Homemade Baby Food: Avocado, Nature's Near-Perfect First Solid Food

Is your baby ready to start on solids? Congratulations on this milestone! Before you automatically reach for that box of powdered rice cereal, consider this: some pediatricians have now started recommending avocado as a first solid food. It was one of Jem's first solids and my only regret is that it wasn't his very first! He loves it, and it gives him many of the healthy fats and nutrients essential to his little growing body. Many of the nutrients found in rice cereal are supplemental (added) nutrients, which tend not to be as easily absorbed and used by the body as nutrients found in fresh fruits and vegetables.

Avocado is also incredible easy to serve, no cooking required. It can be pureed, mashed or, for slightly older babies, diced and served as a finger food. Even when not organic it is generally very low in pesticides, which is always a bonus when organic options aren't available!

Avocado can easily be combined with other pureed or mashed foods, like applesauce or bananas, for a little extra sweetness. However, it's wise to try all foods by themselves for several days to keep an eye out for sensitivities (allergic reactions, tummy troubles, diaper rashes, etc).

The healthy fat content of avocado makes it a great food for plumping up undernourished babies. If your doctor feels that your baby really needs the extra carbs (for instance, if he or she is losing weight instead of gaining) by all means use the rice cereal! I would, however, encourage you to use the rice cereal in conjunction with avocado or other nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables, like bananas, pumpkin, and cantaloupe.

For a full list of the nutritional benefits of avocado, visit WholesomeBabyFood.com, a wonderful resource for learning to make your own baby food! Stay tuned to Jem's Room for more simple baby food tips and recipes!


**Please Note**
This information is not intended to encourage mothers to stop breastfeeding exclusively if that is what they feel is best for their babies. Many babies are able to breastfeed exclusively with no weaning at all, baby-led or otherwise, until they are a year or older. If this is the case for your baby, go for it, you are already giving your child the perfect food! The information in this post is intended for mothers who cannot continue to exclusively breastfeed or were unable to/chose not to breastfeed for any reason.

Homemade Fruity Goat Milk Yogurt

Since we started Jem on purees at six months we've been making our own organic baby food. Because I was breastfeeding and had dealt with thrush a few times we'd been using probiotics for both of us (luckily, probably because of this, he never got the thrush, just me...ow), so pretty quickly I decided to start giving them to him in the form of yogurt. Since he'd shown signs of sensitivity to cow milk formula, I decided to try using goat milk to make the yogurt (though even some milk intolerant babies do just fine on cow milk yogurt, I preferred to be on the safe side). Unfortunately I found it very difficult to thicken up the yogurt using goat milk. I tried everything: adding tapioca powder, powdered pectin, gelatin...the only thing I don't think I tried was agar agar powder (an apparently wonderful thickener), only because it was so expensive. The yogurt would thicken up a little bit, but stay pretty much the consistency of kefir.

Then a thought occurred to me. If certain fruits naturally contain high amounts of pectin, wouldn't pureeing them up and incubating them with the yogurt help to thicken things up a bit?

After a bit of experimenting with some of Jem's favorite pureed fruits, I came up with the following recipe, which not only thickens beautifully, it tastes great!

Homemade Fruity Goat Milk Yogurt

Ingredients:

1 quart goat milk (we use whole Meyenberg...evaporated milk does NOT work for this recipe)
1 medium sized banana
1/8 to 1/4 cup blueberries (fresh or frozen...if frozen they must be thawed)
Yogurt starter - Powdered starter, 1 teaspoon storebought yogurt, or 1 packet/capsule Culturelle probiotic

Heat the milk in a pan on the stove just until the milk starts to climb the walls of the pan, not to boiling. Remove from heat and allow to cool to about 100 to 110 degrees F (use a candy or meat thermometer). Pour about half of the milk into your blender. Add the yogurt starter, banana and blueberries and blend well (pureeing the blueberries by themselves first might help this step go quicker). Add the rest of the milk, stir, and pour into sterilized yogurt containers (we either use the jars that came with our yogurt maker or a quart sized pyrex bowl, which fits quite nicely). Make sure your yogurt maker is CLEAN and incubate for 12 hours or more (I usually do about 15).

If you do not own a yogurt maker you can make your own using a heating pad and a cooler, your stove or a crock pot. There are various instructions found online on how to do this, just do a Google search! I have never tried these methods for this recipe so I personally couldn't attest to the effectiveness of any of them, but I do have a friend who has used her crockpot to make cow milk yogurt with great success.

I plan to post more of my favorite baby food recipes and suggestions in the coming weeks! Making your own baby food is so easy and can actually be quite cost effective. Have fun experimenting with yours!