How to Slice a Banana

Step 1: Slice banana in half.

Step 2: Poke end with finger and push in.

Step 3: Take apart at the seams.

Tadah!

Step 4: Feed hungry baby.

Of Corn Ears and Baby Ears

Braved the rains to get TYB's ears pierced today. From her pediatrician's clinic at St. Luke's Global City, we headed to Eastwood Mall to grab some lunch. Since TYB couldn't eat anything from my plate of bagnet, I ordered a side dish of steamed veggies for her. Here she is sucking on an ear of baby corn:

BLW-Friendly Recipe: Roast Chicken

I said before that  with BLW, there's no such thing as baby food. You simply share with baby parts of your meal that are suitable. When I'm being my usual lazy self, this means TYB eats whatever side dish of veggies I have whipped up to give some semblance of healthfulness (if there is such a word) to our typically sinful meals. When I'm feeling a bit more creative, or extra guilty for our less-than-wholesome food choices, I make an effort to prepare a BLW-friendly entree.

So here's a super easy dish that the whole family can enjoy, loosely based on a recipe from the BLW Cookbook:

INGREDIENTS
1 whole organic chicken (about 1kg)
1 head of garlic smashed, unpeeled
rosemary
bay leaf
1 lemon
ground black pepper
olive oil

Clean and wash the chicken thoroughly. Pat dry with a paper towel. Sprinkle rosemary and pepper all over the chicken, including the inside. Pierce lemon with a fork and stuff inside the cavity, together with garlic and bay leaf. Splash with olive oil. Preheat turbo broiler at 150°C for 10-15 minutes. Carefully place chicken on the cooking rack, and let cook for about 20 minutes, or until it's crispy and golden.

I made some roasted carrots to go with the chicken. I just doused them with olive oil and threw it in to cook with the bird. They came out a bit darker than I planned because I forgot to take them out on time, but they turned out surprisingly sweet and yummy.

As you may have noticed, there is no salt in the recipe. That's because babies' kidneys cannot process a high amount of salt, so it's best never to add it to anything baby might eat. Besides, too much salt is bad, even for adults.

Okay, hypocrite mode OFF: I added a bit of Knorr seasoning to my chicken, while TYD added a dash of table salt to his portion.

But honestly, ever since I started cooking for baby, I have been better able to enjoy the natural taste of food without adding salt. We even buy our butter unsalted now. In this dish though, it helped that the chicken I used was organic. It tasted very chickeny, but not malansa at all. It was actually quite yummy and more tender than I expected.

TYB always gets the breast part, just because it's easier to break into BLW-prescribed strips. She doesn't have teeth yet, so she just sucks all the juices from the meat. She seemed to enjoy it:

The Yummy Baby and the (Not So) Giant Peach

Went grocery shopping yesterday. I'm always on the lookout for what new thing I can give TYB and this week, I had planned on buying bananas. But they had these:

Peaches! I don't think I've had fresh peaches before, so I indulged my inner social climber and got a couple. I figured I could always get bananas another time. 

Please don't tell my husband, but it was only when we got home that I remembered peaches being one of the Dirty Dozen foods that we should try to buy organic because of the high pesticide content. Like I'm ever going to find organic peaches in the Philippines! But, since TYB would only eat a few slices at most, I rationalized that the benefits of having a new food experience would outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure, right?

So for breakfast, I peeled and sliced half a fruit and gave her a few wedges. She loved it! Yay! The texture was just right so she could easily bite off a piece and chew with her gums. There was some gagging, but she quickly figured out how to spit it out, and went right back to eating.

It was sweet and tart, and not too mushy so TYB was able to get a good grip, which meant minimal slippage and waste (since it cost almost a hundred bucks per fruit). Score for social climber momma!

No Baby Food

One thing I love about BLW is that there's no such thing as special baby food. Since I do not have a maid or yaya, I simply do not have the time, energy, or brain power to think of a special menu for baby. Baby eats what I eat. Or more accurately, she eats parts of my meal that are suitable for her. Tonight, for instance, I had this for dinner:

And TYB had this:

The fish fillet was too salty for her. I found it a little salty even for me. Rice, she's not a big fan of. In any case, she seemed perfectly satisfied with just the squash and sayote.

As for leftovers, what doesn't end up on the floor gets eaten by me. Imagine if we were doing traditional weaning and she was eating sayote and squash puree. Eeew.

First Bite

So we've been doing Baby-Led Weaning (BLW) for about a month now. The Yummy Baby was a bit of a slow starter, and didn't actually put anything in her mouth until Day 16. Even now, there are meals where all she'd do is wave the food around and yell at it, before dropping it to the floor. But that's okay, because as the BLW mantra goes, "food before one is just for fun!"

I've read that avocado was an ideal first food, with lots of good fats and nutrients. So a day after TYB turned six months, I carefully peeled and sliced an avocado into the prescribed chip-sized pieces, while The Yummy Daddy set up the video camera, the digicam, and his iPhone to record the momentous event. And then, nothing. TYB refused to even make eye contact with the fruit. She did touch and squeeze it though, which was enough for me. I was actually relieved that she didn't eat any. Mommy's boobs were still The Only One, at least for a little while longer. It was the same routine for the rest of that first week. On the second week, we switched to broccoli, which she enjoyed mashing and smashing. Still, she never took a bite. At that point, she was barely even mouthing her toys. It seemed that she wasn't ready yet, and I was fine with it. 

Since we weren't making much progress, I decided it would be okay to take a few days off. Okay, truth is we got busy and didn't get to do the grocery. I figured we'd start trying again the following week. But a few days into our BLW break, TYB grabbed Sophie the Giraffe and started sucking. I knew then she was ready, even if my mommy heart wasn't.