Jasmine’s Food Adventures

July 30, 2009 by admin 

eating_yams

If you follow our blog, you might have seen the video of Jasmine eating solids for the first time. Well this is the follow-up to that with Jasmine’s first ever feature “in the kitchen”.

We started Jasmine on solids when she turned 5 1/2 months. Her first teeth started coming in around that time and she started to look at us longingly while we ate dinner. We felt so bad for her just sitting there watching us eat that we had to let her in on the fun.

Touchy subject disclaimer: All families are different; this is just what Jason and I decided to do and it works for us. There are so many opinions out there that I actually suggest piecing them together and forming your own.

We decided early on that given our love of food and cooking, it would make the most sense for us to make all of Jasmine’s foods for her. Besides the fact that it’s super easy and convenient (more on this later), our main motivation for home-cooking her meals is so she won’t think that all food comes from a jar or a can. This is especially true since I don’t breastfeed and she is on formula. We’ve been lucky with the vegetable supply because it’s summer and there’s an abundance of fresh foods at the market for her to try. So far, I’ve made a good variety of foods with different flavors and there hasn’t been anything she’s disliked. Hopefully it will stay that way!

The food prep part is easy since most of her food stuff has to be steamed or roasted until very soft and then pureed. I will usually take an hour in the afternoon on Sunday to cook a batch of food and then portion it out to last until Thursday. Then on Thursday night, I’ll throw some extra vegetables of whatever I’m preparing for our dinner into a steam basket or into the oven to cook while we eat. I’ll then finish making her food after we eat and portion it out to last until the next batch of food on Sunday. This is what I portion and store her food in but now she’s eating much more than can fit in one of the containers. I will probably switch to something like this since the containers are larger and use the smaller containers for freezing her summer favorites to be used later on.

To date she’s eaten, in the following order:

  • Brown rice cereal - I toasted up raw brown rice in a pan and ground up the grains in a spice grinder to a powder. Then I whisked the powder with water (about 1:9 ratio) over a low flame until it looked like grits. It was still a bit thick for her first food so I mixed it with some formula to thin it out and to also make it a familiar taste for her.
  • Avocado - Avocados don’t need to be cooked since they are already a mushy food, so we just mashed this up with water/formula to make it like an avocado cream.
  • Barley cereal - Same methodology as the brown rice cereal.
  • Prunes - I steeped some dried prunes in hot water and then pureed it with some water to thin it out.
  • Jook (aka; congee, white rice cereal) - Jasmine had some stomach issues after all of the fiber we gave her - as you can probably deduce from the prunes we gave her - with the brown rice and barley, so we decided to give her plain congee that I made with some fresh chicken stock.
  • Zucchini - I steamed these and then pureed them.
  • String beans - I steamed these also and then pureed them with some zucchini to thin it out.
  • Sweet potato - As you can see from the list of foods before this, I was reluctant to give her anything sweet aside from the prunes, which were more out of necessity than anything else. I don’t want her to develop a sweet tooth for life so was planning on holding off on a lot of the orange vegetables. However, my grandmother (Jasmine’s great-grandmother) came and rescued Jasmine from green/white food purgatory and suggested that we mix sweet potato with congee to bland it down a bit. I immediately bought some sweet potatoes (to Jason’s delight) and roasted them in the oven. A quick mix with some congee at about a 1:2 (potato:rice) ratio and Jasmine was happy. Brilliant!
  • Peaches - I have been giving her fresh cut-up peaches while they’re available at the market through a baby safe feeder. She loves the peaches and has a great, albeit messy, time feeding herself.
  • Kohlrabi - This was steamed and pureed and also mixed with some congee. She absolutely loved this.

    • We’re feeding her carrots now and she’s absolutely loving those too :)

    Here are some pictures of her food adventures. We’ve gotten much better about not getting food all over her face :)
    brown_rice_powder
    making_brown_rice
    avocado_cream
    eating_avocado
    eating_barley
    eating_barley2
    yam_congee
    eating_peaches

    And in non-food related news, she’s now sitting up on her own!

    sitting2
    sitting

    Tags:,,

    Related posts

    Filed Under In the Kitchen
    Tagged: , ,

    Comments

    Feel free to leave a comment...
    and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!