How a Chef Feeds His Baby
When I became a father, I decided to apply the food-prep strategies I’d learned at work to a new domain.
My wife breastfed our baby for the first six months of her life, so when our daughter started eating solids it was pretty exciting, as it was my first real opportunity to be the provider and feed her! As a chef I had been dreaming up of all the fun things to cook for her up until that moment. My wife and I are both in the food industry, and we wanted to make all our daughter’s baby food from scratch with whole, fresh ingredients. But with all the other responsibilities that come with having a newborn, we knew we needed a game plan to accomplish it. That’s where I used my experience as a chef to apply a restaurant preparation strategy to cooking baby food so it wouldn’t become just a pipe dream.
What does that mean? It means first selecting a rotating roster of constituent ingredients (seasonal produce and hormone-free animal proteins), batch-cooking them, portioning and layering them to create different meal combinations, and snap-freezing. You can make big batches using this method every two or three weeks.
We’ve got a system of building blocks — starches (sweet potatoes, rice, root vegetables), greens (spinach, peas, zucchini, bok choy) and proteins (chicken breast, beans, ground beef, lean turkey) — that we layer to make complete mini-meals. Since we can’t use a lot of salt or animal fats, we use different cooking methods to coax the most flavor and best texture out of the ingredients — roasting to caramelize natural sugars in earthy vegetables, poaching to achieve tender, moist proteins, and steaming for delicate greens.
In the beginning, you want to keep the flavors clean and isolated (to make sure she’s not allergic), but her palate develops quickly (like everything with babies!) and you want to start making more interesting combinations. For example, this one combination is ground turkey and beans on the bottom, a layer of roasted broccoli and spinach in the middle, and sweet potatoes and cinnamon on top. Microwave one of these guys for 60 seconds, then let it stand to cool slightly, and dinner is served.
On the weekends, when we have more time, we grab stuff from the farmers market and introduce more diverse ingredients like tofu, eggs, quinoa, cilantro, chilies, and aged cheeses. We try to challenge our baby’s palate. (Sour plums — hilarious!) It’s fun dreaming up different flavors and combinations of ingredients to show our baby. Hopefully this bodes well for the future and makes her an adventurous eater!
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