A significant amount of research has been conducted towards a baby’s nutrition and therefore a lot of information is available through various sources.  What I have done for Harvey’s nutrition is use my scientific research background to correlate the nutritional necessities and summarise the available data, which I will be using for Harvey’s experimentation.

Parenting science and Science of Mum are the two keys websites I have used to help me understand baby questions I had in a more scientific way.  The Raising children network is another website that is highly recommended for Australian parents.  As for advise for baby’s recipes and nutrition, I have found Annabel Karmel to be my go-to resource.  I reckon that as a new mum, her cookbook is one of the key items you should invest in.

I have so far found that there are 2 key aspects when it comes to introducing solids; nutrition and variation.  As such, I have spent many hours researching baby’s nutrition, as the baby’s tummy is so tiny so when I give my son food, I want him to experience both good nutrition and wide variety.   In addition, our family loves cooking and entertaining so I felt that this was also a great opportunity for me to learn about nutrition in more depth which would be beneficial for the three of us whilst maintaining the fun aspect of socialising during our family food time.

Kitchen Ready

You should have most of items required for cooking in your kitchen such as pots and pans, steamers etc.  The key items are: a blender and many storage containers.  I like the hand held blender as I found it to be very efficient.  I needed lots of storage containers as I generally do batch cooking rather than smaller bits and bobs.  It also allows me to have backup in case of emergency where your baby demands food at strange hours.

For containers, I would recommend the Glasslock-Baby meal set, Heinz Baby Basics Mini Press ‘n’ Pop Baby Food Freezer and Quebies.  These containers are perfect to store small food portions and of course they BPA free.  Many articles can be found with regards to the BPA.  If you want no chemical leaching in your food then the best approach is to convert to an alternative such as glass. BPA is not particularly worrisome to me though, as according to ANZ food standards we would need to be consuming an extremely large amount of food and beverage to reach the Tolerable Daily Intake for BPA.