Saturday, July 10, 2010

Fun With Food

Dear Delilah,

For the first 6 months of your life, your only source of nourishment was my milk. On the day you turned 6 months old, we offered you your first taste of "real" food. (Make no mistake, mama's milk is as real as it gets!) Like all of the other decisions we've made so far regarding your care, we did plenty of research into how to feed you. We knew we would give you a vegetarian start in life, until you're old enough to understand what meat is and how it goes from being an animal to being on a plate. But what would your first food be? Rice cereal is a popular choice. Jarred purees are another common first food for babies. (When I was pregnant with you, your father bought a few jars of organic baby food to taste test!) Perhaps we'd make our own purees at home.

I started to hear about something called "baby-led weaning", which basically means allowing a baby to experiment with regular food in baby-friendly sizes and textures. Instead of parents giving mushy food on spoons, babies feed themselves! Your first meal included some wedges of avocado and some chunks of banana. Your uncertainty about this strange new adventure was brief; you've taken to solid food like a fish to water!

You've only been eating solid food for 2 months, but you've gotten to try a variety of fruits and vegetables, and everything from little bits of vegetarian "chicken" nuggets to the fistful of pasta & pesto you grabbed off my plate the other night. One of your favorite foods is asparagus roasted in olive oil; a food I didn't even sample until my mid-twenties!

Tonight for dinner, you started off with some peach and blueberries:



Then you had your first taste of zucchini, from our trip to the farmer's market this morning. I slice it up and sauteed it in olive oil. Simple and delicious:



Next up were green beans; one of your favorites! These also came from the farmer's market, but very soon, we'll get to pick fresh beans from our own garden!



Last but not least, a few spoonfuls of the lentil "stroganoff" concoction I made, mixed up with some rice:



Your daddy isn't a big fan of lentils, but he wasn't home!

It is such a pleasure to watch you explore and enjoy the different tastes, colors, and textures of healthy and nutritious food. You feed yourself as much as you want, and you feed our dog Sadie a little taste every now and then too! It didn't take her long to learn that the best place to be during meal time is as close to your high chair as possible!

I look forward to offering you more and more options, and even more to having you help out every step of the way when you get a little older, from planting and harvesting to cooking and serving!

Love,

Mama

3 comments:

  1. Joella - AWESOME start for Delilah!!! I don't know how Josh and I are going to decide to raise our future kids - I want vegetarian...and he is a total meat guy....This is going to be something we need to research!! Love the blog.

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  2. Haha cute!
    I'm a vegetarian but J is a meat eater, but we are raising our babies to be vegetarian until the random age of 11. :D We figure at that age they can understand what meat is, how people get it, the ethical and health and environmental associations, and then they can chose for themselves (obstensibly, J also wants to eat less meat so maybe by then he wont be so BUT MAYBE THEY'LL WANT TO OMG) and we can push it back further.

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  3. Ty does eat some meat, but we keep a vegetarian household. We haven't settled on an age, we figure we'll play it by ear until we're certain she understands, and then let her make the choice. We'll still maintain a vegetarian household though, so meat wouldn't be a regular part of her diet as long as she's under my roof! :)

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