We’re almost six month into weaning our daughter on to real foods.
For the first six months, we’ve been using the book of books on baby weaning, Annabel Karmel’s Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner.
If you’re short on recipe ideas for weaning baby, this is
the book to have. Without even realising it we’d even gone as far as buying the bowl and spoon from the Annabel Karmel range, we are completely signed up to the book and way of life!
To be fair, it is a great book, and it’s also been hugely educational for me as someone who loves to cook.
I’d never before come across a papaya or a sweet potato in real life before, never mind cook with one of them. I challenge anyone to make up the chicken one pot and not love the taste!
While it’s easy to come up with simply baby recipes by yourself, the benefit of using a structure book of weaning recipes is that you can be assured baby is getting a balanced diet. The overriding principle of Annabel Karmel’s weaning program seems to be ensuring baby gets the best food available, while at the same time giving them a fantastic variety of great tastes, so there is no room for them to become a fussy eater.
Having said that, my daughter did decide around the ten month mark that she didn’t want to eat the puréed foods my wife has been painstakingly putting together for her. Suddenly the “lovely lentils” aren’t so lovely to my daughter anymore.
But we realised what had happened was a natural progression – we now make the same dishes from Annabel Karmel and just don’t puree them – she wants texture, chunkiness and chewing in her meal.
Looks like this book will hold us in good stead for some time to come.
