Making Homemade food for your Baby

Annabel Karmel's cook books for babies and toddlersShe is awesome and has great ideas for foods and different combinations. She also gives great advice on what foods to use as first foods and daily meal planners. I bought her New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. You can get her books from Exclusive Books or Estoril books. She also has a website - http://www.annabelkarmel.com/.

Feeding Sense by Megan Faure, Katherine Megaw and Dr Simon Strachan from the Baby Sense series. This book has covers birth to toddlers form breastfeeding and formula feeing to fussy eaters. It has a good plan for introducing solids and guidelines for amounts of milk and solids as baby grows.


Wholesomebabyfood.com this website gives a page on each food where it explains when to introduce the food, what the food contains, how best to prepare it and some recipes. This site also has fantastic charts with lists of food appropriate per age group. This site and the Annabel Karmel books are from overseas and so don't include all the fruits and veges we can get in SA but its easy enough to make and educated decision on when to introduce stuff they don't include by looking what they do include.


The Optimum Nutrition Before, During and After Pregnancy by Patrick Holford. This book has the best advice on what foods to introduce when in order to avoid causing an allergic reaction to a particular food by introducing it too early. This is the list that I follow because my little one has a predisposition to allergies as he has the hay fever, eczema, asthma gene. I've included this list below. Patrick Holford also has a new book which I don't have but would like to get, called Optimum Nutrition for your Child.


Baby’s first foods: What and when to introduce while weaning


4-6mnths

• Vegetables except tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and brinjals (sweet potatoes are fine)
• Fruits (except Citrus and there is some argument about Strawberries and Kiwis)
• Pulses and Beans (lentils are a great source of protein)
• Rice, Quinoa (expensive and hard to find is SA), Millet and Buckwheat
• Fish (we’ve chosen to stay away from Fish until 9mnths for allergy reasons)

From 9mnths

• Meat and Poultry (we didn’t stick to this as we found Josh needed protein which we introduced at 7mnths.
• Oats, Corn (we introduced this around 8mnth – rice cakes make great finger food), Barley and Rye
• Live Yogurt (we are trying to stay away from all dairy till 12mnths)
• Eggs
• Soya

From 12mnths

• Citrus Fruit
• Wheat
• Dairy products
• Nuts and Seeds (but try to stay away from peanuts as long as possible)

Adapted and added to from The Optimum Nutrition Before, During and After Pregnancy by Patrick Holford. (pg 189 – 190)

Some helpful tips I have picked up while making my own baby food.

• I make large quantities of foods and freeze them in table spoon sized portions.
• I use ice trays with lids. The only place I've found them is West Pack at Lifestyles Nursery off Beyers Naude drive. They are about R18 each.
• Once the cubes are frozen I move them into zip lock freezer bags for storage.
• I use the Kenwood food processor and blender combo. We paid R 1000 for it at Hi Fi Corp and after looking at all the combos this was the best value for money.
• The Annabel Karmel books use stock in most of the recipes which you are supposed to make from scratch (there is a recipe for this as well). I found this to be a pain and so was using water instead of stock but then you loose some of the flavour. My solution is that I recently found a pure liquid stock called Famous Stock. You can get chicken and vegetable stock and they are made from pure concentrates and contain no allergens, no salt and no preservatives.