Doctors say that babies need to eat meat. It's wonderful for it's iron content and that's what babies need the most. Babies need to start with solids because at some point they don't get enough nutrients from milk anymore.
The first nutrient that they become deficient in is iron and this could lead to baby anemia. I'm all for meat.
I love meat and I have no moral anguish involved with happily feeding my baby as much meat as she might possibly want. I actually sympathise with vegetarians because they're totally missing out on so many wonderful dishes and I'd even go so far as to say: if it ain't got meat, it ain't real food. 
Fish or cheese nicely substitute meat for a day or two but then it's time to have some more meat.When baby crossed the magic 6-month line I added solids to her menu. Vegetables first and then fruits and all sorts of combinations I can come up with. Mashing food with a fork or pressing it through a sieve totally failed because food ended up looking like tiny bits in liquid. I bought a good quality hand mixer from Philips and suddenly it was like a miracle. After a couple of failed beginner attempts, whatever I put in the beaker turned into pretty and delicious-looking puree. Zucchini, well-boiled carrots, oven-cooked apples, plums, etc.
Then I tried pork. For myself I fry slices of pork on a pan with a little bit of oil and I eat it with fork and knife. For baby puree I boiled it which I would normally never do. I sliced it in thin slices, covered it with water and increased the temperature to "boil meat until soft". Then I went to do other things, occasionally removing foam or trying if it's soft. Time passed. More time passed. It wasn't getting any softer.
Then the water boiled away so I had to add more... three times. 
Then I decided it's as soft as it ever will be. I let it cool a little and then tried to puree it. What I got was less than appetising. It was dirt gray chunky goo with tiny strands of meat in it. It stuck to the sides of the beaker like cement. I tasted it - the texture was so bad it got stuck on my tongue and it felt like I was eating sawdust. I kept blending but it didn't get any better. I gave baby a try and she made a face that said, "WHAT THE HELL IS STUCK ON MY TONGUE-EWWW-ARE YOU TRYING TO POISON ME?!"
. She took a couple of bites and then pressed her lips shut. Until then I didn't even know she knows how to clearly show me that she dislikes a certain food. I still had a few meals worth of pureed pork which I put into the freezer. I can thaw it when I have nothing better to do than torture baby with inedible food.Baby still needs to get her iron so she ought to eat meat. I decided to try beef next. So we finally reach today. I bought a nice piece of beef from the market. I sliced it thin and boiled it in plenty of water. Again, I kept boiling, removing foam and adding water for a really long time. Must have been at least a couple of hours, if not even more. I'm not sure what had gone wrong last time and I wanted it to work this time so I googled how to make baby puree out of meat. I found a wonderful suggestion to cool meat down before blending. They said meat blends better this way. I started when I was convinced that meat is soft. I lifted the meat out of the water and, like they suggested, I blended it dry and cool.
I turned into nice beef powder. It actually looked pretty good, except it was dry and it needed to be mixed with some liquid. I had earlier decided to be extra smart and add some vegetables to "glue" meat together. I boiled separately some carrot, potato and onion. I blended it all together and then tasted it.
OH MY GOOD, it has the same texture as that pork horror! Potato and carrot didn't help one bit. And powdering it dry didn't help either. I gave baby a taste. At first she really liked it, the first moment she was really excited with the taste, but then she felt the texture. It was stuck on her tongue and throat. It made her cough so I offered her some water to wash it down. She ate a few bites with some more water and then lost interest. I put the rest of the failed beef puree in freezer for future use. Perhaps I'm able to blend it further after it's thawed. 
Or perhaps Siiri will develop a liking to gooey sawdust.It will be a while before I try to make baby puree with meat again. I learned a lesson - sometimes it's best to buy ready-made food.
Few comments spring in mind and I hope they might be helpful. First - what's wrong with frying your meat frist and then stewing it, as you would your own food if you want stew. I am quite wrong that boiling thin slices of meat will never work. Stewing chunks of meat when they are tender and moist, or making soup as you would yourself, but forgo salt until you have removed boiled meant (ON BONE) from the liquid. Then you would also have liquid to moisten the texture and it needn't be sawdust or powdery. What I would do your powdery beef - I would add it to the water where you boil your carrots and potatoes - then it is a little like a soup grown-ups would eat. And then liquidise it once again.
ReplyDeleteIt might be helpful to think in the categories of grown-up foodand then minus salt and sugar and then give it to baby :)
another excellent source of iron is supposed to be sinach and broccoli. Ella's Kitchen does wonderful apple-spniach-swede pure, which looks gooey green, but tastes really good.
And another thing packed with iron - beetroot.
ReplyDeleteI know about trying to make meat for the kid. I finally resorted to shop-made ones :P I just couldn't figure it out.
So good luck! I hope you succeed!
Spinach and beetroot sound like good alternatives to that messy meat thing. I once warmed up one of those frozen beefs and blended it again. It improved it a little. Baby ate it much better. She wasn't too excited about it though. She looked like she was eating a TV-meal because she had a look that said, "It's totally icky, but okay, give me another bite.". (I mean that's the look that grown-ups get when they eat a TV meal, not that I have experience with how baby would look if I gave her a TV-meal). ;D
ReplyDeleteI looked at the ready-made baby-foods in the store and there wasn't even one that I really liked. It was all just sweet and fruity. It was like baby candy. Sure it's better than bland home-made vegetables, but is it really food? Sooner or later I'm just gonna have to swallow my pride and offer her something I haven't made, even though she might like much more than what I make her. Currently I'm not in much of a hurry to do that.