Advice Needed on Quantities for Home Made Baby food - bulk buying

[CupcakesHay]

To explain quickly about my situ. DH works for Foreign Office, so we live abroad in a country where we can't 100% trust food on shelves - i.e. tampered sell by dates, fake packaging, etc. Fruit/Veg is fine with careful cleaning, and we have trusted butcher.

Planning to make baby food from scratch when our DS finally comes along (currently overdue ).

I need to take staple food bits back with me, so like Baby Pasta and Baby Rice. not planning to travel back to UK until Dec - so by my reckoning, I need about 6 months worth of baby pasta and baby rice.

Can any clever organised mumsnetter advise me on roughly how much i'm going to get through in that time - assuming I start weaning at 4 months - so i'm looking at needing about 4 months worth of stuff?

If you don't wean so early you can just give him normal food. I started at 22 weeks and ds basically has the same stuff I'm eating, fruit and veg, readybrek, weetabix.

Don't start weaning until 6 months, then you don't need all that baby rice/baby pasta stuff. We started purees when DS was 6 months old. He did have some baby rice (as I thought that was the "done thing") but he was never that keen and it seemed pointless when he could have pretty much anything else!

If you do purees, use fruit and veg that you trust, and move quickly onto mashed/chopped versions of whatever you're having.
If you BLW, just give the baby whatever you're having.

Well I'm not particularly clever or organised when it comes to this sort of thing, but I am currently making alot of baby food for my third child as I did for my first two.

I don't BLW as such, although I believe it has many benefits, it was not for me. Read up on it and see what you think.

I have found the original Annabel Karmel book on weaning to be very helpful and in fact have made two recipes from it today. It will give you lots of general info on ingredients.

If it were me, I'd take one box of formula powder. I breast feed but sometimes recipes need milk and personally I find it easier to use a little formula rather than express just for cooking. Later on you can use cows' milk if it is reliable where you are.

Rice is not very nutrious so personally I buy an organic 4 grain blend of cereal instead. I don't feed much of it but it is quite useful for thickening very runny purees (such as pear).

It is probably also worth taking some ready made baby food. Even if you intend to make your own, there will be days that you run out, or are out for the day, or too tired / ill / busy, and on those days ready made is very useful. My babies generally didn't like ready made stuff much but DS3 likes the Ella's kitchen brand.

Finally, read the labels of any baby food products before buying them. It is amazing what rubbish some of them contain, barely related to the name of the product. For example I found a banana porridge that was about 80% dried milk and not much either banana or grain.

Hope this helps

You shouldn't really be weaning until 6 months, and your DS certainly shouldn't have gluten before 6 months so that cuts out 2 months worth of pasta!

I haven't ever bought 'baby' pasta, just tiny shapes of normal pasta to put in with whatever sauce I'm making, and very large rigatoni that DD can pick up herself and chew on, so you could take a couple of big bags of these back with you.

Baby rice is good to start so buy a couple of packets of that (they start on tiny portions).

Normal readybrek/adult porridge is also fine from 6 months so again an adult size box of each would last for ages if exclusively used for your DS.