How to produce delicious home cooked dinners for your baby when you don't have the time

I really wanted to make sure that I gave my son delicious healthy home cooked dinners every day when it was time to start weaning.

Couple of problems with this. Main one being I didn’t cook.

Prior to having kids I didn’t cook/couldn’t cook. If we ever ate ‘real’ dinners my husband was the one to cook them. I could heat up frozen things or ready meals but I didn’t cook-cook.

Secondly I didn’t have time to cook. I often had a small child attached to my boob, or was busy playing stacking cups or was attempting to clean my house. And mainly to be honest if I wasn’t doing any of those things then I was either enjoying sleeping, trying to do something for myself or just enjoying sitting quietly without listening to crying, nursery rhymes or Cbeebies!

And the Health Visitors’ comment of just feed them whatever you are eating wasn’t any help at all. There was no way I was feeding my baby processed frozen junk, cereal, toast or on a bad day nothing at all.

Nope the only thing my baby was worthy of was delicious healthy home cooked foods. Hmmm. How was I going to make this work? That’s when I discovered the joys of batch cooking. Not just make a dinner and make an extra portion. Oh no, this was serious batch cooking on a whole other level. This was a whole month’s worth of dinners in one day.

Given the obstacles mentioned above I knew I wasn’t going to cook everyday so I needed a way of cooking in advance. A few days before my big cook up I would peruse the baby cookbooks and buy all of the ingredients up front. When selecting recipes I made sure they had similar elements. Then on the batch cook day I would feed my son and hand him over to my husband and shut the kitchen door. My husband was only allowed to bother me if the baby needed feeding. Other than that I didn’t want anything to do with either of them.

The first task was to wash, peel, chop, open tins etc so that everything was laid out ready a bit like in the cooking programmes. Next having photocopied/ printed out all of the recipes I would lay them out side by side. I would line up all of the different pans and then begin. Lots of the recipes had potatoes, tomatoes and other veg in them. So I would cook up all of the different elements and then combine them together. So the tomato and potatoes mixture was divided into the pot that would become the Moroccan chicken dinner and the pot that would become the lamb dinner and the pot that would become the salmon dinner. Then the carrots would go into all of the pots that required carrots etc. By the time I had divided all of the cooked ingredients into the necessary pots I had a selection of different dinners. Finally I used a hand blender to get rid of the big lumps and then divided them into the individual baby freezer pots and put them into the freezer.

The final job I would do was to draw up a meal plan for the month ensuring that there was a variety of meat, fish and vegetarian dishes spread out over the week.

Then on a day to day basis I would pull a pot out of the freezer defrost it in the microwave for 5 mins and then heat until piping hot which usually took 1 min 30 seconds. Once cooled, I fed it to my baby. The only washing up I had to do was one freezer pot and one bowl and spoon. Result.

Whoopie I had found the Holy Grail, the answer to all my prayers. I was providing my baby with a wonderful variety of healthy, delicious home cooked meals every single day without any of the ag that goes with it. I could sit and read a magazine guilt free knowing that when it was dinner time I could do my usual heat things up and have hardly any washing up. Also as I hadn’t slaved away in the kitchen for hours to make the dinner that evening it didn’t bother me when the baby chose to throw the dinner at the walls, floor and ceiling or smear it on the highchair board instead of actually eating it.

When starting batch cooking I would recommend trying 2 or 3 dinners and gradually building up so that you do not become overwhelmed. Once I became a pro at this I was able to knock up 9 dinners in a cooking session.

However,I did have a very bad experience with batch cooking which left me in floods of tears feeling like a terrible mother. So start small and work your way up. You have been warned.

#feeding #feedinghack #cookinghack #batchcooking #batchcookinghack