Review - Annabel Karmel's New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner

I'd always decided to make Ben's puree's myself, and Steve wanted me too as well. I'd seen Annabel Karmel's New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner (what a mouthful) in the Top 100 books on amazon many times, and it has good reviews too (currently 4 and a half stars out of 778 reviews). So I decided to purchase it a few weeks before I planned to start Ben on solids.

 As you can see from the contents page the book contains food right up to toddler age, which is great for if you're having something, like a take-away that you don't want your toddler to eat.

The book also contains loads of information for each age group, that you need to know. What they can and can't have, vitamins, allergies etc.

In each section (apart from toddler) there's a meal planner, which can be helpful. But I never used this.

I loved this book because it starts with instructions for the simplest of purees, when only using one fruit or vegetable. It tells you the timing for the cooking, although I think that does depend on how hot the water is, and I basically just cooked everything until it was super soft. It then goes on to multiple fruit and vegetable purees, great as I didn't really have a clue of what to mix with what. The book has a great range of recipes to give your baby a varied introduction to food. I think the earlier you introduce more foods the better, and they'll be less picky. I'm very picky - but don't know how that came about, haha! There's fish and meat recipes as well as just vegetarian options, and pasta sauces. Ben has always loved pasta (I bought the little baby shells from Boots to begin with), and the sauces are really easy to do. There's also some pudding recipes in there too,

Some recipes do require chicken stock, I just bought the Boots Baby stock cubes and used them as it was so much easier.

As each recipe makes more than one portion I would freeze the rest in little pots or ice cub trays. I used to do batch cooking, and do 4/5 a week, use that up and then do some more once I was running low. One of Ben's favourite recipes was the Butternut Squash Risotto and the Multicolored Casserole I recommend for helping with self feeding and for finger control.