Introducing Baby Food

Start with cereal. Iron-enriched baby rice cereal is the best food to start with, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. It's easily digested, fortified with important nutrition, and least likely to trigger an allergic reaction. To prepare, mix a small amount of cereal with formula, breast milk, or even water to create a creamy "soup." Don't sweeten the taste by adding things like mashed bananas, applesauce, or juice. If you start off tempting baby with sugar, he'll soon want everything you offer to be just as sweet. Once baby has mastered rice cereal, you can move on to other varieties like barley or oat — but hold off on wheat, which is a common allergen for many babies.

Branch out to vegetables. Next stop: veggies! They're wholesome, nutritious, and not likely to trigger allergies. Start with milder yellow or orange options such as sweet potatoes and carrots before moving on to the green team, like peas, spinach, and string beans, which have slightly stronger flavors. If your baby rejects what you've got, try again tomorrow and the next day and the next. Some babies need to be introduced to a new food four or five (or more!) times before they'll accept it, so perseverance is key.

As with most cooked foods, they may be kept refrigerated for 2 to 3 days after being cooked. After freezing, it's better if you use it up in 1 month. Sweet potatoes freeze well! http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/sweetpotatobabyfoodrecipes.htm

Common Forbidden Foods for Babies:
http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/forbiddenbabyfood.htm

ALWAYS ensure that you are not feeding baby directly from the bowl and then storing the bowl you fed from back in the fridge - take out the portion you will feed, put it into baby's bowl and then put the bowl of food back into the fridge!


Dabble in fruit. Delicious, digestible first fruits include finely mashed bananas or baby applesauce, peaches, or pears (stick with jarred fruits especially processed for babies).

Starter foods: Bananas, pears, applesauce

Organic foods are grown without the use of commercial nitrate fertilizers and thus the risk of nitrate contamination/concentration is minimized, but not eliminated.

Expand the Menu Options

Those early-bird specials (rice cereal, applesauce, bananas, yellow veggies) get pretty old after a few dozen meals. Spice things up (at around seven or eight months) by adding minced meat (chicken, lamb, turkey, or beef), mashed egg yolk (no whites), and avocado to her repertoire. By nine months, whole-milk yogurt, cheese, pasta, beans, and tofu can make their debuts, and then (drumroll, please!) finger foods add a whole other dimension to eating. Here are a few more pointers:

Source: http://www.whattoexpect.com/first-year/feeding-baby/starting-solids/introducing-new-foods.aspx