Just before we started to wean in December I saw on the news that Heinz and Tesco had been recalled all their 7 + month ‘By Nature’ baby foods due to suspected deliberate tampering and sharp metal found in one product. This has also very recently been in the news again with Cow and Gate recalling 15 types of the 7 + month baby food, again due to suspected deliberate tampering.

It’s pretty worrying to think that someone would deliberately attempt to hurt a child and does emphasize that you really don’t know what’s in something unless you make it yourself.

I remember watching a Jamies and Jimmys on tv a few years ago where they looked at the ingredients used in baby foods. Most were sweetened (although mostly naturally with some fruit), meaning that babies were often not getting exposed to the real taste of veg and only encouraged them to reject anything that wasn’t sweet.

So i’ve been keen to make meals from scratch where I can and have Evander eating the same as us as soon as we can so that we’re not preparing several different meals everyday.

That said, i have bought a few pouches to keep in the cupboard for convenience or as a backup although i’d prefer to get jars over pouches in future as they’re more commonly recycable.

For the first few weeks I planned to feed Evander single foods and then start to introduce a few blends before starting to build to fuller meals.
A friend from our NCT group said that, with her first, she prepared batches of veg and used ice cube trays to freeze. Once frozen you can put the cubes in freezer bags or tupperware.
I ordered some sillicone ice cube trays from Amazon and also picked up a larger 4 cube tray from Boots (Aldi also sold these at their last Baby event).

I picked up a bunch of yellow stickered veg on a supermarket shop and prepared a bunch of different trays to freeze:

• Garden peas (steamed in the microwave, mashed with a bit of expressed milk)
• Spinach (wilted in pan with some water and blitzed in food processor)
• Carrots (steamed and mashed)
• Butternut squash and sweet potato
• Beetroot (pre-prepared so just blitzed)
• Apples and nectarines (stewed with some water and cinnamon)

So we had plenty to give him as single foods over the first few weeks then lots of veg to give him alongside other food when we started giving him mixed meals.