To think that ‘just feed them what you eat’ when weaning is much harder than it sounds unless you already make everything from scratch?

[AliceinSlumberland]

I’ve got a 6 month old and we’re doing a bit of a mixed BLW/mushed up approach which is working for us, but I’m struggling with the ‘just feed them what you eat’ advice. I hate cooking, I should start by saying, so I have become a bit more reliant on easy to make meals, especially after a long day at work, but these just aren’t comparable with BLW. For example, I make a hotpot every so often but I use one of the packet mixes and I just feel overwhelmed about how to make it without that? Same with sausage casserole - but the baby can’t have these things as the packets have too much salt for him.

Sometimes I’ll make a pasta bake with a jar, and I do know how to make the sauce myself but it takes a lot longer. I feel like I’m having to rejig our entire menu and find new meals to have, so it’s not anywhere near as simple as ‘just feed them what you eat’ unless you’re already making everything from scratch?

Any simple hotpot recipes with less salt appreciated!

Their gums are really solid so they can eat pretty much anything suitable, steak should be fine

Yeah after the first two-three months of weaning mine have pretty much eaten anything! Their gums are super hard.

I'm talking about 'the whole process' involved with jars, which is often forgotten. They might seem convenient, but there's a hidden time cost of storing them in the cupboard, then when you need it finding the one you want, opening the jar (sometimes not as easy as I'd like), emptying it, getting all of it out (otherwise it's a waste), washing them up and disposal vs a bit of prep chopping the items, adding a shake of herbs/spices as it cooks, chucking the veg scraps in the compost bin. Not much difference in convenience of my time (may be different for others, but I'm very much 'bung it in no measuring' cookery, but you need a certain amount of confidence).

Frankly I hate jars because I ALWAYS forget to take them to the bottle bank - time consuming, as its out of the way - and they mount up and I have little space to store them.

I always fed mine on the extra I cooked us the night before - used to hive it off and keep in the fridge for the next day's meals. So long as you're careful if you heat it, you can warm gently in the microwave or in a pan. Just as quick as a jar or pouch.

Have you actually tried any of those things on your 18mo? You might be surprised, although if he's had a year of mushy food then it might take him a little to adjust.

@TwoShades1 I guess I thought they could have it really, I don’t really know. I thought a pasta bake sauce once a week or so would be okay, we had it as kids.

@Ariela its easier if you know how to make
it, if you don’t, and you’re bad at cooking and find it hard to cook something new, it’s really bloody hard.

As you’ve realised, you actually do a lot more than you give yourself credit for and it sounds like you are far from clueless in a kitchen. Don’t blame you for feeling like doing anything but cooking at the end of a day of work and juggling baby.

I found threads like this, recipe books and fb pages great for inspiration and ideas. Meal planning is what worked for me. Like a pp said, I would often spend a while one day batch cooking a heap of food with music on and filled the freezer to make evenings easier. If you’re making food at home, you can relax a bit with salt requirements too. We generally aimed for salt free but sometimes they just ate our food and I didn’t worry because I don’t make salty food whereas I wouldn’t have been comfortable if it were a jar sauce/ready meal.

Also, use frozen veg! It is a massive timesaver as generally pre-prepped but still has all the nutritional value that fresh does. The freezer aisle is my best friend!

It is worth the effort as they’re only babies for a while and if you can get yourself into the habit of making a good family meal, life is much easier when they’re children and eating the same as you. My children never ate a single savoury pouch because the taste did not compare to homemade food (we bought them for travelling and all ended up wasted). As primary school children, they will not touch nuggets/fingers/waffles for exactly the same reason.

I think you’ve been misinformed on a number of things here. Yes the pouches don’t contain oil, salt, sugar etc but they exploit the taste of the cheapest and sweetest item to form the overall taste of the pouch. There is a significant amount of water in them - our health visitors would actively advise against them because they were watered down so much Due to these two factors alone, you could make your own for a fraction of the price. Using pouches means you predominantly expose your child to sweet food, not multiple flavours

The pouches do not contain enough of the beans/lentils etc that are so good for our guts and the heat treatments involved in preserving the food take away the nutrients and benefits.

The benefits of making your own food far outweigh the benefits of a pouch being organic - don’t be convinced by their marketing

The benefits of making your own food far outweigh the benefits of a pouch being organic - don’t be convinced by their marketing

Agreed. Also read up on UPFs and baby food.

Your baby is 6 months. You don't need to become a pro cook overnight. Feed them "components" of a meal for breakfast and lunch if that's a helpful way to look at it. Scrambled egg and toast. Fruit. Veg off your plate. Full fat yogurt. Porridge is easy. They don't need to eat 3 meals a day at this stage. If you learnt one meal a week from now you'd have loads of meals you could include them with in a few months time.

You can already make a couple of things. So that's two nights a week you can feed them dinner with you already. It's absolutely fine to freeze stuff for them and feed them some when you're eating an unsuitable meal too. For example if I'm eating something very salty for my dinner, I defrost a cube of bolognese and my little one has that. Or they have a banana!! Don't over think it, people get so up in their heads about weaning and it's not needed.

I used to batch cook when my DDs were weaning. Things like a tomato sauce are easy, especially if you have a food processor to chop the veg.

For things like this the casserole and hotpot, try a low salt stock, either cube or liquid.

Ok so taking the pasta bake as example. Why can’t the baby have 2 or 3 pieces of the pasta from the pasta bake. Then some pieces of steamed veg (can microwave from frozen) and a small piece of cheese? That’s a perfectly fine meal for a weaning baby. Or do fruit like banana instead of the veg.

We give our LO (8m) bites of what we have (some carrot, a slice of lamb etc). But mostly we incorporate a jar of mush.
I wanted to blend up what we eat, but it's hassle and DH adds chilli and salt to everything (!), and it creates more washing up!
Her usual meals involve something like cucumber, melon, other soft finger foods, and a bowl of mush (usually packets).

Basically I let myself off the guilt. But I do worry what we feed her as she grows! Will I have to buy chicken nuggets and chips?!

I used to cut the meat into small pieces then put it through the blender to shred it.

We used loads of jars and pouches as we didn’t have time.

Millions of babies have had jars and pouches. That’s nothing new. What is new is the information about the long term health risks of ultra processed foods.

Weaning my first baby was a wake up call to what I was eating because there was no way I could feed her what I was eating, which was mostly protein bars, crisps and pizza. I had never considered salt content before, and I had to learn to cook which was a learning curve but also has put me in good stead for weaning and feeding myself and my children since then. With my second it was much easier, as I would just use a potato masher and mash up what we were having.

You only really need to be able to make 7 meals, that's one for every evening, then leftovers or sandwiches for lunch, cereal/toast/porridge for breakfast. If you learn a new recipe once a week it would take 7 weeks to have a weeks worth of main meals. Yes you will eventually get bored of eating eg. Spag bol every Wednesday, but it does make it easier to shop and cook if you're having the same meals on rotation, if you cook a bit extra you can freeze a portion as well for evenings when you don't want to cook, or where you want something baby can't have like steak.

Neither of my sons had teeth before 12 months and they had no trouble eating meat/fish, bits of stir fry or the vegetables of a salad before that age. Having nursed them both, I definitely know for a fact that they don’t need teeth to chew food.

We did BLW with my first and with my second we mainly fed LO meals from an Ella's Kitchen cookbook (we had the red one and the purple one). Second child is considerably less fussy than his big brother so I wouldn't bother with BLW again. I am not a great cook, but batch cooked a couple of recipes from the Ella's books each weekend and then froze lots of little portions in the freezer so we ended up with a nice selection of different flavours in there. I couldn't have done it with my first, because I was just too tired and depressed but if you think you can spare an hour on a Sunday afternoon for some batch cooking I'd really recommend cooking from scratch for baby and you may find some tricks to adapt your own recipes as baby grows and you will want to be feeding everyone the same thing.

YANBU - I work nights so I eat a lot of convenience food and tend to have my dinner around 8pm. I can’t feed my kids ramen two hours after they’ve gone to bed 😂

I feel you Op. i love to cook and would be a very confident adventurous cook and i found weaning head wrecking. Baby only fed herself so BLW it was.

We use a lot more spices etc than our baby could tolerate so many of the foods we cooked as family foods were just not nice to the adults taste or else inedible for the baby. The baby needed vegetables cooked further than we like and they needed to be colder so we got overcooked food.

Crucially the baby was on a different schedule for us for mealtimes, they loved thier sleep and were in bed before 7pm. That meant them eating dinner at 5-5:30. My husband hadnt finished work yet at that time and we ate dinner later so baby wasn't getting the full family meal experience anyeay.

It got easier as they got older, went to creche etc and firstly the whole responsibility for feeding wasn't on us and also naturally they started staying up a bit later so could have a later dinner.

Still not a fan of spiced foods though. the one thing i do wish i had leaned into more was a stage where they would eat off our plates and i would stop them eating the saucier/spiced stuff as it usually has salt in it. The amount they would have gotten would be miniscule but it would have given them more taste experiences.

You can do a mix of both and call it what you want!

We don't eat the same things at the same time all sat merrily round the table either! We found a few instant foods that she loved such as cottage cheese, hummous and omelette and mixed and matched with wholemeal bread slices/ potato and veggies.

I always cooked pretty much from scratch anyway, but when we had dd I made a concerted effort to cook meals for us that dd could have too, so I want always cooking two meals.

So I'd advise that you take cooking lessons or buy a nice simple cookery book and learn to cook!

The BLW Cookbook was my Bible, still use it for recipes we can all eat.