Super Eco

Photo credit: sarah gilbert

After my first baby spit out every bit of baby food we tried to feed him in disgust, I started questioning the wisdom of the commercial baby food industry. By my third baby, I watched in amazement as he started munching on carrot greens poking out of the top of a farmer's market bag and decided to go ancient and just feed him whatever he picked out of his own accord (chopped, mushed, or peeled as appropriate). For Monroe, that means anything green, cooked any way; beans by the fingerful; and every kind of berry and stone fruit, bonus points for covering his whole body in the juice. When a friend asked how she should make her own baby food using the organic contents of her CSA box, I excitedly sent her some recipes and recommendations.

The first book I turned to was the Organic Baby & Toddler Cookbook: Easy Recipes for Natural Food. If you're looking for strained peas and dessicated instant oatmeal mush, it's not here. Instead of insisting that you just try one ingredient at a time, the book encourages mixing vegetables and fruits together, in delicious-sounding mashups like carrot, potato, peas and corn (sauté chopped carrot in olive oil; add chopped potatoes, peas, corn, and a little water; simmer for 15 minutes, then puree) and a fruit compote of apple, apricot, dried fig, cinnamon and raisins, simmered for five minutes and pureed. You could adapt several recipes in this book for the vegetables in your CSA box, following the developmental guidelines and tips Lizzie Vann provides.

The second book I recommended was Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. While Fallon certainly doesn't focus on baby food, she has a very dense chapter on feeding babies that reflects her general approach to food (which incorporates Weston A. Price's research on ancient cultures' eating habits). She suggests, for instance, feeding an egg yolk a day to babies, and avoiding grains entirely until the child is one or two years old. Fallon does recommend the "introduce one at a time" approach to adding vegetables and fruits, but suggests parents not add those foods until the baby is 10 months old. She also recommends mashing "carbohydrate foods," including potatoes, carrots, and turnips with butter, and avoid fruit juice entirely.

Using the approaches in these two books, an adventurous cook could adapt any number of recipes from cookbooks that include many simple seasonal vegetable-based recipes. A few I particularly like are Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells; Fields of Greens by Anne Somerville; and Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair. After all, the difference between making baby food and making soup is usually only a matter of using a little less cooking liquid and adjusting the spice levels.