Enough of the lunchboxes: lets start at the beginning

Although we at Kiddies Kitchen stock a number of items that are suitable for school lunchboxes our focus is really on providing real food for babies, toddlers and pre-school children. Right from the first day of weaning we think that giving your son or daughter good wholesome food is vitally important.

There are lots of resources out there for parents who want guidance on how and when to wean their children and these tend to suggest that the baby should be at least 4 months and usually 6 months old before weaning takes place. opinions vary but it seems that the common ground is no solids before 17 weeks at the very earliest in order to give yor baby's digestive system time to mature enough to cope with solids. Obviously all this can be discussed with your GP and or midwife and health visitor.

I might talk a bit about the dreaded purees later on but the first thing to get right is the basic equipment.

Personally my son was starving hungry from about 5 months so we started weaning at that point with organix baby rice and then a variety of fruit and vegetable purees. We cooked these in bulk and froze them as cubes. I could go on for a long long long time about the inadequacies of ice cube trays, and the relative merits of the specially designed baby food freezer trays on the market but I won't. The summary of my extensive research is as follows:

• Ice cube trays are useless for this. Cheap or expensive all they will do is crack and split as soon as you try and get food cubes out of them.
• The individual lidded freezer cubes are great BUT we had a habit of overfilling them which caused too much expansion and usually resulted in the lids being forced off and broken. Also the food stays in them until you want to defrost it. Cook up more than a pot full of puree and you are back on the internet ordereing a whole lot more freezer cubes!
• The absolute best baby food freezer tray we found was the Pea in a Pod tray (just scroll down the second page of the food storage category). I am not exaggerating when I say that we have used a pair of these trays non-stop for over 6 months without them cracking, splitting or snapping. They are the only baby food freezer tray that I will sell in the shop and combined with a few freezer bags are all you need to completely fill your freezer with little cubes of food.

Do you need a fancy blender? Probably not. We used a potato ricer for a lot of things. The Baby Dan Food Mill is also quite handy. A little later on a hand blender was great for soups and so on.

Other essentials: A high chair (obviously). Because we weaned a little early we found that feeding him in a Baby Bjorn bouncing chair (there you go a plug for something that we don't sell) was really handy as you could get him pretty upright but it gave more support than a normal highchair until he was able to support himself. The all wooden East Coast High Chair we use at home has been great and is nice and wipecleanable (if thats a word).

A waterproof floormat - its much easier to wash a mat than constantly was the floor and beleive me the food will get on the floor no matter how careful you are.

Bowls, and you'll need more than you ever imagined. Cutlery and stuff is a whole other topic and no doubt we'll come back to it soon. Suffice to say we stock a whole range of excellent items

posted by Richard @ 6:55 AM