Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler

Finally, the must-have cookbook is here for the millions of busy parents who have taken on a healthier approach to eating—less processed, more organic—and who want to feed their little ones easy-to-make, cost-effective, completely nutritious and delicious meals.With more than sixty gourmet-inspired recipes and dozens of Chef Geoff’s tips for quick and nutritious preparation, parents everywhere will be in on the Baby Love secret: that making fresh baby food is pretty simple, even if you’v

Rating: 4 5 Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler (out of 14 reviews)

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J. Schwartz

Review by J. Schwartz for Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler
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In Baby Love, husband and wife authors O’Donnell and Tracy offer inspiration and recipes for making your own baby food. The book is well written. The recipes are well organized into fruits, veggies, and proteins/legumes/grains sections. Included are a few big people recipes too. I appreciated the sections on child development, nutrition and cooking basics. The layout of the book, use of color, and photographs all enhance this book. This is a hardbound cookbook. The text is big enough to read while cooking, yet the book is small enough not to take up too much counter space. The pages stay open while you work.

The fruit recipes are repetitive and typically consist of: cook the fruit in water, puree, wrap and freeze. The only changes are what fruits you use. This is 20% of the book.

The vegetable section, another 20%, is the same as the fruit section (cook the vegetables in water, puree, wrap and freeze). That is until you get to ratatouille and polenta. But then the section ends.

The final section (proteins/legumes/grains) is where the book shines. The recipes are straightforward, varied, and exciting. The Poached salmon is a great and tasty way to get fish into a toddler. The meatballs are good for the whole family. I’m looking forward to trying the Very Gouda Grits. I want to try all of the recipes in this section.

In summary, I feel the fruit and vegetable sections could have been shortened significantly since they are repetitive. The other sections would then have to have been expanded to justify publishing a whole book. Never the less, I liked the book and the recipes. I recommend this book to parents looking for more than just opening jars as the culinary experience for their babies.
Mary Kate

Review by Mary Kate for Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler
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I bought this book as a gift for my daughter who just had her second child. She made about half of the food for her first child, something that saved money and allowed her to better control the quality and overall nutritional value of the food her child was eating. For those reasons and because she also enjoyed doing it, she was interested in trying to make all of the food for this child, or at least a larger percentage of it.

Since she was already pretty comfortable with the ins and outs of preparing fruits and vegetables, I was looking for a book that would provide interesting recipes for other food groups AND that had a number of recipes that would also suit her toddler, or could be easily adapted to do so. Many of the recipes in this book seemed to fit that mold. My daughter has just started using it and, to date, seems pleased with the recipes. She has found a number that work for her toddler and that she and her husband enjoy as well.

She did say, though, that the claim “Learn how to make two weeks worth of Baby Love meals in less than one hour per week” included in the book description must be for people who are either more adept in the kitchen than she is or who don’t have a toddler “assisting” them. Or possibly both.

She thought this was a good addition to the baby cookbooks she already had, but felt it wasn’t comprehensive enough to be the only book on the subject on hand for parents who are serious about making most of their child’s food. She suggested readers might want to consider checking out the following books as well:

Blender Baby Food: Over 125 Recipes for Healthy Homemade Meals

The Petit Appetit Cookbook: Easy, Organic Recipes to Nurture Your Baby and Toddler

Top 100 Baby Purees: 100 Quick and Easy Meals for a Healthy and Happy Baby.

Notes:

- The overall look and layout of the book is very attractive and the photos make the foods look very appetizing.

- Each recipe includes a suggested age for introduction. There are some you may wish to confirm with your pediatrician*.

- The book lays open nicely – a must when preparing the food.

- Most of the ingredients are readily available. This is very important to my daughter as she lives in a small town.

- For the price, I feel there should have been more total recipes and fewer that focus on steaming a variety of fruits and vegetables.

* As with all baby food cookbooks, I would suggest that parents take care that the recipes do not include foods their pediatrician has suggested be avoided or introduced at a later age. Even if the authors take care to follow the current wisdom at the time they’re compiling the book, guidelines are subject to change. Authors may also be from a country that has different guidelines.
Rhianna Walker

Review by Rhianna Walker for Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler
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Once upon a time I was a 20-year-old stay-at-home mommy terrified of raising my baby wrong. Cloth diapers meant horrid diaper rash. Not breastfeeding was a mortal sin. Feeding your baby the same foods you ate meant they might have a fatal allergic reaction. Fast forward ten years and while my first born is certainly not malnourished… he’s not the best eater. Sniff a jar of baby veggies and you might be able to guess why.

The idea of making my own baby food from scratch was one I knew I wanted to do before I was even pregnant with baby #2. A book I purchased about feeding toddlers when #1 was little has lingered in my cookbook collection for years. The first few sections focused on baby food & purees so I knew it was possible. I researched making my own baby food a lot before the time came and while I did go with boxed baby cereals (for the sake of time) at first my wee one only ever eats the other packaged stuff when we pack it for those times when going home and thawing out cubes of pears isn’t efficient. THAT is what I loved about BABY LOVE.

Norah and Geoff have a very realistic attitude toward making baby food. It’s not as time consuming as you’d think and they break down how cost effective it really is. Finally seeing the math really made me happy to be taking the time and making the effort to prep my baby’s food. In these budget concious times when organic food is the ideal it’s nice to know I can give the baby what is not only healthiest, but what keeps some money around for the college fund too.

Yes, some of these recipes are very, very basic. For someone who already knows what they are doing these might seem a little too “duh”. I disagree. Some of the methods I had previously used for prepping foods produced less palate pleasing purees in comparison. Case and point the Perfectly Basic Butternut recipe. In the Chef’s Notes Geoff explains that by roasting the squash and creating that carmelization you get a richer, more complex flavor. The smell in my house when I tried this method was so yummy I debated setting some aside for myself. I did the same with sweet potatoes and won’t go back to steaming them again. Roasting didn’t take that much more time (and what does it matter since it’s sitting in the oven smelling nummy while I’m reading) to do than the poaching method I had previously learned.

Another thing I love about this cookbook is that it is peppered with nutritional tips and the Chef’s Notes which often are insightful and useful. But my favorite, favorite thing is that spices are used and encouraged! Spices for babies you say? Well, certainly within reason. I’m not dumping curry in my baby’s food. But the introduction of spices such as ginger (Carrot and Ginger recipe on page 80), cinnamon (Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal Raisin recipe page 55) or nutmeg (Creamy Butternut with Nutmeg recipe page 93) are actually very common in the later months of the first year. My baby loves a dash of ginger with peaches and oatmeal. Several dishes

What surprised me more than anything considering the “big” names behind this cookbook was that none of these recipes was particularly pretentious. Just when you find one you think might be such as Roasted Red Pepper and Pomegranate Hummus you see a note about using canned chickpeas to save time or read the ingredient list only to discover how very simple and unfussy the dish is. You can tell your friends you made something like that and sound like you labored for hours when it really was super easy.

I can’t believe I am saying this but after making the Peach and Apricot Oatmeal (page 59), adapting it because I only had fresh peaches, this is my favorite baby food cookbook. The next recipes I am going to try are the P.E.A. (pea, edamame and apple puree page 77) and Strawberry and Fig (page 61). I’m also looking forward to trying the three “Get Your Greens” recipes as soon as we get cauliflower introduced to baby #2′s 10-month-old diet.

If you’re looking for a baby cookbook with really great basics, a budget concious attitude, no pretense and just plain excellent combinations of ingredients I highly recommend this one. It even stresses that you don’t need any expensive equipment (I have a food processor but used my blender for the first time making these and found I liked it even better!) or super mad cooking skill, just a desire to make yummy food for your baby. Good luck and happy cooking!
Vicki Bohn

Review by Vicki Bohn for Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler
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This colorful cookbook is a joy to flip through with it’s vibrant colors. The lively colored purees pictured in this book should be enough to convince anyone of the health benefits of home prepared baby food as opposed to the canned junk in the store. If that’s not enough, the authors have added arguments for home prepared baby food in the book.

The recipes themselves look great. It’s nice that some recipes were included for the moms & dads as well. It’s especially nice that many of them include food items that you’re already preparing for baby or for your toddler. I counted 55 recipes in the book geared towards babies and toddlers. My only wish for the book is that it contained more recipes. With a list price of $19.99, I would think a mere 65 or so total recipes just doesn’t cut it, but this book is filling a niche, and is more of a novelty cookbook. With amazon’s lower price, I’d say the price is right!
J. McKnite

Review by J. McKnite for Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler
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My daughter is about to have her second child and I thought this would be a good way for me to help out by making baby food for her when the time comes. I made all the baby food for my son and that was over 30 years ago and he thrived on it. I did it then to save money and it’s still a way to save money today. The presentation of the book is very colorful, inviting and easy to read and understand. I thought it was just going to be recipes but it is so much more. I would have given a lot all those years ago for the information on nutrition, safety, preparation and advice that this book includes. And parents aren’t forgotten either since recipes are included for the grownups too. This would be a great present for an expectant mother.

Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler