Maggie Meade - The Slow Cooker Baby Food Cookbook: 125 Recipes for Low-Fuss, High-Nutrition, and All-Natural Purees, Cereals, and Finger Foods

Sure, popping open a jar of commercially made baby food is easy, and there are seemingly endless varieties, including all-natural and organic baby foods. So why would you want to take the time out of an already hectic day to make homemade baby food? The simplest answer is this: youre already cooking breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the rest of the family, and its likely that some of those foods are baby foods, too! Yes, why not cook for your baby, too? Theres no need to prepare separate meals for baby, using separate utensils and cooking ware. Your baby is able to eat the same foods you makefrom the same appliances and pots, pans, and baking sheets. No matter what youre preparing for your family, the odds are good that any of those foods can be reduced to a puree thats safe and tasty for baby to eat!

Of course, there may be some occasions when you would want to prepare separate foods for baby. Even so, you can do this in conjunction with prepping family meals or by stuffing the slow cooker before you head off to work or are away from home for the day. Cooking up batches of homemade foods for your baby in the slow cooker will allow you to keep a stash on hand so that you arent constantly cooking foods for baby to eat.

The recipes in this book are especially wonderful because they offer tasty sauces, cereals, and meal solutions for the whole family to enjoy in one way or another. Whipping up some slow cooker mixed berries? Spoon some of the sauce over vanilla yogurt or vanilla ice cream. Who knew making homemade baby food could be so easy and delicious? Now you do!

There are a few important reasons why homemade is better:

Taste: Homemade baby food tastes like real food. Jarred baby food and baby food in pouches just cant compare to the taste of freshly cooked homemade foods. Ask yourself, would you rather eat a banana that has been freshly mashed in your bowl or eat a jar of bananas that has been industrially processed and sitting on a shelf for months?

Texture: Commercially processed baby foods have the smoothest and silkiest texture. This texture is difficult to replicate when you make homemade foods for baby, but that isnt a bad thing. Homemade baby food helps your baby adjust to the texture of real foods and takes away one more hurdle to jump through when you wean your baby to solid foods.

Nutrition: Homemade baby foods may retain more nutrients than commercial jarred or pouched baby foods. In a 2016 public health study from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, researchers found that homemade infant foods prepared from recipes in the top baby-food cookbooks may contain up to 77 percent more nutrients than commercial infant foods. The study also found that making homemade baby food from scratch is typically less expensive than buying store-bought baby food. It is also noteworthy that homemade baby foods tend to contain a wider variety of fruits and vegetables than commercial baby foods.

Further, it has long been thought that fresh and frozen foods retain more nutrients than canned foods do because of the way these foods are processed. Cooking and draining foods causes the most nutrient loss, while freezing incurs the least amount of loss. Some foods that you make homemade might contain more nutrients than their jarred or pouched counterparts solely due to how the ingredients are processed.

Quality control: You are the quality-assurance manager. You know exactly where the food you are preparing and feeding to your baby has come from. Also, there is great peace of mind in knowing how and where the food that you feed your baby was prepared.