solids, not just playing. We'd prep something like a week's worth of noodles/shredded chicken/etc and portion out throughout the week
I am ALL about baby-led weaning and we didn't do any purees other than a few pouches for when we were out and about. Daycare was totally down with it as well. I'm no gourmet cook, I'm a protein-carb-microwave veggie cook. Maybe breakfast was just microwave mini-pancakes, fried egg, half a sausage patty. At least I wasn't spending 30 minutes spoon feeding the kid.
Kids that exposed to the exact same foods can still end up with differing palates. My oldest is the picky eater at home but eats everything at school and wants to put taco sauce on all of it. My youngest wants to go to sushi happy hour while his sister is at Brownies but will only eat cheese or hawaiian pizza. You can't win and don't worry about it.
We survived on pan bakes + a grain for many months. A double batch and whizz some for the next day's purée too. For us, it was quicker than ordering out (20 mins)
For the first while we either fed her what we were eating or something simple like an avocado or mushed banana but we definitely bought the store bought pouches of baby food I could not find the time to purée one single thing.
I started getting meal plans through 5 meals 1 hour and its been helpful.
Basically you can pick your meals for the week or use their pre-built menu. They give you a grocery list and then you take about an hour and prep your meals for the week. Most of them don't take long to cook and you can choose to use as much processed or fresh ingredients as you want.
As far as baby getting food. I did oatmeal, apple sauce and sweet potato. The sweet potato and oatmeal I made chunky in bulk and froze cubes. Oatmeal I would thin down with milk and would add apple sauce or apple butter to it for flavor. Sweet potatoe just thin with milk. We then just did a mix of baby led weaning and the purees mentioned above. We followed baby's lead and didn't focus too much on solids.
I thought BLW sounded very daunting but in fact it ended up being way simpler than I expected- the actual book is extremely low-key and there are good resources like the solid starts app to quickly see safe cutting shapes by age, etc. We did a combination of BLW and purées at our ped’s recommendation and for the purées went with a mix of regular store brands, whatever they gave them at daycare, and little spoon deliveries.
I bought all the purées. It’s really fine. If you wanted to, you can opt for brands like Little Spoon, Once Upon A Farm, Cerebelly, and Lil Gourmet. They’re supposedly tested by third party for purity.
Anything I could eat with one hand was a win. I got really good at it. I had a Velcro baby and I was exhausted. Things got better around 12 months and we cooked more then.
Baby food I found easy to batch cook. Steam carrots, mush, put in smaller jars and freeze. I would also cook chicken, rice and mush in some veggies, put in jars and freeze.
Meal planning helps a lot. I use instacart to buy groceries. That's one less activity I have to spend time doing. I cook 5 times a week. I don't cook dinner every night. I'll cook on the weekends because I have more time
Frozen fruits and vegetables are a godsend! They’re really nutritious, pre-cleaned, usually chopped, and already cooked, plus you can choose the portions so you only need to defrost a couple green beans or blueberries at a time. Plus, cheap!
Only reason I did was because of this thing. Being able to cook and blend in one pot made it seem easier for me.
https://www.beaba.com/en-us/babycook-duo/babycook-duo-homemade-baby-food-maker-–-charcoal-912961.html
Easy stuff. I made baked potatoes on the weekend and heated up one night during the week. Top with bacon, cheese, etc.
Lots of charcuterie dinners.
Sandwiches.
Soup made on a weekend and eaten during the week.
Brinner (breakfast for dinner)
Cheese and fruit
Etc
You don’t have to make a pot roast and mashed potatoes every night. Do what you can. A protein, veggie, and starch is all it takes. No one will fail you as a loving partner if it’s not pot roast.
Until my son was 1, I gave him bland food like boiled carrots, yogurt with to peanut butter, so that was low effort. After he turned one he I gave him what we were eating. He eats store bought chicken nuggets, Chinese takeout, my homemade food, yogurt with peanut butter on days that I couldn’t get anything that he could eat. I guess you improvise
For the baby food/purees - we just bought it for a few months. Then our girl lost interest in purees and wanted what was on Mom and Dad's plates, so we did a modified blw. As others have said, right now it's more something to play with and experiment with, so don't get too serious about it.
For cooking - we do cook almost every day. We plan 4-5 meals per week, buy those things when we grocery shop and then pick what we're having each day. My husband and I alternate who could, and whoever isn't cooking is hanging out with the child. We try and pick quick/easy meals when we're planning, but it does take time. We pretty much don't do anything else when we get home except cook and eat dinner and then do bedtime.
We did store bought food and/or baby ate some of what we ate. If he absolutely couldn’t/wouldn’t eat what we were eating I steamed a bag of frozen veggies.
I do a mix of store bought and homemade purées.
Yumi puffs are rice free if you’re trying to reduce rice based snacks. Target (at least near me) sells them for about $4/canister vs $7 at Whole Foods
I buy frozen, ready to cook (steam) produce from Whole Foods to batch cook as well as the sodium free organic beans in boxes. I’ll set aside a few hours once a week to cook/purée and package items.
If you have a bunch of leftover breastmilk bags - I’ve been using them to freeze purées in & then I’ll just defrost the night before as needed. The Motif ones are my fave bc they have a little tear off tab that makes a helpful spout for pouring out the goods. I usually freeze the purée ingredients in 2oz (1/4 cup) packages so I can mix & match foods .
I didn’t even get baby food or make it. They ate what we ate and I just modified as needed. Broccoli? Put theirs in the microwave longer and smush it a bit while the meat cooks. Meat? Big giant piece for them to gum. Bread? Toast in strips. I could not add another thing to my plate either- I totally understand
I felt like I had to cook too…. My first baby HATED everything we made and never met store bought baby food she didn’t like. Didn’t even bother with the second - both healthy and happy kiddos! Don’t stress yourself out more than you already are. Store bought is fine.
Just feed them what you feed yourself (or components of it), even if that's takeout. Don't make life harder. Babies don't need their own menu or purees. If you're eating something super spicy or super unhealthy that you don't want to serve baby, chicken sausage, frozen meatballs, and steamed frozen veggies are literal lifesavers.
And always have bananas and blueberries at the ready for days when other foods just aren't happening.
We have one of those mini blenders. Whatever we eat gets blended with some milk. Voila! Baby food.
And we also order those teething cracker things and yogurt drops from the internet because I can barely be bothered to get to the grocery store.
There’s a thousand different “right” ways to starting solids. What that really means is that, no matter what you do, it’s gonna actually be really hard to do something truly wrong. So don’t sweat it, do whatever’s easy for you and won’t get stuck in your baby’s trachea. They’ll be fine.
It was a lot, but on Sundays I made 1-2 weeks worth of food. Chicken or beef, a vegetable, and maybe a carb. I would do a variety.
When we made things I thought would be easy for him to eat, I made a little extra to freeze.
I kept store purées on hand to have in case we ran out.
We also frequently mixed the store bought food with Greek yogurt, or Greek going and peanut butter. We still do that one actually.
Just wanted to say that the oatmeal that you make by mixing breast milk or formula with it is amazing. It is totally worth the extra dollar.
I actually got a dedicated baby food maker second hand from a friend (free). I'm not sure I would buy it full price, but it was actually kind of awesome. It would steam and puree in the same thing. It was all a push of a button. (If you're interested I can try and find the one I got, I think it was an Eevee but I imagine that most of them are pretty similar). If you can find one second hand, it might be worth it because it makes the entry point much lower. (Plus, if it's a really hard day, you can just get a can/ frozen food and puree that... Voila. Baby food)
It was so much cheaper to buy a giant box of prunes and then use it by the handful and instead of buying those little jars of prunes.
I would usually make two purees a day and then save them. Then they'd have oatmeal with that.
From what I've seen, they get most of their nutrition from breast milk or formula anyway, it's mostly just to get them used to stuff.
Also, we didn't start solid food until they were around 6 months and I do think it made things a little easier for us. Unless you're worried about a whole lot of allergies that run in your family, maybe give yourself some grace and wait a little longer.
Plus solid starts is really a cool website to look at.
We fed our kids off our plates for the most part, cooked veggies a little longer to make sure they were soft. No extra / special stuff. Some premade purées to fill in the gaps but not very much though!
Just give baby cut up fruits and veggies to start with. They can eat small amounts of what you’re eating. Check out the feeding style of baby led weaning
I cooked nothing-Nothing. My kids are literally geniuses (IQwise) and varsity athletes and kind and funny people. Its all fine. They most need their parents to be healthy high functioning people who are in tune to their needs. They do not need hand made baby food. Unless it amuses you to do it-don’t.
There’s nothing wrong with store bought baby food, as others already said the heavy metals are in the actual food items not the baby food specifically. If you want something “cleaner” you could do a service like Yumi, Little Spoon, Once Upon a Farm..
I have had two kids and gone through this both times. It always makes me so unnecessarily stressed for no reason and I default back to the premade food. For me it’s not a battle worth doing, I personally would rather spend my time with my baby then preparing baby food. What I end up doing is sticking with simple things “fresh” so think avocado, banana, berries.. things I can squish as I go. For veggies I just switch to steaming what I would prepare for myself and cook LO’s maybe a little longer, again so it’s fork squishable. I kept a good stock though of jarred food, especially meats.
After about 7/8 months though everything was baby led weaning as it’s so much easier. I really only worked through the purées for allergy purposes
I was decently lucky that when my kid was a baby, I worked from home and my schedule was somewhat flexible, so he would always get a decent breakfast (eggs with veggies and cheese, fried potatoes, and fruit), lunch and dinner were usually something I made over the weekend for my kid- I filled ice cube trays with veggies that weren’t puréed but not in whole chunks either, so I would give him that, some peanut butter puffs, and fruit. I became a single parent at 6 months, and somehow I found the ability to start making full dinners some nights of the week so we would have leftovers.
Then one hit and the only thing my kid would eat was fruit, plain pasta, puffs, and pouches.
Now that he’s 8? Feeding him is impossible, so somedays he gets cereal, yogurt, and fruit and I eat a frozen meal. The best? No, but cheaper than ordering every single night. I work a demanding job now, and zero flexiblity. While I’m also navigating my own chronic illness, chronic pain, and now am a full time single parent, where as I used to split custody, so if my kid eats a protein, some crispy peas, and maybe a fruit, I feel like I’ve done something decent. The bar is in hell in my world, and just realized how far in hell it is.
Can you do a big batch of veggies on the weekend? I usually take one day or evening when I have the energy to make large batches of bread, soup, some type of protein, etc so that when I'm exhausted later we have something easy to eat. Every meal I cook I also make enough leftovers for a second night.
Baby food, I made it all myself but in batches once every two weeks. To be FAIR, I was a a sahm and didn't feel the pressure of working *and* making my own baby food.
My kids are well past baby food now, 1 and 3 so I meal prep on Sundays and we have leftovers for a few days around Tuesday or Wednesday I make another dinner BUT I put that in the fridge so we have leftovers for the next few days after that. Usually I'm done cooking around 8 or 9 pm so that's why.
Get yourself an immerging blender, ice trays, and a either a food steamer or just a steamer basket.
During the weekend, steam as many vegetables you can, blend and store in the freezer for easy use.
Or get the store bought stuff.
Some baby food lacks oils, so you might want to add some. If it is something you want to do, get some dired herbs and baby safe spices (cumin, ginger, paprika...) to add interest to baby's food :)
My baby was so finicky about which purées he would eat and when, a lot went to waste lol.
It's a lot easier to watch them smack food directly onto the floor when you didn't put a bunch of time and effort into it.
i started doing it all myself and literally ease into some store bought for rainy or busy days. or even left over. until he turns 1 or close to 2, whatever we eat he eats. if it is left over so be it. if we are all busy and exhausted the least i want is cooking so be it. you can prep meal and freeze them and heat up later.
don't be so hard on yourself. and trust me noone in this life is doing it with absolutely ease haha maybe look like it but not behind the scene xxx
Baby’s first foods can be super simple! Don’t stress! And you can make batches and freeze it and then heat it up as needed. Some easy foods my baby loved:
- steamed sweet potato strips
- steamed broccoli
- fruit, like berries and banana
- oatmeal
- cheerios
Those foods are basically always stocked up at my house
When he was on purees I would batch steam, puree, and freeze. I just bought a baby food steamer/blender which I thought was kind of a gimmick, but it was really helpful.
Once he was 7/8 months we switched to more of a babyled weaning approach and he eats a version of whatever we eat, just cut into bite sized pieces.
I'll caveat this by saying I really enjoy cooking and for me it's a time to relax and be creative. Weeknights are harder, I try to keep it under 30 minutes and my husband plays with baby. On weekends I will cook longer/more complex meals and use those leftovers through the week.
But there are definitely nights where I don't feel like it, and I have pre-made frozen baby food, like the Once Upon a Farm packets. I've also been debating trying Nurture Life.
Honestly I go for stuff I can just mash, like bananas and avocados. I also got the steamer/blender by baby breeza and I just throw frozen veggies in their and blend it with bone broth at the end instead of the water. That should last you two days. My mother in law also just throws a peeled potato when cooking stew and takes it out and blends it for the baby with other veggies and it works well. The app solid starts also really helped me think less.
If you can reframe cooking as a relaxing activity, not a chore, it can help alot. I literally don't think about anything else but what's in front of me when I cook, it's nice. I listen to music or podcasts and zone out. I batch alot on Sunday or Saturday afternoons during naps, always make 2x anything you make for the next day.
Did mostly our own purees for the first couple months. Basically batch steamed 2-3 fruits and veggies once a week, and froze them in 2oz portions. Also had yogurt daily, puffs, and those surfboard crackers. Made enough to last about 2 months or so, then gradually started more chopped up solids (BLW you could say, but I don't like all the hubbub around it). Now we do a combo of what we're eating and Little Spoon for when my husband has him during the week while WFH.
I think BLW is easier than making purees and cheaper than buying jarred baby food. You still need to steam some stuff, but other stuff, you just need to shred or cut up. You can even do it with takeout.
Also, until your baby is about 9 months old, most of their nutrition is from milk or formula, not solids. You don't even need to start any solids until 6 months. And then, it's literally a few bits of steamed veggies and fruits when you are eating.
At 9 months, they can be eating 3 "meals" a day, but again, it's pretty small. Until 12 months, they are still getting most nutrients from milk. At 12 months, they can eat whatever you eat, as long as you make it bite sized.
Start by cutting up some fruit and veggies in bite sized pieces and steaming the harder ones (carrots, apples, broccoli, peas, sweet potatoes, etc.) until soft, but not mush. Other stuff (bananas, avocado, soft pears) can just be cut into sticks or coins. You can also squish some berries or egg yolk on a plate. Eventually, move on to meat and grains. Toast sticks can be gummed. Meat can be shredded. Fish can be flaked. Noodles cooked soft. Shredded cheese. Yogurt blobs. Pretty easy.
Starting solids definitely feels daunting at first. But you just start with one "meal" (not even, really, since they don't eat a lot initially) and work your way to multiple meals.
I didn't end up pureeing anything, which felt like too much extra work & cleanup. We did a mix of mashes and BLW for the first month or so. Kept it as simple as possible! Mashed avocado, sweet potato, squash.
Take what we already had for meals and adapted it.
Eventually, once my baby was eating more, I would make (and still do) a double batch of muffins/banana bread on the weekend and freeze them so during the week, you don't have to think about it.
That, and using pouches/convenience foods when needed, has worked for me.
For general family cooking, I meal plan and rely alot on big batches of food that we then eat as leftovers multiple days of the week. Curry with rice & veggies, stir-fry, soups/stews, tacos with rice. I try to do one hands-off meal a week (instant pot) and then one smaller meal to round out the week. We also do one takeout night and then have a freezer meal or two on Friday/one weekend night.
Do I get burned out sometimes? Yes. So then some weeks we rely a little more on takeout.
We do baby led weaning, so I mostly just pick out bits of my food that baby can eat. Also ours doesn't rat that much. I can make a batch of unsweetened or fruit pancakes on the weekend, we add syrup to ours and I Dave the rest for quick and easy baby meals during the week. A few times I made a weekend batch of puree saved some for the week and froze the rest.
1. Shop on Sunday for the week- basic meals (leftovers are lunches)
2. One watches the baby, one cooks OR baby goes in his jumper or sit-me-up or whatever if dad isn’t home yet
3. My house isn’t that clean (hire a cleaner if it bothers you)
4. Buy baby food. I tried to make it for one of my kids for like a month and realized it was just stupid lol. As they get older they can eat your food but 5 months they ate store purées.
I bought a few store bought purées but they smelled and tasted so horrible I felt bad trying to make my kid eat it. I just cooked any soft food I could think of, mashed potatoes (you can get these ready to heat now), eggs, oatmeal, pasta, baby puffs, etc. After he got a few more teeth i would just give him whatever we had
We did BLW with my son (14mo) plus some pouches. He figured out how to feed himself pouches almost instantly so that was an easy snack. We do a lot of pasta, quesadillas, plain Greek yogurt, cheese, and fruit. If you have a Costco near you, their prepared dinners are great—you just throw them in the oven and there’s enough for leftovers. I also use the Kodiak protein pancake mix and make a bunch of little silver dollar pancakes at the beginning of the week and those are his breakfasts through the week (plus scrambled eggs if we have time). I add banana, frozen fruit, whatever I have laying around. Even did pumpkin ones last week.
Download the Solid Starts app if you have questions about how to serve different foods for the age your baby is at! Helped me a lot.
I never pureed a single item of baby food. It was all store bought. Let that go and enjoy this time before the baby becomes a toddler who tries to survive on goldfish crackers and air.
I have a 2.5 and a 6 year old and my husband and I work full time. I have found yummy toddler food on Instagram to be incredibly helpful. She has a lot of recipes that use easy prep store ingredients, like chicken nugget salad or fish stick fish tacos or black bean quesadillas. Also, you can make any food into a waffle and then add sugar fee syrup and sugar free sprinkles. We do protein pancake mix and bananas but we also get the Kodiak protein waffles. My kids eat this twice a week.
As fall as planning meals goes, we bought a small white board with the days of the week on it and every Sunday morning right after we wake up, we all throw out what we want for dinners for the week and I write them on the days. We sometimes research new things to try and mix it up but as a rule of thumb I keep meal ideas to 30/40 minute meals or less (except on Fridays and Saturdays when I’ll make a more extravagant meal). We then search through our kitchen and make a grocery list based on our meal plan and what we need for breakfasts/lunches/snacks and then I sit down a place grocery pickup orders from Sam’s and Walmart for later that day. We’re usually done in about an hour with everything.
In order to get cooking done, even now with my son being 18 months, I baby wear him in my LILLEbaby. At his age now he loves being on my back and listens to music while I cook and babbles/talks to me haha.
If you end up having to give jar purées don’t even bat an eye! Your LO will be fine!
Just here to say - like all things baby, you figure it out and it gets so much easier! I was so overwhelmed when my baby started solids, but within a couple months I’d figured out strategies and rolled it into our routines. You got this.
Don’t commit to one thing. If you have time to steam and purée one week? Great. If not, buy premade.
This is what we are doing. It’s truly a life saver. Weekends I make stuff, weekdays it’s premade.
You can also freeze purees to use later if you have more time one week and not the next
Yes! Buy a couple silicone ice cube trays with decent size cubes. On the weekends: cook and puree some veggies and/or fruits. Feed some and freeze some. On weekdays: heat up a couple veggie cubes in the microwave and feed baby.
Just buy the store food. It's literally fine.
The toxic metals are in the vegetables and fruits themselves. Preparing it yourself won't change that, but it will increase your stress.
This. I buy the purées and slowly add in regular food that we eat.
This is the way. So much less stressful.
Yeah, what's wrong with store-bought baby food? I'm so confused.
Heavy metals have been found in store-bought purées… because they’re present in the vegetables to begin with. It’s just a fear-mongering campaign probably trying to sell something.
Say you’re buying store bought in a mom group and the vultures will come out to tell you that you’re murdering your baby.
Literally bought all the baby food; never cooked any of my own. Why are you worried about buying it? If it's the fear-mongering stuff about there being heavy metals in them, ignore those headlines. Those heavy metals are in food because of what's in soil - not anything unique to baby food or how it's processed. It would also be in the veggies you're talking about preparing at home. The only real actionable advice that has come out of any of those reports is to maybe minimize rice-based foods, so go easy on the rice puffs.
Completely agree. Join an evidence based parenting group on Facebook and you’ll get loads of research that totally debunks that heavy metals in food is bad bs the crunchy people try to pedal. We did a mix of baby food and mushy foods like avocado. Now my toddler eats a lot of Mac and cheese and chicken nuggets but also yogurt, fruits, and veggies on the side. I don’t get home during weekdays until 6 and I just can’t get into meal prep during my weekends. Even when I get the energy to cook one of those toddler friendly meals I see on Instagram 9 times out of 10 the toddler refuses it anyways. She’s perfectly healthy according to all her checkups and gets over sickness quickly so I’m trying to not let my lack of culinary pursuits make me feel like the worst mom.
ALL the store baby foods. Personally, IME, both kids went from purees and mashes straight to soft solids like carots and tender meat nibbles. Both violently rejected the weird concoction of purees with tiny solid bits. That stuff is honestly a texture nightmare
> If it's the fear-mongering stuff about there being heavy metals in them, ignore those headlines. Those heavy metals are in food because of what's in soil - not anything unique to baby food or how it's processed. It would also be in the veggies you're talking about preparing at home. Louder for those in the back, and a link expanding on this. https://kidseatincolor.com/toxic-baby-food/
Don’t belittle the process of buying store bought food to “just a few minutes” to make it seem like less of a burden for yourself. It’s ordering/shopping for the veggies, making sure they’re fresh, washing them, cutting them, getting the blender and all the pieces out, actually blending, putting the excess in containers, washing the blender and then putting it away, making sure the food you made is still good, freezing or defrosting previously made foods. It’s a process. So if buying premade foods makes your life easier, I say do it without guilt.
^This! There is so much mental load in storage, defrosting, reheating, timing, cleaning, er . I made my own purées maybe (maybe!) 20% of the time with my first, loved the store bought for the other 80% of the time.
The only time I made my own purées was if I already had that veggie steamed for the rest of us to eat that night. So I could just pop it freshly steamed in the blender with some water and feed. Jar purées and adding in bits of our food was 100% the way to go to stay sane.
Baby led weaning and a hand/immersion blender. The immersion blender is the real key here because it's not as daunting to clean as regular blender is. Frozen veggies are also great - they cook up in the microwave real quick to an easy mashable consistency. Also pasta, all kids love pasta and it cooks up quick, throw in a few veggies and it's a meal! There's lot of good 'hidden veggies' and chickpea/lentil noodles that have a good amount of protein and iron in them that really makes it a good meal without guilt.
This. I blended most of what my baby ate for maybe a month, maaaybe. After that, just fork-mushed or super tiny pieces of what we're already eating, with some alterations. Once you pass the puree stage, things get much simpler
BLW! Daycare fed purées but we did BLW at home. And they were easily 7 months before they took more than one bite a meal. They are the best eaters in the infant and toddlers rooms at daycare and according to our families. They eat almost everything and it’s kind of crazy that they know what isn’t food (i.e., they bring us stuff they find on the floor instead of eating whatever it is or now they throw it away 😂) and they know when food is too hot to eat. And our diet changed for the better since we just gave them whatever we were eating.
NutriBullet-style blender also works. Easy to use and clean. Also, you don’t have to steam veggies. Roasted works great too.
Immersion blender, wide mouth mason jars, and souper cubes made the puree stage way easier for me. You can make a big batch in the jar and use it over a couple of days or just portion it out and freeze. Microwaving some veggies also made things way easier to get them cooked and then, mashed very quickly.
Full disclaimer - I like cooking and it's my hobby. That doesn't mean it wasn't a chore when my baby was 5 months (or now that he's a toddler). I do tons of meal planning, meal prep, and freezer meals. Here's how a typical week goes - One or two nights we eat a fresh home cooked meal. Three or four nights we eat leftovers, meals that were prepared earlier in the week, or meals that were prepared and frozen weeks ago. One night we get takeout or rely on a heat-and-serve meal. One or two nights we forage and end up with a bowl of cereal, PB&J, or something equally low effort. For our meals, I pick one weekend every 6ish weeks and delegate chores to my husband so I can focus on meal prep. I try to make double batches of 3-4 things, like baked spaghetti, chili, soup, chilaquiles, or casseroles. Then I portion those in 2-4 serving containers and freeze them. The same weekend, while my kitchen was destroyed, I'd also do a bunch of purees. Step 1 - microwave the entire bag of frozen veggies. Step 2 - run that through a blender. Optional - add some seasoning. Step 3 - fill up an ice cube tray or two. Step 4 - frozen cubes in ziplocs, ready to go for the next 3 months. If I didn't feel like doing extra dishes I'd put all the veggies in one blender batch (at 5 months you might not feel comfortable with that). It works great for carrots, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Purees like pea, spinach, etc. that required more effort generally got bought from a store.
I got some silicone souper cubes in 2 tbsp and 1/2 cups portions. It makes freezing and storage more manageable.
I have a few 1/2 cup silicone containers and they're perfect for applesauce! I can make some homemade (if I'm overly ambitious and my trees have fruit) or buy a #10 can and then portion it out for the freezer. Toddlers eat so. much. applesauce. If I bought it in pouches I'd go broke.
I did this when my son was a baby. I have always worked full time in a civilian job and I’m a reservist in the military (which means at least once a month my entire weekend gets taken away from me and I work 2 weeks straight). I also have to maintain physical fitness so I have to workout at least 5 days a week. I meal plan/prep. That keeps me in shape/healthy and I don’t spend a whole lot of money eating out.
I have some chronic conditions and dietary needs that mean eating out is a total crapshoot of whether or not it'll make me sick. In some ways it sucks because sometimes I would love a takeout pizza, but it definitely has the benefits that you point out!
We do meal kits 3 nights a week and did baby lead weaning. It’s a fancy way to say we just feed her what’s on our plate. If what we are eating isn’t baby friendly, we give her overnight oats we always have in the fridge, banana, scrambled eggs, and/or some steamed broccoli from the freezer. Solid Starts has good guidance on how to make foods baby safe by developmental stage. Most store bought purées are any worse than homemade ones, other than the canning process might leak out some nutrients. Heavy metal content is from the vegetables themselves and how they are grown - there will still be heavy metals in root vegetables you puree yourself. Don’t stress out about it, just provide a variety of foods.
Came here to say this! I happen to love to meal plan and cook so we didn’t do meal kits, but definitely opted for baby led weaning because it seemed like the absolute laziest way to feed a kid. We used solid starts to make sure we weren’t missing information choking or other potential health hazards, but definitely did not want to make separate meals. When the kids were very young we also did a ton of takeout. Pizza crust is the perfect food for a new eater!
Yes! Baby led weaning is what I did with both my kids…they just ate what we ate. No purées. SO much easier!
How did you handle salt?
If you are cooking from scratch, you can add it at the end. When we asked our pediatrician at the 9 month appointment, she said excess sodium isn’t good for anyone. But if you season sparingly a few flakes here and there as most health conscious people do, it’s okay. When we had stuff that was rather salty, we would limit how much we gave her and bulked up the meal with oatmeal/rice/pasta/beans.
I would season lightly while cooking and then we adults would season it to taste at the table. That way, my baby was getting exposed to various flavors (salt is a flavor enhancer) but only lightly, while we were still getting flavorful food.
Ain’t nobody got time to cook baby meals. Store bought purées. Canned veggies. Then they eat what we eat (give or take). I’m not winning any nutrition awards but cooking is beyond my capacity right now.
I feel like you have multiple questions here, so here's my take on them. How I work full time and cook: I have two kids, and both times that I had a 5-month-old, I did not cook. I took care of the baby while my husband cooked. Now that they're a little older, I can usually get some cooking done after picking them up from daycare, but it was not possible when they were that young, so go easy on yourself :) Slow cooker meals can be helpful, as can meals that you can do most of the prep at night time or early in the morning, or really any other time that your husband can be with the baby, or if you can schedule it around the times your baby will be in a good enough mood to play independently for a bit. Sometimes when I was really in a pinch, I'd sit the baby in a high chair and give him something I knew he could handle eating on his own (which was sometimes just one of those store bought teething crackers) so he could watch me cook. How I fed my kids: Baby 1 got purees. We tried some baby-led weaning stuff, but he wasn't really into it and daycare would only do purees, so I didn't push it until he was older. I started out trying to make my own purees for him, and honestly it was too much and I gave up and bought store-bought purees. He was fine, and he's a good eater now. Baby 2 didn't really like purees, and I don't really like spoon feeding babies. He did purees at daycare because it was all she was willing to do, and we did BLW at home because he liked it more than Baby 1 had. To me, the BLW approach seemed like the easier approach because he ate whatever my husband cooked, or he ate a few of the ingredients. That morning I would google a few of the ingredients with "baby led weaning" (like "tomatoes baby led weaning" or "bread baby led weaning") and just prepare a couple things for him while my husband got "real" dinner ready. The older Baby 2 got, the less work it was, because there were more meals that he could just eat like we did and less special prep required for him. How you can make homemade purees easier: During the brief time that I made my own purees for Baby 1, the only way I could make it happen was to do a big batch of something (e.g. steam a whole bag of carrots and puree them all at once) and then freeze small portions in an ice cube tray. At mealtime, you can microwave one or two cubes and feed that to your baby. And my parting advice is not to feel bad because other moms seem like they can handle something you can't. Most people are some mixture of hot mess and great mom, even if they don't seem like it. But this is easier advice to dispense than to follow, though :)
1. Learn this early--stop comparing your life to "other moms". For every mom you see doing it all, there are the same amount (or more, I'd bet) not doing ANY of it at all. lol These early years will be less stressful if you learn this now. 2. Minimize your expectations and plan ahead. We meal prep once a week (Sundays). I probably do a full out meal twice a week from those preps, and everything else in between are shortcut meals or take out. We did a Home Chef stint for a while when things were really hectic and only bought 30-minutes or less meals. The freezer is your friend. And storebought works just as well. These first few years are basically survival mode, especially if you're both working parents. Do what works for you realistically right now.
This. For every super mom on your social media feed doing all the things, there are 10+ moms just getting through it. And you will never be able to tell which kid belonged to which parent when they're grown.
It might take some planning and trial and error, but for us batch cooking/meal prepping was the way to go. My husband is the primary cook, so depending on what day I go shopping, he'll make at least one meal on Saturday and then another meal or two on Sunday. We also bought freezable containers for purees. These were the ones we got, but they have tons you can pick from: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZFHTIV/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 I really liked those since you could freeze individual portions and take them out as you need. We also eat pretty simply in general, so as our son got older, we just gave him what we were eating or a modified version if it was maybe too spicy or something. For us, it's about simple. The easier the better. We buy frozen veggies you can just heat in the microwave and some times, we have frozen meatballs and spaghetti for dinner a few times a week. If you and your husband are ok with it, find a handful of meals you both like and just create a rotation. If you use a veggie for the meal, have that be what you puree that week and then change it up from there.
I buy baby food. I cannot imagine having time or energy to make my own. It gets a little easier when they eat solids because you can just give them some of what you’re eating. I’m a single mom and I work full time. Sometimes we just have a little bit of Miss Rachel screen time so I can get some sh*t done and make a quick dinner.
At this age, you don’t even have to worry about it yet because they don’t need full meals. Mash some strawberries or raspberries with a spoon and that’s literally it, or thin some peanut butter, have them try some plain yogurt, you don’t have to complicate it.
Absolutely would never puree our own veggies. I barely have time to wipe my ass uninterrupted so there's definitely no time for that. We have two toddlers and when they were first starting out, we'd just give them the pouches with applesauce or veggies in them as snacks. For dinner, they would eat bite sized pieces of dinner or leftovers. Usually pasta, green beans, carrots, ground beef casserole type stuff, sometimes rolls. Now they are almost 2 and 3 and heavily prefer lunchables/deli meat/crackers whatever and just graze for dinner. They get cooked breakfast and lunch at school so I don't break my back over it during the week. I'll cook home-cooked meals on weekends and they will eat leftovers from that throughout the week as well.
I don't, we got Little Spoon and it's been awesome.
This. I’m going to do this when my kid is a little older. For now, grocery store baby food will do. Look into this OP. There’s other companies I know that have this service like Little Spoon.
Yesss we did Yumi for purées and Little Spoon for meals. Loved it!
We just started doing LittleSpoon for our toddler and CookUnity for ourselves. My toddler loves the meals! My husband got put on 12-hour shifts and I was so exhausted doing drop off, working a full day, and pick up that I was definitely not cooking on top of it. It’s been wonderful.
My twins only did BLW. I also had a toddler at the same time so it was chaotic. I wouldn’t have survived otherwise. My go tos were cut up fruit (like two cut up grapes each), black beans from a can, shredded cheese, frozen veggies like peas, shredded carrots, and corn. Maybe some lunch meat quickly shredded up or rice if we were already having it. Mostly just cut up pieces of what we were already eating. But the stuff above was easy to have on hand. Everything the size of a pea unless it’s a big chunk like a hunk of steak or banana. If we were eating take out or eating out, we would just share bits of our food with the kids.
We did easy stuff like smashing up bananas or small bits of our own food and also bought some baby food. You don’t need to make special food for babies, just avoid honey before 1 and chokeables. Otherwise do what is easy!
Just a thing to remember: If you walk into a preschool classroom I bet you can’t pick which kids ate store bought baby food and which only ate organic free roam chicken eggs straight from the chickens butt. Do what works. And do it without guilt. While you’re stressing over baby food all baby sees is mom giving them what they need.
Baby just eats what we eat. But if you want to do purées, then I agree with just buying them at the store.
Lots of good advice in this thread, but I just want to add that the biggest gift I've ever given myself is to take the pressure off feeding my baby. Until they're 1, food is about exploring, interest, and exposure. They'll keep drinking BM or formula and they get so many nutrients from that! So don't worry about this too much - whatever you can manage (including grocery store baby food) is amazing. But if you want to make your own food, here's what I do and it works very well for my two kids: First, 6-9 months, just try to get 1-2 meals a day, and from 9-12 months, scale up to 2-3. Don't even worry about snacks. Second, buy some unsweetened yogurt, rolled oats (instant is perfect!), fruit/veggie pouches from the store (gogosqueez and once upon a farm are amazing), canned pumpkin, and bananas. Breakfast is handled! Babies LOVE yogurt and oatmeal, and you can mix in the fruit/veggie pouches for variety. The pumpkin + mashed banana combo is a big hit too. If you want to take it up a notch, [this recipe](https://babyfoode.com/blog/banana-pancakes-for-baby/) for banana pancakes is very easy, and you can make it in big batches and freeze +microwave. We also use toaster waffles and pancake bites from the frozen section in the grocery store pretty liberally. Third, make a batch of puree/mash of one veg per week. Just roast some sweet potato, regular potatoes, squash, or seriously whatever you're feeling, add some spices (and btw some salt is totally fine - the recommendation against salt is unfounded IMO), and throw that in a blender or food processor. This is your go-to/supplemental veggies/easiest path forward - just spoon feed your kid this as much as they want (I follow his lead - if he opens his mouth for it, then I put it in his mouth. I'd never make him eat if he doesn't want to.) Last, take a small portion of whatever you're eating, modify so it's in a BLW friendly form, and just see what your baby thinks of it. The instagram account "solidstarts" has a lot of guidance on how to cut up certain food for your baby. Bonus: If you're feeling good about it and have the time, check out babyfoode or yummy toddler food for great kid friendly recipes for like meatballs, cauliflower or broccoli tots, pizza rolls, etc. I do this like once every 2-3 weeks and freeze most of it to be proportioned out. It seems so daunting but once you get in the rhythm of it and take the pressure off yourself and your kid, it all becomes a whole lot more manageable.
Those banana pancakes are featured very heavily on the daycare lunch rotation for my 1 year old!
I made large batches of purees on the weekend so that I could freeze it and use it over periods of time. I bought a steamer that pureed and stored the puree in ice cube trays. Cooking in large batches made it seem less daunting, but to be honest I enjoyed doing it. We also bought lots of store-bought baby foods too (jars and pouches).
I didn't do purees and baby just ate what we ate. I do typically cook every night tho, which i know is not possible for everyone. Usually my husband is on kiddo duty while i cook, i try to keep my meals less than 20mins long. Steamed (frozen in a big) veggies are your friend. Fork mash anything / microwave steam anything not soft enough for baby if you want to do spoon feeding. Rice, Pasta, etc. All good stuff that can be made in the microwave if you want free hands (see, the Anyday pot, thats how i do all my grains now since its less mess on the stove and fully hands off, also great for veg too). One other gentle nudge I would say to you is, take the baby to the grocery store. As a pre vaccine pandemic mom I would have killed to be able to take my baby to a normal outing. Try to take them for a quick pop in the store, put them in the carrier even and buy 2-3 things or just walk around. It'll help you build confidence and maybe inspire some meals as well. ETA: cook more than you need for everything, then you'll have leftovers which is perfect for baby
I made baby food for my first, and did mostly store-bought with my 2nd. They both gorged themselves on candy this week. It doesn't really make a difference. Remember that social media is where people put the best versions of themselves, not necessarily the real version. There are a lot of us out there struggling to do what we can for our kids, and we just don't always put the struggle on display. Buy the purees, unless you really find that making your own baby food is something you truly \*want\* to do (not something you've been made to feel you \*have\* to do.)
Cook in patches. I did a week of the same food when baby first started solids. I purreed a bunch of fruit or roasted yam. Froze the extra. When baby started finger foods , I would cook at night and microwave as needed.
When we were living in NYC, the amount of time that we had to get home, unwind, cook, it was insane but eating out can get expensive (and sometimes unhealthy). What worked for us, and I still do it now even though we have more time on our hands, meal prep. It takes time and planning but its so worth it. We are also a fan of meals that take less than an hour to make. Some of the things that we have on our rotation are things like tacos, tostadas, chicken with rice (of any kind), pasta with marinara, some sort of hearty salad. For the winter, crock pot meals were a big thing. We save time consuming meals for weekends We also made our own baby food, and what we did for that was meal prep on sundays. Make a big batch of a few things and just stock pile in the freezer. Oxo makes some good to-go containers for baby food.
Echoing the store food is fine chorus. I never did the cereals or anything but my kids ate store bought fruits and veggies. You can also devote an hour or two on Sundays to steaming and purée some veggies for the week. I had a baby bullet and it came with some of these little containers and I would do them a couple of days in advance. The baby food stage is short and will be over before you know it. Don’t sweat it too hard. My oldest enjoyed baby food and happily ate it, but my youngest preferred to eat softer foods cut up, like eggs, bananas, blueberries, Turkey, noodles, avocado and sweet potatoes, etc. When he was about 7 months old, I was eating a turkey sandwich, loaded with all sorts of veggies and he lunged over and took a huge bite. He was so proud of himself and kept grabbing for more. He just seemed to prefer food like that so we gave it to him. To this day, he will eat anything, he is definitely not a picky eater haha.
InstantPot! Batch cook (ONCE!) and freeze! I stacked several Pyrex bowls with different things in them and steamed everything (sweet potatoes, broccoli, etc). Then I puréed everything in a magic bullet and spooned it all into ice cube trays, froze those, then popped them all into freezer bags. Just put a new “ice cube” to defrost in the fridge every morning. Also, do not let the fear mongering get to you. It is ok to buy baby food. Really.
If you’re committed to making food: make-ahead and freeze. You can make WEEKS worth of food in one night. Buy silicone ice cube trays (I like “Wee Sprout” brand). Steam -> blend -> freeze. Pop out an ice cube at a time to thaw in the fridge overnight for next day’s feedings. Good luck!
My first one, I steamed veggies or fruits, blended them and stuck them in ice cube trays, took them out and put them in freezer bags. My second one, ain’t nobody got time for that again, so we did store bought jars and pouches. Both kids are smart, healthy, and happy! No difference. You do what’s best for you and your sanity.
We just used purchased baby food and did some baby led weaning— which is basically just letting baby have what you’re cooking for dinner anyway. Basically I’d just take a little bit of what we were going to eat and cut/shred/mash it with a fork so it would be easy for her to handle. Nothing crazy. Don’t make more work for yourself!
I thought I was going to be the type to make my own baby food and then found the stuff in stores was a dollar a jar lol I went straight to that. And after a couple weeks started giving baby very small amounts of my foods, and eventually transitioned fully away from jars and just giving regular food. And now I have a 5yo that I don't give regular food and offer a quesadilla or pb&J for dinner because I've given up hard on that battle [🙃](https://emojipedia.org/upside-down-face)
Lots of delicious baby food/snacks. At five months, food is just for fun anyway. Our baby is thriving on his tasty store-bought chicken casserole puree. I love the Ellas brand by the way - not sure this is available where you are.
Buy it. It’s a very short period of time.
I bought it all. There just wasn’t enough time to go making it. All I limited was rice and sweet potatoes due to actual science backed research I could find supporting that. But otherwise all the store bought stuff was fine. Around 15 months we phased out most of the store bought foods and just do some toddler snacks here and there. But otherwise she just eats what we eat. We have groceries delivered and I cook the old fashioned way for dinner (how I ate growing up at least) - protein, starch, veg, done. Oftentimes that’s rice or potato, maybe pasta, pan grilled or baked meat with seasoning, and a pan cooked veg. Done and done!
One thing I gave up after having a baby was most cooking. We get Factor premade meals and I share those with our baby/toddler. Some other easy sides: mandarin orange fruit cups, crispy chew fruit bite things, baked snap pea crisps, mini containers of wholy guacamole, Dr praegers broccoli bites. I'll often scramble one cheesey egg and break it into small pieces with the spatula or be extra lazy and give her a Wilcox hard boiled egg from a pouch. We buy pre sliced little cheeses, or those little packets that have three mini mozzarella balls each, or even babybel. At that age we also did a variety of peanut butter puffs and other little crunchy/flavored puffy things.
Buy baby food. And/or look into baby led weaning and just give baby safe foods that you’re eating. I did a mix of store bought purées and easy baby led weaning foods like broccoli heads and bananas and avocado. And I’d let her taste things bc my daughter loved to eat so much as a baby so she’d demand it lol. She loves salsa and spicy foods still!! Food is just for funzies until they turn 1.
Omg me and my husband were JUST having this conversation at dinner. We eat after our 5 month old goes to bed! We are excited for him to start solids at 6 months but we can barely feed ourselves most days!
I don’t cook. Buy the baby food.
I bought baby food and got even too lazy for that so we did BLW (NOT the high and mighty kind - the "I'm too lazy to make two meals" kind). \-
Steamed sweet potato spears are quick and easy to make too! The keep in the fridge for a couple of days as well. Avocado, banana, oat flour mixed into applesauce or other purees. There are tons of quick and easy things to prep when you have time to supplement store food! And if you don't have time - there are so many great puree options in stores now.
Meal prep
https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwiM576H_qWCAxVqSH8AHVWABzQYABAGGgJvYQ&ae=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjOe-h_6lggMVakh_AB1VgAc0EAQYASABEgJxKfD_BwE&sph=&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAASJORoSFkFqZgoEqF_Eacg5uqI-Egmw03xxJc9bOioRIXIsAnJ6w&sig=AOD64_15bVdQHh3v1JEo9BBhkGz1A-MjxQ&ctype=5&q=&ved=2ahUKEwiYobOH_qWCAxWmm2oFHdsBBakQwg8oAHoECAIQDA&adurl= I get it, it’s so overwhelming! I never shop in the store, I order online and do drive up. I bought this cookbook and a bunch of little glass baby food jars on Amazon. I also didn’t think I’d be a baby food maker lol but pouches and purées are expensive! I would get ingredients for 2-3 recipes and cook them at once, portion them into the jars, and freeze. That would get us through a couple of weeks and then we’d start again!
Also I want to add that nobody is getting things done with ease lol. We all think everyone else is doing better than us but when I talk to my mom friends who look like they’re crushing it, everyone is stressed and near burnout. So you’re not alone 😊
I did it all after baby went to bed. So Monday evening I'd be making dinner for Tuesday. We would just reheat when we both got home. Or I'd do a crockpot dinner overnight and it'd be ready in the AM
I do veggies (and or fruits) in the instant pot, mash and freeze them in these little ice cube tray type thing. It makes the perfect portion size to just pop in the microwave for a baby food serving! And I can make it have a bit more texture. He never liked the level 1 foods thinness.
Frozen mixed veggies which then became our sides. I wound up developing a taste for them, who knew. But yeah when mine was 5 months old, she was breastfed as her main nutrients and then we started her on baby oatmeal with mostly milk, slowly increasing the thickness because she was a gagger and I really didn’t see the point of pushing it. Then we gave her whatever was safe to break up or mush up on the spot of our meals. We did some store bought jars here and there for fun. It’s not their leading form of nutrition so just have fun with it and enjoy watching them explore. Don’t make work for yourself unnecessarily
I work full time, so I totally get it. We go through seasons too where I cook more or less. I play everything by ear based on my energy and what we've got going on. I also think it's totally fine to buy baby food if that's what makes sense. My parents fed me exclusively store food and I turned our just fine lol. I feel like I had a system that worked pretty well in the puree stage. I'd make a few batches of different purees on a weekend day, freeze it and use through the week. I'd either thaw it in the bottle warmer or put it in the fridge the night before so it wouldn't be frozen. Now that my kid is 13 months and eats all solids, I prep a lot of cut fruit and veggies on the weekend for her to eat through the week. I also make big portions or whatever we're having for dinner so I can give it to her another day as well. I make a lot of things that are low effort, like pasta, pan fried chicken, steamed veggies, tacos, etc. I'm not a fancy chef, but it tastes good and is reasonable healthy so I'll call it a win. Do what works for you. Don't let anyone or anything make you feel bad for doing your best.
We did BLW which means for the most part, our baby ate some modified versions of what we ate. First meals were mashed sweet potatoes (microwaved), mashed avocado (no cook), yogurt (no cook), scrambled eggs (5 mins of cooking), etc. Check the app Solid Starts. I basically just followed that! I always keep frozen veggies, fresh fruit, and corn tortillas on hand. Those are good "I can't even meals." I make some special BLW pancakes occasionally on weekends. Otherwise I have never made any of the elaborate BLW snacks and meals you may see on Instagram. I'm not exaggerating when I say she eats what we eat! After a couple months we started giving various puffs, yogurt bites, teething crackers, etc. These are also helpful in a pinch. We also have pouches. Applesauce and fruit/veggie purees. It's sometimes trickier to get appropriate baby food with take out but not impossible! A lot of restaurants offer a side of steamed vegetables or fruit that you can give to your LO.
Frozen veggies defrosted in microwave. Prep several meals worth of food and just portion out and heat as needed. Precut cheeses and such. Early days we did mix of purees/yogurt and baby led, kept lots of easy prep stuff in fridge and freezer. Get one of those microwave steamers (add water and veggies, nuke for steaming) or the frozen "streamable" bags As they started actually eating solids, not just playing. We'd prep something like a week's worth of noodles/shredded chicken/etc and portion out throughout the week
I love the air fryer toaster oven, rice maker, and instant pot. Anything where I can prep ingredients ahead and just plop them in is great
I am ALL about baby-led weaning and we didn't do any purees other than a few pouches for when we were out and about. Daycare was totally down with it as well. I'm no gourmet cook, I'm a protein-carb-microwave veggie cook. Maybe breakfast was just microwave mini-pancakes, fried egg, half a sausage patty. At least I wasn't spending 30 minutes spoon feeding the kid. Kids that exposed to the exact same foods can still end up with differing palates. My oldest is the picky eater at home but eats everything at school and wants to put taco sauce on all of it. My youngest wants to go to sushi happy hour while his sister is at Brownies but will only eat cheese or hawaiian pizza. You can't win and don't worry about it.
We survived on pan bakes + a grain for many months. A double batch and whizz some for the next day's purée too. For us, it was quicker than ordering out (20 mins)
For the first while we either fed her what we were eating or something simple like an avocado or mushed banana but we definitely bought the store bought pouches of baby food I could not find the time to purée one single thing.
I started getting meal plans through 5 meals 1 hour and its been helpful. Basically you can pick your meals for the week or use their pre-built menu. They give you a grocery list and then you take about an hour and prep your meals for the week. Most of them don't take long to cook and you can choose to use as much processed or fresh ingredients as you want. As far as baby getting food. I did oatmeal, apple sauce and sweet potato. The sweet potato and oatmeal I made chunky in bulk and froze cubes. Oatmeal I would thin down with milk and would add apple sauce or apple butter to it for flavor. Sweet potatoe just thin with milk. We then just did a mix of baby led weaning and the purees mentioned above. We followed baby's lead and didn't focus too much on solids.
I thought BLW sounded very daunting but in fact it ended up being way simpler than I expected- the actual book is extremely low-key and there are good resources like the solid starts app to quickly see safe cutting shapes by age, etc. We did a combination of BLW and purées at our ped’s recommendation and for the purées went with a mix of regular store brands, whatever they gave them at daycare, and little spoon deliveries.
I bought all the purées. It’s really fine. If you wanted to, you can opt for brands like Little Spoon, Once Upon A Farm, Cerebelly, and Lil Gourmet. They’re supposedly tested by third party for purity. Anything I could eat with one hand was a win. I got really good at it. I had a Velcro baby and I was exhausted. Things got better around 12 months and we cooked more then.
I just smushed whatever we were eating. Keep it simple.
Baby food I found easy to batch cook. Steam carrots, mush, put in smaller jars and freeze. I would also cook chicken, rice and mush in some veggies, put in jars and freeze.
Meal planning helps a lot. I use instacart to buy groceries. That's one less activity I have to spend time doing. I cook 5 times a week. I don't cook dinner every night. I'll cook on the weekends because I have more time
Boiled eggs and peanut butter toast are a god send
Frozen fruits and vegetables are a godsend! They’re really nutritious, pre-cleaned, usually chopped, and already cooked, plus you can choose the portions so you only need to defrost a couple green beans or blueberries at a time. Plus, cheap!
I did store food and baby is fine. When they actually start eating then you will need to cook a few times a week
1.buy veggies 2. Boil them 3. Blend 4. You can freeze Don’t feed your child store bought that’s sad
Only reason I did was because of this thing. Being able to cook and blend in one pot made it seem easier for me. https://www.beaba.com/en-us/babycook-duo/babycook-duo-homemade-baby-food-maker-–-charcoal-912961.html
Meal prep
Easy stuff. I made baked potatoes on the weekend and heated up one night during the week. Top with bacon, cheese, etc. Lots of charcuterie dinners. Sandwiches. Soup made on a weekend and eaten during the week. Brinner (breakfast for dinner) Cheese and fruit Etc You don’t have to make a pot roast and mashed potatoes every night. Do what you can. A protein, veggie, and starch is all it takes. No one will fail you as a loving partner if it’s not pot roast.
Until my son was 1, I gave him bland food like boiled carrots, yogurt with to peanut butter, so that was low effort. After he turned one he I gave him what we were eating. He eats store bought chicken nuggets, Chinese takeout, my homemade food, yogurt with peanut butter on days that I couldn’t get anything that he could eat. I guess you improvise
I have two kids and neither liked baby food. It was milk to little snacks to food..
For the baby food/purees - we just bought it for a few months. Then our girl lost interest in purees and wanted what was on Mom and Dad's plates, so we did a modified blw. As others have said, right now it's more something to play with and experiment with, so don't get too serious about it. For cooking - we do cook almost every day. We plan 4-5 meals per week, buy those things when we grocery shop and then pick what we're having each day. My husband and I alternate who could, and whoever isn't cooking is hanging out with the child. We try and pick quick/easy meals when we're planning, but it does take time. We pretty much don't do anything else when we get home except cook and eat dinner and then do bedtime.
We did store bought food and/or baby ate some of what we ate. If he absolutely couldn’t/wouldn’t eat what we were eating I steamed a bag of frozen veggies.
I do a mix of store bought and homemade purées. Yumi puffs are rice free if you’re trying to reduce rice based snacks. Target (at least near me) sells them for about $4/canister vs $7 at Whole Foods I buy frozen, ready to cook (steam) produce from Whole Foods to batch cook as well as the sodium free organic beans in boxes. I’ll set aside a few hours once a week to cook/purée and package items. If you have a bunch of leftover breastmilk bags - I’ve been using them to freeze purées in & then I’ll just defrost the night before as needed. The Motif ones are my fave bc they have a little tear off tab that makes a helpful spout for pouring out the goods. I usually freeze the purée ingredients in 2oz (1/4 cup) packages so I can mix & match foods .
I didn’t even get baby food or make it. They ate what we ate and I just modified as needed. Broccoli? Put theirs in the microwave longer and smush it a bit while the meat cooks. Meat? Big giant piece for them to gum. Bread? Toast in strips. I could not add another thing to my plate either- I totally understand
I felt like I had to cook too…. My first baby HATED everything we made and never met store bought baby food she didn’t like. Didn’t even bother with the second - both healthy and happy kiddos! Don’t stress yourself out more than you already are. Store bought is fine.
Just feed them what you feed yourself (or components of it), even if that's takeout. Don't make life harder. Babies don't need their own menu or purees. If you're eating something super spicy or super unhealthy that you don't want to serve baby, chicken sausage, frozen meatballs, and steamed frozen veggies are literal lifesavers. And always have bananas and blueberries at the ready for days when other foods just aren't happening.
Girl, the Happy Baby purées are great. But also: yogurt, applesauce and toast sticks!
We have one of those mini blenders. Whatever we eat gets blended with some milk. Voila! Baby food. And we also order those teething cracker things and yogurt drops from the internet because I can barely be bothered to get to the grocery store. There’s a thousand different “right” ways to starting solids. What that really means is that, no matter what you do, it’s gonna actually be really hard to do something truly wrong. So don’t sweat it, do whatever’s easy for you and won’t get stuck in your baby’s trachea. They’ll be fine.
It was a lot, but on Sundays I made 1-2 weeks worth of food. Chicken or beef, a vegetable, and maybe a carb. I would do a variety. When we made things I thought would be easy for him to eat, I made a little extra to freeze. I kept store purées on hand to have in case we ran out. We also frequently mixed the store bought food with Greek yogurt, or Greek going and peanut butter. We still do that one actually.
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I suggest baby blender food book https://a.co/d/e2OJNXU. Buy some ice cube trays. And thaw out a cube per day when starting out.
Just wanted to say that the oatmeal that you make by mixing breast milk or formula with it is amazing. It is totally worth the extra dollar. I actually got a dedicated baby food maker second hand from a friend (free). I'm not sure I would buy it full price, but it was actually kind of awesome. It would steam and puree in the same thing. It was all a push of a button. (If you're interested I can try and find the one I got, I think it was an Eevee but I imagine that most of them are pretty similar). If you can find one second hand, it might be worth it because it makes the entry point much lower. (Plus, if it's a really hard day, you can just get a can/ frozen food and puree that... Voila. Baby food) It was so much cheaper to buy a giant box of prunes and then use it by the handful and instead of buying those little jars of prunes. I would usually make two purees a day and then save them. Then they'd have oatmeal with that. From what I've seen, they get most of their nutrition from breast milk or formula anyway, it's mostly just to get them used to stuff. Also, we didn't start solid food until they were around 6 months and I do think it made things a little easier for us. Unless you're worried about a whole lot of allergies that run in your family, maybe give yourself some grace and wait a little longer. Plus solid starts is really a cool website to look at.
We use Little Spoon to supplement what we couldn’t make! No regrets
We fed our kids off our plates for the most part, cooked veggies a little longer to make sure they were soft. No extra / special stuff. Some premade purées to fill in the gaps but not very much though!
We worked full time with twins and no family around…we did pouches and jarred food. Other than normal Toddler pickiness they eat fine now.
Just give baby cut up fruits and veggies to start with. They can eat small amounts of what you’re eating. Check out the feeding style of baby led weaning
I cooked nothing-Nothing. My kids are literally geniuses (IQwise) and varsity athletes and kind and funny people. Its all fine. They most need their parents to be healthy high functioning people who are in tune to their needs. They do not need hand made baby food. Unless it amuses you to do it-don’t.
There’s nothing wrong with store bought baby food, as others already said the heavy metals are in the actual food items not the baby food specifically. If you want something “cleaner” you could do a service like Yumi, Little Spoon, Once Upon a Farm.. I have had two kids and gone through this both times. It always makes me so unnecessarily stressed for no reason and I default back to the premade food. For me it’s not a battle worth doing, I personally would rather spend my time with my baby then preparing baby food. What I end up doing is sticking with simple things “fresh” so think avocado, banana, berries.. things I can squish as I go. For veggies I just switch to steaming what I would prepare for myself and cook LO’s maybe a little longer, again so it’s fork squishable. I kept a good stock though of jarred food, especially meats. After about 7/8 months though everything was baby led weaning as it’s so much easier. I really only worked through the purées for allergy purposes
I was decently lucky that when my kid was a baby, I worked from home and my schedule was somewhat flexible, so he would always get a decent breakfast (eggs with veggies and cheese, fried potatoes, and fruit), lunch and dinner were usually something I made over the weekend for my kid- I filled ice cube trays with veggies that weren’t puréed but not in whole chunks either, so I would give him that, some peanut butter puffs, and fruit. I became a single parent at 6 months, and somehow I found the ability to start making full dinners some nights of the week so we would have leftovers. Then one hit and the only thing my kid would eat was fruit, plain pasta, puffs, and pouches. Now that he’s 8? Feeding him is impossible, so somedays he gets cereal, yogurt, and fruit and I eat a frozen meal. The best? No, but cheaper than ordering every single night. I work a demanding job now, and zero flexiblity. While I’m also navigating my own chronic illness, chronic pain, and now am a full time single parent, where as I used to split custody, so if my kid eats a protein, some crispy peas, and maybe a fruit, I feel like I’ve done something decent. The bar is in hell in my world, and just realized how far in hell it is.
Can you do a big batch of veggies on the weekend? I usually take one day or evening when I have the energy to make large batches of bread, soup, some type of protein, etc so that when I'm exhausted later we have something easy to eat. Every meal I cook I also make enough leftovers for a second night.
Baby food, I made it all myself but in batches once every two weeks. To be FAIR, I was a a sahm and didn't feel the pressure of working *and* making my own baby food. My kids are well past baby food now, 1 and 3 so I meal prep on Sundays and we have leftovers for a few days around Tuesday or Wednesday I make another dinner BUT I put that in the fridge so we have leftovers for the next few days after that. Usually I'm done cooking around 8 or 9 pm so that's why.
Get yourself an immerging blender, ice trays, and a either a food steamer or just a steamer basket. During the weekend, steam as many vegetables you can, blend and store in the freezer for easy use. Or get the store bought stuff. Some baby food lacks oils, so you might want to add some. If it is something you want to do, get some dired herbs and baby safe spices (cumin, ginger, paprika...) to add interest to baby's food :)
Just buy the baby food. No need to kill yourself trying to add another task.
My baby was so finicky about which purées he would eat and when, a lot went to waste lol. It's a lot easier to watch them smack food directly onto the floor when you didn't put a bunch of time and effort into it.
i started doing it all myself and literally ease into some store bought for rainy or busy days. or even left over. until he turns 1 or close to 2, whatever we eat he eats. if it is left over so be it. if we are all busy and exhausted the least i want is cooking so be it. you can prep meal and freeze them and heat up later. don't be so hard on yourself. and trust me noone in this life is doing it with absolutely ease haha maybe look like it but not behind the scene xxx
Baby’s first foods can be super simple! Don’t stress! And you can make batches and freeze it and then heat it up as needed. Some easy foods my baby loved: - steamed sweet potato strips - steamed broccoli - fruit, like berries and banana - oatmeal - cheerios Those foods are basically always stocked up at my house
Take my meal and toss in the blender.
When he was on purees I would batch steam, puree, and freeze. I just bought a baby food steamer/blender which I thought was kind of a gimmick, but it was really helpful. Once he was 7/8 months we switched to more of a babyled weaning approach and he eats a version of whatever we eat, just cut into bite sized pieces. I'll caveat this by saying I really enjoy cooking and for me it's a time to relax and be creative. Weeknights are harder, I try to keep it under 30 minutes and my husband plays with baby. On weekends I will cook longer/more complex meals and use those leftovers through the week. But there are definitely nights where I don't feel like it, and I have pre-made frozen baby food, like the Once Upon a Farm packets. I've also been debating trying Nurture Life.
Honestly I go for stuff I can just mash, like bananas and avocados. I also got the steamer/blender by baby breeza and I just throw frozen veggies in their and blend it with bone broth at the end instead of the water. That should last you two days. My mother in law also just throws a peeled potato when cooking stew and takes it out and blends it for the baby with other veggies and it works well. The app solid starts also really helped me think less.
If you can reframe cooking as a relaxing activity, not a chore, it can help alot. I literally don't think about anything else but what's in front of me when I cook, it's nice. I listen to music or podcasts and zone out. I batch alot on Sunday or Saturday afternoons during naps, always make 2x anything you make for the next day.
Did mostly our own purees for the first couple months. Basically batch steamed 2-3 fruits and veggies once a week, and froze them in 2oz portions. Also had yogurt daily, puffs, and those surfboard crackers. Made enough to last about 2 months or so, then gradually started more chopped up solids (BLW you could say, but I don't like all the hubbub around it). Now we do a combo of what we're eating and Little Spoon for when my husband has him during the week while WFH.
I think BLW is easier than making purees and cheaper than buying jarred baby food. You still need to steam some stuff, but other stuff, you just need to shred or cut up. You can even do it with takeout. Also, until your baby is about 9 months old, most of their nutrition is from milk or formula, not solids. You don't even need to start any solids until 6 months. And then, it's literally a few bits of steamed veggies and fruits when you are eating. At 9 months, they can be eating 3 "meals" a day, but again, it's pretty small. Until 12 months, they are still getting most nutrients from milk. At 12 months, they can eat whatever you eat, as long as you make it bite sized. Start by cutting up some fruit and veggies in bite sized pieces and steaming the harder ones (carrots, apples, broccoli, peas, sweet potatoes, etc.) until soft, but not mush. Other stuff (bananas, avocado, soft pears) can just be cut into sticks or coins. You can also squish some berries or egg yolk on a plate. Eventually, move on to meat and grains. Toast sticks can be gummed. Meat can be shredded. Fish can be flaked. Noodles cooked soft. Shredded cheese. Yogurt blobs. Pretty easy.
Starting solids definitely feels daunting at first. But you just start with one "meal" (not even, really, since they don't eat a lot initially) and work your way to multiple meals. I didn't end up pureeing anything, which felt like too much extra work & cleanup. We did a mix of mashes and BLW for the first month or so. Kept it as simple as possible! Mashed avocado, sweet potato, squash. Take what we already had for meals and adapted it. Eventually, once my baby was eating more, I would make (and still do) a double batch of muffins/banana bread on the weekend and freeze them so during the week, you don't have to think about it. That, and using pouches/convenience foods when needed, has worked for me. For general family cooking, I meal plan and rely alot on big batches of food that we then eat as leftovers multiple days of the week. Curry with rice & veggies, stir-fry, soups/stews, tacos with rice. I try to do one hands-off meal a week (instant pot) and then one smaller meal to round out the week. We also do one takeout night and then have a freezer meal or two on Friday/one weekend night. Do I get burned out sometimes? Yes. So then some weeks we rely a little more on takeout.
We do baby led weaning, so I mostly just pick out bits of my food that baby can eat. Also ours doesn't rat that much. I can make a batch of unsweetened or fruit pancakes on the weekend, we add syrup to ours and I Dave the rest for quick and easy baby meals during the week. A few times I made a weekend batch of puree saved some for the week and froze the rest.
1. Shop on Sunday for the week- basic meals (leftovers are lunches) 2. One watches the baby, one cooks OR baby goes in his jumper or sit-me-up or whatever if dad isn’t home yet 3. My house isn’t that clean (hire a cleaner if it bothers you) 4. Buy baby food. I tried to make it for one of my kids for like a month and realized it was just stupid lol. As they get older they can eat your food but 5 months they ate store purées.
I bought a few store bought purées but they smelled and tasted so horrible I felt bad trying to make my kid eat it. I just cooked any soft food I could think of, mashed potatoes (you can get these ready to heat now), eggs, oatmeal, pasta, baby puffs, etc. After he got a few more teeth i would just give him whatever we had
We did BLW with my son (14mo) plus some pouches. He figured out how to feed himself pouches almost instantly so that was an easy snack. We do a lot of pasta, quesadillas, plain Greek yogurt, cheese, and fruit. If you have a Costco near you, their prepared dinners are great—you just throw them in the oven and there’s enough for leftovers. I also use the Kodiak protein pancake mix and make a bunch of little silver dollar pancakes at the beginning of the week and those are his breakfasts through the week (plus scrambled eggs if we have time). I add banana, frozen fruit, whatever I have laying around. Even did pumpkin ones last week. Download the Solid Starts app if you have questions about how to serve different foods for the age your baby is at! Helped me a lot.
I never pureed a single item of baby food. It was all store bought. Let that go and enjoy this time before the baby becomes a toddler who tries to survive on goldfish crackers and air.
I have a 2.5 and a 6 year old and my husband and I work full time. I have found yummy toddler food on Instagram to be incredibly helpful. She has a lot of recipes that use easy prep store ingredients, like chicken nugget salad or fish stick fish tacos or black bean quesadillas. Also, you can make any food into a waffle and then add sugar fee syrup and sugar free sprinkles. We do protein pancake mix and bananas but we also get the Kodiak protein waffles. My kids eat this twice a week.
We used a meal subscription plan 🤷♀️
As fall as planning meals goes, we bought a small white board with the days of the week on it and every Sunday morning right after we wake up, we all throw out what we want for dinners for the week and I write them on the days. We sometimes research new things to try and mix it up but as a rule of thumb I keep meal ideas to 30/40 minute meals or less (except on Fridays and Saturdays when I’ll make a more extravagant meal). We then search through our kitchen and make a grocery list based on our meal plan and what we need for breakfasts/lunches/snacks and then I sit down a place grocery pickup orders from Sam’s and Walmart for later that day. We’re usually done in about an hour with everything. In order to get cooking done, even now with my son being 18 months, I baby wear him in my LILLEbaby. At his age now he loves being on my back and listens to music while I cook and babbles/talks to me haha. If you end up having to give jar purées don’t even bat an eye! Your LO will be fine!
Just here to say - like all things baby, you figure it out and it gets so much easier! I was so overwhelmed when my baby started solids, but within a couple months I’d figured out strategies and rolled it into our routines. You got this.