How to Feed a Henry

It’s the final day of our giveaway event for a copy of “ The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook ” by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett. (To enter, click here )  One of the cookbook recipes we tried this week was fish cakes. Fish and cake are two words I don’t usually put together, but they do make a lovely dinner. Think of crab cakes, but substitute the crab with fish. You can find the recipe for fish cakes on the baby-led website (click on the Recipes tab and scroll down to the last recipe on the page). This recipe is Henry-approved. Along with cooking from “The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook”, we are harvesting lots of tomatoes. The fish cake recipe calls for fresh coriander / cilantro, which sparked my idea to pair it with a mild salsa. This turned out to be a delicious combination. The pico de gallo recipe makes about 3 cups which is much more than you need to accompany the fish cakes. It will keep in the refrigerator for a few days. You can also freeze any extra, and th...

This week we’re cooking “ The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook ” and giving away a copy to one lucky reader. If you haven’t entered yet, what are you waiting for? (To enter, click here ) Yesterday, I wrote about serving a classic English dish for my family from “The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook”. This cookbook, however, is not limited to British fare. It also features several international recipes such as Lamb Tagine, Ratatouille, Baba Ganoush, Easy Dahl and Thai Green Fish Curry. We decided to give Moroccan Chicken a try. Henry tries out new foods and flavors. It has been more than a year since I have eaten chicken, so this was a big deal in our house. During my second trimester of being pregnant, chicken became completely unappetizing to me. I’ve heard that many other pregnant women have the same experience. Along with eggs and cantaloupe, I have pretty much avoided chicken since then. But Daddy has been clamoring to put chicken back on our family’s menu, so I decided it was tim...

This week we’re cooking with “ The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook ” and giving away a copy to one lucky reader. (To enter, click here ) For this cookbook review, I wanted to try out dishes that would be new to our family. Since the cookbook was developed by two British authors, I found several recipes that are not typically found in American home kitchens. How about Yorkshire Pudding, Fish Pie or Bubble and Squeak? I decided to start with Toad-in-the-Hole. Let me start by saying that Toad-in-the-Hole was a big hit at our family dinner table, but it is not what I had always thought it was. I grew up thinking that Toad-in-the-Hole was a breakfast dish – a piece of pan-fried toast with a hole cut out of the center for an over easy egg. I guess that dish is more commonly called Egg-in-the-basket or Egg-in-the-hole . Henry devours this Toad-in-the-Hole. Toad-in-the-Hole is a traditional English recipe that consists of sausages baked in a popover pastry. I even found British...

UPDATE (10/2/12): Unfortunately, I did not hear back from our original winner. Congratulations to our alternate winner for "The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook" -- Robin Pfefer. UPDATE (9/29/12): I am happy to announce that Kashia Clopper is the winner of "The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook". When I was first thinking about using the Baby-Led Weaning (BLW) model for Henry, I was unsure about whether it would really work. I was excited about BLW’s claims of less stressful meals that the whole family could share together. Plus, I was all for encouraging Henry to gain new skills by learning about the shapes, textures, colors, smells and flavors of food. This sounded ideal in theory, but would it work in practice? After some fun but ineffective attempts at letting Henry feed himself, I went in search of resources to learn more about BLW. I needed to learn how to prepare meals for our family in which Henry could participate. That’s when I found “ The Baby-Led ...