Category Archives: Cooking

Quick Baby Food Recipe – Bean & Sweet Potato Spread

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Super fast to make and yummy for mummies, too.

If I had a quid for every time this week I’ve Googled “quick baby food recipes”, I wouldn’t be a penniless writer, that’s for sure. And it’s only Tuesday. This recipe is sponsored by whatever I could find in the cupboard while the baby was hitting me in the side of the head with a plastic donkey. It’s prolly got some protein and stuff in it, but most importantly, it’s quick and it goes on toast. My baby has been a pretty fussy eater, but toast is Always Acceptable.

Ingredients

  • 1 tin of butter beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 sweet potato, peeled, diced and steamed²
  • 1 heaped teaspoon of mixed herbs
  • Juice of half a lemon
  • 2 tablespoons of olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons of creme fraiche
  • 1 clove of garlic, peeled

Method

Er, I’m pretty sure you’re au fait with my food preparation methods by now, but for the uninitiated:

  1. Bung all the ingredients in your food processor or blender. Whiz. Serve. Try it on toast, rice cakes, pitta bread, vegetable sticks, crackers; all good.

¹ I have a particularly awesome method for steaming my sweet potatoes (a recipe which I stole from Jamie Oliver’s 30-minute-meal TV thingy). It’s rather more complicated in the show, but I just cube the sweet potato, sling it in a glass bowl with one half of a lemon and a couple of unpeeled cloves of garlic, cover the whole thing with clingfilm and microwave it for 5-10 mins. (Bish-bash-bosh, yeah?)

If you’re looking for some other quick baby food recipes, check out my little cooking section.

Baby Food Ideas: Sweet Lentil & Tomato Stew

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Green Lentils (photo by johnmoews)

Like most of the parenting that happens at Chez Bump, we looked at both methods of weaning a baby – purées and baby led weaning – and pitched ourselves somewhere in the middle. I’d heard horror stories of baby led weaning, desperate mothers who couldn’t get their kids to eat anything off a spoon for three years. Likewise, puréeing everything in a blender for the next year or more didn’t sound like any fun. Ha! I thought, My baby will do baby led AND purées and eat everything! I’m so clever!

Yeah. My baby doesn’t eat anything. At all. Well alright, she eats rice pudding, quiche and carrot flavoured maize snacks that look for all the world like I’m feeding my ten-month-old Wotsits. But I digress. The point is, I spend most of my waking day trying to get the baby to just.bloody.eat.something. I ran short on baby food ideas at about two weeks in, so multi-tasking baby food is a big win. If she won’t eat it one way, I can try it another, and so on until she’s full or I’ve lost the will to live, whichever happens first.

I discovered this one quite by accident. They say necessity is the mother of invention; this is what happens when you badly need to do some food shopping but just can’t face the supermarket. She loves it, by the way, and best of all: so do I…and food in Mama’s belly means she lives to fight another day.

Sweet Lentil & Tomato Stew for Babies (and Mamas and Papas)

Makes enough food for a baby and two grown-ups (well, adults…) plus some extra to sling in the freezer, and takes about twenty minutes, all in, to cook.

Ingredients

  • 2 tins of green lentils, drained and rinsed
  • 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
  • ½ tin of apricot halves in syrup, drained and finely chopped
  • 1 tbsp of tomato purée
  • 1 tbsp (or to taste) of dried rosemary
  • 2 tbsp (or to taste) of dried basil
  • A good grind of black pepper (if your baby doesn’t mind it)
  • 1 super-low-salt (or baby type) stock cube – feel free to leave this out if you want to keep it 100% salt free

How to Make the Stew

  1. Bung everything in a pan. Simmer until the liquid has reduced by about half.
  2. Er, that’s it.

(At Least) Four Different Ways to Serve It

  1. As is, for hungry parents and older babies. Chunky. Awesome.
  2. Blended to within an inch of its life, to make soup. Mix it with a splash of milk or yoghurt to thin it out a bit and make it more palatable for fussy babies.
  3. Blended a bit to leave a little texture, to make a yummy dip. I served it to TS with slices of wholemeal pitta bread, and after thoroughly coating the kitchen with it, she ate it. Which is no small miracle.
  4. Blended (or not) and poured over pasta shapes with a bit of grated cheese.

Congratulations. You’ve got some wholesome baby food into your spawn of Beelzebub little darling. Now redress the balance of yin and yang by stuffing cake in your face.

Indulgence

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I’m a big fan of chocolate. Actually, it would be fairer to say that I’m a big fan of cocoa. Whilst I’ll admit that any passing chocolate – any at all – will end up in my belly, I certainly prefer my sweet treats to be somewhat grown up and, dare I say, a little bitter. There’s probably some sort of analogy in there somewhere, but let’s move on.

To that end, I have been – in between wiping little noses and changing nappies (yes, I washed my hands) – working on the perfect grown up brownie recipe. It’s still, and probably always will be, a work in progress, but I’m ready to share it with you. Be warned: they’re no good for losing baby weight, won’t help your caffeine addiction and I really wouldn’t feed them to your diabetic friends. Enjoy!

Mayan Spiced Chocolate Brownies

  • 150g cocoa powder (or, much more decadent, Montezuma’s No. 1 Blend Drinking Chocolate)
  • 75g rich dark chocolate (preferably 70%+ cocoa solids)
  • 225g butter
  • Generous splash brandy
  • 2 tsp vanilla essence
  • 2 drops red food colouring (optional)
  • 200g demerera sugar
  • 2 tsp hot chilli powder
  • 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 150g wholemeal flour
  1. Preheat the oven to 170C (not fan assisted) and line a 24cm square baking tin with baking paper.
  2. Melt the chocolate, drinking chocolate (or cocoa) and butter in a saucepan over a very low heat.
  3. Stir in the brandy, chilli and cinnamon, then turn off the heat. Add the sugar, vanilla and colouring, and stir gently. Add the beaten eggs and the flour and combine well, trying not to incorporate too much air. Leave to stand until any large bubbles have worked their way out.
  4. Pour the mixture into the baking tin and bake in the middle of the oven for 25 to 30 minutes (I find 27 minutes produces the best fudgy texture!) until firm on the outside but still gooey in the centre.
  5. Allow to cool slightly in the tray then cut into four horizontally and vertically. Lift out of the pan by the edges of the baking paper and stack on a wire rack to cool completely.
  6. For a truly naughty finish, melt a bar of posh dark chocolate in a largish bowl in the microwave and mix in a quarter
    teaspoon of chilli powder; dip the top of each brownie in the liquid chocolate and then sprinkle with edible glitter or metallic powder (I’m currently using this gold lustre but I’m in the market for something even more bling), before chilling until the chocolate sets hard.

    7. Oh, and if you like ‘em extra bitter, try slinging half a cup of strong tea in the mix, then ice the brownies (rather than dipping) to offset with some sweetness. Nom!

Mayan Spiced Chocolate Brownies