organic food - toddler & beyond

After 12 months, baby can join with most family meals but obviously avoid very high fibre foods or spicy meals.

Family meals often enjoyed by toddlers include pastas, rice or couscous based dishes, tortillas (use organic mountain bread), pizzas, soufflés as well as traditional meals like meat and vegetables.

Remember that children often prefer vegetables raw, so raw tomatoes, grated carrot, cucumber slices and mushrooms to name a few make great snacks. as do cold cooked potato, pumpkin or yams.

Sippy Cup Safety:

What's all the fuss about Bisphenol-A? See the further reading box for information on the safety of plastic sippy cups.

The best solution is to use BPA-free Sippy Bottles or Eco Tanka bottles with a sippy adaptor. Visit our webstore to view these products.

Milk:

Baby can now drink cow's milk and eat eggs (both white and yolks), providing no allergies run in the family. Please read our disclaimer.

Organic milk is available in supermarkets but the whole (unhomogenised version) is best. All milk sold in NZ and US supermarkets is pasteurised.

Of course, whole organic milk does not contain added iron like infant formula brands. You may prefer to use organic milk - it's your choice. It possible to give liquid iron supplements instead (available from your supermarket).

Cooking with organic ingredients:

Depending where you live, it is nearly impossible to buy all organic ingredients and you may not be able to afford to buy everything organic. So you will definitely need to make some compromises.

Start by buying what's in season (organic produce is alot more seasonal than conventional produce).

Organic cooking involves using natural, whole ingredients ie leaving out all those instant stocks, packet mixes and meals in a jar. These are made from inorganic ingredients and contain plenty of additives.

You can easily adapt your usual recipes by leaving out these ingredients and replacing them with organic alternatives.

Stock:

You can replace instant stocks in recipes with ones you have prepared and frozen earlier. It is also very handy to have a jar of organic vegetable stock in the pantry (like this Organic Pathways article suggests).

Natural yoghurt:

You can replace ingredients like sour cream, buttermilk, cream and custard with natural yoghurt. Biofarm make an excellent natural yoghurt and have a useful recipe book (which can be ordered on their web site).

Tofu:

Tonzu make an organic tofu which they say may be substituted for cottage cheese, cream cheese, sour cream or yoghurt in any recipe. It is also an excellent cheese and meat protein substitute.

Tofu takes on the flavour of whatever it is cooked with. It is easy to cook - You can bake it, grill it or boil it.

To prepare Tofu for babies, put a small piece of soft tofu in a boiling water for a couple of minutes. Take the tofu out of the water and mix it with little hot water and mush it until it is the required consistency for the babies age.

Serve when cooled down. You can also add mushed cooked carrots..

For a soup variation, try miso soup with tofu cubes.

References:

1. Ministry of Health, Eating for Healthy Babies & Toddlers. Revised December 2005.
2. Commonsense Organics - Guide To Food for Children.

Further Reading:

For more organic cooking tips and recipe ideas, read this Organic Pathways article.