Elspeth and I have just begun the weaning journey, and she is keen to try everything, which is a huge relief. I have been doing lots of steaming finger sized food for her to feed herself, and making simple purees of two or three fruits or veggies mashed together.
The things I am struggling with though, are:
I have always been very suspicious of pre-made baby food, being unsure completely what is in them and also, the fact that they usually taste disgusting or just really bland. Being a cook myself, I cannot bare the thought of Elspeth putting up with bland “kid food” when she could be eating almost the same things as me and Ben.
So, I was very excited to be sent to the Cactus Kitchens (where they film Saturday Kitchen don’t you know) to spend an evening cooking with the Babease team.
When we arrived we were greeted with kombucha cocktails and canapes – made with Babease baby food! Tom and his team had made delicate little tortellini parcels filled with pumpkin and pea, from the First Tastes range, I was delighted to find they were delicious and not at all bland.
We were then taken upstairs to the kitchens to hear how it all began and to get stuck in.
Tom is a chef and when his friends started having kids he would try the food they were being given and was shocked at how bland it was, and how accepting people are that “it’s baby food, of course it doesn’t taste good”. After hearing this he decided to embark upon “creating food for babies, not baby food”.
All the ingredients are things that you would recognise from your own kitchen, and a bonus for people trying to avoid a sweet tooth, many of the flavours don’t contain fruit, which a lot of companies use to make everything sweeter and disguise vegetable flavours, which can be more appealing to babies in the short term, but causes problems later on when they realise that not all their meals are super sweet. This helps develop a love of savoury flavours from a young age and (hopefully) makes for less fussy toddlers.
After this we got to have a go at cooking some baby food which we would then eat at a dinner party. Pumpkin and chickpea Keralan curry, pea fritters and sage and onion savoury muffins. They were all very simple to prepare, great for an easy weeknight dinner, and were all delicious enough for grown ups as well as babies.
Sadly at this point Elspeth decided she had had enough and wanted to go home, so I didn’t get to join in for the dinner party, but I have since then made both the pea fritters and the curry for her (and for me and Ben) she wolfed down three helpings of the curry, and the pea fritters made an excellent brunch with some crispy bacon for the grown ups.
We have now tried quite a few of the flavours from the Babease range, and Elspeth is a huge fan, and seeing her enjoy healthy, organic, tasty food has made me so happy.
PWT rating: ♥♥♥♥♥
The Babease range is available at Ocado and Tesco (coming to Morrisons this summer) £1.19 for the First Tastes range, £1.49 for the added textures range.