Customer Reviews

Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Once upon a time I was a 20-year-old stay-at-home mommy terrified of raising my baby wrong. Cloth diapers meant horrid diaper rash. Not breastfeeding was a mortal sin. Feeding your baby the same foods you ate meant they might have a fatal allergic reaction. Fast forward ten years and while my first born is certainly not malnourished... he's not the best eater. Sniff a jar of baby veggies and you might be able to guess why.

The idea of making my own baby food from scratch was one I knew I wanted to do before I was even pregnant with baby #2. A book I purchased about feeding toddlers when #1 was little has lingered in my cookbook collection for years. The first few sections focused on baby food & purees so I knew it was possible. I researched making my own baby food a lot before the time came and while I did go with boxed baby cereals (for the sake of time) at first... my wee one only ever eats the other packaged stuff when we pack it for those times when going home and thawing out cubes of pears isn't efficient. THAT is what I loved about BABY LOVE.

Norah and Geoff have a very realistic attitude toward making baby food. It's not as time consuming as you'd think and they break down how cost effective it really is. Finally seeing the math really made me happy to be taking the time and making the effort to prep my baby's food. In these budget concious times when organic food is the ideal it's nice to know I can give the baby what is not only healthiest, but what keeps some money around for the college fund too.

Yes, some of these recipes are very, very basic. For someone who already knows what they are doing these might seem a little too "duh". I disagree. Some of the methods I had previously used for prepping foods produced less palate pleasing purees in comparison. Case and point the Perfectly Basic Butternut recipe. In the Chef's Notes Geoff explains that by roasting the squash and creating that carmelization you get a richer, more complex flavor. The smell in my house when I tried this method was so yummy I debated setting some aside for myself. I did the same with sweet potatoes and won't go back to steaming them again. Roasting didn't take that much more time (and what does it matter since it's sitting in the oven smelling nummy while I'm reading) to do than the poaching method I had previously learned.

Another thing I love about this cookbook is that it is peppered with nutritional tips and the Chef's Notes which often are insightful and useful. But my favorite, favorite thing is that spices are used and encouraged! Spices for babies you say? Well, certainly within reason. I'm not dumping curry in my baby's food. But the introduction of spices such as ginger (Carrot and Ginger recipe on page 80), cinnamon (Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal Raisin recipe page 55) or nutmeg (Creamy Butternut with Nutmeg recipe page 93) are actually very common in the later months of the first year. My baby loves a dash of ginger with peaches and oatmeal.

What surprised me more than anything considering the "big" names behind this cookbook was that none of these recipes was particularly pretentious. Just when you find one you think might be such as Roasted Red Pepper and Pomegranate Hummus you see a note about using canned chickpeas to save time or read the ingredient list only to discover how very simple and unfussy the dish is. You can tell your friends you made something like that and sound like you labored for hours when it really was super easy.

I can't believe I am saying this but after making the Peach and Apricot Oatmeal (page 59), adapting it because I only had fresh peaches, this is my favorite baby food cookbook. The next recipes I am going to try are the P.E.A. (pea, edamame and apple puree page 77) and Strawberry and Fig (page 61). I'm also looking forward to trying the three "Get Your Greens" recipes as soon as we get cauliflower introduced to baby #2's 10-month-old diet.

If you're looking for a baby cookbook with really great basics, a budget concious attitude, no pretense and just plain excellent combinations of ingredients I highly recommend this one. It even stresses that you don't need any expensive equipment (I have a food processor but used my blender for the first time making these and found I liked it even better!) or super mad cooking skill, just a desire to make yummy food for your baby. Good luck and happy cooking!

***Update: In the days since I wrote this review originally we've tried the Papaya Banana, Strawberry Fig and Strawberry Banana Pineapple which have all gone over reeeally well. I recommend a really nice creamy whole milk yogurt with some of the Papaya Banana stirred in as a breakfast alternative to cereal.

I also wanted to add on that each of these puree recipes is set to make two ice cube trays worth of puree which is just the right batch size in my opinion. When this book says you can take an hour on a Sunday night and whip up enough purees to last the week they're right! I take an hour a couple of nights a week now and make 2-3 different purees. At the moment my freezer is packed to the gills which gives us variety and saves me tons of time.

I bought this book as a gift for my daughter who just had her second child. She made about half of the food for her first child, something that saved money and allowed her to better control the quality and overall nutritional value of the food her child was eating. For those reasons and because she also enjoyed doing it, she was interested in trying to make all of the food for this child, or at least a larger percentage of it.

Since she was already pretty comfortable with the ins and outs of preparing fruits and vegetables, I was looking for a book that would provide interesting recipes for other food groups AND that had a number of recipes that would also suit her toddler, or could be easily adapted to do so. Many of the recipes in this book seemed to fit that mold. My daughter has just started using it and, to date, seems pleased with the recipes. She has found a number that work for her toddler and that she and her husband enjoy as well.

She did say, though, that the claim "Learn how to make two weeks worth of Baby Love meals in less than one hour per week" included in the book description must be for people who are either more adept in the kitchen than she is or who don't have a toddler "assisting" them. Or possibly both. :)

She thought this was a good addition to the baby cookbooks she already had, but felt it wasn't comprehensive enough to be the only book on the subject on hand for parents who are serious about making most of their child's food. She suggested readers might want to consider checking out the following books as well:
Blender Baby Food: Over 125 Recipes for Healthy Homemade Meals
The Petit Appetit Cookbook: Easy, Organic Recipes to Nurture Your Baby and Toddler
Top 100 Baby Purees: 100 Quick and Easy Meals for a Healthy and Happy Baby.

Notes:
- The overall look and layout of the book is very attractive and the photos make the foods look very appetizing.
- Each recipe includes a suggested age for introduction. There are some you may wish to confirm with your pediatrician*.
- The book lays open nicely - a must when preparing the food.
- Most of the ingredients are readily available. This is very important to my daughter as she lives in a small town.
- For the price, I feel there should have been more total recipes and fewer that focus on steaming a variety of fruits and vegetables.

* As with all baby food cookbooks, I would suggest that parents take care that the recipes do not include foods their pediatrician has suggested be avoided or introduced at a later age. Even if the authors take care to follow the current wisdom at the time they're compiling the book, guidelines are subject to change. Authors may also be from a country that has different guidelines.

In Baby Love, husband and wife authors O'Donnell and Tracy offer inspiration and recipes for making your own baby food. The book is well written. The recipes are well organized into fruits, veggies, and proteins/legumes/grains sections. Included are a few big people recipes too. I appreciated the sections on child development, nutrition and cooking basics. The layout of the book, use of color, and photographs all enhance this book. This is a hardbound cookbook. The text is big enough to read while cooking, yet the book is small enough not to take up too much counter space. The pages stay open while you work.

The fruit recipes are repetitive and typically consist of: cook the fruit in water, puree, wrap and freeze. The only changes are what fruits you use. This is 20% of the book.

The vegetable section, another 20%, is the same as the fruit section (cook the vegetables in water, puree, wrap and freeze). That is until you get to ratatouille and polenta. But then the section ends.

The final section (proteins/legumes/grains) is where the book shines. The recipes are straightforward, varied, and exciting. The Poached salmon is a great and tasty way to get fish into a toddler. The meatballs are good for the whole family. I'm looking forward to trying the Very Gouda Grits. I want to try all of the recipes in this section.

In summary, I feel the fruit and vegetable sections could have been shortened significantly since they are repetitive. The other sections would then have to have been expanded to justify publishing a whole book. Never the less, I liked the book and the recipes. I recommend this book to parents looking for more than just opening jars as the culinary experience for their babies.

What's to love about BABY LOVE? Well, plenty. Except, like most books written by celebrities (which I didn't realize when I ordered it from Amazon) one is left wondering how someone who is SOOOOOO busy finds time to cook all this kids food from scratch. Quite frankly, I'm a stay-at-home-mom for now and find it hard to keep up with 2 toddlers and a baby by myself all day despite better-than-average time management skills. Nevermind the fact that one of the authors here is a professional chef with the skills to match. Baby food would seem like child's play.

Here's what I love...

They assume you know nothing. The introduction of the book covers the basics of food safety, preparation, storage, cooling, etc. They give some realistic time estimates and break down the cost of store-bought food versus homemade baby food, though I doubt that being a TV anchor and the owner of 5 restaurants that cost was the primary motivator here.

Here's a breakdown:
Getting started
Baby's stages (development/taste)
Nutrition/foods to avoid/good starters
Page 11 - cost analysis of homemade vs. store bought brands
15-34 Prep, storage, working safely - lots of info, but not overdone
Not too bad, so far. You can get through the introduction in about a half hour if you're not taking notes.
From here on the rest of the 132 pages are recipes.

First, the basics.
FRUITS:

Baby options during the first 6 - 8 months are very limited. There isn't much room for creativity. Here are simple recipes for applesauce, pear sauce, pomegranate pear, peach 1 & 2 (using fresh or frozen), mango, banana - no cooking needed, banana-apple-pear, banana-papaya, avacado, apple prune, cinnamon apple oatmeal raisin (yum), very blueberry and apple, apricot-pear, peach and apricot oatmeal, baby guacamole (hey, the kids in Mexico grow up on it, right?), strawberry and fig, strawberry-banana-pineapple, cran-orange, berry smoothie, peach smoothie, and tropical smoothie.

VEGGIES:

Basic pea, carrot, butternut, sweet potato, zucchini and carrot, p.e.a. (pea, edamamae, apple), carrot and ginger, creamy cauliflower, greens 1, greens 2, greens 3, ratatouille and polenta, butternut and nutmeg.

PROTEINS, LEGUMES AND GRAINS:

Alba's chicken soup, Poached salmon and carrot, poached halibut, slow beef stew, ginger beef, meatballs, roasted pepper and pomegranate hummus, 20 minute pasta sauce, pasta bolognese, orzo and cheese "mac", pasta with spinach, ricotta and pesto, parmesan risotto, zucchini and corn risotto, butternut and cranberry risotto( a bit time consuming), very gouda grits, lentil soup, lentils and brown rice, whole grain blueberry pancakes with flax, norah's brain booster zucchini muffins, banana flax bread.

Finally, a section called "Mom and Dad eat, too" This chapter has no introduction, but I doubt that these are kid-oriented recipes, and certainly not what I would call a quick weeknight meal for your average family, as they would imply.
Veggie stir-fry, fish tacos, pan-roasted salmon with lentils/rice/beans/pesto, spaghetti and meatballs with ricotta and basil, seared sea scallops with zucchini-corn risotto and balsamic drizzle, jumbo shrimp and very gouda grits (you can see here that they are adding an adult entree to these other kid-friendly recipes), and finally, mango margarita - definitely not for the kids.

The book concludes with an index on nutrients with their benefits and a few suggestions on where to find them in food. And thus ends the book. Having typed all of that, here's where I think they could have improved...

Add some transitional foods. There's nothing here in the way of "finger food" for late baby/early toddler years. There comes a time when most babies refuse to be spoon fed, but are not quite ready for risottos and pastas unless they've been through a baby grinder.

There isn't a lot of info about which months to give which foods, and they are not organized that way, so it's hard to reference. The other books I've read are by Anabel Karmel, Super Baby Food, So Easy Baby Food, and Love in Spoonfuls (Parenting magazine). Here's my take on all of them...

Baby Love (this book) and Love in Spoonfuls are the best looking. Lots of great pictures, side notes and yummy looking recipes. Anabel Karmels baby books come a close second. Her nutrition information, however is UK inspired and sometimes clashes with the US guidelines for infant nutrition and food safety.

Baby Love is the only one with no definitive guide for appropriate foods by age in a convenient format.

Super Baby Food and So Easy Baby Food are the most user friendly and here's why...they divide recipes by appropriate age and US guidelines and build upon the basics with each additional chapter. They are both simple enough to pick up and start cooking in the same half hour. Also, they both offer lots of options for using your microwave or frozen foods (which have been proven just as nutritious and far cheaper). Finally, they both offer nutritional charts that are far more in-depth and easy to follow.

Super Baby Food is the least attractive, aestetically, but gives the best information for the dollar. Her recipes include many options for age-appropriate stir-ins like nutritional yeast and flax to enhance nutrition. Her nutrition charts and superior for readability and she provides meal plan charts to make it simple for your child to get nutrients from every major category.

Of all those books that I recommended, this one has some fabulous gourmet-style cooking. And yes, I will use some of these recipes. However, if you can only buy one baby food book, I recommend either Super Baby Food or So Easy Baby Food. The latter being absolutely the most user-friendly, with microwave cooking options for every single recipe and frozen food options to make it budget- friendly.

Baby Love is not the quickest, or the least expensive by a long shot, but it's substantial in it's own right. I would recommend it,but it wouldn't be my first choice for a very busy family.

Overall, I was not impressed with this baby food cookbook. The first half of the book is too basic. I didn't need so many "perfectly basic" pear, apple, sweet potato, etc., recipes, which basically consist of "steam this fruit or veggie, add water, and puree it." I felt like the same instructions were just repeated over and over again.

The second half of the book has recipes that are more complicated. In fact, most of these meals you would just cook for yourself (as an adult)--things like stir fry and tacos. When my baby gets to the point where he is eating adult food, I will just feed him what I already make using my Joy of Cooking cookbook. I probably won't reference a baby food cookbook at that point.

I also didn't like that the recipes use cauliflower, instead of potatoes, as a base. I like the taste and texture of potatoes better, but, of course, that is just my preference.

If you are looking for a basic, getting-started baby food cookbook, I would recommend both Top 100 Baby Purees: 100 Quick and Easy Meals for a Healthy and Happy Baby and Parenting: Love in Spoonfuls. Both have great recipes and lots of variety. And my son loves almost everything I make from these books.

Whole pages given to "recipes" such as mashed bananas: Mash bananas with fork. Done. Could've been covered in a section on techniques. Spend your money on real baby food cookbooks like The Best Homemade Baby Food on the Planet or The Petit Appetit Cookbook.

Prior to purchasing this book, I had very little knowledge on the world of baby food. I loved to cook, but had never made food for a baby. All I knew is that after my son was past the initial stages of learning to eat solids, I wanted to make all of his baby food from fresh, organic ingredients. I turned to Amazon to find out which books were the top rated books on baby food and I fell upon this book as well as Cooking for Baby: Wholesome, Homemade, Delicious Foods for 6 to 18 Months. I can say that I love both books equally and I would purchase both of them again. Below are the reasons why I recommend purchasing Baby Love:

SIMPLE APPROACH. This book is all about how to make the process of making baby food quick and easy. Although the book provides the "freshest" approach to cooking baby food, it also provides little tidbits to making the process easier for you. For instance, Chef Geoff mentions different fruit and veggies that he recommends to purchase frozen (peas) or pre-processed (baby carrots) that can make the prep work easier for you. Purchasing frozen peas instead of fresh keeps you from having to shell the peas. In addition, baby carrots keep you from having to do the peeling! I'm a busy working mom and appreciate this insight.

VARIATIONS. Although in the early introduction of solids it is recommended to stick to one fruit or veggie at a time, when your child is about 6 plus months of age you can start to mix and match flavors. Baby Love provides alternatives to the classic purees that allow you to introduce new flavor profiles. For instance, the "Perfectly Basic Apple" and "Perfectly Basic Pear" recipes have variations that include 100% pomegranate juice. Yum! Even I would love to eat that.

UNIQUE RECIPES. In addition to the classic baby food recipes, there are some unique recipes that we your baby will love once they are 8+ months! For instance, the P.E.A. (Pea, Edamame, and Apple) and Carrot and Ginger recipes look very promising.

ADVOCATE OF LOCAL AND ORGANIC PRODUCE. If you are a parent like me, you are very mindful of what you feed your child. I was so glad to see that Chef Geoff recommended using local and organic produce if it is within your means. There was also a quick rundown on how to read food labels. This is great for parents that are just starting to learn about organic produce. I did a comparison of purchasing conventional vs. organic produce for making baby food. Even though the organic produce was more expensive, I was still saving a lot compared to purchasing jarred baby food. Plus, the baby food I cooked was only peas, no preservatives additives. Plus, they were actually green!

This book along with Cooking for Baby: Wholesome, Homemade, Delicious Foods for 6 to 18 Months, has allowed me to cook food for my son that is unique, fresh, and easy. I believe that by feeding him the recipes provided in this book, I will be able to keep him from becoming a picky eater when he gets older. The more I expose his to new foods and unique flavors, the more foods he will enjoy!

Ugh. My father gave this book to me. I have a degree in culinary arts, but I still second guess myself when cooking for my young son, so I like to use recipes for him instead of winging it. I find these recipes to vary WIDELY in quality. We liked the pancakes, and I also liked the idea of steaming squash with juice to up the calories. Every member of my family HATED the ginger beef. I was very unhappy- I followed the recipe and it was awful. I threw it all out. Every parent knows that time is too precious to waste and I spent an hour chopping and stirring- not to mention shopping and cleaning the kitchen.

"When I became a dad, it never once crossed my mind to feed my children mass-produced baby mush."
Chef Geoff is not a big fan of the baby food that they sell in little jars in the supermarket. He says that it "is devoid of anything that makes food satisfying and good", and that it "is mass produced and has no love". Of course he is just not that big of a fan of any canned fruit or vegetables, with one exception. "Except for canned San Marzano tomatoes, canned vegetables and fruits are quite simply gross."
That's why he and his wife Norah have taken the time to put together a book to help normal ordinary people create food in their own homes from scratch that will keep their infants and toddlers healthy until the day that they discover Twinkies and Ding Dongs.
For example, bananas are usually a good first food for babies. A banana can be peeled and mashed with a fork and a cutting board in less than 2 minutes. That's something most new parents can handle, even dads.
Carrots take a little more time, effort and equipment. Peel and cube 1.5 pounds of carrots, then cook them in 2.5 cups of water until they are tender, but not mushy. Put the carrots and the water in a blender and puree until smooth. Pour into two ice cube trays and freeze. Then pop them out into freezer bags and store for up to 3 months.
The authors insist that it only takes one hour every two weeks to make enough food to feed your child. They estimate that 6 months of store-bought jarred foods costs about $650, but that you can make your own for just $260.
The book contains over 50 recipes, plus on page 6 there is a great discussion about different colors of poop.

The cover is beautiful and the pictures inside are lovely, the recipes are mostly very simple. I would recommend this book for those new parents who are used to ordering take-out for themselves and don't know how to make an easy and nutritious meal for a young child. (or themselves!) It's step by step and easy to follow. Some might complain about time limitations and how it's easier to open a jar or can or pop a store bought meal into the microwave but is that best for your child or yourself? If you are unsure if you want to buy check out the website which is baby love foods - all one word - and check out some of the recipes.

One thing to note - making your own food is more time consuming but it's much much cheaper.