Adventures in Real Food: Round 1

Over five months and pushing sixteen pounds, our little peanut is becoming quite the conesuir of non-formula foods.

Food experiment one: Rice Cereal.

Reaction: meh. He wasn’t too impressed. I must admit, I am impressed with neither rice cereal’s appearance nor taste. We add a shake of cinnamon on occasion to spice things up. Peanut is like his dad and loves his cinnamon. After the first two days of cereal dinner, peanut would push his bottle away at dinner time, awaiting his cereal.

Food experiment two: green beans

Reaction: Good at first. Peanut used to scarf down green beans, until he discovered peas. Now he makes a face when he gets green beans, wishing he was having peas instead.

Food experiment three: peas

Did I mention, peanut loves his peas? He would eat peas for every meal if he could. We’ve been making our own baby food purees. We use frozen veggies with a little formula and a whole lot of food processing. We pour the purees in to ice cube trays and freeze. Frozen veggie cubes are stored in freezer bags and thawed as needed. One cube microwaved about 30 seconds makes a pretty good meal.

Food experiment four: Oatmeal
Reaction: No noticeable preference between rice or oatmeal.

Food experiment five: Pumpkin.
Reaction: Yeah, that’s right. Peanut is now on his orange veggies. He’s had two gallon sized bags of pumpkin puree waiting for him for several months. Grandpa bought peanut a very large and very cheap pumpkin near Halloween. Since we didn’t get a chance to carve it, it became baby food. I split the pumpkin and threw out the innards. I steam baked the pumpkin for about an hour. Then let it cool, and purred the pulp.
Pumpkin is actually pretty watery. Normally I add a little formula to his veggies, but not pumpkin. Our doctor said to start with green veggies first, but if she hadn’t so instructed, his first food likely would have been the pumpkin. It pureed so smoothly. Pumpkin likes to blow bubbles in the pumpkin on his spoon. He has also timed a sneeze appropriately and managed to spray pumpkin all over both of us.

It’s pretty silly, but I think dinner time is becoming one of my favorite parts of the day. Despite the mess, I really look forward to it and hope peanut does too. If not, I know he loves the bath that follows—a close second for my favorite time of day.