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Simply Natural Baby Food: Easy Recipes for Delicious Meals Your Infant and Toddler Will Love |
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Reviews |
| | Great little book with lots of information  |
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As a working mom with a baby, I knew I wanted to make my own baby food but I wasn't sure where to start. I picked up a copy of this book at a local store, and found it to be just what I needed.
It's a small book, so it's not as overwhelming as many others I've seen, but it has great information and basically follows the advice of my pediatrician as far as when to introduce certain foods, how long to wait before introducing something new, etc.
In the beginning, the foods are really basic. Mashing an avocado or a banana is quite easy, but I hadn't thought about using avacado as a first food. It turned out to be a great first food that my baby really enjoyed--he started with avacado and banana at about 7 months old.
From there it gives you some simple but good combinations, such as apple pear sauce and squash with peas. She goes into the equipment you need, and how to make baby food. I just make up a batch and use silicone ice cube trays to freeze it.
Unlike many other books, this book is not geared toward raising your baby as a vegetarian, but she does say to wait until 10 months or so before giving meat (my pediatrician recommends 11-12 months). There are, however, many vegetarian and vegan meals in the book for children who are either not eating animal products yet, or who are raised vegetarian or vegan. For these children, she recommends additions such as nutritional yeast and sea vegetables to make sure they get enough vitamins and minerals.
I really love the toddler food section, where she has many meals that sound great for the entire family. She also has a number of desserts that don't contain sugar or artificial sweetners (most of them contain fruit or other natural sources of sugar). There is absolutely no reason to ever give a baby or toddler any food that contains sugar, although a few other baby cookbooks I have contain sugar laden recipes.
To answer some of the other critics about this being for "crunchy" people or containing a ton of weird ingredients, I'd like to say that I'm a normal person who lives in Alaska and is a full-time Realtor and a full-time mom. I like to hunt and fish, and we are not vegetarian or vegan. I do try to eat healthy, and buy organic produce when I can, but living in Alaska I'm limited in what is available.
We don't have a lot of health food stores or restaurants here, but I can find the ingredients in her sea vegetables in our local store in the Japenese food section. I was unable to find one ingredient (hiziki I think), so I just used the other ones. I've added them to many foods I cook for myself and my husband as well, since they are a good source of iodine, iron and calcium.
My pediatrician even recommends kelp as a good source of iron for infants at 6 months of age (granulated kelp is found as a salt substitute in the seasoning aisle of my local store). The author always says you can substitute kelp for the sea vegetable mix.
I think this is a great book to introduce people to a few new healthy foods that are easy to incorporate into your baby's diet. I've purchased 5 books on baby food, and this is by far the best. My only complaint is that all cook books should have a spiral binding to make them easier to use while cooking! |
| | Sea Veg Mix  |
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I thought this book would be good but in the end, I didn't use it very much b/c it wasn't very practical. A lot of the recipes include an ingredient called the "Sea Veg Mix" which seems like a seasoning concoction that the author has made up and includes in a lot of the recipes. The Sea Veg Mix includes kelp, hiziki, arame, wakame and kombu. What? Exactly, I have no idea what ingredients these are and where to buy them. And I'm not a novice in the kitchen. Even if you know what you are looking for, these aren't ingredients that you buy at your local grocery store. Also, a lot of the baby food recipes are pretty logical, just pureed or mashed vegetables or fruits. You can figure those out without this cookbook. I would have preferred a book that had recipes with ingredients that one already has in the kitchen or can easily obtain at the neighborhood grocery store. Unless, you live in a big city where all this stuff is readily available, then you won't have much use for this book. My main gripe is definitely the ingredients that these recipes require. Its tough enough to have to cook healthy meals for a family but to add the extra job of trekking all over the place to find the right ingredients for the recipes in this book just doesn't make sense. |
| | Wonderful Gift for New Moms |
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The book is petite, as it should be; yet the writing is large and easily legible. Cathe's format emphasizes the simplicity of the recipes (that moms can literally whip up in minutes and freeze in batches for later use). Nonetheless, while the recipes contain just a few ingredients, Cathe emphasizes the importance of nutrition, and ensures that her recipes are well rounded from a nutrient perspective for each stage of an infant's development. In fact, there are numerous healthy tips and the chapters are broken down by age.
Actually, I found several of the older baby recipes (apple oat pancakes and pineapple carrot cake) and toddler recipes (whole grain waffles and minestrone soup) enticing myself! Really, the recipes cover breakfast to dinner tastes, and everything in between. This book even offers recipes for homemade animal cookies and graham crackers!
Worth noting, no diets are excluded from this handy guide. While there are a few omnivorous recipes (with meat), most of the recipes are vegan/vegetarian or offer easy alternatives. Along those lines, there is a plethora of dairy-free, wheat/gluten-free, soy-free, egg-free, and nut-free recipes for any child born with allergies or other diet-related autoimmune condition. Cathe does use some unique ingredients that are popular within the health food movement, yet they are becoming easier to find, and could easily be omitted if you don't feel like seeking them out. The only thing that I think would help this book is a food allergy index.
It was hard for me to believe that over 150 recipes were packaged into this easily manageable cookbook, but after perusing the contents I was sold. Each of my expecting friends will be getting a copy! |
| | A good recipe book for a healthy baby  |
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I have tried most of the recipes in this book and all of them have turned out very well. Both my daughter and I liked the recipes. My daughter has managed to maintain a healthy weight throughout after eating food prepared by me using this book as a reference. Very good buy.
The food is definitely tastier than the store bought ones. |
| | we absolutely LOVE this book! |
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It's a wonderful little book with great recipes. Our family found this book to be invaluable as our middle child was a bit of a discriminating eater at first. Ms. Olson's recipes helped her become the decidedly UN-discriminating eater she is today! Highly recommended. |
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