Ideas and advice please, 7month old!

[xSMISHx]

Hi ladies,
Well LO has been having solids since basically 4months, he currently has 3 meals a day and still has all his bottles.
Usually for breakfast he has baby porridge or some of a baby fruit pot, lunch is a baby jar of food or toast with jam/banana and dinner is a baby jar too.
I was wanting to move on from baby food a bit like make my own stuff, what can I give him? Can he have weetabix or readybrek for breakfast?
What can he have for lunch and dinner that we eat too? Are the following food items ok,
Pasta?
Eggs?
Any meat even ham?
Any veg including tinned and frozen?
Should he be having gravies or sauces?

X

 

[MindUtopia]

Hi ladies,
Well LO has been having solids since basically 4months, he currently has 3 meals a day and still has all his bottles.
Usually for breakfast he has baby porridge or some of a baby fruit pot, lunch is a baby jar of food or toast with jam/banana and dinner is a baby jar too.
I was wanting to move on from baby food a bit like make my own stuff, what can I give him? Can he have weetabix or readybrek for breakfast?
What can he have for lunch and dinner that we eat too? Are the following food items ok,
Pasta?
Eggs?
Any meat even ham?
Any veg including tinned and frozen?
Should he be having gravies or sauces?

X

Now that he's 6 months, he can have anything except honey, whole nuts or lots of added salt and sugar. My daughter loves weetabix as well as normal porridge (not the baby kind). Weetabix was one of the first breakfasts we offered her. I just broke the piece of it in two and softened it with milk but left it whole in two big chunks so she could pick it up. You might also dissolve it in warm milk so it's like a porridge and let him dig in with his hands. Pasta is great, I found spaghetti or chunk tube pastas worked best, at first without sauce so it was easier to grip. Scrambled or fried eggs (with the yolk fully cooked) are also great. Any meat is fine as long as it's fully cooked and not salty, so I'd stay away from salt-cured meats (like cured ham), but anything else, fish, roast chicken, beef including mince, roast lamb, etc. is great. Give it to him in strips so he can easier pick it up. Any sort of veg is fine as well, though I'd stick to fresh or frozen or no salt added tinned (some tinned veg has a lot of salt in it). Gravy or sauce is okay as long as it's not got added salt (so I'd avoid gravy that comes in a packet, like Bisto, and only use homemade without added salt) or in the case of some sauces, just use them very, very sparingly. My daughter is 15 months now so she has exactly what we eat, but when she was smaller, I'd either take some out for her before we added a sauce (plain pasta instead of pasta with jarred sauce) or I'd only give her a very small amount of sauce (like curry sauce) in her food, so she wouldn't get too much salt. You might find just making things from scratch is easier. You can whip up a curry or stir fry using spices, then take some out for your LO, before you add salt or chili or anything else he shouldn't/might not want to eat. I found that was a lot easier than trying to find sauces that were low salt but didn't taste like crap.

 

[Tami]

Lily started purees at 4 months and normal food at 6 months. At 9 months now we no longer buy any baby foods or porridge etc because normal is fine! To be honest we gave up with jars quite early, I realised they all looked the same and smelt the same no matter what was in them so started tasting them and they all tasted exactly the same! After that I started making my own but she took to finger foods quickly and is a pro now, lol.

Breakfast can be something like scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs with toast fingers spread with passata. Weetabix, porridge, etc made with whole milk and sometimes with fruit in. Greek yogurt with fruit. Banana oats fingers, mash a banana and a couple of handfuls of pats together, add a drop of milk, shape into fingers on a baking tray and bake for about ten minutes. Or if baby doesn't like Banana mix oats and milk together and push into a microwavable dish, microwave for a minute or so for quick porridge fingers. You might need to drain off excess milk. We also give bite sized chunks of most fruits. Umm what else.. Omelette strips are good, bagel, egg muffins.
I would avoid crumpets because they're high in salt. Basically most things you would eat yourself!

Lunch can vary a lot, cheese/ham/houmous/banana/peanut butter/etc in sandwiches, in pittas, on tortillas. A favourite here is cream crackers spread with passata and topped with cheese which is then melted to make a sort of cracker pizza. Bradstock, fruit salad, pasta, fruit salad, pizza fingers (cauliflower pizza is a good alternative too) , cucumber fingers with skin off, chicken chunks, cheese chunks.

Dinner ideas are things like roasts with veg, Yorkshire pudding with chunks of meat, corn on the cob, spaghetti bolognese, mash potato with cheese and veg, potato waffles, homemade burgers (I use a cookie cutter to make them the right size for baby hands). I also picked up some veggie sausages the other day which are made from something like broccoli and carrot which went down well! Really there are a lot of things, it's hard to narrow it down, lol. Lily loves mild curry and they're so easy to make at home. They can also be made in big portions and extra can be frozen in baby sized meal containers for another day.

Once baby starts eating "normal food" it gets a lot easier!

I just thought, if baby is mostly on jars then you might need to put the meals through the food processor at first.