Behan - Microwave cooking for your baby & child: the ABCs of creating quick, nutritious meals for your little ones

Copyright 1990 by Eileen Behan, R.D.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Villard Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the American Academy of Pediatrics for permission to reprint illustrations and descriptions from the Choking/CPR section of the First Aid Chart. Copyright 1989 American Academy of Pediatrics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Behan, Eileen.
Microwave cooking for your baby and child: the ABCs of creating quick, nutritious meals for little ones/by Eileen Behan.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN: 978-0-345-54058-4
1. Cookery (Baby foods). 2. Microwave cookery. 3. InfantsNutrition. I. Title.
TX740.B449 1991
641.5622dc20 90-50221

v3.1

To David, Sarah and Emily
my source of
joy and inspiration

Little eyes see pretty things,
Little noses smell what is sweet,

Little ears hear pleasant sounds,
Mouth likes luscious things to eat.

Chinese Nursery Rhyme

I once heard it said that writing a cookbook is not a solo effort, and now I know how true that statement is. I had a lot of support and technical advice from many people and I appreciated all of it.

For support, criticism, comments and suggestions I must thank my family, starting with my parents, John and Elizabeth Behan, who always told me to pursue my goals and then gave me the tools to do just that (a very special thanks to Mom, too, for recipe testing). To Sheila, who never failed to ask about the book, and to Sharon and Kevin, who never doubted Id accomplish the task. To Kathy, Chuck and Tory, who as a family provided inspiration for parts of this book.

When writing about something medical or scientific, two heads are better than one, and Id like to thank the following people who reviewed all or part of this manuscript for accuracy or comments: Dr. William Dietz, M.D., Richard E. Mudgett, Ph.D., Marilyn DeSimone, R.D., and Madeline Walsh, R.D.

For artwork Id like to thank Agi Behan.

Thanks to Trish Cronan and Brad Lavigne, who have been two of my best sources for refining and developing ideas. To Susan Yorstin, and Gale and Kara Day, thank you for comments and recipe testing.

To Judith Paige, a very special thanks for all your contributions.

To Ralph McCue, thank you for your words of encouragement. I only wish you were with us to see the final results.

To Alison Acker, who through her fine editing and skillful suggestions made this a better book, and thank you to Tom Fiffer, Alisons assistant. I am also grateful to the other people at Villard whose contributions were so important: Richard Aquan, Janis Donnaud, Nancy Inglis, Corinne Lewkowicz and Barbara Marks.

To Carol Mann, thanks for seeing the potential in my idea.

If a magic genie appeared to new parents and allowed them to create the ideal cooking system for babies and small children, Im sure theyd come up with something fast and nutritious that involved little cleanup. Voil, the microwave!

My husband, David, and I purchased our first microwave about six months before the birth of our daughter Sarah. We never felt the need for instant cooking, but with the impending change a baby would bring we thought wed take advantage of every modern convenience. In truth we hardly used it until Sarah started to eat. Boiling a cup of water and defrosting were what I thought a microwave oven did best. I suspect I was like most cooks who just never took the time to master it.

Mothers and fathers today have many choices and decisions to make about feeding their babies. You can buy commercially prepared jars of ready-to-eat food or cans of dehydrated baby food that just need reconstituting. You can also take foods from the family table and simply pure them, or you can cook your babys food fresh from scratch. So how do you choose?

Your personal situation will determine how and what you feed your baby. Youve probably already asked your pediatrician about safe feeding practices, probably read a few magazine articles on the subject, then balanced the time you have for cooking against the time you have for your husband, other children and family members, community commitments and work responsibilities. After taking into account all these considerations, you make decisions about how to feed your baby that will work for you and your family.

In many cases youve probably chosen a combination of feeding possibilities. If youre traveling and dont have a kitchen, then a jar of ready-to-eat food for your baby may work best. When the family is eating a simple meal of chicken, potatoes, and vegetables, then a quick pure in the blender works nicely. When take-out pizza is on the adult menu, making baby a meal all his own may be the solution that day. But for cooking healthy food that babies and children love, nothing beats the microwave.

When babies grow into toddlers, they can share much of what youre serving on the adult table, and your microwave may become the primary cooking tool for all of you, or you may still just use it to prepare your childs meals. The same qualities that make a microwave ideal for cooking small babies meals still apply to older children, and many mothers simply adapt their recipes to suit their childs tastes. In this book Ive included recipes for children from tiny babies all the way through age three, but if your children are like mine, theyll keep asking for their favorite baby foods even beyond that age. And why not? The recipes are good for your preschooler or school-age child for the same reasons theyre good for your toddler. Theyre low in salt, offer a lot of variety and, most of all, the recipes in provide a balanced meal in one dish.

When my daughter started on solid foods, I was dissatisfied with the choices offered on supermarket shelves. I wanted her to have fresh-cooked foods and more variety. Besides being a parent like you, I am also a professional nutritionist. I counsel adults, mothers-to-be, even children and teenagers, about nutrition and diet. I feel strongly that good, healthy food served to children when theyre young helps lay the foundation for good health and eating habits when theyre grown up. So when cooking for Sarah, I did what I thought a mother was supposed to do: I steamed the vegetables and boiled the potato, baked the chicken, then ground or mashed it all up into a consistency Sarah could handle: nice, soft mush. At the end of one meal Id have three or four dirty pans, not including the utensils or dishes she used, and I still had to cook dinner for the grown-ups. Finally, I got smart and decided to tap the resources of my microwave.