Baby food

Close-up photo of baby with solid food around her mouth.

Making baby food is (pretty) easy!

Photo of small and large plastic jars with smiley faces of home-made baby-food.
On the right is about 10 tablespoons of Sweet Potato Nagaimo Surprise; the small jar on the left contains a puree of miniature banana and Ataúlfo mango with plain, whole milk yogurt. Because even babies deserve a desert now and then!

Monday, April 13, 2020

If you’re lucky, feeding your newborn baby is a pretty simple thing: place baby on mother’s breast and let nature take its course!

For the rest of us, there are complications. It turns out that breast-feeding is not an innate ability, but a learned skill and, in our case, one that never really developed. Raven rented — and then bought — a breast-pump early on and, for the first couple of months, we supplemented her milk with formula — it took that long for a full supply to come in!).

Of course, though mother’s milk is an almost perfect food (What happened to the vitamin D, Ma Nature? What happened to the vitamin D?), all perfect things must pass. And since she turned four or five months old, we have been supplementing her diet with an ever-more diverse set of “solid” (usually pureed) foods.

Close-up photo of baby food before it is pureed, including sweet potato, nagaimo, millet and cabbage.
Before the puree! Sweet potato, nagaimo, millet and cabbage.

In our own eating habits, Raven and I tend towards the Michael Pollan school of thought: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Nor do we eat out often. We eat more meat than Pollan recommends, but we eat a lot of plants and we make most of our meals from scratch. (Speaking of plants, what a variety of plants the Chinese eat! One day I will talk about that; did you know that potato leaves are delicious? Raddish leaves, too!)

So we want it to be with our baby. Real food, made from simple ingredients. And, according to Raven, who has taken it upon herself to introduce Baobao to food Beyond Milk, it isn’t too hard at all to nourish your baby without bankrupting yourself buying tiny, disposable, plastic or glass jars of commercial baby-foods.

Our first recipe is a little dish we call Sweet Potato Nagaimo Surprise! Below you will find an expanding list of dishes as we create or come across them!

Baby Food Recipes

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