How I prepare Nathan’s food

Recently, me and a couple of other mums have started to get together regularly to form our own mothers group or playgroup. Our children are generally within the same age range with variations of a few months here and there.

We generally try to time our meet ups around the kids’ mealtimes so we can all sit down to feed our kids around the same time and let them play together afterwards. I always find the scene of the variations in foods we prepare for our kids based on their different developmental stages so interesting. It’s also great to see what foods and snacks the other mums prepare to get some ideas for myself.

So today I thought I might share my system for preparing Nathan’s food.

Because I don’t have a maid and am still juggling work whilst still looking after Nathan almost full time, I don’t have the luxury of cooking every meal for him from scratch as much as I’d like to. So I cook his food in batches and freeze them to eat over the coming week.

So over the weekend, I boil or steam a few varieties of vegetables and mash them up. Previously I pureed each vegetable very finely, but over the months I’ve introduced lumpier textures into Nathan’s food which cuts down my food preparation time a little more.

After that I portion the mashed vegetables into ice cube trays and pop them into the freezer.

Once they are frozen, I pop the cubes out and store them in containers like this…

Favourites are sweet potato, pumpkin, carrots and potato. I’ve also done the same with cauliflower and broccoli. I’ve tried zucchini once but found that the texture turns out too watery for my liking after defrosting.

I do the same with some meats like chicken or turkey and just pulse them in the food processor to shred them. When he was younger I’d puree the meats with a bit of the stock from cooking. With fish, I prepare a small portion at a time as they cook fairly quickly and are easy to flake into bits on the spot.

Rice is our staple food so I cook a batch of rice porridge and freeze them into mini plastic containers. My rice porridge for Nathan is mixture of about half and half brown rice and jasmine rice.

Then after all that, at lunch or dinner time, it’s just a matter of mixing and matching different combinations of vegetables and meat/fish with some rice porridge and heating it up in the microwave. Nathan has a bit of a sweet tooth, so I find the food goes down better whenever I include at least one cube of sweet potato or pumpkin.

On some weekends or when I have a bit more time, I’ll sometimes make something from scratch like a mini cheesy mashed potato casserole, tomato and pasta or polenta. I think Nathan appreciates the variety. I’ll share some of my recipes in another post next time.

Nathan’s definitely showing more and more preferences for certain foods, but overall he’s a pretty good eater.

Here’s a snapshot of him opening his mouth wide for big spoonful of some yummy stuff from his grandma…

I’ll share about my breakfast ideas in my next post.