Blended Foods

[redgate]

I am looking after a couple of lo's who eat orally, but need to have blended foods. So far, I have been making pasta with sauce which blends nicely, but am looking for some more ideas/recipes that would work? I have heard that blending rice doesn't really work, but is there a good alternative? Thanks :)

If you're freezing anything, use sweet potatoes rather than regular potatoes as they freeze better.
I always try to give DS3 whatever food we're having and blitz it. Most things blend eventually, but sometimes you do have to add a lot of liquid.
How smooth does the blending have to be? For several years I had to do first stage no bits at all, but latterly, there could be a fine texture which made things easier - that meant rice etc could be included - although rice that holds a lot of water - such as arborio, or rices that have spent time cooking in an oven and are not 'al dente' are much easier to blend to smooth.

as auntevil said, you can blend rice if you over cook it a bit so it's nice and soft and yes to adding lots of liquid, tins of tomatoes are quite good for adding liquid as is the water from boiling veggies. If you're going to be doing this for a while it's certainly worth investing in a good blender.

DD ate blended food for 12 years before having to resort to a gastrostomy. We used to blend virtually anything. She more or less ate what we had but whizzed up with varying amounts of liquid added, depending on what the food was. I am assuming that you are intending to mix all the components of the meal together in one blend - rather than separately whizz the veg, meat and carbo (which I have experienced in hospital but less successful in my opinion) which enables the child to taste each individual part of the meal.
We have blended most things including pastry, salad (have to eat quickly though as goes brown if left ) rice, pasta.
When we were going out for the day and there was nowhere to heat a meal up, DD's favourite meal was salmon, cucumber, potato and mayo with a bit of dill, which she would happily eat cold.

Brilliant, thanks for the advice. So far I have been blending everything together, but def want to try blending items individually so that they can try different tastes. Never thought of freezing it (presumably it's ok to blend then freeze) have asked my social worker for a cordless bender so we can eat out too :)

Always used to blend leftovers eg stews, curries etc and freeze them. That way if we were having a quick tea such as pizza (which doesn't blend very well) I would always have a 'ready meal' for DD which I could defrost & reheat
Likewise if we were going to friends for the day, the 'ready meal' just needed heating up at mealtime, so no need to mess about trying to blend food when out and about.
You can basically freeze anything that it would be safe to freeze if it were not blended. I used to make a lot of soup and freeze that in batches so that DD could have that for lunch as she didn't eat a huge amount.