Baby Led Weaning

Growing healthy babies with healthy appetites

Posts Tagged ‘dinner’

Baby Led Weaning Chicken Soup

Monday, August 14th, 2006

So, what did you do with the bones and carcass of your lemony roast chicken from the Finger Foods section? Boiled them up for half an hour with an onion, a stick of celery, a carrot, a couple of bay leaves, some peppercorns and a clove of garlic, did you? Mah-velous, then we are ready to make baby led weaning chicken soup.

Okay then, it's basically just normal chicken soup, so do whatever you usually do (in my case sweat an onion and some leeks if I have them, sling in a couple of sliced carrots and some sliced sticks of celery, add the stock and possibly some low-salt Marigold bouillon to taste and if I feel like it throw in some rice or pasta near the end).

But the smarty-pants thing to remember is to cut some of your veggies in the chip-sized manner (or finger-sized, if we wish to be understood by our New World cousins) and to drop them into the soup while it is cooking.

After a while you are left with the most delicious soft carrot and celery (and whatever else you fancy) which has been poached in chicken soup and can be taken directly from the parental bowl and handed (after a bit of blowing and cooling down) to the baby. Which they love, let's face it. I also find that Babybear likes to eat crusty bread dipped in soup and wrung out like a wee sponge so it isn't too soggy.

Post Script.
We've been putting a good handful of barley into our chicken soup recently and Babybear loves it. She can feed herself a few grains of barley at a time on a spoon (I load it up) and also if you put some crusty bread into the bowl to soak up the soup then press down hard you will simultaneously squeeze the liquid out and pick up lots of barley and veggies. She eats these like an open sandwich, her face wreathed in smiles and carrots.

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Roast Chicken

Monday, July 31st, 2006

You'll no doubt have gathered by now that what I am attempting to do is systematically work my way through the list of Babybear's favourite delicacies that I mention on the front page… it's taking a while, eh?

Well, nobody's feeling it more than me, let me tell you… if I don't get it finished soon I'll have to regress her to a diet of sloppy baby rice for a fortnight while I catch up on her spectacular dietary habits.

Anyhow. Roast chicken.

First roast your chicken. I do it upside down (but enough about my love life, fnarr fnarr) so that the breasts are yummy and juicy, then whip off the tinfoil (again, enough about my love life) and turn it over for the last half hour so that the skin crisps. For extra flavour I tend to stick a lemon and some herbs, rosemary or thyme let's say, up its backside (insert your own sex joke here) especially now that the baby precludes smothering the skin in salt.

I found that the easiest and tastiest bit of the chicken to give to Babybear comes off the leg, but I suspect I'm going to find it hard to describe. You know, the kinda bingo wing bit, but it's on the leg… do I mean the thigh? Maybe. Anyway, the pieces part in almost a teardrop shape, which is perfect for baby led weaning, and the sinews of the meat run lengthways. I have found that if I give her the slightly drier breast meat she loses interest quicker and because more bits come off she is more likely to gag. Whatever works for you, kiddo. Oh and she's not above sucking on a bit of the skin. Nor is her mother.

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Pork Fillet

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Yes, pork fillet. If you don't believe me take a look at the Photos folder…
Anyway, we are at my mum's house and she is making dinner for her daughter (that's me – do keep up at the back). It's like Baby Led Weaning, but thirty years later.

So mum douses pork fillet in lemon and parsley butter, fries it on a ridged pan and puts it on my plate alongside some salad and some Jersey Royal potatoes. Yum Yum, thanks Mum.

Now, you might think that some lettuce, some potatoes and some cucumber might satifsy a younger person but no… once Miss Babybear had spotted her mother and grandmother tucking into their delicious meal then nothing else would do.

I first of all cut it into a kinda chip-shaped piece which was NOT a good idea as she was able to bite too many pieces off and was doing a bit of gagging.

Being my daughter, however, her will to eat the pork outweighed any sense of fear that she might have of an imminent choking incident so she continued to eat it and I was forced to take it off her.

Plan B, and this is the one in the photo, was to give her a lump the size of her fist (actually, this is in Gill Rapley's guidelines but I had forgotten) and Babybear was absolutely fine with it. She just chewed and chewed and sucked on it, turning around in her wee hands until she was left with a pretty tired and grey looking piece of meat which she dropped casually to the floor. This was, as you would expect, accompanied by a round of applause from the two preceding generations of women who surrounded her. Ma che brava!

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