Making the transition to adult foods
Food writer and mum Fran Warde shares her experiences of graduating her son from baby food to adult food.
There comes a stage when you no longer want to keep making separate meals for your baby
and it would be easier if you could cook one dish for all the family to sit down and eat
together. Also, eating is a sociable habit and your child will enjoy sitting at the table
and eating with others.
The first thing to take into consideration is a baby's teeth, so there is no point in offering adult food to a child with few teeth.
But once she has a reasonable number of teeth, (this can be at anything from 12 months onwards), you
can start to offer new and more adult foods.
Some of the foods that I started my son with are listed below - all food that the rest of the family could eat too.
- soup and bread
- cheese or ham sandwiches
- boiled egg and soldiers
- scrambled eggs on toast
- potato-topped fish pie,
- spaghetti bolognaise
- pasta with pesto
- various risottos
- roast chicken
- pizza
- rice pudding
- fruit crumble
- egg custard
- apple pie
When you're first feeding your baby adult food, there are a few things to bear in mind:
- Don't season food as it isn't good for a baby - season your own food at the table
- Don't add too much garlic, slowly build up to amounts you would normally add
- Never add alcohol
- Disguise greens by finely chopping them and adding them to cheesy pasta
sauces or risottos
Allow your baby to feed herself. Yes, it will be messy,
but she will get great enjoyment and satisfaction out of
choosing how and what to eat. Just ensure that everything else on the table is out of
reach and that she only has her own plate of food and drink on which to concentrate.
This is a very important time for baby, which will form her eating habits for years
to come. The more flavours you can introduce at this age, the wider range of tastes your
baby will be used to as he grows. It's simple really - a baby fed on very bland foods will
be shocked when given a taste of a delicious and rich tomato sauce for pasta. So, don’t
stop your baby experimenting and trying out new flavours. If your baby wants to try
a pitted olive, let her. If she doesn’t like it, the worst that will happen is that she'll spit it out.
Babies today have very cosmopolitan tastes, thanks to our varied diets - which makes life much easier for parents. I still remember the day, when my son was about 16 months old,
that we went out to a restaurant for our first meal all together - and it was a triumph. We were happy and adoring parents and Otto munched his way through
pieces of pizza topped with olives, herbs, ham, cheese and tomato. I really felt that all
my home cooking and good wholesome diet had paid off and he was both eating well and
enjoying the sociable aspects of a meal.
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