Ideas for a hungry 6mo

[Newfamily2014]

Hello my baby turned 6mo on the 1st of this month and has been having tastes of foods for a few weeks and loving it. She has a fantastic appetite and clearly needs more than the fruit and veg I am offering. Is there a website or book (Annabel Karmel?) that I can look at to know what she can eat? Is it everything now? She's just woken for a feed which is unusual so early and makes me think she needs some more filling foods during the day. Can she have pasta/rice? Should it be white or wholemeal? When can she have red meat like minced beef? Do I need to check the salt content of bread? And food? I read she shouldn't have salt but how can I avoid it other than by making my own bread etc? Can she have butter or margarine? Sorry, so many questions. I've googled weaning and it tells me the same stuff and foods to avoid but doesn't give me all my answers.
She is having porridge an hour after her morning milk, lunch and supper of mashed veg and fruit plus the same amount of milk she normally does, is that ok? Which is about 4 milk feeds in the day plus one over night, when should I lower her milk intake/drop a feed? And does she need vitamins if having a balanced diet and a mixture of breast and formula milk?
Thanks for any help!

Firstly I would go to your local library and borrow a few books about weaning. Annabel Karmel is popular if you are spoon feeding, although there are obviously others. You might want to consider looking at the Baby Led Weaning book by Gill Rapley which takes a different approach although it isn't everyone's cup of tea. Find a book that appeals to you and use it as your starting point.

To answer your questions from my inexpert point of view, at 6 months you can offer all foods apart from honey (risk of infant botulism) and whole nuts (choking hazard). How soon you introduce different flavours and textures is up to you and your baby. In terms of volume, the NHS recommend that you move towards 3 meals a day by around 8 to 9 months. You don't need to try and push to drop milk feeds - they should naturally drop away as she moves towards 12 months.

If she's having less than 500ml of formula a day then she will need a multivitamin daily.

Pasta and rice are fine, and you shouldn't offer too much wholemeal stuff as the fibre can be too much for them. Butter is fine and probably better than margarine. I cook with olive oil or rapeseed oil which are better than other types of oils (more omega 3-6-9 and less nasties at high temps).

You can make your own bread if you want to of course, but you don't need to! You should keep an eye on salt levels as under 1s should only have 1g or less a day. In practical terms this is quite easy as they consume such little quantities. I would only offer bread once a day at most and don't add salt to cooking, and use very low salt stock - you can get special baby stock cubes for this. The NHS site has a list of salty foods that you can limit. Hard cheese is surprisingly high in salt, so cheeses like emmental are lower in salt.

Thanks a lot culture that's a really helpful reply. I have the reserved the Annabel Karmel book and will have a browse at the weaning section too. I do intend to make as much food as I can for my daughter so I know exactly what's in it. She does have three meals a day now as we sit her up at the table when we eat and she want to eat with us. I guess there is no harm in her having three meals already (albeit small ones) as if he's hungry she's hungry! Also, isn't 6 months when another growth spurt should occur? Perhaps this might account for her big appetite too?